From hi👋 to buy: how to use FB messenger to book appointments or sell your program

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Adding Facebook Messenger to your funnel is a great way of generating more sales and targeting specific leads in a more effective way, ensuring the best experience possible for all involved.

Ideally, you want to have a running conversation with your prospects where you actually try to understand their problems and where they don’t feel like you are in a selling mode.

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Why do You Need This?

Facebook Messenger has proven to be a more engaging platform than traditional marketing tools, outperforming email by a wide margin. You can get 4x more views to your messages, and almost 10x more clickthroughs!

Yet, if you don’t have a system to sell by chat, you’ll probably face several problems:

Problem #1 - No Consistency

There’s no consistent lead flow and that’s going to cause problems with your pipeline.

Problem #2 — Your Chats Don’t go Anywhere

Even when you do get chats, they don’t result in anything.

Problem #3 — You’ve got no focus when you have no system.

Multiple conversations with multiple people across multiple channels don’t equal sales.

Knowing these, it becomes vital to have a system in place and to optimise the way you use the chat function.

Here’s a pre-defined chat flow inspired by Taki Moore’s video that you can refer to and adopt for your coaching business. By the end of this deep dive, you’ll have a great system for selling by chat!

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The Three Stages of a Chat

How to open up dialogues that lead to conversations that result in conversions for your coaching services? When you break it down, there are really three stages to a chat:

Stage #1 — Engage

This is the action that you make that gets someone to “raise their hands” such as asking a simple question that’s designed to have your prospects reply to you. Usually, you’re posting somewhere public or sending a message to your list, and that causes the chat to start as the prospect is going to show interest.

Conversation starters  — The Lead Magnet

This is really simple. If you have your own Facebook group or are part of other groups,  just drop a lead magnet (e.g. Would you like a free copy of my book?) and ask people to “comment below” or to send you a message to “find out more”.

If you haven’t got a book, find a worksheet or something of value. You don’t have to have a fancy thing to offer.

Identify the three biggest problems your clients have and tailor your conversation starter/freebie to that: “Hey, if you got this problem (name problem), I have a simple 4 steps checklist of things to do to maximise X (name benefit). Comment below and I’ll give it to you”.

Tip: If people ask you questions on FB posts, reply to them and say “rather than block up everyone’s feed, let me send you a message”. You are just starting conversations with permission, usually involving the promise of something cool or details to follow.

Another known strategy is “5130”, shorthand for 5, 1 and 30 - "I am looking for 5 business coaches who want to get 1 specific result (e.g. 100 new leads) in the next 30 days (insert your deadline). If that’s you, comment below and I’ll give you all the details".

If you do it on Instagram, it could just be a simple story and instead of asking people to “comment below” you just ask them to send you a direct message with a key word.

Ideally, you’re going to get a ton of comments/replies which indirectly translate into permissions to start a conversation. Your job is now to engage and go from that post to a chat conversation.

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Stage #2 — Qualify

You open up a dialogue. Now what?

This step is about building trust. You don’t want to make offers to people who don’t want it or don’t match. So, you have a qualification stage to get rid of the leads who will never convert.

A common mistake is starting conversations and not having any predefined pathway nor knowing where you want your prospects to get (so you know how and where to steer the conversation). Before designing conversations, make sure you know what your goals are and how you want to get there.

How much you go through the qualification stage, will depend on your offer.

In this regard, it is also important to define qualifying criteria for your prospect e.g. Our 5-star prospects are willing to engage in a dialogue, they are friendly and cooperative, they know what they want, they know when they want it and they’d like some help.

The harder you qualify, the more questions that you want prospects to answer in a certain way.

Whatever the case might be, you ask and they answer. After a bit of back and forth, you’ll know how to qualify them.

Chat Flow:

1. Opener – opening question designed to have them reply. For example, What kind of clients do you coach? or What problem do you have?. Reminder: we want to be polite and not jump straight to the offer.
2. ”This or that” question - mostly about building trust. For example,  Do you coach mostly one on one or in groups? Do you already have a podcast or are you thinking of starting one?. A bit deeper into topic, but easy to answer yes or no to.
3. Find Their Needs

e.g. What do you think you need most right now? What are the top three things you need?

Questions like these help you speak to their exact needs, instead of talking about all the things that your programme offers.

These are some of the questions that you might ask: “What kind of training are you doing? Are you currently using anything similar to this? What price range are you looking at?”

You can ask questions until you know that you can make the right recommendation for your prospect.

Reminder: Often as coaches we are either really terrified of selling or we tell people all about our program instead of telling them the bits that they want.

Don’t trick consumers into taking the final step. Legitimately answer their concerns. Help them confirm that they have what they want and need.

If you can’t help them, you’ve just found out that you are not going to be super relevant in their life right now. That’s great too. You’ve just triaged.

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Stage #3 — Offer Help & Convert

If you can help them, guess what? Now we are in the privileged place of being able to offer some help.

So, if you feel you can specifically help them with one of their needs, simply offer it. Would you like some help? Often as coaches, we don’t ask the obvious question. Be straightforward.

This is also where you propose the call to action. It could either be to book a call with you to dive deeper into the offer, or to simply buy your product!

Caution: There’s plenty of people out there who’ll confirm and disappear.

Don’t just give them a link and assume they’ll follow it. As soon as someone says “I’m in”, you’ve got to make sure they actually take the action. You do this by holding their hand through the process until they either pay money or book an appointment.

Send them the link and explain to them what they need to do when they get there. If needed, ask them to inform you when they’ve done it. Leave the chat open on your end.

As there’s expectation on their end, you’ll have fewer people drop off during the conversion stage.

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Conclusion

The point of having all of these conversations, and engaging deeply with your prospects, is, of course, to get coaching clients on Facebook chat! But, on a deeper level, it is simply to understand whether you and the prospect are a good fit or not.

I hope you’ve found all of this useful. Now, it’s time for you to start putting it into practice. Follow the examples I’ve given you and build on them. You’ve got this! 😎🤘

P.S. Read here the DO's & DON'Ts List on Selling By Chat

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