Ep. #1234 - Social Selling Secrets

Matt Watson  0:00

And we’re back for another episode of the Startup Hustle. This is your host today, Matt Watson. Today, we’re going to be learning all about social selling. We’ve got the CEO and Co-Founder, Chris Baden, today from FlowChat. They have a really interesting product that helps you slide into some people’s DMS and sell them some stuff, which works great. I do a little bit of that myself. I’m hoping to learn some things today. Before we get started, I do want to remind everybody that today’s episode of Startup Hustle is powered by Full Scale. Hiring software developers is difficult, but Full Scale can make a quick, quick and easy. We specialize in building long-term teams that work only for you. Visit FullScale.io to learn more. Chris, welcome to the show, man.

Chris Baden  0:40

Matt, appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

Matt Watson  0:43

I’m not sure you think about your businesses sliding into DMS.

Chris Baden  0:46

I’m not gonna lie. I started to cringe a little bit. I like to think I hope people do the exact opposite of that. Yeah, go ahead.

Matt Watson  0:57

But, I mean, it is your guys’s goal, right, to help people do social selling and message people? And

Chris Baden  1:03

In terms of context, you’re spot on, like, works really well. That is the area and, you know, kind of, in a funny way, like, ironically. Because that is a lot of the stigma, that is a lot of the stereotype like you’re not wrong and saying that the way that we view it is, it makes it so that much easier to stand out. Yeah, in that type of environment. That is another way of saying this that’s your competition. That’s not that hard to compete with, Matt.

Matt Watson  1:35

So I think I think all of us that use LinkedIn get highly annoyed when we connect with people, and then they just start spamming us and trying to sell us stuff and whatever and, and that there’s a right way and a wrong way to do those things. And I’m hoping that we learned some more about the right ways to do those things today.

Chris Baden  1:52

Yeah, and I, I’m excited well, because we do have some developed thought and result not only for ourselves but for hundreds of other companies that we’ve been working with. So it’ll be fun.

Matt Watson  2:03

So, you’re the Co-Founder of FlowChat, and looks like you have been an entrepreneur for a while and done some other things. Love to hear the short version about your entrepreneur journey, as well as what led you to start FlowChat.

Chris Baden  2:18

Yeah, definitely. Well, let me give you an immediate picture of stark contrast, there is where I started. And then there’s where I’m at today. We do, we built and sold our first software company. So, we do have an exit under our belt. And we’re working on our second project now, which is which, you know, the goal is to have a $100 million valuation in the next 24 months. And so the gap between that and where I started was very different. And I’ll share a short story about my second month, the second month of my first sales job that happened almost 15 years ago. I learned something that shaped and shifted the very the whole trajectory of my now entrepreneurial career, which I didn’t know is gonna be an entrepreneur. And, Matt, let’s be honest if I knew what being an entrepreneur was going to be like from the beginning, I don’t know that I would have signed up for it.

Matt Watson  3:15

Come on, it’s not all bad.

Chris Baden  3:16

It’s not all bad. But there’s still some, you know, trips to the hospital with my heart not working anymore, and ulcers breaking out and, you know, building marriage and family all at the same time. You know, so it’s like, it’s been a, it’s been a blessing. It’s been a crazy ride, too. But in in the second month, what happened was, and this is b2b commission-only sales is where I started, I didn’t know how to sell. I was in the payment technology industry like Chris, what’s that? That’s how I felt, right? But nonetheless, I need to meet with all these different business owners. And I need to close deals, and it’s commission only, and I’m working 70-plus hours a week at that time. And I did that for the entire month. Do you want to know how much I made that month?

Matt Watson  4:02

A $1,000.

Chris Baden  4:04

Unfortunately, it was less. It was eight hundred dollars. So not only could I not sell very well apparently, it made it even harder to close my then girlfriend now wife, Hey, you want to move in with my parents? Like I had a horrible pitch for getting married to. And I just wasn’t closing anything but something, something shifted? Because I was really frustrated in that moment. And I was like, gosh, I’m working hard. I’m doing everyday this, this, this, this this and I realized, Matt, no one cares. No one cares about how much I’m working or how much I do or don’t do, but what they do care about our results. And so I don’t get paid to work. I got paid to produce results. And so I had to I did three things. I started listening better. I started practicing empathy, and I started creatively solving problems not just for myself, but for others. Those three things are kind of the pillars of what helped me do sales. I don’t fit like the sales personality with all those like profile thing and assessment stuff that we’ve probably both taken like 1000. No. But those keys really helped me start to do this Excel and go a different trajectory. And so I just started asking a bunch of questions and listening, thought about, you know, empathy, like, what would it actually be like to be them? What would actually move the needle forward and change the status of their business and their life? And then I started thinking of solutions, who could I talk to? What could I do? What piece of tech? And I started to get all the answers I needed. And what happened was, I ended up becoming the youngest, and in some, you know, categories and rankings, the top producing sales rep in that fortune 900 company at the time.

Matt Watson  5:44

Well, and I think the key is, right, you’re thinking about what’s in it for them, right? It’s for whoever you’re trying to sell to, it’s not about selling them whatever you do, it’s trying to figure out how do you help them be better at their job, or whatever it is, they’re trying to accomplish and understand their problems and solve their problems.

