The DM Scorecard
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Access by invitation from AdvisorWeb Growth.
A companion to The DM Bible
Paste a LinkedIn DM before you send it. This grades it the way a reply actually gets earned: Reply = (Recognition × Usefulness × Permission) − Pressure, then scrubs it for the sales tells and AI tells that quietly kill replies. Any term at zero, and the message is dead.
What each part of your message is doing, and why it matters. This never rewrites your DM. It teaches you to.
Trust opens in six gates, in order, stranger to trusted ally. A later gate cannot open while an earlier one is shut, and pushing a closed gate only bolts it harder. When a thread stalls, match what they said to find the shut gate and the move that opens it.
The writing leaks sales-speak and AI-speak no matter your intention. The test for every phrase is simple. Would a mate texting another mate ever say this? If it only lives in sales emails, CRMs, or guru captions, it dies. One hit, rewrite the line in plain talk.
Banned in any cold DM, by category. The plain-talk swap is on the right.
| Banned | Instead |
|---|
One AI tell in a short message is loud. A cluster of three fails outright. The starred ones are fatal on sight.
The surface rules. Casualness comes from tone and word choice, never from broken grammar.
Why shorter and plainer wins, measured on real DM data. Under-50-word DMs beat 150-plus by about 42 percent. Writing at a 3rd to 5th grade reading level gets about 67 percent more replies. An informative, corporate tone drops replies about 26 percent, a curious tone lifts them. Write shorter, curious, and plainer than feels natural.