Cole Gordon Podcast

How To Build A 10M/yr Outbound Setting Team (Full Course)

Cole Gordon

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0:00 | 2:43:20

Pick up rate for your setters below 20%? Try https://www.dialer.io/

After generating 50M+ solely from outbound appointment setters in our own company…

I’ve packaged all the best setting practices into a software that simply allows your setters to click “Dial” and work the leads in the most efficient and profitable way possible.

This leads to: 

-Higher answer rates 
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-20-30% increase in overall sets per day production

…and more.

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Want me to 1-on-1 audit your business to learn exactly how to hit the next level of scale? 
Click here  👉 https://bit.ly/Cole1on1Setting

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Saleskick is a booking/calendar system designed specifically for sales teams to:

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-AI score every lead so it's delegated correctly...
And more.

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0:00 – Intro
1:28 – Defining Outbound: MDR vs. SDR Models
17:11 – The Different MDR Revenue Models + Requirements For Them To Work
19:56 – Call Funnel With Opt-In
23:15 – Low-Ticket Funnel + Setter Outbound
24:24 – Low-Ticket Ascension + Implementation Call
25:45 – DM Setting Funnel
29:04 – Live Event Funnels
32:16 – How Many Leads Per Setter Per Month?
39:21 – Common Funnel Benchmarks
42:21 – What To Do If You Don't Have Enough Leads For 1 Setter
44:11 – Should Setters Take Direct Bookings?
54:27 – The Triage Capacity Problem
57:17 – Setter KPIs For Call Funnel
1:01:27 – Speed To Lead
1:02:42 – Setter Activity (And Dials Per Day)
1:06:01 – Setter Workflow & Dialing Logic
1:15:02 – Old Way: Manual Setup For Dialing Logic
1:18:49 – New Way: Dialer.io (Automatic Setup)
1:20:32 – Dialing Logic Best Practices
1:25:13 – How To Determine Peak Calling Hours
1:25:59 – Pipeline Setter Process
1:29:25 – Texting Scripts
1:37:16 – Quick Note On AI / Automation
1:38:11 – Email Scripts
1:39:08 – Calling Scripts
1:40:56 – Outbound Script & Call Flow
2:08:15 – Adjustments For Triage Call
2:11:13 – Buyer Leads
2:12:43 – Revised Script For No-Shows
2:14:02 – Revised Script For Pipeline (Old Leads)
2:15:15 – When Closers Take The Setting Calls
2:17:21 – Troubleshooting & Common Mistakes
2:33:06 – How To Compensate Setters