Chris Baden  6:00

100% 100% and, and when you do that, then they care. That they’re like, Hey, Chris, Matt, y’all ain’t so bad. You know, you got to meet my friend, Jeff, you got to meet my, my friend, Sarah, over here, you know, and then things exponentially grow. Even even today. Like Matt, we’re having a conversation right here right now. Everyone listening, watching, you know, I will, we’ll see where we go. But I’ve got multiple, like arrows in my quiver, just to give away for free for value today because I understand time and attention is the biggest asset that everyone listening watching can never even get back. And so it’s like, man, I want to be prepared to make sure anyone that spends time with us here today, like gets value, get something that they can they can do right away. So that’s kind of where I started. And that’s something that really, you know, in between that, you know, there’s for different companies, four different industries at all did at least, you know, low-seven figures per year in sales. One of them was an eight-figure company. And now we’re working towards building that that, you know, nine-figure tech company.

Matt Watson  6:59

So what led you to start sales flow? Was that originally your idea, or one of your co founders ideas? Like where did the idea come from?

Chris Baden  7:06

Great, great question. The genesis of FlowChat.com was, Is this pattern that keeps happening to me, Matt, it’s, I find my own problems, and I don’t find the solution that I need. And then I’m like, Oh, crap, here we go. Again, I’m gonna build it. And that problem, after our first exit, we were acquiring for our mastermind, the mastermind is no longer open. But it was 25k. And we’d bring on 15 to 20 businesses at a time. And we would talk about, you know, sales processes, ways to acquire in different markets. And it was a 90 day focused, you know, exercise. Now, when acquiring for this, we’ve done challenges and webinars and paid ads and funnels and summits. And like all the things we’re like, we don’t need to acquire that many people, right? It’s just 15 to 20 people a cycle. What if we just talked to people, we’re like, let’s just message a few people and see what happens. And so here’s what we had Matt, we had a Google Doc, with an outline. And we, you know, and we DM people, and we just treated them the way we wanted to be treated. So it wasn’t like, Hey, why am I saying that? It’s like, just take a deep breath. Like, think about who we’re serving, you know, who can we get this this outcome and result for in this amount of time? Well, it’s going to be these people in this industry. And here’s, here’s the three things that we’re going to do. Right, the levers, we’re going to pull. And here’s where we track the KPIs. Like it was a thoughtful exercise. So we already knew everyone that we were reaching out to X percent would say yes, and we knew that we were going to we can get them results, right? And so I think that is a key part not to skip over. And so in this process, we’re like, okay, you know, we wrote over 1000 $100,000 of business and about 41 days and not, not that that’s a lot. But we’re like, the CAC on this is nothing. And the LTV is great. So pound for pound acquisition strategy, we’re like, dammit, we can’t ignore this. The reason we didn’t like it is just manual. Right? But we’re like, I’m not going to turn this off. It works too good. We haven’t even like tried it yet. You know, we’re scaled it yet. So we then we got put a spreadsheet together, and we put a VA in there. And we started building team and system. We’re like, ah, it keeps working even better, you know, then we did it, you know, half a million in sales. And then we’re like, alright, well, let’s find some tech for this. Let’s keep doubling down here. And we looked for a bunch of tech, and we’re like, that none of it were like one off features and things like I need a whole sales flow, and the whole process. And so there’s more to it. But that’s roughly, we solve our own problem. And then people in our mastermind, we’re like, Well, what’s that we’re like, the software.

Matt Watson  9:47

The core FlowChat is building the sales pipeline or and integrating it with the chat, right? It’s a combination of those two, would you say is kind of where the magic happens?

Chris Baden  9:56

Yeah, for context. It really depends who we’re talking with, but somehow have deemed you know FlowChart like a CRM for DMS. We are not just to be clear, we’re not a CRM. Like, if you’re using HubSpot, or close or whatever we are, we are like MQL. We are front end, you know, prospecting tool sales tool that that we’ve got webhooks and API and work with Zapier and make doc hot, like, listen, we can automate everything, you know what I mean? And like, connect with whatever you’re using. So we’re very tech stack friendly. But we found this gap like in our own CRM, look, we’ve got email, love email, got SMS, we’ve got ringless voice message call, where is the pocket for DMS, that was the gap that we were seeing. And we’re and when when we’re acquiring this way, like we’re talking about acquisition, but people also use this for strategically raising capital, right for recruiting talent, for finding other strategic like JV partners for launches and stuff, like those are the four core that people are typically using this tool for, but look like, let’s bring more context to this. Okay, let’s start with Facebook because we’re on 13 different social media platforms right now. But let’s just take Facebook, let’s go to a Facebook group. Okay, you find like all the different members of the group you’re part of, in a couple of clicks, we can import Facebook group members, and retarget them with a direct message campaign. We have a lot of best practices around that around, you know, how you’re conducting yourself in that group, again, treat a group owner and treat a group the way that you would want to be treated as and we run our own group. So we like collaborative strategies. So and if you want me to leak, like a really good best practice tip, would that be good to specifically around the group?

Matt Watson  11:46

Absolutely. Yeah, Facebook groups, I think, are their own goldmine. So how do we how do we mine them?

