I’m gonna start by saying that DM’ing works. It’s just that I loathe it.
I didn’t get into the business of helping people so that I could spend half my life having convos in DM’s.
The first client I shared this with went from a couple of clients a year to getting 10 clients in one month. At that time he was charging 5k, so yeah, his business changed drastically.
This is how I run my business, and all my clients will tell you I’ve never reached out to any of them, they ALL came to me.
And this isn’t some long nurture process either — average time from stranger to client is less than 10 days, some as fast as 4 days.
Genuine, high-quality people, ideal clients, paid and enrolled in as little as 4 days. All with zero outreach.
I’m going to show you how it works.
So, today we’re going to cover
Why we find ourselves in this predicament
What high-end providers do so differently
How to do this for yourself
What I’m about to discuss here works across all industries, but I’m going to show you what this looks like when applied to high-ticket coaching, consulting, and information products.
WHY WE FIND OURSELVES IN THIS PREDICAMENT
As leaders who genuinely want to help people, the main challenge we face is how to be present in the market in a way that attracts perfect clients, while aligning with who we are.
Cast your mind back for a second, back to when you first decided you wanted to do this.
The business most of us imagined having at the start of our journey probably quickly became something almost out of reach -- as the realization set in that the job of marketing was much more difficult and time-consuming than expected.
So then naturally, what most ended up doing, was observing what other people like us were doing with our marketing and copying (in fact, that’s what most marketing programs are, even the really expensive ones).
The problem is, that the most obvious and visible marketing that’s getting copied -- doesn’t actually work.
So, a situation arises.
Instead of having a business with marketing that does the heavy lifting — like it’s meant to — you’re left fighting for attention.
Perhaps you post something and someone engages with your content, and you might feel like if you don’t snag them immediately, you fear you’ll lose them.
Why does this happen?
Because, without marketing that empowers prospects to help themselves, your only real option is to get in there and manually bring them in over the line one by one, in DM’s, to try and bring them to a phone call.
There’s an internal tug-of-war going on. On one side you have the need for clients -- on the other side, you have your integrity and reputation.
And if you’re someone who cares about integrity; you’ll tend to retreat, to go quiet, because you don’t really want to bother people, because it doesn’t align with who you are. So instead of your business growing and developing authority, you kinda never really get to lean on your reputation, you never really get the flywheel moving on its momentum.
Let’s take a step back, and look at the process most are using.
Get attention
Pounce on them
Manually attempt to bring them to a call
This leads to a feedback loop rewarding “attention-y” looking marketing.
But then even with this extra juicy attention-y content -- people are even more cautious to engage with you because they don’t want to get pounced on.
Even if you don’t normally pounce — because that’s the norm, that’s what everyone else is doing.
We all get cold DM’s. We’ve all experienced weird messenger convos with people. We’ve all probably had to block persistent people who just don’t stop, who just won’t leave us alone.
Whether you do this or not — people are wary that you will.
So — they don’t engage.
…and so you have to make even MORE “attention-y” looking marketing, just to try to break through.
It’s a vicious cycle, and no one is served well, not the coach who wants to find ideal clients, not the prospect who wants to find the right help.
WHAT HIGH-END PROVIDERS DO SO DIFFERENTLY TO ATTRACT AND CONVERT PERFECT CLIENTS
By now you should see that what I’m about to share with you is completely different.
See, I learned marketing selling expensive things to the affluent.
You can’t be like that with very wealthy people. They won’t tolerate it.
You have to BE better.
Your message must be interesting, but not pushy.
Be engaging, but not needy.
Be enjoyable, but not pandering.
If it sounds confusing, it’s not. It’s actually far simpler — because there are no tricks involved. There’s a set of principles to follow. This constantly levels up the quality of customer you attract. It gives your prospects the ability — from their very first engagement with you, remember this can happen fast — they can immediately see what's going on, and then take action all by themselves, and before you know it you’re on a phone call, all within a few days.
Or perhaps they don’t have a burning need right now, but they genuinely like what they see. They might come across your stuff, and for whatever reason, they need a bit more time. And your marketing allows them to binge a bit, to start soaking it in, and to build desire. And without any interaction from you they start having epiphanies about their situation (when they’re not even thinking about you) and they start having these realisations about their actual problem. They start seeing you as someone who likely can help them — in fact they start realising that they need to speak with you, that THAT is their next step. THIS is how you get people booking calls on their own.
Let’s look at the basic principles to take people through these mindset shifts.