SPEAKER_00

I created three multiple eight-figure companies totaling a combined 150 million in cash collected revenue. And in each of those companies, a huge part of our revenue, probably 75 million plus, came from our outbound appointment setting teams. And so after consulting 3,000 plus sales teams on how to build their outbound appointment setting teams over the past seven years in our sales training company, Closer.io, I boiled down everything I've learned about building high-level appointment setting teams into this video you're going to watch right now. And so it's going to cover everything from hiring your first setter to being able to build a team that's able to produce over 100 million per year. So specifically, we're going to cover the difference between MDR and SDR setting models. We're going to cover setter systems for call funnels, low ticket funnels, DM setting funnels, live event, challenge funnels, and webinars. We're going to talk about how many lead you should give your setters per month, how to get instantaneous speed to lead, why monitoring dials per day per setter is wrong and what to do instead, as well as dialing algorithms based on recency, frequency, value, and peak call time, which is the most important thing you can learn from this training. Period. If you watch that, that's all you would need to watch. We'll give you all the outbound scripts, text scripts, email scripts, we'll talk about AI setting tools and so much more. So with that being said, we're gonna splice into a training I recently did for private clients. I hope you enjoy. If you want this document, um, this is in our SDA program. So if you're watching this on YouTube and you want a document like this, as well as tons of other trainings, you can check out our SDA program. Link is in the description. Now, let's actually start with the training. So, how do we define outbound? Which really there's two outbound models. There's, well, there's really three, but we're only going to cover two. There's MDR models and there's SDR models. Those are the two major types of outbound appointment settings. So, what is an MDR? What is an SDR? What an MDR is a marketing development rep. Okay. We'll cover that, what that says in a second. SDRs are sales development reps. Okay. Now, sometimes they're called BDRs, which is business development reps. That's actually the third one. That's more of like business development. So generating strategic partnerships, affiliate relationships, and JVs. So that's a BDR team. Those are the three fundamental outbound teams. Okay. Now we're not going to touch them on all on this training. We're really going to focus on MDRs, and you're going to understand why in a second. But to kind of set that up, I need to tell you what SDR systems actually are. So sales development reps and SDR systems is what you traditionally think about when you think about outbound. Okay. So what does this actually look like? Well, it looks like you're building a cold list. These people have no idea who you are. You're maybe buying it from Zoom Info, Seamless Apollo, or whatever. And then you might build it or you're buying it, or a team of VAs actually might build it manually. Okay. And then once you have this cold list of people who have no idea who you are, your reps do outbound on that cold list. And usually it's a combination of cold email outreach, LinkedIn outreach, or true cold calling. And the goal of that is to really usually drive a 15-minute appointment, which is like a little triage, and then set it for an account executive, which is an AE. This is very common in like mid-market and enterprise software. And so they are not working in conjunction. This is very key for this one for M uh for SDRs. They're not working in conjunction with any sort of inbound marketing effort. That's MDRs, which we're going to cover in a second. Okay. So SDRs also operate on a spectrum. And this is very important to understand. There's low volume, high personalization, multi-channel. And then on the other side of the spectrum is high volume, low personalization, and channel focus. And what dictates where you fall on the spectrum is dictated on your TAM, which is your market size, your LTV, which is how much your client's worth, and also the accessibility of the client on certain channels. So let me give you two examples. So example number one is if your target market is Fortune 500 companies and your LTV is over 100K, so like an enterprise software. So here, the SDRs are essentially using what's called an ABM function, so an account-based marketing function, where their entire marketing strategy is created for one specific client and the campaign can last years. So if you ever heard like Russell Brunson or a lot of these other people talk about like the Dream 100, you know, Chet Holmes talks about this. That's this type of approach, right? To where you're literally creating a whole marketing campaign for one person, right? That's because that one person can be worth so much and the market size is so small. So that's where your approach is on that other side of the spectrum. It's going to be hyper-personalized, low volume, and over a very long time horizon. And it's going to have to be multi-channel. Like it might be LinkedIn, cold email, direct mail, trade shows, cold calling. Like in stuff like this, the rep who's responsible for that account will like track them down and show up at events they know they're going to be at and try to get a meeting at the event, right? Like it's that level of touch, right? Because again, the clients are worth so much. Now, example number two is let's say you're going after real estate agents who advertise on Zillow and it's a $10,000 LTV. Okay. So here you might see a higher, or so here you might see a higher volume of an outbound approach. So for example, because there's so many real estate agents and because your LTV is still not that high, what you're more likely to do opposed to like an ABM approach is a scaled automated cold email campaign with like very minor personalization. So you might personalize the first line, which sometimes you can do that through AI, and then the rest of it is a template. And then you're just mass sending that out in a way that maximizes deliverability and et cetera. And if you want a training on that, we also have that training in the SDA portal. It's not going to be in here. But essentially, you're mass sending that out with minor personalization. It's all driving the 15-minute appointments. And then maybe, you know, you could have, if they open the email, it triggers into the list for the SDR to actually call them. So it's creating a little bit of an inbound based on engagement or link clicks or whatever. And so you'd have like a scaled automated campaign for that. The SDR is playing some cleanup and then they're doing the triage. And then you probably do something similar with LinkedIn. Like there's ways to automate LinkedIn campaigns at scale or do it with VAs, and it's a bunch of messages, it's driving to a 15-minute appointment. Okay. And so again, like I already mentioned, there's cool ways you can do this where you can have the engaged leads zap into a list for the SDRs based on email opens, email replies, LinkedIn responses. And so the SDRs can trigger a warm call. Like, hey, I just saw you open the email, whatever. Okay. So, anyways, SDR model, pros and cons. So the pros is it's great for if you have like 100K LTV type companies and a really small TAM. Okay. It's also very good for going up market, you know. So like let's say you're a 10 to $20 million company and you're focusing on small businesses, but you want to go mid-market or enterprise or drastically raise your price AOV LTV. This is the type of thing a lot of software companies, for instance, use to be able to do that. And it's very, very scalable if it's validated. So outbound scales in a linear fashion, right? Where ads scales in basically like a reverse exponential fashion, where you get massive growth in the beginning and then it starts to flatten out and uh top out at scale. Okay. Now, what are the cons of this approach? So the cons is the appointment and deal frequency per rep is lower, which means you have a higher base salary. Okay. So think about this. Anytime appointment and deal frequency is lower, it means higher base salary. Anytime appointment and deal frequency is higher, it means lower or even no base salary. Okay. So as a side note, like the different way to think about this is if let's say you were doing uh a weight loss offer, that's a highly transactional sale where most everything is a one-call close. And it's also generally very high volume. So that is on that other side of the extreme spectrum where they're gonna have a hundred percent commission and no base, right? Whereas if you're going after enterprises that have a nine month sales cycle, it's gonna be very, very high base, like maybe 70, 80% base. And then the rest is bonuses paid out quarterly or what have you. Does that make sense? Like for enterprise type of stuff. And so the longer your sales cycle is, higher base, the shorter it is, the more transactional it is, less base, low base. Okay. That was a little bit of an aside. So SDR models should be used really for more of these mid-market enterprise level functions, because again, those companies are harder to access via ads. And then also to really make the economics work on these models, you have to have the high AOV and a high LTV, which is where SD or the SDR model really comes in play, right? Again, because the frequency is low, salaries are high, et cetera. And the last con of SDR models is it's really hard to crack. It's much harder to crack than MDR models, and even harder to really crack at scale. So, in my experience, doing it for services like recruiting or professional services can be very tough because it's so competitive. It tends to work way better in tech, in SaaS, where you have like maybe a more new product, new category, and you're going after mid-market plus. And the thing is, is a lot of people, even if you go after SMBs and you crack it, like a lot of people do that on LinkedIn. What my experience has been with clients is 99% of those people, they can't get past $2 million a year with that model because the economics start to break. Okay. So we're gonna move on to marketing development reps, so MDRs. So these reps capitalize on inbound leads generated from marketing. So these can be paid-driven, like VSL webinar, lead back, et cetera. They could be content-driven, like that's the same thing, but it's coming from your IG or your YouTube, and that might go to an opt-in or a PDF or a VSL or whatever. They can be event driven, like you could speak on stage in an event you're sponsoring, or somebody you actually gave you their stage and you're just speaking. And it's like, hey, you know, here's a barcode. You can opt in for this thing at the end of the talk. It's totally free. Here you go. Or DM me on Instagram for this thing. It's only for you guys. So that can actually generate leads. But again, it's coming from some sort of marketing. And then the leads are coming in for some sort of lead magnet, or even just intently reached it, reaching out uh for the offer. Like they're very intent-driven. They're actually opting in for the offer itself. So they can be intent-based or non-intent-based. So the leads opt in for some sort of lead magnet, and then they're assigned round robin to the MDRs, and then the MDRs are gonna contact them through phone, text, which could be also automated through AI or or um just pure automation, which we'll talk about way later. And same with the same with email, which is definitely gonna be automated or through AI. Now, both with the text and email, and we're gonna again cover this in detail in a little bit. The text and the email aren't marketing blasts. It should be as if they're coming from that specific rep that the lead was delegated to. Okay. Then they can they're gonna triage a lead after they contact them. So that's either gonna happen upon contact if it's off of a cold call, or they might through email or text set a 15-minute set appointment, then run that appointment and then set for a closer. Okay. If that doesn't make sense, we're gonna go into way more detail on that later. So the best setting teams, and this is gonna be a huge part of the training, they have advanced dialing logic. And the way to think about what I mean by dialing logic is it's like an algorithm of how you dial. And so good dialing logic forces maximum lead to set efficiency by forcing the setters to focus on leads in a way that optimally prioritizes a couple of things. Recency, which is how new the lead is, frequency, which is how many times we contact a lead, which is gonna be day dependent because of recency, right? We're gonna contact them more often the newer they are, and less often the older they are. And then we're also gonna factor into our algorithm value. So we want to factor in specific uh factors that could be totally different depending on the company you're running. But for instance, let's say you're doing credit scores and you're getting liquidity on every single opt-in or lead that you have. So if you know what their credit score is of every single opt-in, you could factor that into your dialing logic and hit more frequency on the better quality leads. Same thing if it's a low-ticket thing and you're doing purchase value or AOV, if you're getting buyers and so on and so forth. You could have a longer form of applications they're filling out. And then based on that, that could get weighted and graded. And then that can factor into the algorithm to where those get weighted to be able to hit more in the algorithm. Okay. So this is all gonna make sense way more later. And it's also the part where it's gonna get a little complicated if you're new. Okay. And if you are new, don't worry about this too, too much. If you have one setter, it's not gonna be that big of a deal. Two setters, really not that big of a deal. If you have four, five, six setters more, then this is gonna be what can actually just totally let your setting performance absolutely take off. Like you could have massive results by going from not doing this to doing this successfully. Okay. Now, in the online service-based industry, which is what most of my viewers are, and most of my clients are, 99.99% of companies and successful appointments teams, successful outbound teams, they're running MDR models, not SDR. Okay. I probably have a thousand active, 900 active clients right now. I have a lot of people who are over $10 million a year. I can maybe think of, I mean, I've had three, 4,000 clients over the past several years. I can maybe think of like one or two that were above 10 million a year purely through outbound, okay, in our industry. So I'm not saying in other industries it doesn't work really great. I'm just saying in our industries, 99.99% is MDR models. Okay. So a couple pros and cons here. Well, for MDRs, the pros is it's best for SMBs and B2C by far. It's far easier to make work. Like it's way easier to make this work. It also enables way, way more scale with your marketing, right? So you might be running basic inbound marketing to where people are directly booking in calls. But if you add in setters to that process, you're gonna get more revenue out of the same amount of ad spend. Okay. Now the con is that long term, it can be limited by marketing scale and capacity. So a lot of people tend to top out. It's somewhere between 15 million and 40 million a year. Like it's kind of hits that curve there. And that could be dependent on TAM, it could depend on a lot of things. They're LTB to CAC, their basic economics. But obviously, ads go up at scale. So as you go up, you have a decreased marginal benefit relative to your marginal return or marginal uh relative to your marginal cost. Okay. So you tend to top out, which is why a lot of SaaS companies, they start with paid and then as they get more resources, they switch to more going up market, uh, like in a mid-market enterprise outbound type initiative. Okay. So the verdict, right? If you already can't tell, what should you use if you're watching this video? You're somebody from my audience, you're one of my clients, et cetera. Should you use the SDR model or the MDR model? Okay. Unless you truly target only $50 to $100 million plus companies and you have an extremely small TAM, unless it's one of those two things, use the MDR model. It's what 99.9% of our industry uses to get past 10 million a year. It's so much easier. It doesn't require high-based salaries, and it's way faster to scale to eight and multiple eight figures. Okay. And frankly, even if you want to or you do target $50 to $100 million plus companies, what I do would encourage you, what I encourage you to do is go down market a little bit. Okay. Unless you have substantial traction connections up market. But for most people who start upmarket, it's like, dude, you're up market and you're doing like $50K a month. Like go down, run ads to SMBs in your industry. Like let's say you're doing solar companies. Instead of doing the huge ones, come down, work with the smaller companies, adjust your product a little bit. And what's going to happen is you're going to run ads, and 80 to 90% of the clients you sell will