Chris Baden  11:51

Here’s a huge hack. It’ll save you hours and hours and hours of time. Okay, prospecting, as we all know, is very time consuming. How do we speed that up and get higher quality leads. If you’re on the phone, and like, no one’s closing, and you’re annoyed because of the quality this is for you. Okay, when you go to a Facebook group, and you go to the members like tab, when you’re scrolling through there, look for the section that says members with things in common. And we’re gonna click View All. And there’s a couple of reasons why that’s so important. Number one, is you’ve kind of curated your audience by industry, if you found the right group, okay. So you know, you’re gonna have a higher hit rate there. But then the second thing is members have things in common, what are you doing, you’re saying yes to and using Facebook’s algorithm or Meta, or whatever, they’re calling themselves these days, right? And, and they love that, hey, they’re using our thing, the way it was designed, okay, you’re gonna have more mutual friends. So you’re gonna have a higher friend acceptance rate, you’re gonna have a higher delivery rate, you’re gonna have a higher open rate. So that one little thing there could easily save you 10s of out 10s of hours per week, right? Spread out over your team. Obviously, that’s just a little one. But that’s a lot of time so it matters.

Matt Watson  13:10

So let me ask you this. So if I go, I could go on Facebook. And I find a group that has 10,000 entrepreneurs in it. And they potentially could be leads for Full Scale. But how do I qualify all those people? How do I take 10,000 people and figure out which of them I would actually message, like, does your tool help with that qualification? Or how do you do that?

Chris Baden  13:29

Excellent question. And 100%? Yes, we you know, ICP ideal customer profile, we have what we call our four Q method. And that’s for simple yes or no questions. That is an SOP, essentially. And so we have, there’s a couple ways you can do this. But if we have we have, you know, our VAs on our team say, look, once we establish the four Q’s, they say, Does it meet all these criterias? If it’s yes to all, then they go into our pipeline. And then now actually, this just really, you know, just released at the time of this recording or airing or whatever, our Facebook automations, this is Facebook profile, we can auto, you know, friend request, we can auto send a like, on some of their content, and then we can send that initial message automatically. So we have work used to qualify, and then you can just run the campaign and you can see, and we have some guards around that because you it’s not like you’re gonna go message outbound new, hundreds of people. Facebook does not allow that. And that’s against terms. So we have the criteria that are proper, that don’t jeopardize what we call the social asset, in this case, the profile.

Matt Watson  14:38

But as that qualification process, still a manual process, then?

Chris Baden  14:42

It or at the time of this conversation it is but like internally, we’re automating that piece as well. And so so

Matt Watson  14:51

So I think it’s a little easier with something like LinkedIn, right? Because I can go in and get from my first connections that people that filter down to some lists and then import that into your system. And they’re a little more qualified, probably, at least the start of the qualification process than, like, random people from a Facebook group is a comparison, right?

Chris Baden  15:11

100% Yeah. And so playing with that comparison on the Facebook group, we do some of that qualifying on the front end. Being that you’re, you know, like members with things in common. You can go in there something you can do, as you’re scrolling through that list, you can actually just one off import people, like, you know, highlight over there. Oh, cool. Like that title fits my criteria. You can in seconds, man, like, quote manually, a, that’s a good fit. That’s a good fit. That’s a good fit, and just import import, import import import. So you could do that front-end, too, with being still really time efficient.

Matt Watson  15:47

Okay. Yeah, I’ve, I’m super interested in how this works for LinkedIn, because for our business, Full Scale, you know, we’re we’re trying to reach out to other startup founders and IT executive, CTOs at smaller companies, and etc. And I have 30,000 followers on LinkedIn. If you don’t follow me, you can follow me on LinkedIn. But that’s, you know, if you have that many connections, you’re sort of sitting on a goldmine, right? It’s like, well, how do I, how do I mind this 20,000 connections I have. And so at Full Scale, we only have like 60 customers, we have 300 employees, it’s a good size business. I only need 60 more customers to double the business. I don’t need like 1000s, right? So, you know, how do I mind through those 1000s of people and find the next, you know, 60 customers over the next couple of years is my goal. Yeah, and I think a tool like this could really, really helped me do that.

Chris Baden  16:41

You’re embarking on a really crucial question for yourself, and everyone listening watching right now, because what we’ve discussed was prospecting and kind of outbound efforts, which are very powerful. We’re still doing we use FlowChat to grow FlowChat, we still haven’t even done any paid ads. You know, we’re growing well. But still, no one basically knows about us, you know, we’re still really small. And so all this being said, what you’re starting to ask about is is inbound. And so to dive in LinkedIn, let’s take Hey, you know, how do I create more meaningful conversations with just a select few group of people, here is the message and messenger and this is where FlowChat really is useful and shines for people, okay. In that I’m like, you know, Vanna White gesturing here. If you’re listening to this, but picture if you’re just listening and not watching picture, your, your LinkedIn or Facebook inbox, right? It only maybe you got one of those cool, really big screens, you’re only seeing about 10 to 12 different contexts or DM conversations, not you or anyone on your team is going to sit there and scroll for 20 minutes or 10 minutes, that alone 30 seconds to find who’s lost in the abyss of that Inbox? Okay, 100%. Now, once we’ve established that to be completely true, and then we know this best practice business practice of for centuries, in the past and to come, the fortune is in the follow up. So if we know that’s where the value is, but yet we can’t execute on it in the Inbox, that’s the problem. And that’s one of the major problems that FlowChart solves. How does it do it? Here’s how it does it. Every contact record, we can import from anywhere, your inbox, from likes, from comments, like if someone someone else’s post, if someone else post and a bunch of people are commenting on that you can import all the people that commented on that other post, okay. So you can import, you now have this ability, you know, keys of the kingdom, you can import any prospect on social that you can see on your computer. Okay, great. Now you can now you have the list, okay. But you can now in a click of a button, access that exact one-on-one conversation on across 13 different social media platforms. So you don’t have to spend time scrolling. So, if you talk to Kevin from two months ago, and they, you know, finally got funding, you know, Matt, they’re ready to bring on three more, you know, junior engineers. And they’re like, alright, Matt, time now for the conversation, right? You can just click a button, it’ll go right to that conversation. And you can pick up where you left off. And you know what you said last and where they’re at in the sales process?