They go from “I don’t know what my challenge is” all the way through to “Now I know what my challenge is, I know what hasn’t worked in the past, I know why it hasn’t worked in the past, I know what this person offers and I need to have the conversation with this person.
So what does this look like?
Well, it looks like, this.
This is a simple way to visualise what’s happening with all of us, all the time, and how we come to make buying decisions — especially high-ticket buying decisions.
This represents a person's exposure to you, and these levels of awareness. Awareness of you, and the problems you solve, and the solutions you bring. That’s in the very middle, and there’s different levels of awareness.
So, from the very start:
A person becomes aware of you because of an ad, or a conversation, or they see a post in a group or they see a comment you’ve made somewhere, or they hear someone else talking about you, or they hear you on a podcast or a guest interview — anywhere, anything at all, that’s the outside loop, the outside ring of awareness.
The next level of awareness is people in your audience, your social followers, your email subscribers, group members etc.
Then we have people who are actively thinking about you right now if you could be the answer they’re looking for to help them become the desired future version of themselves.
And in the centre, we have clients, customers, whatever you like to call them.
They can go move through the stages as fast as one day. Don’t believe me? Well, we all do this, we find something interesting and we binge whatever info we can find, and make quick decisions.
Low-impact decisions lead us to the movie cinema or a hotel choice — high-impact decisions lead us to test-drive a car or book a call with a potential advisor.
What does this set-up look like?
Well, this is foundational stuff. And there are 2 components.
The first thing you need is something I call ETC, Epiphany Triggering Content. This content is evergreen. Often, it’s in video form, but the medium is not important.
What is important is that people see
the standard you like to keep
the way you like to run your business
The values that are important to you
the results you get for clients
The things that matter to you
Most people don’t have this done and it’s precisely why they end up stuck on the hamster wheel of attention chasing, and then whittling time away in DMs.
The second thing you want to have set up is your ULM, your Unique Lead Mechanism. Just think of your ULM as a lead magnet on steroids.
And that’s basically it.
The businesses attracting high-quality prospects and enrolling them without doing any outreach all have a version of this setup.
The ones that are doing everything manually in DMs — don’t.
With these powerful marketing assets in place, now we get to the good stuff. This is where it gets fun.
From here, all you then do is live your life. And you provide leadership through your content.
It’s my experience that most leaders want to share stuff. We desire an outlet. This is the kind of content I’m talking about. Whether that’s a newsletter like SubStack, a YouTube channel, or simply posting on social, or maybe you’ve got a podcast, or an email list, or a FB group… Whatever preferred channel you use to share with the world, you simply focus on that to lead your audience.
Your marketing assets do the heavy lifting.
And people reach out curious, expectant, and hopeful.
HOW TO DO THIS FOR YOURSELF
Let’s bring it all back.
Ok, so who is this for? This method, this way of doing things is not unique to one type of business.
My first discovery of this was when my business was at about 1.5M. I achieved more with this simple method working alone than I had previously with a dedicated marketing team.
I’ve used this method consulting with and running fractional CMO with multiple 30M/year businesses — down to people working from their laptop coaching over Zoom.
The exact same principles.
No matter what you’re selling, no matter how long you’ve been doing this... If you want to get away from inconsistent lead flow that relies on manually going out and chasing down leads and DMs and all that, if you want to get away from that stuff, you MUST build these marketing assets.
And once built, it’s quite simple to run. In fact, it’s fun.
It’s fun because you’re no longer focussing on “How do I get people's attention, and how do I get people to raise their hand” and then how do I get in and try convince them to book a phone call.
Instead, there’s a whole different way of doing things. And this way of doing things is awesome.
Now, I’m sharing videos about this on YouTube. I have this newsletter where I talk about this stuff. I have a FB group I teach stuff in regularly, and that’s all free.
But the one place I would tell you to start, no matter what stage you’re at — is simply to use the How Many Clients Calculator.
It’s a free tool that tells you how many clients your audience right now should be bringing in. How much monthly revenue without changing your prices, without adding audience members, without DMs, and with zero outreach.
Fill out the calculator, you’ll get your result, and you’ll get resources.
I hope this has given you a moment of clarity: The reason other people are getting different results and it’s that they’re playing a very different game.
There’s a way to step away from relying on bait-and-switch attention hacking and DM’s once and for all.
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See you next Saturday.
Cheers,
Pat Sgro
PS: Hit the ❤️ button on your way (if you enjoyed it) so I know you made it this far.