Several months ago there was a big broo-ha-ha on Twitter when my pal Sean Kaye got fed up with guys cold DM’ing him about how to make an extra $1k per month… and he screenshot and mocked it.
Very amusing post.
And quite brutal too.
He basically mocked guys who sit around stroking their bobble head dolls of Andrew Tate desperately trying to manifest greatness by squirting out cold DM’s on social media and sliding cold into strangers’ DMs like dik pics on grindr. And to do my part to help cure the cold DM bros of their misguided bad marketing habits, I told a story about when Stefania had gotten nailed by a fraudulent chargeback putting her $6,000 in the red overdrawn on her bank account when dealing with a female Facebook life coach.
This was BB (before Ben).
Her back was to the proverbial wall.
And she was just days away from being evicted by her landlord (her own uncle) who could get a lot more money for her apartment than she had been paying in rent. She also couldn’t pay for her utilities, food, and other bills since she had zero income, with even her other family members turning their backs on her.
Not a fun spot to be in.
And here’s what happened:
She was doing the copywriting, online marketing, branding shtick at the time. Specifically, to the female life coach niche. If you know anything about that niche they are basically Money Twitter bros with ovaries in how they approach marketing. And she got into a situation with a sociopath client who scammed her out of thousands of dollars and put her $6,000 overdrawn on her bank account by doing a fraudulent Stripe chargeback.
This happened at probably the absolute worst time too.
Like I mentioned earlier:
Her landlord/uncle was itching for an excuse to get rid of her due to her paying so low of rent (due to family) in Jersey City at a time when all the New Yorkers were flocking over due to being priced out of NY. He could easily rent it for a lot more to the hordes of dumb money coming over from NY, and her lease was in his way.
Even worse:
She couldn’t pay for anything since she didn’t have a real credit card.
Just a debit card attached to the overdrawn account.
i.e., negative money to her name.
That meant she literally couldn’t get food, pay bills, or buy anything, really. Stripe wasn’t having anything to do with it, either, with their decision being final. And so there was no getting even a penny of that money back.
This is the sort of situation financial nightmares for are made of.
Her solution?
Blindly send cold DM’s to randos?
Start an Onlyfans?
Beg her family (who were hostile to her business plans)?
Pray to Quetzalcoatl?
Nope.
But before I explain what she did:
Understand Stefania’s background in business is not online marketing or email or websites or social media or eBooks or anything digital. Her background was working in her mom’s resale shop in Manhattan which is frequented by everyone from street hookers to A-list Hollywood celebrities and those celebrities’ fashion consultants.
A very interesting place.
And so she learned how to sell the good, old fashioned way:
One-on-one talking & interacting with and finding out what people want.
And that’s what she did when overdrawn in the red.
If you were to ask her, she’d tell you she went into almost a haze and doesn’t remember much. She was obviously very scared and freaked out. And who could blame her? But she did what she knew and followed what came naturally to her from working all those years growing up in her mom’s store:
Warm outreach to clients, peers, people she knew.
One-by-one.
No agenda other than to find out how they’re doing.
It only took a few to tell her about a problem she could help with.
And then, boom, clients acquired, back in the black, within a few days.
Nobody wants to hear that of course.
They want the sEcReT cold email or DM turn-of-phrase.
But life doesn’t work that way.
Ironically:
The best advice for those doing cold outreach is not to do it.
It’s actually warm outreach.
Everyone thinks they need to do cold outreach to start or grow a business — which is as big a mistake as direct response marketers and other businesses neglecting their current warm list and only spending time on getting new cold leads and customers. That happens so much it is literally a trope that gets (rightfully) mocked at direct marketing seminars and in direct marketing books, yet people still do it anyway.
Go figure…
None of what is in this email is new.
It’s all very basic salesmanship 101.
But it might as well be new considering how few do it.
Of course, the ideal way has always been to build a warm email list and mail it.
That way if you get in a financial jam with the wolves at the door it can be as simple as:
1. Think of ridiculously valuable offer with looming deadline
2. Email your list
Chances are that’ll do the trick.
If you want to learn my ways of doing email see the paid Email Players Newsletter here:
Ben Settle