Matt Watson  19:39

Are, you and I can do that chat. And I can do that chat in your software. I don’t have to leave your software and go to LinkedIn.

Chris Baden  19:46

So this, this answer might shock you. The answer is the conversations are all still taking place natively on each of the platforms. And here’s why. Here’s why we did it this way on purpose. We, selfishly, when we’re solving your own problem, I’m like, Look, you know, because LinkedIn specifically got a ton of software, like DM software that’s automated, you know, friends with some of the other founders, and they’ve done a great job bringing some product and service to market. But here’s the problem. All I want to do is capitalize on DMs. Okay. I said one little pattern, and I want all of it on all the platforms everywhere as much as possible, right? So I don’t want to have, I wanted one program that does all that. So we create a FlowChat. So because we don’t link any particular social media accounts like you’re referring to, to FlowChat, I can do that not only with your profile, I can have 100 LinkedIn profiles. And there’s just one license per business. And so you can everyone on your team can just come on and use their profile and run pipelines. And so I just, I was like, look, I want one tool that’s on all the social media platforms. And I want to be able to use as many profiles as I want. And so that’s why we set it up that way. And people typically like that because there’s that scale scalability element.

Matt Watson  21:07

So you can you see all the chat messages in your software, then?

Chris Baden  21:11

You can see, what you’re seeing is that like a traditional is a good question like HubSpot or Salesforce, that Kanban pipeline view, that’s what you’re seeing, and they have all those contact cards. And so from there, you can build your workflows and your automations. And messages can be executed from that view. It is important to note, if you’re on saved native LinkedIn, are our extension overlays on that. And you can function from that view. We have, sometimes this stuff is a lot easier to see. And so we have, you know, some demos and videos available on our YouTube channel. Also a FlowChat.com, we have hundreds of free videos and free resources for people to like see actual flows that we’re doing. So I know sometimes it’s like, hard to just talk through.

Matt Watson  22:04

Yeah, sure. So what I what I heard those you have a browser extension that also helps do some of these things. 100%. Yep. Okay. Okay, very cool. Well, when the way that I found out about your guys’s product was there’s a local, local business here that as offering some basically consulting around your product. And so, you know, you guys are doing white labeling. And I’m curious about for those who are listening that have thought about doing white labeling before, if you could share some tidbits about white labeling and what that means and how that is how that is going for your company as part of your strategy.

Chris Baden  22:40

I appreciate you asking about this part, Matt, this is actually one of my favorite parts about FlowChat because it affects me personally. Something that I learned in agency is that I can do you know, a similar service. But when I productize, myself with tech, the multiple of my company skyrockets. And I know you know this, because you’ve been in tech around Tech with multiples. And so white label allows us to work and partner with digital marketing agencies and other b2b service providing agencies product tie productize their IP, their intellectual property within our tech. And not only will it is it in this is already happening, because we the program has been been live this whole year. Not only is it helping them in, you know, two 3x sales, but it’s helping that dollar, those dollars collected also are valued at a multiple, let me give you an I know you understand but an example for all audience listening, if you do a million dollars per year in sales, and you’re now you know, more of a tech product and company, you know, venture capital private equity, you know, depending on a couple of different variables would view you as worth 3 million or 5 million, or even up to 10 plus million dollars worth of value compared to if you’re an agency just selling time for money. They give you $700,000 for your company. So what I what I’m passionate about is not only changing, you know, my own financial equation, for my for legacy for my family, but this white label program allows us to empower and serve as the entrepreneur that I was by productizing their intellectual property with our tech and it helps them sell more. Yes, and most people will just be excited about that. Yeah, we’re making more sales. But meanwhile, that’s generational and life changing wealth accumulation by affecting how they’re the asset that they’re actually building which is their business.

Matt Watson  24:50

So I think to say it another another way if I repeat it for you is like so Ryan that I met that is doing this like she has formed her own business based off of your product right and But she becomes like a really big, like value added kind of reseller for you because she provides like all the consulting and the best practices, and maybe she has her own content and strategies and all these things that she can go sell like a marketing agency would, where you guys are providing more of the tech, right? But if you can partner with 1000 people like Ryan, now you have like 1000 value added, like resellers basically running around, like, selling for you. Hot right?

