Being Where Your Customers Are (Discord Edition)
Your customer is spending more and more time on social as email wanes and selling products to and through online communities wins. Discord is one of the most leveraged social channels today, and if you’re B2B selling to a B2C business, 99% of the time you’ll find your customer on Discord. If you’re in the B2C game and at least a piece of your biz isn’t on Discord today, you’re losing.
Stat check: As late as 2023 Discord has 19M monthly active communities on the platform (Discord Revenue and Growth Statistics, SignHouse)
Let’s flip the script for a moment, and talk about what it looks like to be sold to on Discord. When you enter new Discord channels it’s a common behavior to turn off ‘Direct Messages’ as the first step to eliminate spam / scams. Your ‘friends list’ spans 100s of rows, with friend requests from bots, and lazy SDRs mass copy-pasting their pitches wherever they can. Any pitch sent to #general or #water-cooler is getting deleted because ‘we don’t allow soliciting’ in our channel. It’s a nightmare. Now, back to being a Salesperson. ‘Cold’ outreach on Discord is broken, so how do you break through the noise from thousands of bots?
Step #1 of joining a Discord server today, turn ‘Direct Messages’ off.
Differentiation lies in your ability to prove you’re a real human that has real interest in the prospect’s very real business. Sending a custom pitch or selfie in Discord DMs won’t work. Discord is a place for community, so respect the laws of the land and play the game. Join their channel, engage in community events, discussions, ask interesting questions, and be authentic. Sooner or later a team member will notice you, your name will be known in the community, and your ability to ‘be heard’ will be much higher than if you sent a bunch of cold DMs.
Now, this isn’t the most timely process or strategy, which is why I like to use Discord in conjunction with other channels as a part of my sales process. I’ve said this before, but leveraging multiple social channels alongside email works very well in the blockchain industry because your prospect is so busy that social pings become helpful reminders to look back at the all the meat that lies in your email thread. You would’ve already built rapport with them through email and they are more likely to answer your message on ping #6 than #2 because of that. I do not recommend using Discord only when trying to sell to one to few prospects, B2C is a whole different story. Although, if you’re not having any luck across other channels, then becoming a long-term community member can be helpful.
Your main goal should actually be to get them off of Discord. The platform’s UI is not friendly for DMs or personal conversations. If you don’t get them to any other platform (Telegram, Email, Whatsapp, etc.) it’s likely you’ll lose traction. The key to moving them from Discord -> Email is garnering interest. In your pitch make sure you tease out pieces of your product, or key value props that they’ll want to know more of. You can then tie a ‘call-to-action’ to what you’re demoing. If you’re selling a CMO on customer engagement software then you can show them all about the neat reporting you offer, and how attribution leads to better targeting, but it’s more powerful to leave them curious. For example, instead of explaining everything up front, you might say, 'Beyond the reporting, what really gets results is how we co-market for partners using our network. I’d love to share more over coffee.' This way, you tease the value over Discord and leave them wanting to know more, taking them off the platform. By being authentic, and creating value in your process you can take a Discord user and turn them into a customer easier than you’d think.
Follow along here and on X if you’re interested in learning more about navigating sales in our increasingly digital world.
