Are DMs the new Cold Calls?

Sean Malone (00:00): The one thing that’s different about dms, and actually the numbers prove it, is that when somebody sends you a dm, if it’s good messaging, you don’t discard it. What do you do? You click on that person’s profile and you creep on them a little bit on social. Make sure that they’re real, and then if they’re real and you like their stuff, then you come back and you respond. This is why dms have a high response rate way higher than anything else. And then if you’re not a clown, when you’re actually chatting in dms and you do it well, then you can start actually converting higher than any of the other methods of communication.

John Jantsch (00:32): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Is this John Jantsch My guest today is Sean Malone. He’s the co-founder and CMO of flowchat.com, a software tech company that is refined how people use dms for business agency owners and founders Turn to Flow Chat to set up an effective social selling system using dms seeking automation and one click power. Sean’s built eight companies. It’s first to achieve multiple six figures annually. The next four reached multiple seven figures, and the last two exceeded 10 million sales a year is aims for Flow Chat to become his first $100 million company. So Sean, welcome to the show.

Sean Malone (01:12): Hey, John, thank you so much for having me. I’m so grateful to be here, man, you’re a legend, obviously you writing the books that you’ve written in, so I’m really honored and humbled just to be here and chatted with you today. So thanks for the time.

John Jantsch (01:23): Well, I appreciate those kind words. So when I was reading your bio, I built eight companies. I kept wanting to hear about the total bomb. Was there not a total bomb in there?

Sean Malone (01:34): There’s plenty of bombs in there, I think. Yeah, for sure. Where do we start? Holy cow. This takes me back into when I was 15, I was pushing the shop room for my dad and I was learning, I was watching him. He had immigrated from South Africa to America when I was a young kid, and he just had this work ethic that I still haven’t seen rivaled Today. He was working like 120 plus hours a week, I guess maybe he had to because we moved here with little to nothing. And so he just started to just building stuff on his own. He’s a metal just by trade. He ended up, he was selling metal as a day job, and then he started a small business on the end, which was a import export cookware business. And so that’s where I really kind of started to learn entrepreneurship and I just kind of saw what it took to actually do it.

(02:24): And so then I went off into college and I started my own little auto detailing company. I would say that one kind of bombed. I got it to the point where I was doing work for the city and I was cleaning cop cars and some of those types of vehicles. And then my college career kind of came to an end and I didn’t know what to do. And so I just kind of gave the business away, even though it was making some pretty healthy money. It was, I don’t know, I’d say it’s probably making about 15,000 a month, but when you’re a college kid, that’s a lot of cash. So after that, I started selling as a manufacturer’s rep. I did pretty good, made a bunch of commission, ended up buying my first electronics manufacturing company, and that one I started, I think I negated a lot of failure in the early part of it because I always had somebody that was kind of in the game that knew how not to fail.

(03:15): And so I think it goes a long way to talk about mentorship. But that business, I grew that one from about 250,000 a month in revenue to, well, we were doing about 8 million a year, so that was almost, it was, it’s probably like 650 to, yeah. So I basically doubled that, tripled that business in about a couple of years, and that one got sold out from underneath me without me knowing. I was actually on a sales trip in California and my business partner called me back. He’s like, emergency, and I come back and there was no emergency. He just ended up selling a company without telling me in two weeks, which kind of hurts. Well,

John Jantsch (03:50): I was halfway kidding. But I mean, obviously you learned a lot from every one of those experiences. One of the things that seems to me that was a through line through all of your experience, your journey, including where you’re today, is mastering sales. Would you say there’s an element of that in that? So in fact, I think I saw another interview where you talked about being kind of a sales training junkie along the way. So I talked about Flow Chat being a software tech company, but would you say that at its heart it’s really a selling enablement tool?

Sean Malone (04:26): Yeah, definitely. Tech, sales, enablement, tech, I call us a communications organization. I’d say that’s probably better fit genre than anything else that we want. And like you said, yes, so I learned a tremendous amount of, throughout my journey was all sales related stuff. So I came out of college and I said, Hey dad, how do I make a boatload of cash? And he said, there’s three options. First option, are you a CEO? No, I’m 21. I don’t know what those letters mean. He’s like, are you an entertainer? No, I can’t sing or dance. He’s like, well, you better go and learn sales.

John Jantsch (05:03): Oh, he forgot another one. Can you throw a hundred mile an hour change up with your left hand? That would’ve been another good one.

Sean Malone (05:08): That would’ve been another great question. And the answer to that is also no, but yeah, and so then he said, you better go learn sales. So I was like, okay, great. So I took a job sales so I could learn sales, and I was terrible. I think that was probably my biggest bomb. I made 2,400 cold calls and I never booked a single appointment. That’s really bad. That’s like 80 calls a day for six weeks straight. And I was about done with it. I was like, this sales thing is stupid. I’m done. And I told my dad and my dad was like, don’t quit. I was going to quit. And he was like, go to the library and read a book. Okay, cool. Well, I went to the library, I picked up a Tom Hopkins, how to master the artist selling stuff book. And I was like, oh, there’s a theory. I can get really good at this. I was good at theories in school. I can definitely do that here again. And so that’s really where I started my junkie, I guess down the path. And 500 K later in my own investments of learning every selling system you could think of, I really distilled it down to there’s five to seven things you have to do in every sales situation, and if you do those things consistently, you’ll always win. That’s kind of the idea.