Chris Baden  25:31

So yeah, speaking from the perspective of, of positioning flow chat 100% That’s one of our strategies of launching the white label is like, hey, you know what, while we’re continuing to build out and be the tech arm, you know, we need education and we need, like the soft skills, so to speak. And we see this pattern that’s very similar for say like HubSpot, how many certified HubSpot, you know, dealers are there, you know, this pattern is very common. Although HubSpot doesn’t white label, we just want to pass more of the value on and support agency owners to a much higher level, because that’s just part of our model and what we want to do. So yeah, they are 100% right now. Yeah.

Matt Watson  26:10

And when I talked to Ryan, you know, she, of course, was very upfront, she’s like, well, we use this thing called Flo chat, and then you know, we help you make it work and be successful with it, and yada, yada. Yeah, it’s like, she was really hyped. She was hiding it right. She’s like, you don’t need to chat. And, you know, it’s great to see her build a business like that. So I also own a digital marketing technology product that manages Google ads to business called at capacity. And, you know, our goal is the same, like we don’t want to be a marketing agency, we want to sell our software to other marketing agencies and let them build on top of what we’re doing. So yeah, my other company is actually kind of similar in that that way. It’s like, we don’t want to be an agency, we want to be a tech company. Yep. Yep. They’re very, very different businesses.

Very much are.

Yeah. So you, you mentioned earlier that your software really helps manage that the pipeline and knowing who your leads are, and what stage they’re in and be able to track all of that, which is great. But you also mentioned you are building some automation. So for some of these 13 platforms, you are building integrations with some of them, to try and automate some of this, some of the stuff that’s part of your roadmap you guys are working towards?

Chris Baden  27:21

Yeah. 100%. So, you know, the time of this conversation, as you know, you know, with Tech, I live in the present and I also live in the future, you know, I’ve already seen working models that are in beta and, and, and, and but what I get to talk about, you know, today, that’s just, you know, hot off the press is Facebook profile, that Facebook page, Facebook profile, automations this is this is complete, this is so, so useful for a lot of different cases, solopreneurs, smaller, you know, mid sized agencies, b2b service providers, coaches, consultants, that, that have their expertise, and they’re looking to connect with some high quality, you know, 510, up to 30, like new clients a month, right? These are campaigns that you can run, click, click a button, have it running, do it once a day, and start seeing some some inflow and close deal and book call and, or recruiting that. As you move further. In fact, if this is a resource that’s useful, we put together a business blueprint, it shows when you’re making $0 per month, all the way up to 100. Sorry, a million dollars per month. Each there’s six, six or seven different stages that we put together. And it describes had this, you know, monthly range, here’s the challenges that you’re having, here’s the needs that you have, here’s what your team looks like. And it breaks down that step-by-step. It’s something that was really really useful for us in our journey of like learning what you need to do at each stage. And so as we go further in those business cycles, Matt, the things that become important is like okay, well now I’m I’ve acquired and we’ve got sales and marketing on lock, I need to recruit talent. Like it’s so hard to find good people today does it? Well, there’s, there’s good people finding good people and there are a lot more competitive companies and you need to be in that bucket too. You know, you and I, Matt, need to be in that bucket too. And so this becomes a really really good recruiting tool as well. And guess what recruiting is sales it’s all the same pattern. So anyway, yeah, those are a couple different use cases.

Matt Watson  29:29

Yeah, I can see us using this Full Scale to help do recruiting you know, we find software developers and all you know on LinkedIn and trying to recruit them and trying to track all of them is kind of a mess, right? Unless you get really organized and so I can see this as being helpful for that as well.

Chris Baden  29:46

And and in FlowChat visually, like those will just be two separate pipelines with with different messaging with different stages. And it just will be running for you every day with the automations that you’re asking about. So float, Facebook profile. I’ll has that we’ll be replicating that, actually LinkedIn is up next. So that’s the highest, you know, in our roadmap, people are voting on that one the most, like, we’re user-driven. So if like, there’s a way that people come in, they’re like, We all need this, it’s like, guess what’s going to be built next, that, you know, we’re just, it’s very click-up-ish, you know, with their, how they grew, you know, to their billion plus valuation is just constantly, you know, listening and like, really quick turn, we’re pumping out new features every single week. So, we’re just listening and building, listening and building and we’ve got four full time engineers currently. So yeah, LinkedIn is next. And then we’re gonna go through through all of them, right? Instagram acts, you know, or, or formerly known as Twitter, TikTok, you know, and all of them, Slack Discord, Telegram, you get the idea.

Matt Watson  30:55

Okay. So what, what suggestions would you have for somebody who’s listening right now, that’s like, you know, what, I probably should be doing this, I probably should be messaging people on LinkedIn or Facebook groups, but it just scares the crap out of me. And I don’t know how to do it. Like, what what suggestions do you have for somebody like that?