be the SMBs. You know, they're going to be doing 500 grand a year to about 15 million a year. But a small percentage, like 10% of those, will be the 15 million to 100 million plus companies, like solar companies in this example. And that's a small percentage. But what's crazy is through ads, you end up getting the same amount of enterprise clients that you would have gotten through a full enterprise ABM function, anyways. Because like you might only close three enterprise clients a month and you might close 50 small businesses a month. But like with a full enterprise ABM fraction, you might only close like two to six of those a month, right? Which is still a lot. And so instead of paying major salaries to do it, you also get paid to do it. So I'll give you an example. For us, we've mainly focused on like the high-ticket industry, the online service-based based industry, et cetera. All of the quote unquote up market enterprises in our industry, we've worked with them all. We haven't done any outbound. Okay. So like everybody from the Tony Robbins to the Deans to, you know, a bunch of a bunch of people, right? I'm not going to name drop all of them right here. But we've worked with pretty much everybody who's at the top layer in the industry, all the category kings of the respective markets, we've almost worked with everybody. We've never had to do outbound. It's just been from a sheer volume of advertising and just a law of numbers of eventually getting those people in, right? So we kind of got there anyways without having to do the outbound, and we got paid to do it along the way. Okay. So one more thing, and this is a big more mistake, uh, big mistake before we move on, is that in the rare chance you have both MDR and SDR functions, do not combine the teams to do both, right? Like do not have somebody working cold LinkedIn and working your inbound leads. Okay. They should be exactly separate teams with separate management and separate operating systems and separate comps. If you do combine, what you're gonna do is you're gonna have an MDR team, okay? Because the MDR work is gonna be so much easier. They're gonna get overpaid to do MDR work, and then you're gonna be mad at them constantly for not doing any of the SDR LinkedIn work. But they're like, why would I do that? It's way harder and I can just work over here and make more, you know, and it's way easier. So even if they can make a little bit more by doing their LinkedIn, they're just gonna do all MDR work. I've seen this happen a hundred times. It's just everybody agrees and sales training, et cetera. Just don't do it. Okay. So, with that being said, this kind of sets the stage for the rest of the training because everything we're gonna cover from here on out is going to be MDR model best practices. Okay. So we're gonna get into the different MDR revenue models and the requirements to get them to work. Okay. So there's a very important concept for MDRs. To get them to perform, you have to provide them with something called curated opportunity flow. Okay. Curated opportunity flow means you have a system that generates new leads on a daily basis, generates them a consistent way, which means they have the same context of what they're coming in and the same mechanism that's generating them. And then there's a clear SOP and how to convert that opportunity from an opportunity to a set for the closer. Okay. So think about this like a conveyor belt, right? You have new leads coming in from the same source under the same context, having the same process to execute them and turn them into sets, and you're doing that every single day. So the system in which you generate curie opportunity flow, because there's different systems. There's low ticket, there's call funnels, there's app funnels, there's setter or there's DM funnels, there's all this stuff, right? There's tons of different ways you can do it. So the system in which you generate the curated opportunity flow dictates all of your setter SOPs. Okay. And so we're gonna cover that in a little bit. Now, here's what is not a conveyor belt, right? Here is what is not curated opportunity flow. What is not curated opportunity flow is putting your setter in a Facebook group with no training and telling them to go farm. Don't do it. It's not giving them access to your CRM with all leads and telling them to go farm. Okay, that can work in some cases. We're gonna talk about pipeline setting later, but that pipeline setting can only work when you already have first an established MDR opportunity flow. Okay, so again, we'll cover that later. Now, um, having them cold DM people on LinkedIn, email, brand of Facebook groups, again, that's an SDR process, not an MDR process. So if you do any of this under the premise that you're basically hiring an MDR, your setter's gonna quit because your opportunity sucks. And then you're gonna say there's no good talent out there. The truth is you haven't created an opportunity good enough with the right flows, opportunities, the right good lead gen system. You haven't created an opportunity good enough to attract good talent. In all recruiting, the best job opportunities consist of good lead systems, good training systems, good culture, good product, on track earnings. And so when you have that, you're gonna get the best talent. Okay. So it's really as simple as that. It's like if you have a really great offer, you're gonna get the best clients. If you have a really good offer for the recruiting marketplace in the form of your role and your company and your culture and all of that stuff, you get the best talent. Okay. Hopefully that makes sense. If you really want great people on your team, that's all you got to know. So we're gonna cover the common MDR models that we're working right now. There's many, many, many that we could cover, but whether you're running organic or paid, which is most people watching this video, here's several of the common models that generate curated opportunity flow that you could run. Okay. So the first one is a call funnel. It actually doesn't say that here for some reason, but it's a call funnel. Okay. I told you. So a call funnel is basically where you run an ad to an opt-in to a VSL to an application, then to a booking page, then to a thank you page, and then to a sales call. So it's like a direct booking funnel. And some people call this a VSL funnel, some people call it a DTA or an app funnel. This VSL could also be like a webinar that's an automated webinar. In fact, it could really be like a live webinar. That'd be slightly different of a process for your setters, but you get the point. There's ad, there's an opt-in, there's also some sort of value video where you educate and then tell them to book a call. They apply and then they book the call, and then there's a thank you page and they show up. Okay. So the setter outreach, how it would work here, is there's different curated opportunity flows. Okay. So I listed some of these here. These are the primary ones. They're going to be calling and texting new opt-ins. They're going to be calling and texting new applications who didn't book because some people will apply, but then they won't book. So they're going to be calling and texting that. Then they're also going to call and text partial applications. So if you run the right application software, what happens is let's say they fill out name, email, phone number, but they don't finish the application. So it's a partial. They don't actually submit it at the very end. You'll still be able to capture that and your setters can still hit them up. Right? You can also do email opens who didn't book. So let's say they opt in, they don't book, but then they get into your email sequence and then they pop an email open and look at an email. You can trigger that right in to do an immediate call. It's very effective. And then the secondary opportunities are no shows, rebooks, and basically five plus day pipeline. That's called pipeline setting. So if you can see here, this is basically going through everything I just said. There's new opt-ins, new apps, no bookings, partial apps, live transfers. This is the only one I didn't cover. So live transfers is only if you double book. So in some systems, which if you want to know about double booking, we have a whole training on sales ops. That's where you'd learn about it. But essentially, if two if you're double booking appointments because your show rates are low and you're trying to maximize live calls per closer per day, if you double book appointments, if two people show up at one time, you need somebody to Be able to take that. So a lot of times that's the setter. Uh, we have a live transfer closer. Again, that's in the sales ops training, that's a little bit different, but sometimes a live transfer closer is even hooked up or um they're busy. And then essentially you still it's still gonna always overflow to the setters. Okay, so that can always happen. So that's another primary opportunity. The secondary opportunities are the rebookings, pipeline setting, emo opens. Okay, so this is the same. This flow and these curated opportunities are the same for the following funnels, right? A webinar funnel that books a call, exact same process. Call funnel with no opt-in, a lot of people call that DTA, direct application. So you remove the opt-in. Some people do that because it actually makes their marketing work better, even sacrificing the email and that uh and the phone number to be able to call the people. But even if you remove the opt-in, outside of like there's no opt-ins for the setters to call, it's all the same process, right? Um, maybe you have a call funnel, but instead of, hey, opt-in for the video, it's opt-in for this PDF. And then then the in the headline, it's like, hey, your PDF is on the way, but then you have like a VSL and it's just a basic like VSL call funnel. It's the same exact flow, it's just a different lead magnet. Okay. VSL funnel, like I said, just a different name for a call funnel. It's pretty much the same. Whether it's direct and it starts with the offer or it's indirect and it acts like a training and goes to the offer, it's all the same. Regardless if you're doing paid or organic, it's the same process for the setters. So moving on, talk about the next model, which is a low-ticket funnel plus setter outbound. Okay. So this is where you'd have an ad. It goes to a low-ticket offer sales page, goes to the checkout page, and there's like $47 bumps that they can take. Then there's a OTO one, which is an upsell one. There's an upsell two, usually, and then you get a new buyer on the thank you page. And then what happens is in this model, right? There's different low-ticket models, but in this model, all the leads are really gonna be generated after the fact through SMS and email or in the actual course portal, and then also mainly through the setters. Okay. So the primary lead source for them is calling and texting new buyers sorted by AOV. Okay. Then the secondary lead sources are gonna be add to cards who didn't buy, right? Generally, those are very low quality, by the way. We have never gotten much results out of that, but just wanted to throw them in there because maybe your offer is different. No show rebooks, also the same thing with pipeline setting, which is five plus day old leads. And then also the email opens that didn't book. Okay. So all of that is still gonna apply, and you might even still have some live transfers in this situation as well. Then we get to the different low-ticket model, which is low ticket plus an implementation call, which is this is really the gold standard for low-ticket funnels right now, which is why I wanted to talk about it. So this is a little bit different. Most of this is the same. The big key difference is after they check out with the bumps and all that stuff, the first one-time upsell is a basic implementation call where it's like it's basically framed as an onboarding call and it's framed as part of their purchase. So you don't want to like sell them on doing this call and talk about all the benefits. You want to frame it as like, hey, you purchased this call, claim the call you just purchased. Okay. You'll get way higher conversions that way. And so then after that, that's basically OTO1, and we don't have an option for them to skip it either. And then OTO two and so on and so forth is really the same. Okay. And so what happens is, is obviously the primary source for the setters is gonna be they're gonna be taking these implementation calls that are run by setters, so they're gonna be triaging these people to a closer call. But then the other primary source is that all the people who didn't book, which usually, like if you ever run a good process here, about 30 to 40% of people won't book. Okay. So what are they gonna be doing? They're gonna be calling and texting all those people trying to get them to book. And it's gonna be a little bit of a different script. We'll cover that later. And then the secondary sources are basically all the same. Add to cards they didn't buy, again, it's low quality, no shows, pipeline, email opens, they didn't book, so on and so forth. So that's all listed here. Then the next one that's very common is a DM setting funnel. This is a great funnel to get to like 100 to 200 grand a month. And then usually you want to shift it into one of the ones we already just talked about. So this is where you might do IG, like you have IG organic, which is your reels, posts, stories, et cetera. And then you do your boosted posts, uh, or you might have some boosted posts, which is like your top organic content that you're amplifying. And then you have like actual traditional DM ads, which is probably the volume of your traffic, right? Like the click to DM ads. And then essentially this all goes to your DMs, right? And usually they're commenting into a keyword. If it's an ad, it's pretty obvious that they're coming from the ad. You'll just be able to see it. But like, let's say it's a story, they might um reply with, you know, sales, if like I'm giving away a sales training or whatever. Now there's different DM flows and scripts depending on if it's what's called indirect versus direct. So what I mean by that is if I have a story and I'm like, hey, I'm looking for five people who want to get X result in Y days, that's a DM me uh get started if you're interested. That's a direct lead, right? That's a that we're gonna use what's called the direct script because the lead is coming in intent based, right? They already have intent on what we have to offer. So that's just one or two quick qualifying questions right to a triage. Whereas an indirect lead is if I have if I do the same story and I'm like, hey, I put together this amazing training on setters, comment setter or reply setter to this story and I'll send it to you, right? That's an indirect script because we got to give them the training and then we have to have a longer process to weave that and and basically sell that into uh a triage, right? And getting them to actually book a 15-minute call with us, right? So we're gonna have an opener, qualifier, transition, book, et cetera. Um, there's a whole other training in SDA about that, right? So the primary curated opportunities here are gonna be the inbound DMs. There's again indirect if it's a lead magnet, direct if it's more offer-based. And then also they might be reaching out to comments from like boosted posts and organic posts and all of that stuff, right? So this is important to understand because even if you're not running DM ads, um, the process is very important to understand for your setters if you have, let's say, 200,000 followers on organic, right? Because you also might reach out to new followers, maybe another primary lead source, is what which was really what I talk about here. So the secondary curated opportunities are new follows. Um, usually you can't rely solely on these unless you get a lot, but it's still worth doing. Surprisingly, I was very shocked when we started doing this and it worked. But uh it does work just DMing new followers. And if you want to know how to do that, we have training elsewhere in SDA. Um, you also get phone numbers generated from like the Lincoln bio, lead magnet, all of that stuff. So, like I might make uh I might be running DM ads and I might have um in my bio DM me this keyword. I might also be doing some of that stuff with my story. But what also works is you might has just have like a VSL in your Lincoln bio, and then people are gonna opt into that self book, and then you're also gonna get phone numbers from the opt-in. So you're gonna want to have a separate setter, usually DM setters and phone setters are two different archetypes of people and two different comps. So you're gonna have a different team hit those people up, call them, et cetera, and set, right? The other thing that's a secondary lead source, especially if you have a big organic, is like polls, quizzes, question boxes, sliders, or whatever, because all of those can be outbound DM opportunities. Hey, I saw you respond to this quiz. And then you just kind of get into like some more of an indirect type of conversation. So we're gonna lightly touch on live event funnels. So this is like a live webinar, a live event, a challenge funnel. They're all very similar. They can both