An Instagram DM script for coaches is the structured sequence of messages that qualifies a lead inside the DMs and turns them into a booked call. A ton of coaches I've worked with use this exact script, from ones generating $10,000 a month to others generating up to $500,000 a month, to close the most leads that opt in through their DMs. The knowledge and the iterations come from coaches like Jaden, Jad, Elder, Dearis, Sherbo, and my own theme page coaching business that I partnered up with Sherbo on. In the video above, I walk through the full script line by line. Here it is broken down so you can model it and scale it.
The script comes down to six moving parts:
- The universal messaging rules every DM has to follow
- The ACQ structure behind every message you send
- Two paths, one for beginner leads and one for sophisticated leads
- The Hormozi value equation that makes the call proposal land
- Execution: speed to lead and relentless follow-ups
- How to scale the whole thing with AI in 2025
Before the script itself, start with the universal messaging rules you must have when qualifying leads, because they are what make every message below convert.
The universal messaging rules
The first one is relationship first qualification. You must always package your messages in a way that makes it feel like you want to know more about the person while making sure you're progressing through the qualification framework.
The second one is question reframing. If the lead doesn't answer your question, you should re-ask it again in a different way.
What is the ACQ messaging structure?
So what is the ACQ messaging structure, and why should you have it inside your DMs and apply it every time you click on the send button? First of all, you want to acknowledge everything the lead sends you. If you go on and ask the next qualification question in the script and you don't acknowledge what they're saying, you give them the feeling that you're not listening to them, like all you're doing is asking the next question as an interview. But the DMs should be a place where your leads feel more like they're getting direct support and rapport with you, because the last thing you want to do is just answer questions and that's it. What they want to have is a relationship.
To grow a relationship:
- Acknowledge what they say.
- Compliment them, and even relate with them on things that they say.
- Ask the next qualification question inside the script to make sure they're moving from a regular person to someone who books a call with you whom you can sell on your offer.
If they already answered some of the questions in the script before, then you want to skip the questions they already answered and move on to the next ones.
Why does the script have two paths?
This script is built for two types of leads. The first type is the sophisticated lead. It's someone who already has experience in the business model that you're teaching. You're going to get a lot of these, especially if your content is targeted. Let's say you're a trading mentor and you have a lot of trading content, you trading live and giving value about trading. You will have people who follow you who already have experience in trading, and people who follow you who are looking to get started because they see the results you're doing and the lifestyle you have, and they want to be like you.
These two types of leads each require a custom script or framework to follow to make sure that you turn them from a person who just messaged you, or you messaged them, into someone who's interested in buying what you have to offer. Knowing the difference between the two will help you with the script.
The lead sources can be different too. There can be outbound, where you're reaching out to your followers, or organic inbound, where they reach out to you. The script I'm going to be using is one that's inspired by the trading offers I've helped build, so I'll be using trading examples, but you can replace the trading with whatever business you do.
The opening message: outbound vs inbound
For outbound: "Hey [first name], just saw you're following me and we haven't had the chance to connect yet. Are you familiar with trading or are you just getting started?" Right here you can change it to whatever you do. Are you familiar with Amazon FBA? Are you familiar with e-commerce? You can test out different outreach messages to see which one performs better, but this one performs good in trading offers.
For organic inbound, let's say they reach out to you with a keyword: "Hey, thanks so much for reaching out. Just to make sure trading would even work for you, where in the world are you located?"
The purpose of these questions: "Are you familiar with trading or are you just getting started?" helps you get to know the level of the lead so we know which flow, which script you want to use for them. Then it leads to: "Awesome, just so I know what will work best for you, where in the world are you based?" If they're from a non-qualified country, you can send them the free course link. And if they're qualified, then you can continue by asking them those questions. So we're qualifying them based on the country and based on whether they're experienced or looking to get started.
The beginner lead path
Once we know the type of lead and that they're qualified, let's first start with the beginner lead. If they're beginners, you want to ask them: "What motivated you to learn more about trading? Any goals beyond money? Time freedom, location freedom?" This will get them to open up about their motivation. We want to get them sort of emotional in the conversation, because it's not enough to just ask technical questions and let them answer things that aren't related to how they feel. Because at the end of the day, we make the sales when our leads are the most emotional. We as humans buy when we're emotional, and we justify our purchases with logic.
Once we get their motivations, ask: "Okay, just so we're on the same page, do you know a bit about how trading works, or is this totally new for you?"
Based on their response you can have two types. If they tell you they completely know how trading works, you want to say: "Okay, cool, and just so we're on the same page..." then send them a like 60-second voice note which gives them a quick rundown of your trading strategy, whatever business you have, and the student wins. Here you're nurturing them, you're giving them the perceived value, you're proving to them that you are the authority, that you can generate them results, and that others who have worked with you have gotten those wins.
The voice note is one you pre-record and send to everyone. It will build more trust. They will feel like you're sending this voice note to them alone. You can do this automation with many softwares, including ManyChat as the best one, where you can pre-record them and with a click of a button send the same voice notes and videos at the same time.
Once you send this voice note, end it with: "Is that something you're interested in?" Based on the responses, take different paths:
- If they say something like "makes sense" or "interesting" but don't give you direct confirmation, send another voice note: "Sweet, so let me know if what I explained sounds like something you could actually see yourself doing. If so, I'd be happy to share a bit more information."
- If they give you direct confirmation, go for: "So I can better guide you, what do you currently do for work? Are you looking to replace that income with trading, or just build extra income stream?"
Once they answer this question, you can give different responses based on what they say. For example, if they say they want to make less than 10K a month: "That's totally doable. I actually have a student who recently hit 10K in a single month using the exact system I teach here." If you can be more specific and say the name of the student, it would be better, it would build more trust. "And it's definitely possible when you have the right structure and support in place."