Chris Baden  31:14

There’s three simple steps. It’s, it’s right leads, it’s right scripts, and it’s right systems. And that essentially solves all the things. And so to your question, Matt, hey, where do I start or what do I do, and to be frankly, honest, like, this is with FlowChart or without FlowChart, everything I’m saying to you, you can do this manually, like you don’t need, you don’t have to have flowchart as you do it more, you’re like, I totally get why I would use it. But, you know, look, ultimately, we want to see people win. And so number one, you might just need to hear and believe that, yeah, if you’ve spend, you know, 30 to 60 minutes a day on the revenue generating activity known as prospecting, to connect with new people, you’re gonna get, you’re gonna get great, you know, a new lead source and flow that’s going on there. And you’re and what you’re going to feel when you go to do that, is oh, shoot, like, where do I go, though? And so you’re start thinking about different Facebook groups, you’ll start thinking, if you’re on Instagram, maybe different hashtags that you’re searching, think about where your ICP is living, and you’ll get a little better at hunting, and then you’ll find this pool of people. And you’ll be like, Oh, my gosh, like, I didn’t realize how big my market is. And I think your confidence in your belief will go up. And then and then you’re gonna be like, Well, what do I say? What do I say? How do I approach somebody? You guys want to hear the highest converting response rate message that we found over the 1000s of campaigns that we’ve done?

Matt Watson  32:43

Absolutely.

Chris Baden  32:45

It’s a compliment. Okay, it’s not, here’s the sales tactic, or hook or data, data data, and to execute this properly, just to give something on the spot. You know, there’s different if you’re on Instagram, you know, there’s more creators on that, that, you know, platform. So it’s like, Whoa, I got sucked into your content, you know, content just blew up your notifications. Ha. You know, I love what you’re doing. I’m gonna reach back out more soon, you know, in a meaningful way. So it’s just, it’s just saying hi, it’s just saying, hey, Keep being you, you’re doing a great job. And there’s no pressure and you’re letting him know that you’re going to come back a little bit later on LinkedIn, I would be a little more direct, right? Not, not hard sell in the first message, but hey, looking forward to you know, reaching out to connect more, it looks like you’re doing you know, actually, let me say this cleaner. Why you? Why me? Why this? Why now? that framework works really good on LinkedIn. Think through those four questions. Why you? Why me? Why this? Why now? Because on LinkedIn, and this can work on other platforms, too. It’s like, when you read a message that’s direct, you’re like, hey, you know why you it’s like, Hey, we’re, we both serve the same customer. Why me? Because because we’ve gotten XYZ results for the customer. And I see you have to. Why this? Because there’s a collaboration that would make a lot of sense for us to have, you know, conversation. There’s a lot of upside to this conversation. Why now, because we just released this new feature. And in four sentences, a very short message. It’s like, wow, I really liked this person, like this makes sense. If you want to go to the next level, we’ve done this too. This is a huge hack right here. Don’t talk about who you are and what you do. Just show it. Okay, so to give context, if I’m FlowChat and I’m helping people with approaching people and what to say, and a sales process, here’s what I’ve done. And this has worked on on companies that are doing multiple eight figures a year, and their response was like, I want to call immediately, okay, we put together a custom video, and I just share screen as like, Hey, I noticed in your recent challenge in your recent campaign, there’s some opportunity here in gaps in our sales processes, here’s what we’re doing. And so if I was you or your team, I would, I’d click here, I’d import, and I have a couple of messages like this, and I would send them. And so it’s like you receive a video like that. You’re like, Oh, I’m not asking for business. I’m there to serve. And I’m solving a problem. And I’m aware of what’s going on in their world. So Matt, for you, if you’re recruiting, or you only need, you don’t even need 60 clients a year, you just need 60 more clients to double the company. Yeah, yep. So if you bring on another 10, or 15, it’s like what’s, I mean, spending 10 minutes to just look at someone’s profile, research them a little bit and put together a meaningful video. If you did two of those a day, like three of those a day. And all it did was land you and other 15 ideal clients that lead to warm, warm referrals, like that’s exponential, that makes complete sense. So those are a couple of best practices on, you know, where do we go on this journey? We said, Okay, we got to first learn to hunt a little bit. And then we learned that, hey, what do we say? And so we went, you know, just today, like, if you just found the right people and sent them a compliment, you’re gonna start getting responses and near at least you’re in a conversation.

Matt Watson  36:14

Do you think this is something that, for example, for my company that we can hire any salesperson, and they could all do this? Like every one of our salespeople should be doing this? Or what are your thoughts?

Chris Baden  36:27

I wouldn’t, I would advise it, you know, at, I’ll speak in terms of what we’re doing. Personally, we have our outreach team. We have our setters. And then we have our closers. So right now you and I are having a conversation, but all of my social profiles, well, not not all 13 of them. But you know, because one of them is now YouTube, right? That’s less of a social platform. But we have some cool stuff going on there. But this being said, you know, majority of my social profiles, right now, I have an outreach team that’s constantly qualifying, I have a setter team that’s engaging in conversation based on SOP and, you know, an FAQ database we’ve compiled. And then we’ve got closers that are taking those calls. So I’ve so yes, I would, they’re all using FlowChat every day, I’d highly recommend having your sales team plug into flow chat.

Matt Watson  37:19

But what if they don’t have any connections with our potential customers? Like they don’t have those LinkedIn connections? They don’t, where would you? Where would you have them start?