be free or paid, they could be organic or through paid ads. And here, the setters can DM people in the group if it's like a challenge or a live event. So, like if you do a two-step post, like, hey, you know, if you guys want this training I talked about on the challenge today, comment below. And there's all these comments. The setters can reach out and then use an indirect script. And they can do this before, during, or after. They can also reach out to people upon when they join, whether that's through a call or they're joining a group through DM or a Facebook DM or whatever. That could either be to make sure they show up. I've also seen people set an appointment right away and actually sell early before the challenge or whatever even starts, or to set an appointment for after the challenge. So an appointment's already set after your challenge is done. So there's many, many different ways to do it. It's not something that most people are doing. So we're not gonna talk a lot about it in this training. Okay. So now, with that being said, we're at a crossroads. So from here on out, we kind of been filtering it down. We started with MDR versus SDR, and then we just did a lot more on MDR models so that you know what system you have to have to actually hire setters in the first place. Now, what we're really gonna focus on is most people, they're running something along the lines of VSL and call funnels, webinar call funnels, whether that's live or automated, direct application funnels, PDF lead magnet to book a call funnel or a low-ticket buyer funnel. Okay. So we're gonna cover simply all of those for the rest of this training. We're not gonna cover the live event stuff. And the reason why is these funnels are the most common and they're just very linear and simple to understand. So even if you're not running one of those funnels, learning these ones will give you the simplest, clearest idea of how a proper setting system should actually be run. And if you can understand that, you'll be able to apply it to any other model that you're doing. Okay. And again, these funnels are they're the same, whether it's paid or organic. Okay. You're gonna get what I'm saying. So there's gonna be separate training in SDA on how to run implementation call. Actually, there's not, I just linked it right here. So if you want to know in the low-ticket funnel how to do the implementation calls, this video is your that's your video. Okay. So that's the training for that. If you want to learn that system, we're gonna talk about the actual outbounding buyers in this training. DM setting, we're not gonna talk about in this training. That's gonna be a different system. And it's gonna be a different training. It's already there in the uh course. And then um the live event challenge stuff. Again, it's a different system. We're not gonna talk about that here. If you ever wanted to get my one-on-one help in terms of scaling your business, then listen up really fast. So we're taking on a few clients to where I can personally one-on-one audit their business across marketing, sales, operations, fulfillment, finance to be able to tell you what your constraint actually is and ultimately what are the one, two, three things you need to do next to be able to scale, working entirely one-on-one with me. So if that's interesting, there's a link in the description that'll say call one-on-one that you can go book. But essentially, not only will you get my personal advice, but we'll also be opening up our entire playbooks of my $36 million year company across marketing sales, operation fulfillment, finance. So you can basically model the best practices of what we've done right into your business. And it'll include the opportunity to meet in person up at an event with me. So if that's interesting, click the link in the description and mount back to the video. So, with that being said, how many leads should you give your setter per month depending on the funnel that you're using? So we covered all the different MDR models. So now the question is depending on which MDR model you're using, because it's different, how many leads should you give each setter per month? What are the industry benchmarks? Okay, because if you give them too few, you're leaving money on the table. And that's common for more people at scale. And if you're giving them too um, or sorry, if you're giving them too many, you're leaving money on the table. If you're giving them too few, then your entire system won't work, which is very common at the beginning, right? So people at scale tend to give too many. People who are at the beginning tend to give too few. So for instance, I'll see people who uh they have four setters and they're complaining about none of their setters performing, and they're only at 150 grand a month. So immediately I'll be like, okay, well, how many leads per setter per month are you giving your setters? And it's very, very few. It's like 200 leads per month per setter on a funnel that normally should be 800 leads per month per setter. So it's like they have enough leads for one setter, yet they have four, and then they're wondering why everybody's churning, nobody's making money, and their setters aren't working. So, what I want to do is first give you the formula and teach you how to fish. So I'm gonna give you the benchmarks in a second because everybody wants to know what's the number, right? And so I can give you industry benchmarks, but what's more important is me teaching you how to actually think about this question. And the reason why is every market is different, every industry is different, different funnels have different lead quality, and that all means different leads per setter per month KPIs for different businesses. So I can give you benchmarks, you still need to think for yourself. And just as an aside, I just not too long ago, this was in like 2025, I was using my own industry benchmarks for my B2B offer. And what I realized was is I started to use the formula that I'm about to teach you to actually test and see if uh we were actually giving our setters too many leads because I had a little hunch. And turns out we massively were. We were almost able to double the setting team without any decrease in performance of any individual setter because just for our offer, our leads had so much high intent, right? And so every offer is different. So here's the formula the first thing you want to do is establish your on-track earnings for setters. Okay, so we're actually gonna cover comp at the very, very end, but you're gonna want to figure out what the comp is for your setters. I recommend overpaying, which I'm gonna talk about why I recommend that in a bit, but I just recommend in almost any position that you ever have in your business, you look at the comp range. And if this is the range, you want to be up here, right? Or even a little bit above the range. And the reason that's important is because, you know, even just paying a little bit more, sometimes two or three grand more, can get you twice as good of people just paying at the top of the range. So in this example, let's say you go through the exercise, it's gonna be at the very end of this video about comp, and you set a 10K a month target. So, like let's say the range, the on-tracked earning range, is these setters are gonna make with commissions or their base or however you're gonna pay them, seven to 12 grand a month. Okay. So it's about a 10K a month target. Okay. So then start with the benchmarks that I have, which we're gonna cover shortly, and then add setters slowly to decrease the leads per setter per month. All right. So this is gonna kind of happen in two scenarios. So let's say you're a newer business and you have 800 opt-ins per month and you're running a VSL funnel. So then you hire right one setter exactly, which is like right at the benchmark we're gonna cover in a second. Then you increase to 1200 opt-ins per month because you raise the ad spin and you hire a second setter. So now each setter is at 600 opt-ins per month per setter. And what you're gonna want to do is gauge performance, which we're gonna cover in step four. But let's say you have an established business. So let's say you already have 4,800 leads per month and you have six setters. So that's 800 leads per setter per month, which is right at benchmark. Here you just change nothing and you add one setter, right? And now each is at 685. You're gonna reevaluate performance. The reason here I'm recommending like increasing the spend a little bit if you're a newer business is because if you go from 800 all the way down to 400, it's gonna throw your first setter who's already working in a huge rut. So you do got to increase the ad spend a little bit because at a lower setter count and a lower lead count, the drop is pretty insane. Now, obviously, if you have one setter and you're way above benchmark and they got 2,000 leads, you probably just add a setter and it's gonna be fine. So the result of doing this is you're gonna have three scenarios. Scenario one is all the existing setter individual production will stay the same. And so essentially nothing changed. Everybody's doing the same numbers, but now you have one or however many extra people who are also doing numbers. And so the team production in that case is up significantly. And all that meant was you just had way too many leads per setter, and this is a massive, mass efficiency increase. So here you would know, okay, I would test it again to see if that happens again. Okay. Now the next scenario is that each individual contributor, their production goes down slightly, but the team production is up moderately. So here, this is what's key. Here you're you're fine as long as the individual setters, the individual setter performers are still close to or at their target on-tracked earnings, which was a 10K a month in this example. Remember, okay. So scenario three is that you you add a setter, you don't change the leads, and then individual production drops significantly, but the team production is maybe only up slightly, or maybe not at all. Okay. So this is an issue because your existing top performers, what's gonna happen is they're gonna make less. They're gonna drop below that target on track earning, which was 10K a month in our example. So if it dropped 25%, now they're making seven. And then that means now you don't have enough leads and you're overstaffed, right? Which is gonna increase your churn. This will make sense just to give you a short kind of summary of all of this. So, step one, you determine the on track earnings range and the target on track earnings. Then you start at the benchmark, which I'm gonna cover in a second, then you increase the amount of setters that you have, or to, or it's the same thing, decrease a leads per setter per month count continuously. And then what you're gonna do as you do that is measure the overall team production simply by just by looking at lead to set percentage, cost per setter booking, which is your ad spend divided by your sets. And if they improve, your production is up, right? But what you want to do is you want to stop when the on track earnings at the top 25% of your team is below that target on track earning, right? That's kind of how you find that intersection of when you know you have the right KPI, right? Because really at the end of the day, if you're adding good setters and always decreasing leads, you should always get incremental increases in performance. The question becomes is when is it not worth it to add that next additional setter for the amount of leads that you have? And the way you determine that is when the decrease in pay the setters are experiencing starts to risk churn and then you're losing your good people and your ability to recruit good people because you can't pay them enough. Hopefully that makes sense. You want to find that intersection there, all right? But a lot of times, again, with scale companies, you can start to add keep like add it and keep decreasing the account, and you're gonna have a huge production and they're not gonna make that much less, right? With beginning companies, a lot of times they just hire too many and they don't spend enough, and then they actually are um overstaffed. Okay. So now, what are the common benchmarks? So this is highly dependent on lead source, which is why I wanted to teach you how to think about it in the first place. So I'm gonna give you a few options, right? And we only go off of the primary metric. So, like in a VSL call funnel, that's opt-ins for a DTA funnel, that's apps. So we're not really counting no shows, pipeline, all of those other opportunities. And so what I would do is consider these requirements to when you're ready to hire another setter, unless you've already determined your own metric, or if you've never hired a setter before, this is the requirement of hiring your first setter, okay? Until you know until you know your own metrics. So if you're running a VSL webinar call funnel with an opt-in, it's about 800 to 900 opt-ins per setter per month. And then what you're looking for out of that is about 80 to 110 sets per month per setter. If you're running a PDF lead magnet to a call funnel, it's about 1200 to 1500 leads per, is this a sets, but it should say leads per setter per month. And out of that, they should get 80 to 110 sets per setter per month. The reason this is different, even though the funnel is very similar, is PDFs and lead magnets tend to get lower quality leads. It just always does, especially with Facebook ads. Now, if you're doing a what a VSL webinar call funnel without the opt-in, so this is also called DTA funnel, direct to app, then it's about 400 to 500 apps, app no bookings is what we call them. So apps that didn't book per setter per month, which is a lot. I mean, you're gonna have maybe three or four closers and one setter, okay? And then out of that, you should get 80 to 110 sets per setter per month. If you have a buyer funnel without the implementation call, okay. So one where it's just pure outbound of your buyer funnel, it's about 400 to 500 buyers per setter per month. Again, they should get 80 to 110 sets per setter per month. And this KPA, again, like I said, it drastically changes if you do an implementation call, right? And so it's different because when you do an implement implementation call, the buyers who don't book the implementation call to begin with are generally way worse quality. So you may have to raise this up to like 800 if you're calling the buyers who didn't book the implementation call. Okay. So as you can see with all these metrics, you end up at about 80 to 110 sets per month. Okay. I've had setters as high as 130 to 140 plus sets per month, just to be clear. But 80 to 110 is a good range. And the way to think about it is really 80 to 110 means your setters getting enough answers and enough qualified combos per day to where essentially like that maxes out their day if they're having enough quality combos. So, you know, at the end of the day, one thing that's constant, no matter what funnel that you run, is essentially that the setter only has eight or nine hours or however many hours in a day, right? And so generally I find once they get to 90, 100, 110, 120 sets per setter per month, that's pretty much the max, regardless of lead flow. That's gonna be the max that they're gonna be able to do in a normal work week. I'm sure you have the beast who works 10 or 12 hours and works weekends and all this shit, but that's kind of the exception to the rule. Most times that's gonna be about the max. Now, what do you do if you don't have enough leads for one setter, but you're like, man, I still got some needs, leads that need hit, right? So this is only gonna happen, by the way, when you're hiring your first setter ever, right? So, like the scenario here is you might have 400 opt-ins per setter per month, right? So you only have 400 opt-ins. You really should have 800, but you only have 400. But there's also, let's say, because you're doing app grading, there's two great apps that need re-qualified. And there's also no shows to reach out to. There's apps, no bookings that are not getting called, but you don't have enough of those to hit on-tracked earnings, okay? In this case, I'd still hire a setter, but what you're gonna have to do is you're gonna have to put them on a guaranteed draw until lead flow increases. So for example, you're gonna put them on the regular comp. Like let's say your regular comp, which we're gonna cover that later, is like four to five percent per set close. You're still gonna have them on regular comp, but you're gonna put them on a draw that basically means they're guaranteed to make 7K. That'd be a 7K a month draw. So what you do is you end up paying them the difference between their regular comp and the 7K. So let's say the comp structure in this example is $2,500 a month plus 3%, uh, 3% per close set, right? And let's say based on the leads that they close that month, they would have made just raw off that compensation $5K. Okay. But if they're on a $7K a month guaranteed draw, that means you're gonna pay them an extra two grand to get the seven grand. But in the same example, if on the base comp structure they would have hit 10K, then you don't pay them anything extra, right? That's what a draw is. It's just a