Then send them a video where you're recording your screen and showing them quickly about your strategy, what you do, what results your students have generated, so you can build authority and increase their perceived value of success. End it with a CTA like: "Hey, want to hop on a call so we can help you?" You can send this after the video in the voice message, or include it in the video.
If they say yes to the call proposal, send them the calendar link so they can book a call. If not, if they give you objections, of course handle those objections. If you want another video on how to handle objections, when to handle them, and what to say, let me know in the comments or the private messages and I can cook something up.
The sophisticated lead path
For the sophisticated lead we want to change the script a bit, because sophisticated leads want to talk more about the technicals of what you do, of the business. If they're in trading, they want to share with you as the trading mentor the systems they use. They want to get your validation on their strategies and their results. They need your help with what they're doing. Most of them will have the goal of increasing their profits or becoming profitable. Whereas the beginner leads barely know any lingo of the business model, so you ask them more emotional questions. You're still asking the sophisticated leads emotional questions, but they're framed more in the language of them.
So for the sophisticated leads we can ask:
- "Since you're in [country], what markets do you trade?" If they're doing e-commerce, "what products are you selling?" You can customize this however you want. This starts to build rapport.
- "How long have you been trading those markets for, and how's the journey treated you so far?" These are rapport building, and this question specifically starts indirectly transitioning from rapport into getting to know their pain points.
If they give you a vague response, dig deeper. If they say "the journey is good" or "not so bad," tell them: "Oh cool, okay, what does not so bad look like for you?" Try to get the specific details. Once you get them, ask: "What's holding you back from achieving your vision or the goal that you have?" This will reveal the pain or the problems they have so that we can pitch the call with a pain.
If they don't have any pain, if they don't have any goals they want to get to, there's no point in them getting on the call. This will affect your call proposal to call booked a lot, because no one will be booking anything as there's no reason to. That's why it's essential to ask this type of question and other forms of it.
Once they give you their pain, tell them: "I totally get that. One of my students faced the same problem and we solved it by..." giving them a hint about the solution. You don't want to give them the how, you want to give them the what always. "And I'd love to teach you about how we've done that. Would you be up for hopping on a Zoom call with my team to help you achieve your goal without that pain?"
Using the Hormozi value equation
What I'm doing here is using all the elements of the Hormozi value equation. Hormozi is known for this, it's a very powerful equation that everyone's using. We give them the sense of reaching the dream outcome, their goal, then the perceived likelihood of achievement increases once we tell them that other students in your position have been able to achieve the same thing. Then with the time delay, you can include something like "my student X has been able to achieve this in a very short period of time," which can help a lot. And effort and sacrifice is related to their pain: without their pain, this means they don't have to go through the effort and sacrifice they're going through right now.
So you want to increase the dream outcome and the perceived likelihood of achievement, and you want to decrease the time delay and the effort and sacrifice it takes to get what they want. This is what creates value, and this is what creates commitment and positive responses to proposing the call. Of course, when they say yes, send them the calendar.
Executing the script correctly
One thing coaches understand wrong is: "Okay, I get the winning script, and that's it." But that's not all. What you need to do is execute correctly on the script.
- If you have slow speed to lead, you respond very slowly to your leads, you're missing out on a lot of opportunities, because their emotions would fade away by the time you contact them and start qualifying them.
- If you don't do follow-ups that are accustomed to each step of the script, you will miss out on a lot of opportunities because people are busy and get distracted easily. If you don't follow up again and again, you will miss out on like 60% of the opportunities. The fix is an automated Instagram DM follow-up sequence that re-engages every lead who ghosts you inside the 24 hour window.
There are plenty of nuances to know here, and slow speed to lead plus weak follow-ups are two of the biggest reasons your Instagram DM booking rate leaks even when the script is perfect.
How to scale this in 2025
If you're paying more than $10,000 a month on a DM team in 2025, you're probably doing something wrong. The old way of running a DM setting team that follows the script, qualifies leads, and does the follow-ups is like this: you hire a setter, and as the lead flow increases, you hire more setters and more setters. As you hire more, your commission costs increase as your leads increase. This also increases the human management workload. It requires a lot of emotional management for the setters, a lot of PIPs, stress about compensations and bonuses, and a lot of training, which most of the time leads to burnout, especially if you're getting a lot of leads. This causes the setter and you as the business owner to burn out, which leads to team burnout, and this leads to DM funnel disruption.
To detect if DM funnel disruption is happening, look for:
- A gradual drop in conversion rates.
- Setter objections to additional tasks you provide them with.
- Setter response time drops.
- Persistent negative feedback from leads.
If you want to have all your leads pass through your DM setting funnel without any friction or disruption, then the best way to do that is the technological solution we have in 2025: all you need is one DM setter and one AI setter, and AI can do all of the work. You can't believe how much I'm getting. I'm getting clients and those clients are referring their friends, and I'm getting almost a 100% closing rate because they can see the power of AI qualifying the leads in the DMs instead of DM setters. There's been a lot of situations where I step into businesses, I replace their teams of like four or five setters with AI, and they keep their best setter so they can handle the lead flow. Whether they're getting 100 or 500 leads a day, they're still able to process them through this system. This is the frictionless DM setting funnel, where all these leads are coming in and going through the phases of interest, qualification, and booking without any friction at all.
This is the script, this is proof that the script works, and this is the system you should be using in 2025 to make sure the script is being put into use in the best way possible. If you also want to know where booking rates leak and which common AI DM setter mistakes to avoid, that matters just as much as the script itself.