Chris Baden  37:28

Very good question. So there’s, there’s two different ways that you can approach this, but both can work. Number one is you’re saying, hey, if their profile doesn’t have that, you can have your, you know, they can always reach out to new connections constantly, right? So you have a sales rep, that’s an ambassador of, of the program, and they’re building up kind of their, their brand and credibility as well. But additionally, you can have, you know, we do have designated VAs and setters that are not reaching out as them. They’re using our profile to have the conversations. And when you’ve, when you’ve mapped out your customer journey, I know what I say every time, I just need that to happen more often with more people. And so if something, if something is they’re not allowed to really speak on our behalf, if there’s something off script is what we call it, it goes into another bucket, and then it’s actually me personally responding.

Matt Watson  38:27

Okay. So, so you’ve got them. Just like any other types of sales, you got some people making cold calls, setting appointments, and somebody else has to step in and in handle those things. Right? They get to a certain stage, but now you’ve got to do that in DMS.

Chris Baden  38:42

Same, it’s, it’s all the same. Fortunately, fortunately, it’s all the same. It’s just how do we replicate those patterns that have worked for decades, within the DM environment, because there’s higher Look, I’m a numbers person. Because like, I suck at social media socially, you’re never gonna find me like Friday night be like, I can’t wait to just scroll through my feed and like, I can’t stand watching shorts. It like screws up my brain. I’m like, it makes me feel sick. I don’t know, I just, I’m not that type of consumer. However, when I see that people are logging into Facebook alone 12 times a day. And I’m seeing, you know, like Nielsen reports and other data that saying, hey, people are spending on average five plus hours a day and it’s like, oh, Chris, I talked to business people. I talked to doctors. Okay, pull up, pull up your phone. Go to go to screen time. And let me know how many hours are there? Because I’ve spoken in front of other masterminds. All entrepreneurs. I was like, it’s all good. Let’s do this right here right now. Pull out your phones. Do the same. Wow. minds over six hours. I’m like, listen, I know we’re all special. We never watch Netflix. And we always work 24/7 And there’s still social media that’s consuming us. Yeah. So while I was like, Alright, if those are the numbers While they’re ignoring my email campaigns, they’re not picking up the phone. And they’re, and they’re like, how did you get my number with these cold SMS is, you know what they’re doing, they’re scrolling on social. So I need to learn that language to connect with my market. And look, I’m an ad guy, I’m not, I like I like email, I like phone, I like SMS, right? Those still work, don’t get rid of those. What I’m saying is don’t ignore DMS, because there’s, there’s literally millions of dollars like that will have lower pound for pound CAC, by the way, Cost to Acquire Customer, right? And they’re still there, you’re still bringing in really quality, LTV lifetime value, you know, customers from there, too. So when I saw when I looked at the numbers, I was like the attentions there. It cost me less to acquire there. And I’m still getting great customers. It’s like how do I ignore that?

Matt Watson  40:48

So how do you how do you advise using this for somebody like me that more it might be more like, I’m not trying to message somebody today and sell them something today, I’m trying to nurture or build a relationship with them? How would you? How would you do this little differently?

Chris Baden  41:07

Really good questions, Matt. A really powerful way to do this is a lead magnet, a lead magnet can be a PDF, it could be a live event, it could be a workshop or a training, it could be content like this, just like hey, I’m doing a podcast, go check it out. Or maybe you’re a good fit to be on it. That’s Those are good nurturing relationship type moves. Having community could be a Slack community. I mentioning Slack, just because you’re heavier in tech, you know, maybe discord Facebook group. And then there’s a bunch of others right there school, there’s mighty networks, you know, build some type of nurturing community where you’re, they get to see you, they get to hear from you more often. And so what does that look like? There’s actually five key stages to every single DM conversation. The the first piece is just engagement, you’re engaging with them. The second is nurturing them. So it’s having something prepared, you know, value driven to talk about. The third is now you have that social equity to to have a call to action. Alright, so you can ask them to come to your event, or watch your training or, and a lot of people screw that up, too, because they’re like, oh, but I’m like asked, I’m just asking you to look at my website. No, you just gave them another to do list on their desk. Nobody wants to do that. But if you said, I noticed you had this problem. If you go right to page three, and look at the second part, it will solve the exact thing you’re just were asking about. That, that’s valuable, right call to action. The fourth piece is follow up. You got to get that second, that third, that fourth touchpoint in there. If you’re not getting at least four or more touch points, you’re missing out on a 60 to 80 plus percent of sales that you could have to oversimplify before I get to the last and the fifth one. I’m not that smart. Unfortunately, Matt, I do the same thing. I’ve been doing the same thing for for a decade and a half. You know what it is? Hey, Chris, I talked to two people today. Okay, man, I got this brilliant idea. Let’s talk to 10 people a day. That’s that’s, you know, and how do we do that? And how do we do that consistently? And so like, how do you do you know, more of the right revenue generating activity? That’s it. And then and then when I’m evaluating sales processes, and people have paid us, you know, 10s of 1000s of dollars just to come into their business for a day. We’re like, oh, well, your sales process only has four touch points. We got to get to an industry average of seven to 13. Right? Let’s at least get to 10 to 12 touch points, watch your sales triple. That’s it. There’s, it’s just you need a system. There’s an art and a science people are missing. They’re skipping the work. They’re skipping the science. And when you do the real work, there’s no more guesswork. Here’s the fifth one. Okay, we’ve got engagement, we’ve, we’ve got nurturing, we’ve got call to action. We’ve got that follow up getting past that fourth plus touch point. And the last one is is clear. Next steps, it’s clear future people want to be led. They’re buying confidence. There they need there, you’re solving a problem for them. Okay? So no one wants to give somebody money in and then it’s like, well, you know, may we do this or no, like, I’m hurting over here. Here’s money. What do I do? People need to be led and want to be led, right? Even leaders in particular areas. So what are the clear three next steps that you’re doing? And every conversation you’re having in DMS, it progresses that way. We can be creative with well, I’ve got the workshop and I’ve got the PDF and I do calls and look at those all fit within that framework. We’ve just seen 1000s of them. And that’s the pattern everyone needs.