guaranteed floor. So in examples where, like maybe you have double bookings and nobody to take them, you have you have leads to call, you just don't have enough really for one setter. I'd still hire the setter. I'd put them on the right comp structure that'll work at scale. And I'd tell them, hey, we're scaling and we're scaling really fast. But until we kind of get to this level, so you have enough leads, you're going to have a draw. They'll be cool with it. Okay. Now, this is a big question and a huge mistake that a lot of people make, which is should setters take direct bookings? Okay. So it's multifaceted. The answer is kind of yes and no, but tons of people make mistakes with this. And what's key is understanding how sales ops should work. And then that kind of factors into all of this equation. So again, I have an entire training, I already mentioned it on sales ops. It's in the portal. But as a quick primer, the ideal sales ops for call funnels is prospects apply or they book a call. The sales coordinator, and this is going to be AI if you're using sales kick. If you're not using sales kick, it's going to be a human. The sales coordinator is going to grade every single application based on the answers. Okay. Again, separate training on this. And then essentially they're grading one through four. Now, the way we do it is ones get canceled. That's like spam. Twos move to a setter to get requalified. Threes go to a closer, fours go to a closer, fours are just like better leads, right? So if you ever do best leads to best closer, you can kind of delineate that by the four grade. Okay. So the question is here, and why I'm bringing this up, is what's a two? What's a two grade? This usually means like you're not sure if you can help them, which is very, very common in B2B. So, like for us, you know, we'll have somebody put solar on the app. It's like, what business do you have? Solar. But then the revenue is good. And now, in a lot of cases, depending on the model, we can help solar companies, but some other companies we can't help that are solar. So instead of just putting them right on the closer's calendar, what we'll do is we'll put them on the setter's calendar. Now, if the calendar is light that day for any reason, we'll just move them right back to the closer. But usually the setter is going to take it because we need to re-qualify and get for information just to even determine if they are qualified in the first place, right? So that's a probably the most common example of why we have two grades. Um, but you also might, maybe your B2C or what have you. You also just might know based on hard data that, hey, you know, people who answer this and that on the app or have this app grade, they're unlikely to close or unlikely to show up. But all that needs to be based on data, right? So for example, like you could have tracked that a person who gives a one-word response in a certain field or who has an unideal financial situation doesn't show up or barely ever closes. So you might two grade those and move them to the setters, okay? Just, but let me be clear here. You have to do this based off data. Do not do this based on gut feel because your gut feel is usually wrong. Okay. Even mine, it's usually wrong. So if you want to know more about this, you can go through the sales ops training, but you'd send these to setters to qualify before setting on the closer's calendar. Now, so the question originally was should setters take direct bookings? Okay, I had to kind of teach you this to answer that question. So the the two great appointments are the only direct bookings your setters should take. Okay. So for the love of God, in 99% of scenarios, there's some exceptions, but in 99% of scenarios, the setters should not be triaging every single appointment before the closer takes it. Okay. Because I see people with call funnels, like they're running ads to a book or call funnel, and every single appointment is going to a setter. It's like, oh my God, do not do that. Okay. Here's why. So here's why you should not send all your direct bookings to the setters. It's because the math doesn't work. So I'm going to give you two examples. Example one is sending calls to the closer first. So let's say you have 100 bookings, 70 show, that's 70%, 25% close, that's 17.5%, and you have 175K cash collected because your price is 10K. Now, let's say you send all the calls to the setters first. You have the same 100 bookings, 70 show. Now 55 of those book with the closer. So you have a 78% booking rate. Okay. And by the way, that's generous. I usually don't see it that high, but that's generous. Then you have a 38.5%, I had to do 0.5s here to keep the math right, but 38.5 actually show to that closer call, the real closer call. So that's a 70% show rate from the setter bookings. Then 15.4% close. And I even gave them in this example, you got to look at the screen, I gave them a 40% close rate, the closers, right? Because since they're talking to the setter first, I'm going to allow them to close 15% higher because they're a little bit warmer. They've had another call, had another call, which I'll just say right now, that's crazy generous. It usually doesn't happen like that. But whatever. Let's say they close 40% now because the setters are triaging them. Okay, compared to 25%, but only 15 close. You're only making 154,000 cash collected at the same 10K price. So you made less money. And by the way, you have to manage a shitload of setters because they're gonna have to triage all these appointments, and you're gonna have to pay the setters like 3% or whatever on those appointments at close. So you're not just making less raw gross, you're making less altogether. And frankly, your closer's calendar is not gonna even be like in this example, your closer's calendar is full. In this example, your closer's calendar is not full. So your closer calendar is that, you know, they're gonna be mad, they're gonna want you to fill their calendar. That's gonna uh cost you to spend even more on ads. And you're also gonna get hit, uh you're gonna get hit higher tiers or colder traffic faster because you have to spend more on ads to essentially fill one closer's calendar and to make less money at the end of the day. Okay. So it's very stupid. Okay, do not do this. A lot of people, but my market's different because our people really need to, you know, feel heard and you know, not get pissed right away and be slow. No, it's not. Okay, no, it's not. It's not. All right. So um just to just to actually show you when it can be worth it, for the setter first model to even break even to make the same is just going direct to closer at 25% closing ratio. The closer would need to close 45.4%. That's just to break even. Okay. To actually make it worth it, they probably have to close 55%. You see how this is just like crazy, all right? I've had this argument with sales managers many times throughout my years. It does not work. But your sales people, your sales managers, they're gonna want you to do it because they don't care what you spend on ads. They just want the easiest job possible and to make the most money. Well, yeah, like, you know, what they want is the people to show up with an Amex. Hey, I'm ready to buy. Like, you got to kind of put your closures in their place sometimes. So, what you want to think about is your setters are really there to drive new appointments. Okay. Net new appointments. They're not there to qualify existing appointments. And the other issue is too, this is a huge issue. Is if your team gets used to this, then what's gonna happen is when you finally realize what I'm telling you, and you change it, they're all gonna go into a huge rut. Okay, they're gonna complain, they're gonna go into a huge rut, they're not gonna perform, they're gonna quit, they're gonna be like, oh, the leads, oh my God, I can't believe that you know, somebody's not pre-selling all of my leads. Give me a break. So, um, what I really recommend is that you not do this model from the very beginning. Okay. But if you are stuck with it, just be careful of changing it. So the way I'd recommend changing it is you test you you test the whole new direct-to-closure model yourself and you validate the whole new sales process from the very beginning because these leads will be colder. So you do need to probably sell them a little bit differently, which is just normal. Like now you got to do a normal sales process, God forbid. So you got to do a normal sales process now, but having that proof that, hey guys, it works will help your sales team believe that it can work, not get too in their head because it's all mental for them. Okay. And so um, what you wanna do is you wanna test it out on yourself. Sometimes if your best closer, your sales manager, they can test it out. And then when you roll it out to everybody else, you want to map out how they can actually make way more money doing this because they're gonna have way more appointments and they're gonna make way more offers. And then you want to set the expectation expectation that, hey guys, you're not gonna have as high as a closing rate, but you're gonna have way more appointments and you're ultimately gonna make way more money. Okay. Now, there's a few exceptions to when it's okay to do set or first. The first one is if you're the owner slash founder and you're just trying to conserve time, obviously that's fine. Just make sure you shift to the direct-to-closer model before you hire your first closer. Okay. So do not do this in the very beginning. Or sorry, it's fine to do this in the very beginning because, like, if you're the owner, you're doing a bunch of stuff. Like, it is worth to pay more per appointment, technically, just to have a premium on your time and not burn out talking to people who you shouldn't be talking to. I get that. But again, just shift the model before you scale. And by the way, I'm not even right, like when I took calls when I started this company, I didn't do the setter first thing. But I'm just saying, some people, it does make sense. And if you are doing it, I don't hate that. That's fine. Just change it before you scale and hire a closer. Um, there's another thing is, and this is the other exception where I'm okay with, right? Is if your prospects constantly show up to an appointment in non-buying situations, it can be okay to send into a setter first. So, what I mean by that is I have clients who serve people in construction, right? Construction business owners, contractors, they're on the site, they're in the truck, they're never on Zoom, they're never on a laptop, they're not in a buying situation. And so here, it does make sense sometimes to just send them to the setter first, right? But it also might even make sense to test something like a lead form to where everything is just outbound to the setter and just it's all outbound based. It could even make sense because you can get cheaper leads that way. You're not paying for the appointment. That model could even be superior here. But in this case, what you really want to do is you do need somebody to have some sort of preliminary conversation to make sure that then when they take the meeting with you, they're actually sitting at a computer or somewhere where they can like see one Zoom, see what you're presenting, and actually be in a buying situation, right? Like being on a construction site when you're the business owner and you're dealing with, especially like guys doing one to five million a year, they're dealing with tons of fires. They got to interrupt and take a call in the middle of it. They're like, oh my God, I'm looking at this, I'm looking at this, I'm walking around. They're just not gonna buy, right? So you do need to reset them in a buying situation. It's just a nature of that market. The only other exception I would say that I could find is if what you saw is very strict qualifications and most people don't qualify no matter what you do, right? Um, that's not really a reason, but because you should be able to filter those people out in the application. But I'm putting it here because, you know, it could be an exception, I suppose. Now, the next thing we're gonna talk about is the triage capacity problem. Okay. So let's say you're a B2B offer like me, and 40 to 50% of your total bookings are MQLs, which means 50 to 60% are ones and twos, right? So in this example, but this is how my business works, by the way. 25% of all my applications coming in are two grade applications. And so they go to the setters, right? So at my scale, that's a lot of bookings that land on the setter's calendar. So then if you're not careful, setters who are supposed to be driving net new business, right? Net new appointments and working the opt-ins and the leads and hitting speed to lead and doing all this great stuff. The people who are doing that, now what they're doing, if you look at their calendar, they're just talking the triages all day, every day. And they're getting a lot of sets through that, actually. So they don't even really have to hit the new leads. And so then what happens is your leads go uncontacted and unworked, and you make way less money. Okay. This is very, very common. And the thing is, it's happened to me. It just sneaks up on you. Like it's not an issue for a while. And then as you scale and you scale and you scale, like I remember one time years ago, I looked at the setters calendars and I was like, how are they even making any dials? Like they're literally full all day with two great applications. And the truth is they're not. So, what to do is if you're only at one to two setters on your team, I just wouldn't worry about this. It's probably not that much of an issue. But as you have a bigger team and you have three, four, five setters plus, I would have setters that are designated to only take triages. Okay. And if the show rate on these is low, what you can do is you can double or triple book them. Or like if they have a no-show, what they can do is they can hit like a lead list where they have just access to everybody else's leads and you just pound them out. Uh, and they can hit those whenever they don't have a show, right? But if they're taking appointments all day, they're at a serious disadvantage of working leads compared to the setters who are gonna be on the other team who are only gonna be dedicated to those leads, right? Which brings me to the other team. The other team doesn't have any triages at all. And what they're gonna be doing is essentially working new pipeline, right? And hitting speed to lead and just like absolutely torching all those leads that are to come in, right? So you're gonna have two teams, one for triages, one for just working and outbounding new leads only. And then if this team has free time and no shows, they can hit new pipeline, old pipeline, et cetera, which all of that will make sense as we go on. If you're a business owner who has appointment setters or an outbound sales team, you're gonna want to hear what I have to say for a second. So a multiple eight-figure business owner texted me the other day, and when he started using $.io for the first time, his pickup rates went from 9% to 20%. So imagine doubling your pickup rates and ultimately the throughput of what your outbound salespeople and setters are gonna get. How does that impact your business? The answer is a lot. So if you want to check out $.io for a phone sales outbound system, just click the link in the description or just go to $.io. Now back to the podcast. So now we're gonna talk about KPIs. So setter KPIs starting with the call funnel. All right. So uh we're gonna talk about setter activity and speed delete. Those are very important KPIs, but that's gonna be in a different section. So you can go through these in the document, or if you're watching on the video, you can just like look at these. But basically, these are all essentially the um major KPIs that I look for in the call funnel. So um all I will say is I'm gonna highlight a couple of things. So with dial to combo, like how many dials we make per combo, I usually see 10 to 15%. With dollar.io, we've had pickups as high as 15 to 20 percent. With combo to set, it's usually 65 to 70, but with B2B, you might see lower. Lead to set, it can wild, it can really vary wildly because you could have different lead qualities. You could also have um, if you have a lot of triages from two grade apps, it's gonna make your lead to set look a lot higher. If you have live transfers from double bookings, it's gonna make your lead to set look a lot higher. So generally 10 to 20%. I mean, mine's like 37%, but a lot of that's because I have tons of live transfers. I have inbound triages from the two grade apps, and then I have my outbound team working all these leads, and I have a pipeline setting team. So it's like we are squeezing everything out of these leads that we possibly can. So um that's just a little bit different. So these things are a little bit subjective here. Um, if you're doing pure outbounding, usually eight to ten lead eight to ten percent lead to set is um pretty standard. Like if it's like PDF leads or just pure lead forms, that can actually be pretty standard as well. Again, depends on quality. And also in my experience with pure outbound, people using $.io, they tend to get some. I mean, I've had a $40 million