[reply worthy | day 13] 14 DMs this week
(twelve of them sound exactly like yours)
Tuesday morning, 9:47am.
You are at a coffee shop. Laptop open, waiting for your oat milk cortado.
The woman at the table next to you is on a phone call.
At first, you tune it out. Normal coffee shop background noise.
But after 5 minutes, you notice something. She hasn’t paused once.
Not asked a single question. Not responded to anything the other person said. Not adjusted her tone, her topic, or her pace based on any input from the other end.
10 minutes in, you realize she’s not on a call at all. She’s delivering a speech to someone who happens to be on the line.
You channel your best Michelle Tanner and say to yourself: ‘How Rude!’
But … your team does exactly this in your DMs everyday.
The first 12 days of this series I highlighted the individual mistakes in the sequence my friend Reid paid an agency $2k for.
Today, I’m talking about the root cause underneath:
→ Why every mistake from Days 1-12 is a symptom of the same disease
→ The Monologue Score and how to calculate it for your sequence
→ The one question that separates dialogue from performance
Let’s start with the disease underneath the symptoms...
Mistake #12: You’re monologuing instead of dialoguing
12 days. 12 mistakes. One root cause.
Every single mistake from Days 1 through 12 is a symptom of the same disease: DM conversations talking AT the prospect, not WITH them.
It is a monologue pretending to be a dialogue.
Here’s how to check if you or you setter has been monologuing
The test is simple. For each message in your sequence, ask: does this message change based on anything the prospect said or did?
Not “does it include their name.” Not “does it mention their company.” Does the structure of the message shift based on their input?
Reid’s opening message talks about what his agency does, who they’ve helped, and what results they’ve gotten. Swap the prospect for anyone else on LinkedIn and the message reads exactly the same.
His follow-up is two words. “Thoughts, [NAME]?” Zero connection to anything the prospect said, did, or posted.
It sends identically whether the prospect opened the first message, ignored it, visited Reid’s profile, or blocked him.
Seven messages. Seven monologues. A conversation that doesn’t need the prospect to run.
Your prospect isn’t lazy. They’re not always too busy. But they are tired of same pitch/different day landing in their inbox.
They’ve received 14 DMs this week. Twelve of them sound exactly like yours.
Same structure. Same cadence. Same pitch wrapped in a different compliment.
Prospects can feel that in the first line…. before they even decide whether your offer is relevant.
The Monologue Score
Take your full sequence or recent DM conversation.
Count the monologue messages. Divide by total messages. That’s your ratio.
Reid scored 7 out of 7. Every message in his sequence could be sent without the prospect having replied to a single one. A perfect monologue.
Here’s what the score tells you:
0-2 out of 7: your sequence adapts to the prospect. You’re in the minority.
3-4 out of 7: mixed. Some dialogue, mostly performance.
5-6 out of 7: a one-sided conversation disguised as outreach.
7 out of 7: a speech delivered through DMs. Reid’s result.
Most sequences I audit score 5 or higher.
The agencies writing them optimize for sequence completion, not conversation quality. Seven messages sent feels productive.
But if all seven are monologue, you didn’t have seven touch-points.
You had one long speech broken, broken into several parts.
That’s it.
Here’s what you learned today:
→ The Monologue Score is the ratio of monologue messages to total messages
→ Reid’s $2K sequence scored a perfect 7 out of 7 (worst possible score)
→ Dialogue messages cannot exist without the prospect’s participation
Calculate your own Monologue Score.
Pull your setter’s last few conversations.
Count how many messages in would be identical if the prospect never replied.
Over the next 18 days, I’m walking you through:
→ How to write a reply that sounds like you read their previous message
→ The context callback that proves you are paying attention
→ How to reference their content without sounding like a stalker
→ The engagement ladder that turns lurkers into repliers
→ How to ask follow-up questions that feel natural, not scripted
→ The time-delay strategy that makes silence work for you
→ How to handle the “not interested” reply without burning the bridge
→ The soft close that feels like a conversation, not a pitch
→ How to turn a “maybe later” into a specific next step
What we have already covered:
→ Day 1: How to write a DM opener that doesn’t sound like every other DM opener. The sender-first opener and why “Hey [Name], saw your profile” is dead.
→ Day 2: How to personalize without sounding like a merge tag. The lazy line every prospect has seen 200 times this month.
→ Day 3: How to ask a question your prospect actually wants to answer. The bait-question test.
→ Day 4: How to pass the IKEA test on every message in your sequence. One instruction per message, every time.
→ Day 5: How to stop your prospect from ghosting after the first message. The pacing pattern that earns a second touch.
→ Day 6: How to write a follow-up that doesn’t look like a follow-up. The reopener that pays off the opening message.
→ Day 7: How to stop booking calls that don’t close. Qualifying inside the DM before the calendar link goes out.
→ Day 8: How to spot the question that wasn’t a question. Spencer’s opening message and the bait under the curiosity.
→ Day 9: The Frame Flip. When “teach me” becomes “let me teach you” in one message.
→ Day 10: The lazy automation. Why your ManyChat flow asks a question it doesn’t use the answer to.
→ Day 11: The Unnecessary Breakup. When the “last message” kills a thread that was still alive.
→ Day 12: Your doctor’s office does this better than your DM sequence. The three touch-points between “yes” and “showed up.”
Your head of growth just sent you the Q1 DM performance report.
3,247 messages sent. 127 replies. 14 calls booked. 2 closed.
The numbers look like a funnel problem. But the real problem is upstream. Your sequence is performing a monologue in someone’s inbox.
The Monologue Score Diagnostic
→ Calculate your exact Monologue Score using the 7-point assessment
→ Identify which messages are dialogue vs. performance
→ Get specific rewrites for your three worst monologue messages
→ Access the 12-message audit checklist I use for client sequences
→ See real before/after examples from sequences that went from monologue to dialogue
Paid 8am In Atlanta subscribers: use code included with today’s mega-prompt at checkout for $20 off.
Not a paid subscriber yet? Upgrade your subscription to get $20 off this diagnostic (and every tool I drop in the May Series).