John Jantsch (06:14): So you and your partner, Chris, developed a prospecting system that you use today and have really built into this software. Can you give us the high level? You kind of mentioned five things. I suspect that the five things are in it.

Sean Malone (06:29): So the last start of prospecting is one side and then high ticket sales is on the other side or sales, I guess I should say. And so here’s how it came to be. So we had our software company that completely burned me out, the first one, and I almost took my own life because I was in a very dark place, and we could go really deep on that story anytime you want, but I’ll skip over that for the highlight of where we at. So at that time, my coach, Russell Brunson says, because like, what do we do? We just sold this software company that was doing lots and lots and we were doing 10 million plus a year. We ended up selling it, and we were like, what do we do now? We didn’t even know. And he said, well, what are you good at? And we said, sales.

(07:06): And he said, all these online entrepreneurs, all these agency owners, these SaaS founders, they don’t like to do sales. Like, oh, cool. So we called ’em up, Hey, do you not like to do sales? Yeah, every one of ’em like, yeah, we don’t want to do sales anymore, Sean, fix it. And we’re like, well, we know how to hire on board and train sales teams. You want us to do that for you? And boom, our agency was born. So we find five clients, showed ’em how to hire onboard and train sales teams, and then we showed ’em how to close deals in their warm market. We were doing sales training, and then about five months in, they had big gains in those first couple of months we were actually closing deals with them. And then five months in, they come back and they’re like, Sean and Chris, thank you for the sales team, but now I can’t sleep at night because I don’t know how to put more leads in front of the salespeople that you just built for me.

(07:55): And we’re like, oh, well, we have a system for that that we’re using even before the internet existed. Just put this in your business. It’s direct conversation. One-to-one at scale. Here’s the system how to work. Every one of ’em hit a home run. After about six months of that, Chris and I looked at each other, we’re like, that is more important than all the other stuff that we were doing in the first place. And so how do we do that at scale? And then one of our friends was like, you should do a mastermind. And so then we launched a mastermind and we did a $25,000 three months of put this in your business, nine months of advanced sales coaching to close the deals that the system created had 83% success rate of the dozens of businesses going through the system. And about two years into 18 months into that, one of our clients is like, you guys need a software.

(08:37): And so it was like, okay. We ended up, our messaging ran into our CTO’s messaging and what do you do? I have a software, but I have no clients. What do you guys do? We have hundreds of clients, but we have no software. What if we just did that? And so that was what happened in 2020. We kind of merged, acquired, did the whole thing, redressed the whole thing, and then we brought a hundred clients into this thing and saw how it worked and everything broke, whatever. It was great. And then we put another a hundred clients in, more stuff broke, and eventually we got the machine just ripping. And so now we’ve been into it four years. And really what it does at a high level is it allows anybody at any time to go anywhere and find, connect, nurture, and close deals through dms, personal messenger, dms, and it does it just more than one or two platforms.

(09:23): We actually work on 14 of them. The idea is based on three principles. First one universally importing or extracting what we call suspects. Then we have a qualifier, turns ’em into prospects, and then we take them through basically. So universally importing from anywhere on social at any time, go to a Facebook group, whichever one, click one button and click the whole group list. Go to your post that has thousands of comments, reactions and engagements. Click one button, get ’em all right. That was the idea. Second one was Pipeline view or Kanban Trello style board, but we built it for personal dms and as soon as we launched it, everyone copied it, which is great validation. And then the last principle was that of reporting, because anyone does anything organic, their reporting is usually really messy. So that’s really in a high level of what Flow Chat does. It sits in front of A CRM. It allows you to filter out all the bad and only put the really good into a system like a HubSpot or Salesforce or a pipe driver, a go high level or anything like that.

John Jantsch (10:26): AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It’s storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So buckle up. The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power. So how do you compete without cost spiraling out of control? It’s time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud infrastructure or O-C-I-O-C-I is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds offers one consistent price instead of a variable regional pricing. And of course, nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half of the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less like Uber eight by eight and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive@ociatoracle.com slash duct tape.

(11:24): That’s oracle.com/duct tape oracle.com/duct tape. Hey, digital marketers, this one’s for you. I’ve got 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things that you can do in 30 seconds or less when you manage projects on Wix Studio, work in sync with your team all on one canvas, reuse templates, widgets and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best in class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites. Alright, time’s up, but the list keeps going. Why don’t you step into Wix studio to see more? Do you find that, I mean you’ve really built, obviously you’re using technology to do some things that used to take hours to do, right? And do you find though that DM conversations in particular are more effective, different, say because there’s tons of people doing cold outreach, similar sort of approach. So what have you found has been really the driver of, or why you’ve really leaned into dms?