company just recently use it. You would know who they are, who went from 9% to 20% with this model. So it can make a big difference. Show rates of the sets, right? So the actual set show rate of the setter sets they're setting for the closers is 70 to 80 percent. And we've had as high as 90, uh, being B2B helps, but I definitely 70%, anything below 70%, red flag, get it up. Okay. Set to close rate. The way I would think about set to close rate is it should be 20 to 30 percent higher than your ads call close rate. Okay. So if ads call close rate is 25%, set close rate should be 30 to 33 percent. Okay. Your sets should be your best leads. If your sets are not your best leads and your sets are closing at lower than the ads call close rate, your setters aren't very good. Very simple. I just solved it for you. That's what's happening. They're not very good. If they are good, they're gonna close higher than the ads calls. Just use common sense. Like if the person had two conversations and the first conversation was really, really good, that person's gonna be more likely to close. If the setter knows what they're doing and they're actually setting qualified people, that person's gonna be more likely to close. So if your setter team is operating how it should and your setters are actually good and your operating systems are good and your talent is good, they should close higher and they should show higher. Okay. Now, those are the major KPIs. A couple adjustments here. If you're running a buyer funnel with no implementation call, the lead to set should be 20% plus, maybe even higher, right? Because you'll see in the scripting, but we're using a customer service frame opposed to like more of an outbound frame. If it's PDF leads, you might see six to eight percent because PDF leads are worse. But the most important metrics you really want to look at are leads per setter per month, which we covered, sets per setter per month, that 80 to 110 number, which we covered, speed to lead, which we're about to cover, and setter activity, which are about to cover. So if you simply just focus and make it really simple, if you simply just focus on getting the setter to 80 to 110 sets per month, and then using them as baseline for all the mid-funnel metrics, and then following the formula about having, you know, how many leads you give your setter per month, if you just focus on those two things, the rest will naturally fall in place because people get really hung up on these numbers. But the issue is it just varies so much depending on the funnel, depending on the industry, depending on the messaging, depending on the lead quality, depending on all sorts of stuff, right? So um that is uh what I would say there. And then the other thing is too, is if you don't know if like a metric like combo to set is good or not, all you got to do is review a full day's calls and you'll know. Like it'll be obvious if your actual setter conversations are good or not. Okay. So let's move on to speed to lead, which is by far the number one most important KPI you can measure for all your setters. All right. So, um, and this is also the biggest leading indicator of pickup rates and lead the set. So I think, you know, I don't know if I have the study in here, but there's studies for, for instance, that, you know, if you call the lead immediately versus five minutes, they're like 10 times more likely to get a set. If it's five minutes versus 60 minutes, they're another 10 times more likely to get a set. Regardless, it's basically an exponential curve to where you're tremendous. If like if you think about a graph and this is like how old the lead is, it's like an exponential curve to where the quicker you call them, you're just exponentially more and more more likely to have a result and get a set and get an answer or what have you than if you don't. Okay. So a good KPI for this is for texting, it really should be automated, which we're gonna cover later, but that should be all under five minutes for all leads, 247, 365. And then for calling, this should be under five minutes for all leads during the setter's business hours, right? Because if a lead opts in at 2 a.m. and the setter's sleeping, you know, you can't really be like, dude, you should have woken up out of your bed and called that lead. So under five minutes for under business hours. And um obviously, uh, okay, how do you track speed to lead? Number one, but also how do you track it only specific during business hours? Uh, if if you use dialer.io, you can do it. Uh, there's another software called dialerOS that sits over top of other dialers that will allow you to do it as well. Or uh, we've even created our custom like clock code software thing that does it. So, anyhow, now we're gonna talk about setter activity and dials. This keeps saying dialers, I should say dials per day per setter. So the big issue here is, and this is a big mistake nowadays, is the old way of gauging setter activity was to monitor minimum dials made per day per setter. Okay. So this isn't bad, but it has limitations. And the limitations are is that you can't a setter can't dial when they're talking to a live prospect, which when they're talking to a live prospect is the most profitable thing that they become doing and spending their time. And so if you have a system in which, you know, gives live transfers to the setters, it's giving them these two great applications. Maybe your leads are really good and there's super high pickup rates, or maybe they're really responsive your leads are to text and they're booking a lot of triages via the text sequence. What's gonna happen is it's it's gonna look like your setter's not doing enough dials, even though they're productive. So, like I've had times as we were figuring this out in the early days, where we'd have a setter make 20 dials in a day, but they'd have seven sets, right? And that's due to super high answer rate, texting, triaging, et cetera. So the dials per day per setter, like 100 dials per day per setter. I mean, it's generally as a ballpark, like a pretty good metric, usually to look at. But the better thing to look at is setter activity. And so again, you either have to use dialerOS, which is a bolt on the most dialers, or dialer.io, either of them will do this. But what they basically do is they monitor, and this is like if you have a remote team. If you have an in-person team, you just know if they're working and doing their job, right? But the issue with virtual setters is you kind of don't know if they're doing just enough to hit KPIs and taking two or three hours off, or if they're working the full nine hours of the day that you're expecting them to until now. Because if you use either of those softwares I just mentioned, basically what they do is they combine talk time and dialing time. So that way, even if your setter is virtual, you can literally see how many hours they work each day. Okay. And so setter activity should be about seven hours a day, which accounts for like they're gonna have to do a sales meeting and a one-on-one sometimes. They got to take a couple breaks, that's fine. And they got to do lunch, right? So, like in an eight and a half hour, nine hour day, eight hour day, seven hours of activity, six and a half hours of activity is what you're looking for. And activity is defined as like they're either dialing or they're actually talking to somebody. And those softwares can actually track that. Okay. Now, again, if you're hiring your first one or two setters, you don't need to freak out about this and be like, oh my gosh. Like you can just measure it on like how many sets per or how many sets per day or how many sets per month is this person actually getting. But as your team gets bigger, this is absolutely game changing. You know, like I've had people figure this out and they have a 20% lift once they figure it out on all their setters because they hold them accountable to how much they work and how much they dial. And then a 20% lift across eight setters is like saving 200, 300. Thousand dollars a month in ad spend. It's like freaking crazy. So now we're gonna get into the complex stuff, right? And this is probably the most advanced part of the entire training, which is your setter workflow and dialing logic. Okay. So this is the most important part of the video, and this is like how to run a setter team at the top one, one, one percent level. Like I've been setting a lot of foundations up until now. Now we get to the fun stuff. So here's like the basic flow for a setter is a lead is created by marketing. It zaps into the CRM, it's tagged properly. So some leads, for instance, like if they book, they're not gonna get tagged. So they're not gonna go to the setters. But others, if they don't book, they're gonna go to the setters. That depends on your tagging system. And so then they're delegated to setters in a round robin fashion. All right. Now, a bonus, and you'd have to work with Edward on this. Again, you can book with him. I'll put a link in the description. Is um there's a bonus if the lead moves through um essentially, like if a lead's delegated to a setter during business hours and it doesn't get called within five minutes, it'll dish the setter to somebody else, right? So it can keep reassigning the leads. Okay. So dialer does that instantly, but you can also build that into your HubSpot and do it that way with your sequencing, etc. So that's kind of the basic flow. Now, a lot of people ask, well, like what's the dialing cadence? Like how many times should my setters call each lead? And in what order? What's the cadence? All that stuff. That's this is where this gets a little complicated. So we covered this earlier, but there's four determining factors. There's frequency, which is how many times a lead is hit. There's recency, which is how new the lead, how new the lead is. So, like for instance, I'd rather call a new lead three times today than dial three old leads or sorry, dial three five old leads today. Does that make sense? I kind of worded that word, worded that a little weird. I'd rather call one new lead three times today than three different leads one time today if all those leads are five days old, right? So the more new the lead is, obviously the more valuable it is, right? The other thing is we look at value, which is any sort of data that makes this lead more valuable than others. So, like for instance, an application that didn't book is more valuable than an opt-in. A partial application that obviously didn't book because it didn't even finish the application is more valuable than an opt-in. And then an opt-in is like the third most valuable, and then you know, probably so on and so forth from there, like maybe an email open or whatever. Like you can tier all these leads. We'll look at that in a second. If you're doing a buyer funnel, a $200 AOV lead is more valuable than a $17 AOV lead. An 800 credit score lead is more valuable than a $500 credit score lead, right? So how do you actually create an algorithm that kind of like factors in recency, frequency, and value and all that stuff, right? The other thing is peak call time. So knowing the statistically out of like, and every market can be different depending on the market, but knowing the statistically highest answer rate time of the day of your market. Okay. So like I always want to dial a new lead immediately because that means they're online. But if I have two other dials and I want to spend that day on that lead, I would ideally want to dial those at peak time, right? Like let's say peak time is two to five PM. I might do immediately when they opt in at 11 a.m., then again at two and again at five. Okay. So the big mistake is that most people only focus on frequency, right? They're like, I want to get my cadence perfect. How many leads, how many times should my setters hit each lead in the next 15 days or in the next seven days? And they like really force and constrain this frequency on their setters so that every lead gets worked the right amount of times. But what they're not doing is they're not considering there's a hierarchy of leads at any one time from most valuable to least valuable because there's new leads coming in, those should get prioritized. There's people who are texting back to certain sequences or opening emails, those should get prioritized. So a lot of people, they constrain their setters to hit all leads this amount of times, this amount of days, this amount of, you know, this amount of times on this day, and they give all these people tons of hubspot tasks, it'll kill performance. Okay. So to fix all this, what you need is essentially like a dialing logic or a dialing algorithm. Okay. And so it's an algorithm for calling the highest value lead segments in the most productive order at the proper time per day, in a way that prioritizes maximum speed to lead, to where you'll know this, you, you know, you'll know you're doing good speed to lead when the prospects are like, damn, that was fast when they answer. Okay. So this will make more sense as we go on. This is why I said it's a little bit more complicated, but it's very, very important. And so a good way to understand this is looking at highest to lowest value lead buckets. Okay. And so imagine you're running a call funnel with an opt-in. All right. You have different buckets of leads, and we're going to prioritize them right now from highest to lowest. So your highest value lead actually is calling people who just texted you back, right? It's actually not the new leads. You would think it's the new leads. It's actually calling leads that you texted who just texted you back. And so what you'd want to do with those leads is you want to, as soon as they text you back, call immediately, and then you text back second, which could be also an AI or an automation or whatever, which we're going to cover all that in a second. Um the next highest value lead will be the new apps no booking, new partial apps, the new opt-ins would be next, then the recent email opens that trigger, and then maybe people who responded to one text or more, but they're two or three days old. Right. So they haven't, um I don't even know what that says, haven't gotten a old of. Doesn't even make any sense. And then after that, we'll be calling and texting today's no shows. After that, we'll be calling today's new leads two times more, okay, ideally during peak hours. Then after that, we'll be calling two-day old leads in respective text follow-ups for those leads. And then after that, we'll be calling three-day old leads, and then maybe you have four-day old leads, five-day old leads, and that's where you cut it off at five, right? So you see how like with all of the things, and this is pretty easy to put together, right? Is like, okay, with all of how my funnel can work and how my leads can kind of interact in my ecosystem. This is how I'd ideally in a perfect world, I'd want an algorithm to where like these things are always getting prioritized. So if you think about it, the most productive way for your setter to essentially do their daily workflow is to essentially always start at the top and hit all these leads first, then move to lead these leads, hit all these leads, hit the all these leads, hit all these leads, all these leads, all these leads, and then just work all the way down the list, right? And what's gonna happen is there's new people throughout a business day, like there's somebody who texts you back. There's a new lead that opts in. So it's like they kind of work down this list, but as new stuff populates in these buckets, they have to go back up. Okay. So it's like they're working down, but then they're constantly going back up, working down, constantly going back up, working down, right? And so that's what the ideal workflow is. You can see it can be kind of tricky to actually think about, which is why you have to have an algorithm to do it. Okay. So you can also like you could make this even more complex. Like you'd have separate lists based on certain factors like revenue, industry, app score, financial data, et cetera, and prioritize those in the sublist. So it could also get more complicated if you have multiple funnels. So let's say you had a buyer funnel running as well, right? Well, your dialing logic would need to factor that in. And so this is far more effective, right? Because, okay, back to the buyer funnel. Like imagine you had a buyer funnel. Well, maybe the buyer funnel leads are better, new leads are better than the opt-in funnel new leads. So you kind of have to filter that into the dialing logic. But but point is, this is far more effective than berating your setters that they're not calling every single lead 13 times. Okay. Like, why would they care about calling a five-day old lead if a new one just came in or a new one just texting them back? So setters, a lot of times that are good. If you let them sort of naturally, they gotta be good, by the way, but if you let them naturally just sort of work the system, they'll start to actually work this way. If you rigid, if you if you create a rigid system they have to follow, it is gonna drop performance. Okay. Now we still want to actually give them a system to work within, but using this in mind. But it, you know, even if you didn't, they naturally start to work your leads this way because they're