Matt Watson  45:06

So do you guys provide any kind of consulting around how to do this stuff and helping them do it? Or do you rely on these these other partners like Ryan, we mentioned earlier to help do that kind of stuff?

Chris Baden  45:18

Yeah. So great. Great. There’s two questions there. So yes, we do we have a do it yourself, done with you and done for you offerings at FlowChat.com, with all the details. And we also have these, these really powerful and valuable white label partners like Ryan, who find themselves in these other niches. And so if you’re happen to be in a particular niche, and you know, Ryan’s in that niche, it’s like, man, grab all the benefits that we’re bringing to the table, but get them through Ryan, because she’s going to speak specifically your language in the way and help you go even faster. And that’s where the power is.

Matt Watson  46:01

Well, this has been an awesome conversation today. And I mean, probably like a lot of people that are listening, if they can figure out how to make this work. It’s worth millions of dollars, like a lot of millions of dollars, right? Like I said, for my company, if I could sign up another 50 customers over the next couple years from this, it’s worth maybe 10s of millions of dollars, right? So for some, it absolutely works. And, you know, one thing I think a lot of entrepreneurs do is they’re always looking for this, like easy button growth hack thing. And this may sound like one of those, but it’s really not, it’s more of like the fundamentals, and just getting good at the fundamentals, putting effort into those fundamentals every day, like you said, like he spent an hour a day doing this or whatever. And just doing that every single day is what produces the big long-term success. It’s not the weird little hacky things. It’s the fundamentals like this, that people need to do, in my opinion.

Chris Baden  46:56

It’s really well said, and I wish I had more entrepreneurs like speak what you just spoke to me so much sooner because it’s very tempting not to respect how powerful revenue-generating activity is, which is really just business growth activity. Today, it might be an acquisition. Tomorrow might be recruiting, right? It’s a business growth activity. And no matter what stage, there could be someone listening to this, that’s the, hey, Chris, I’m doing 50 million a year in sales. It’s like, that’s great. We have some really powerful inbound flows that you’d love to see because we’re working with companies like that. And here’s what here’s what value growth-driven systems look like. And look, you know, oftentimes, like you’re saying, when we’re like, it’s so easy to compare, oh, man, like, when is it going to be me? And why not me? And, you know, I’m not ready for this yet. It’s like, look, the people that are ahead of me, and ahead of maybe anyone listening and watching is this, they have better systems, they’re not that much smarter, they’re not working that much how’re harder that many more hours, they have the right, like, systems, right? Like even us as humans, we can only run so fast. But if you give us a bicycle, not only do we go faster, but we use way less effort, and we go a lot further. FlowChat is like that bicycle. And that’s why we were doing it manually. And then we went from six figures to seven figures like that. Right? And so you know, that can work for others too.

Matt Watson  48:24

Absolutely. Well, a reminder: if you need to hire software engineers, testers, or leaders, Full Scale can help. We have the plot, and the people in the platform to help you build and manage a team of experts. The big difference with Full Scale is we help you build a team that works directly for you. You can check us out at FullScale.io to learn more. Well, Chris, so much. Thank you so much for being on the show today. I’m definitely a fan of FlowChat and what you guys are doing. To learn more about your guys’s product, it’s FlowChat.com, right?

Chris Baden  48:53

F-l-o-w-chat.com.

Matt Watson  48:56

And I always like to end the show by asking if you have any other final words of wisdom or tips for other entrepreneurs out there. It doesn’t have to be about flow. Check the about anything.

Chris Baden  49:09

The one thing I can share that’s coming to mind is that, there are so many things I can share. But here’s what’s coming to mind. So we’ll roll with it. Is this you if you’ve listening and watching this and you’ve been feeling stuck or frustrated, and this is at all levels, this is at all levels? Okay? Fortunately the answer, this is something I found, is not in my head. I actually don’t have to have all the ideas, and the pressure feels like it’s all on me. But it doesn’t. It’s not really all on me. The answer is in the minds of the market. And if we never go into the market and just ask them, we’re never going to get the answers that are actually the answer to serve that market to a higher level, which renders more service and creates more value for us and our families. And so don’t lock yourself away. Don’t separate yourself rather lean in. Whether you’re connecting on social via DMS, you’re going to other masterminds or wherever. Keep putting yourself out there, keep having more conversations, and keep asking quality questions so that you and your business can benefit from it.

Matt Watson  50:16

Absolutely. Perfect. Well, thank you so much for being on the show today, Chris.

Chris Baden  50:19

Appreciate you, Matt.