Sean Malone (12:36): So great question, and it kind of goes along the case of your book. You find your ICP and you speak with them in the right way, you’re going to have the right thing. So we just made it so that you can do that at scale. And I think if you look at the methods of communication, there’s usually there’s five, but I’ll say the main four are phone calls. So if you have phone calls, you get spam risk, you don’t even answer, you get a text message, you still don’t know who it is from, unless the words are dead on perfect, you’re probably not going to respond to the text, even though text has highest open rates, has a very low response rate because of that reason. Then you’ve got email marketing, which is you’ve got CAN SPAM and GDPR and A two P and all this other stuff that’s happening now, deliverability down, you’ve got MPP from Apple, there’s all this stuff that’s happening there.

(13:22): So email is a source, right? So you’ve got phone, text, email, but then you have dms. And the one thing that’s different about dms is that it’s better than I think all of them. And actually the numbers prove it is that when somebody sends you a dm, if it’s good messaging, you don’t discard it. What do you do? You click on that person’s profile and you creep on them a little bit on social to make sure that they’re real. And then if they’re real and you like their stuff, then you come back and you respond. This is why dms have a high response rate way higher than anything else. Open rates similar to text, but response rates for dms are the highest. And then if you’re not a clown, when you’re actually chatting in dms and you do it well, then you can start actually converting higher than any of the other methods of communication. I’ve just seen this over the course of almost 30 years in the sales games, like one-to-one communication, if you can do it at scale is pound for pound the best.

John Jantsch (14:16): So really the trick, if you will, is getting the conversation that’s whether it’s on the phone or email or whatever it is. And what you’re suggesting is that the dms have been more effective at getting the conversation. You can still fumble the ball, but you’re not even in the game if you don’t get the conversation.

Sean Malone (14:34): Yeah, I mean, just from a sure volumes perspective, if we looked at, let’s say a hundred is the number, if you’ve cold call a hundred people, you might get two to answer. Just statistically, if you text a hundred people, you’re usually going to get about, I’d say 75 of those people will open your text, but you’re only going to have about six or eight of ’em that respond. Emails send a hundred emails, you’re getting five opens. Maybe two people actually read it, but the dms is different. If you send a hundred dms and you’re really good, you’ll probably get 50 or so people to open those dms. But if your profile is in alignment, you’ll get 30 to 40 responses. So if you’re actually looking at the stuff that truly matters, this is why dms I think is just superior to everything else that’s out there.

John Jantsch (15:27): And maybe the day will come, especially with the success of a platform like yours. But do you find that there’s some people that get angry about a text or get angry about an unsolicited email? Do you find that dms will eventually fall into that category?

Sean Malone (15:44): Yeah, I mean, people will throw shade at any which way that you market to them or sell to them at any time, and dms are no different. But the thing is about dms or text message or any form of communication, if you do it wrong, everyone’s going to hate on you. But if you do it well, then it’s okay. And there’s a few strategies that work really well and for whatever reason, completely unbeknownst to me, when people get into the dms, they just try to just vomit verbally on everybody and sell them everything from one single message. When you can’t do that, it’s like if you go to a live event, you don’t walk up to John Jans and say, Hey, man, do you want to buy my stuff? It’s really amazing. You’d be like, get out of my face. But most people speak that way in dms, which is really unfortunate.

John Jantsch (16:32): Have you found that certain types of businesses do better or this is more suited, or do you feel like this is something that used correctly, could be used by just about any type of business?

Sean Malone (16:43): I think used correctly could be used by any type of business, but there are a few niches and verticals that really hit pretty well. I think business to business and then a lot of business to consumer. If it’s brick and mortar, that’s really a really suited very well for this type of technology because all we’re doing is the same thing that we would be doing anyways. In the old days, you’d get a phone book and a bunch of numbers, right? Today you have technology like ours where you can just go to a Facebook group and collect the whole list. That’s like getting a phone book. And so now you was like, oh yeah, I got the phone book. Let’s use some automation to just filter it down to the ones that I really want to start speaking with. And then you don’t even go, you keep going. Another filtering mechanism is like, let’s send out a series of our first messages to get some responses, and that’s the big key. When you’re DMing, remember, we don’t try to sell in our first message. We don’t even try in our second or third or fourth message. Usually you don’t even ask for anything like a call until message is six, seven, eight, nine. They say 80% of sales deals are closed at 13 touch points. Well, getting engagement usually takes four to six of ’em, right? So it’s like if you design it right, it works really well. Awesome.

John Jantsch (17:53): Well, Sean, I appreciate you taking a few moments to drop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you’d want to invite people to connect with you and learn more about Flow Chat?

Sean Malone (18:01): Yeah, so just flowchat.com. Fl O-W-C-H-A t.com. Go check out the site and then if you want to talk directly with me, just look me up on Facebook and say that John sent you my way. We’ll take care of you nicely. Awesome. Yes.

John Jantsch (18:15): Again, I appreciate you dropping by and hopefully we’ll run into you soon. I usually say on the road, but you’re just down the road, so we ought to get together soon. Anyway,

Sean Malone (18:24): Let’s go have a lunch. I would love it. Love it, love it.