trying to make the most money. And so a good example and a quick story is when I sold full time, I was with a company who was really upset. I was the closer, but this company was really upset at the setters for not calling their leads a certain amount of times per day for 14 days and all this stuff. So they created this very rigid system and they assured that all their leads had to be perfectly worked and called a certain amount of times through the course of 15 days. And we literally went from full calendars, setters performing at an extremely high level, to just tanking the performance in a week. It just blew out the setter performance. It was terrible. Okay. And that's because they were trying to constrain them and they were prioritizing frequency over the proper logic. All right. And so after a week, we just switched it back. That's really where I learned this lesson and figured all this stuff out. It was years ago. This would have been 2019. So, how do you actually okay? So, what do you do now? Okay, I kind of get it. What the hell do I do? So, I'm gonna talk about the old way we used to do this, all right? And this was the manual jerry-rigging way that you know me and Edward would have to set up, and it was just like a lot, a lot of work. Okay. And this still works, by the way, but it's just not as ideal as the new way, which I'm gonna cover a second. So here's what we used to do. So you would set up a CRM. So all these lead segments are tagged accordingly, right? So, like all these buckets that I went through, you'd have to set up the CRM. So as those leads come in, all those buckets have different tags. And then for each different tag, you would create a different list and your CRM to segment each of those things. So you'd have different lists, right? So you'd have a separate list for every single lead bucket. And then you would educate your setters, hey guys, here's your highest value leads, here's your lowest value leads, and they work in this order. So you'd order them out like high priority to low priority in a spectrum. Okay. And then what they would do is they would sit in the CRM with their dialer and they would load up, they basically you have to refresh their page, load up the highest value list, see if there's anything in it, hit those leads, as soon as refresh again, see if there's anything in it, then move to the next list, refresh, see if there's anything in it, hit those leads, then go back to the first one, refresh, see if there's anything in those. Then okay, go to number three, see what's in that, hit all that, then go check one and two again, then go to number four, and so on and so forth. So basically that's how they would work. I kind of put a diagram. It's like they work all these ones down, but then they're constantly rope uh looping back to check essentially um if there's any new ones. Okay. So the issue with this was is like a lot of times, especially with those new leads coming good, you got to like refresh the list to actually see if it pops up. And as you can tell, you know, you're asking the setters to have like five different freaking lists open. It's just kind of bulky. Okay. So what we also used to do to assist this process is for let's say like the top three or four priority channels, what we do is we'd set up a Slack channel for each individual setter. And then anytime a new league came in from the uh top like two to four segments or what have you, it would pop in that channel and they would have to have the notifications on the computer screen for that channel. And then what we would do is we'd set it up to where they could just click the Slack notification and then it automatically would pop up in the dialer, right? And then that way, too, we'd also have a manager channel that would have all the priority leads for all the setters inside of one manager channel. So the manager could QC speed the lead on all the hottest, uh, like you know, tier one, tier two, tier three, tier four bucket leads, right? And so they could work these lists, but to assist them and keep them from having to constantly refresh and open this and refresh and this and that, we'd always have that setter, um, the um setter slack notification popping up, essentially, for every single new hot lead coming in. That way we could assure they just get hit pretty much freaking instantly. Okay. So again, how do you set this up? All right. If you have one to two setters and you do not want to deal with all this complexity, uh, frankly, I would just teach your setters how to think about doing this stuff, have them set up some basic segments and priority lists and just let them rip. Okay. It's just not worth going through all this complexity if you have one or two setters. What it is worth doing is just teaching them how to think about it. Because like I said earlier, they will naturally sort of optimize this way. They won't do it perfect because they're not a robot, they're not an algorithm, but they'll naturally kind of optimize this way if they know how to think about it. Now, if you have three plus setters and you want to take this shit to the next level, uh again, I'd hire Edward to set this up. I mean, I never set any of this stuff up for my company. You got to hire people like Edward to be able to do it. Okay. So I think a link to him is in the description or what have you. So um, when we did this, we used Alloware and HubSpot, right? Was our tech stack. Uh, Alloware and GHL works too. I'm not a big fan of GHL, but HubSpot's much better. So back when we did this whole thing and Edward set it up for us, it was Alloware plus HubSpot. Now, the new way, and this is why I had the beginning preface, it's like I'm not trying to just shill dialer.io, but the reason we built dialer is because we realized this process was a mess and it'd just be much easier if it was all in one software. So, um, as you can see, you know, the above process, it's not perfect. Um, but it's the best we could do for years. And so we package it all into dialer. So dialer does it all for you. Basically, it's like all the setters got to do is they log in, they go dial. And it just does the algorithm perfectly, which is why we've generally seen 50 to 100% increases in pickup rate from the clients using the software because they're working the leads in the most perfect way they can possibly work it. And they're also doing it in a TCPA compliant way, which is huge because most setters don't do that at all. They'll call, you know, you'll have rogue setters who call like leads like nine times in a freaking day, like you can't do that compliantly. So it makes it makes them work compliantly, which also keeps your lines from actually burning, and then that will kill your pickup rates. And then it also, you know, because it's working them perfectly, you get better results and all that good stuff. Okay. So uh obviously I have an interest in you using it. I think it's what you should use because, like, of all the, you know, things I'm saying here. But uh, even if I didn't own an interest, it'd still be my legit recommendation. The only thing I'll say about dialer, and there's a link below if you want to check it out, but the only thing I'll say about it is because we have to set this up on the front end for every single client, there is more setup involved in dialer than other dialers. Like most dialers, it's a Chrome extension or whatever extension, super easy to do. You upload your list, you go to town. Okay. With this, obviously, because we got to set all this stuff up, it's um, you know, it's a little bit more work. It takes a week or two to set up for clients, but it's worth it. It's what we use. So now we're gonna go into dialing logic best practices. Okay. So, regardless of what option you choose, you should at least be informed on what the best practices are when someone sets this up for you. Okay. Obviously, dialer.io, they get this stuff because this is like why they build it. Edward, he also gets it, but maybe you use somebody else, you have an existing tech guy. This is kind of the stuff you want to tell them. So the best practices here are the new leads should be contacted immediately. Duh. Okay. New leads that are further down the funnel are higher priority than leads less down the funnel. So, like higher AOV is better than low AOV. Apps no bookings are better than opt-ins. Okay. Uh, three dials in the first day, and you can look at doing more. I just look into the compliance rules around that. I know we do three. And so three dials in the first day, one is immediate, the other two are ideally during peak hours. The other thing is that every new lead that comes in should be automatically enrolled into an email sequence that doesn't look like a marketing email. It looks like it's a direct outreach from the setter. Okay, and that's completely automated. The setter doesn't have to do anything. And we'll cover the scripting of that in just a second. Then you want immediate texting of all new leads. Okay. So usually the first three or four texts are completely automated. We'll cover all the scripts in a second. And you're gonna have different sequences because I recommend having sequences for non-business hours and sequences for business hours. Then you're also gonna want the setters to maximize uh peak call time, right? So you should know what peak call time is and have setters maximize peak call time. Okay. Then I usually recommend a five to seven day cadence. Like how long should you even really work the leads in the system before it's not worth it? Usually it's about five days, okay? Because at that point, you just rather hit the new leads more times than hit the old leads longer times. Okay. That's just what I found. Those are the trade-off. And then after day five or day seven, whatever it is, you still hit those leads, but when you're at a bigger scale, maybe you have three, four, five setters plus, you start to hire pipeline setters. Okay. And those are people responsible for hitting leads from day five to day like 90. Okay. But as you can imagine, because those leads are less responsive, you have to give more leads per setter to the pipeline setters. Like you might have to, if your thing is 800 leads per month per setter, you might have to give 3,000 per setter per month for the pipeline setters, right? So you just have to think about that. And uh, it might even be more. I don't know. I'd have to check out what our metric actually is. And then also you want to prioritize more recent leads. So obviously, day two leads are better than day three leads. Uh, you want to use weighting criteria if appropriate, like if you're doing credit score, liquidity, you want to have that in there. And you also want to have unenrollment criteria and tagging, like if they book a demo through the setter text or marketing, it need, or if they say, hey, do not call me, it needs to unenroll them from the actual sequence. Okay. So now we're gonna get into, oh, and then in terms of texting, in terms of best practices, for texting, I usually recommend automating it. AI can be good too. So we'll cover that in a second. But for apps, no booking specifically. So for your apps that don't book, have your setters hit those people up in their logic sequence. But generally, I find that that is something that you can use just basic sales kicks, AI, SMS, or just set up an SMS through your dialer automatically to just rebook those leads back to book a call while you have your setters actually call them. Like it doesn't really make sense for your setters to text those leads because it's just very basic. And you know, you can that way you don't have to pay the commissions because you're gonna get a lot of people who are rebooking through the text, and you just might as well automate that through your marketing system, opposed to having the setters text them and then you gotta pay setter commissions for somebody who would have easily booked through an automation. Hopefully that makes sense. Okay. So um have the setters call and then essentially have the automation rebook. So again, I'd recommend reach out to Edward, Dialer, whatever to get this set up. Uh, if you're hiring your first setter, don't be overwhelmed. Oh my God, I gotta do all this stuff. Just give them the theory, let them rip. It's gonna be fine. Okay, you're gonna be fine. If you're enjoying this conversation and you wanna be in a room of people who are just like the people I have on this podcast, so you can ultimately network with the highest level people in the industry and up-level your business, you should fly out to meet us in Scotland at the end of July. So this is a one-time opportunity where you can get a ticket to actually be able to come if you qualify to network and get content and ultimately work with me and my team and so many other high-level speakers in the industry in Scotland at the end of July. So you have to be doing at least $100,000 a month in your business to qualify. If not, don't bother with it. But if that's you and you're trying to scale to $10 million or even 20 million or 100 million a year, there's other people in the room who have done that. And the speakers I'm gonna have in Scotland have done that too. So check out the link in the description and see if you qualify. And if you do, book a call with my team. We'll talk about the ticket price to be able to come. This is the only time you're gonna be able to do this. So take advantage of it. Now, back to the podcast. And now we're gonna move on to how to determine your peak calling hours. So I've mentioned this a few times, and so it's very, very simple. All you gotta do to determine peak calling hours is pull the HubSpot answer rate data into a CSV. And then you run that through claw code and have claw code tell you bada bing, bada boom, done. Not to be to beat a dead horse, dialer or dialer OS, they'll do this for you automatically. Most dialers won't do it. Um, but we've seen companies figure out their peak call hours and they figure out like, oh man, our peak call hours or peak answer rates are four to seven p.m. And then they shift their setter work schedules to adjust for it, and literally it can be like a 50% increase in production. So it's pretty crazy. So it's just something you want to think about uh doing at some point. Now, pipeline setters. So the setters who hit it's a separate team, and it's the setters who hit the cold leads. We're gonna talk about this. It's pretty cool. So as a backstory, uh, over the years, I've built up a ton of old leads in my CRM. You know, we run a lot of marketing, we spent millions and millions and millions and millions and millions on ads. And I've always known that we should hit these, but I never really prioritized it. Okay, because it was like, uh, whatever, you know. And uh at the at one of my masterminds not too long ago, one of my clients, Tom, he had mentioned that he had added approximately $10 million a year to his business just by hitting old leads. And so I got my head out my ass and I started doing it. And guess what? It worked. So, what is the actual process for it? Well, the process is after day five, transition all the leads from like the the day five cutoff to a new list that's just called pipeline. And then you can create a similar dialing logic here. I just don't think it's as important at this point. It's just they're all leads, you just power them out. And usually we just do most recent at least least recent, right? And we go up to 90 days. And what's important is using a dialer system that can power out a lot of leads quickly. I know I'm like, at this point, I feel like I'm just pitching and chilling dialer like crazy, but dialer.io is really good at this. But some power dialers are better at hitting volume than others. You want to hit it, you want to use a high volume dialer for this type of thing because these people are gonna be making like two, three, four, five hundred dials a day, okay, because their answer rates aren't gonna be that high. So you need something that can move quickly. All right. And so what I've learned in terms of how many leads per pipeline setter, it's hard to define. But what I've found is for about every four normal setters you have, try having one pipeline setter. So if we have four normal MDRs who are hitting all the leads within five days based on our volume coming in, we probably need one pipeline setter. So I'd start there and then just, you know, try it out, gauge it, and see what works for you. Um, now, important thing here is generally you either have to pay these guys increased. Commissions or increased base. I recommend base because sometimes these guys might fill um, they might fill in for an inbound setter. So the reason why is you have to pay them a little bit more because all of their metrics are going to be a little bit less and their close rates, frankly, aren't going to probably be as high as your inbound setters because the leads are older, right? They're less fresh off the marketing. Okay. And then the on-track earnings in terms of pay for this should be like 15 to 25% lower than your inbound setters. So it kind of like think about the pipeline setters as like a junior role. That's what's really nice about it is it acts as your bench that you can ultimately promote these people over time to an actual inbound setter. Okay. But what's really key is I recommend if you have to pay them more and you have to choose between commission and base, I'd recommend just paying them a higher base because what happens is is like let's say one of your inbound setters is sick or they're on vacation and they're out for a week. Well, you're gonna probably move up one of your pipeline setters for a week. And then what happens is is they're getting all this increased commission on leads that really you shouldn't be paying increased commission for. Does that make sense? So there you go. Now, here is all the scripts you need. Okay. This uh font got messed up, but we're gonna go through all the scripting now, all the scripts you need, email, SMS, phone, and we're gonna do it revised based up based on different situations, adjustment for adjustments for different funnels, all of that stuff. So we're gonna start with the texting scripts, okay? So this is like imagine it's a call funnel, all right? And so this is the text messages that are gonna come. I'm also gonna give you a PDF that is going to really explain this and have it in a flow that all makes sense. So I'm gonna give you two variations you can start with, but this is the text that's gonna go out. Uh, in most cases, this is gonna be automated. You could also not do it automated, you just have your people send it. I think automated is much better. So the text goes like this Hey John, Sam here from Cole Gordon's team, parentheses closer.io, send. Okay, so I'm just gonna address this now. You're gonna see a lot of these sends. So the reason you want to do that is because when you're texting a friend, you usually like text a sentence, text a sentence, text a sentence. Like you don't send a big block, you send multiple messages. And so even though these are automated, or even if they're not automated, we want them to seem like they're coming from a human. Because a lot of times the first reaction from the prospect is this is a robot. And then they don't want to respond, right? So whether it's AI, whether it's automation, you should be able to set it up this way where it goes send, send, send. So it's three blocks. It makes it look like a person. Okay. So I've addressed that now. So now you know why there's all these sins there. So hey Sam, just call or uh hey, Sam here from Cole Gordon's team, closer.io, parentheses send. Saw you responded to our ad about placing salespeople in your business. Okay. Or whatever, you know, saw saw you responded to our ad about, you know, uh potentially getting supplementation around your SIBO. Whatever it is, okay? Send. Did you find the setters you were looking for, or are you still looking? Right. So saw you responded to our ad about placing salespeople in your business. Did you find the salespeople you were looking for? Are you still looking? Okay. I really they're gonna be like, I'm still looking. And then you go into it after that. This is variation two. You can use this as well. Hey John, same here from Cole Gordon's team closer. So you just want to do our ad about potentially getting some salespeople in your business. Question mark, is that right? Question mark. Okay. So you can test both of these, see what works better for you. Now, this is variation three, but it's the call funnel, but specifically for non-business hours. Okay, so this would be automated, right? Now, if you're using AI for everything, you know, it's just gonna be AI all the time. But um, this is gonna be always automated, no matter what. And so this would be, and the reason why is is obviously you want a text going out so we can achieve speed of lead with text in the non-business hours. And through the automation, we're gonna be able to book some of the calls essentially, like some 15-minute appointments simply through text at like 10 p.m. or 2 a.m. or whatever, or at least at the very least, the setters are gonna wake up the next day with some text responses and conversations. Like maybe you can just hit the first one and then have your automation hit the first one. And then the setters have all the responses they can field the next day via text and also calling those people, et cetera. Okay. So the non-business hours one is hey John, same here from closer.io or from Cole Gordon's team, parentheses, closer.io, send. Saw you responded to an ad about potentially getting uh help with placing salespeople in your business. I wanted to check in and see if I could help send. Technically, I'm off right now, but if you're open to a quick convo, grab a time tomorrow or this week. Happy to help. Link, right? And this would be your 15-minute triage link. All right. A lot of people will book. Now, the next one is specifically for buyer funnels without the implementation call. Okay. So hey John, Sam here from Cole Gordon's team, closer.io uh was calling about product name that you just purchased. We do a one-on-one call with every new member of product. Just gave you a shout, but couldn't get a hold of you. When would be a good time to chat? I can drop my calendar link here if that's easier. Send. Okay. So that's what that looks like. Then message two would be this. Okay. So you can just look at this. I don't think I need to read all this. I think I think you get all the principles and what have you now. Message three would be this. And then when they respond, okay, this is what's really key. When they respond, immediately call first, like double dial first, and then text back, right? Like when they respond, immediately dial so we can just get them on the phone. That's the whole point. If we can't get them on the phone, we're gonna text back, right? This is why also having phone setters actually involved with this opposed to just AI is pretty helpful. But we even had an AI system when we were doing RCA that did all this, but the setters could interject at any time and watch the conversation. So um obviously this lead is a higher priority. It goes into a higher bucket. And if they don't answer, you send the following hey, awesome, happy to help. What's your week looking like? I can drop my counter link here if that's easier. Okay. Then when they ask you to drop the counter link, you say, Hey, okay, book here link. Will you let me know if you find a time? My availability gets wonky sometimes. Okay. That's the phrase I've always used for my entire life. I don't know what wonky, I guess wonky means something. But um, this will you let me know if you find a time? There's like some, I don't know if it's NLP or what it is, but that will you language, not can you, it I've tested this because I've done so much DM setting and text setting over the years that you'll it it kind of provides this commitment to where they always will come back and let you know if they found a time or when they found a time or whatever. Okay. So this is an image that really shows you, okay, the entire flow based on if they came in during business hours, didn't come in during business hours, or if they've uh if it's a buyer funnel. Okay. And I've also linked this all here, right? So this will kind of help you visualize it and it makes more sense. All right. And so by the way, the big mistake is that you got to realize these people already applied and came in for information. So I don't know why people do this, but I see like a QC texts or DMs on social sometimes. And it's different if they like opted in for a PDF that's just like a, you know, you know, it's an indirect lead, right? It's just a lead magnet. It's not intent-based. But oftentimes with like a funnel like this, it's all intent-based, you know, it's like a direct offer or whatever. If they applied for information about an offer, you don't have to have like a 17 freaking text conversation. You're gonna have a massive drop-off during that. It's one or two text, three texts, boom call. Okay. The purpose of quality, like the worst thing you can do over the DMs is qualify somebody. I know that seems a little controversial, but really what your your setter should be doing is the triage should be for the qualifying over the phone. The more you qualify over the DMs, the bigger the drop-off you're going to get. So if you're trying to maximize throughput, it's a different question if you're not. But if you're trying to maximize throughput, what you're gonna want to do is you're gonna want to save the qualifying for the triage. The conversation should really just be one, two, three questions, boom. Right? If it's an indirect DM conversation, again, that's a different training. We're really focusing on selling the conversation and widening the gap in pain, not necessarily qualifying. So I do want to touch on TCPA laws as we talked about text. Again, I am not an attorney. Okay. So if you are serious about this and you should be, you should check with an attorney about all your texts. Now, I will say you do need to include stop in every text. I typically uh make it a little bit more personal so it doesn't seem as automated. That's why I wanted to talk about this. And so, like, I'll tack this on um at the end of every single message, and you can send it as a separate message. Okay. So um I'll say by the way, oh here it is. I'll say, by the way, if you don't want me to message you, just reply stop, and I'll take you off my list. That's better than like the automated thing they require you to do. It just is a little bit better language. So again, um, it's also for appointment setting. You don't want to talk to your attorney or even look this up, but it's debatable if you need to include this on every message or just the first message. The rules are very strict. If like you're an e-commerce company and you're like texting people discounts and stuff, that's where people can get sued out the wazoo. And there's very strict rules for appointment setting right now, especially if it's manually through a human setter. I think the rules are a little bit in a gray area, but again, not an attorney, not legal advice. Go get an attorney if you want legal advice. I'm not an attorney, not legal advice. Okay. So now we're gonna talk about a quick note on AI and automation. I would 100% at least automate the first text, as we already covered. This just assures speed to lead. And then through certain texting systems, even if it's not fully AI, you can actually get the entire thing automated pretty easily. Um, there's also AI to where you can use AI to do the whole entire thing too, to make it a little bit more easy and just give them the kind of the frameworks and the training they already gave. And so uh whether you want to do AI or automation, that's up to you. At the very least, I would automate at least the first text. And I'd also make sure that your setters are involved in monitoring the sequences, which they should which they should be based on their lead list of seeing who responds. So they can always like turn off the AI or turn off the automation and butt in if it's like a very complex question or it's something weird or whatever, right? Like in that case, and you could even sit in some AIs, you can even set it up to where it will ping the actual setter to be able to know to interject and all that stuff. So that's just a quick thing on AI and automations. So now we're gonna move on to email. Okay, so again, this should happen automatically. This should auto-enroll in all these sequences. All the emails are gonna happen 24 hours apart. And all the text, by the way, are 24 hours apart, except for the responses. I didn't mention that. So these are gonna be 24 hours apart. So the lead's gonna uh opt in, it's gonna auto-enroll to the email, send it immediately. It should look like it comes from the setter, not a company email, not a promotional email. And every email is going to include a link to schedule. But if any email replies, it should trigger a call on the dialing logic. And then there should be some sort of notification that somebody knows to go back in there and reply if they don't answer. So here's basically the email. Hey, John, name here from closers.io, cool coordinates team. So you saw you responded about an ad about getting salespeople into your business. Did you find the salespeople you're looking for? Are you still looking? If you're still looking, would love to chat. Will you let me know if you find a time here? Name, company, title. Okay. So you can go through these emails. They're pretty straightforward. And with that said, we're gonna move on to the fun stuff, which is the call scripts. So you wanna think about it this way: there's two types of setter calls. Okay. There's outbound calls and there's triage calls. So what's an outbound call? So an outbound call is you outbound dial, they pick up, you engage enough to push the call into discovery, then you transition from discovery and pitch a call with a closer, and then you qualify at the end after they're already booked, if necessary. We'll talk about how that looks. And then you tie down that they're actually gonna show up. Okay. A triage call is the appointment was already set on your calendar via text or a direct booking because it was a two-grade app. Maybe they book from the email, whatever. So here you're either gonna get on Zoom with them or phone dial them, and they're actually expecting the call. So you start it a little bit differently because it was like basic rapport and frame the call, just like a closer call. Then you go into discovery and the rest is the same. Okay. So sometimes, I mean, outbound calls inside of an outbound call is a triage call, if you want to think about it this way. But it's it's important to understand there's kind of different things going on. We're also gonna cover, but we're we're gonna start with covering a full outbound call because that's kind of like the most raw thing I can show you. And then I'm gonna show you all the different variations for buyer leads, calling no shows, pipeline setting, and implementation call. And again, implementation call, and sorry, implementation call, I'm just gonna send you this link. All right. So here's kind of a diagram that explains this. It's basically what I explained. The outbound call has a triage call inside of it. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna cover the outbound call first and then all the variations after that. Okay. So what does the outbound script actually look like? Here's the outbound call flow process. So, first, there's an introduction that includes the hook of how we start the call, and then an agreement that we're gonna get to move the discovery. Then we have the discovery, which is kind of like sales call light. All right. So why are they here? Background information, we isolate the problems, we chunk it down, we get a neat payoff. All right. Then we have transition, which is a firm you can help, reference somebody you've helped in the past, and then pitch the value of meeting with a closer. Then we're gonna have schedule, which is you pick a time, tight on them showing up, make them accept the invite, and then qualify, which is you ask any hard-hitting qualifying questions here. We're gonna talk about why you do that in a second, why you don't do it on the discovery, even though you kind of can qualify in discovery too, but we'll talk about that. And then you end the call by committing them to watch the pre-call video, then you end the call. Okay. That's the flow. All right. So the big question I get is how deep should the setter actually go in the discovery versus a closer, right? I get this question all the time: like, hey, the sales processes are kind of similar. How deep does my setter go? How deep does my closer go? Because I don't want the call to be repetitive, right? So again, we just went through the setter flow. Okay. So you kind of see like what the discovery looks like here. This is what the closer discovery looks like. So it's like, you know, this is almost like sales call light, right? Whereas the closer, what we're doing is is the beginning might be pretty similar, but we're going way deeper into the pain, what they've tried in the past, how it's affecting other areas of their life, what's the cost, and ultimately a lot more on goals, right? So it's gonna be like twice as long, potentially 15 to 20 minutes, depending on the prospect. Whereas a set of discovery might be five to 10 minutes because you're just kind of getting down to what the problem is, chunking it down, which is the same. And then basically what happens if the problem is fixed, which is need payoff. That'll make more sense when we go into the script. Okay. Now, a few things before we start. I highly recommend um you check out the other sales training videos on my YouTube channel or in the school portal in SDA, because all the closer sales trainings that I have, they go way, you know, the I can't put all everything I know about sales in this video. I'd be here for seven hours. So they go way more into the sales psychology, the different nuances, the different tactics that you can use during the call, right? So because this training is so large, I'm just kind of giving you the essential, uh, the essential essentials in terms of the setter call process here. Okay. So now also what I'd recommend is you can check out me actually doing a setter call in this link. And then I also have more in the SDA training. Okay. And so um, oh, and then last thing is the example script I'm gonna give you is for somebody who's selling something that helps with lead gen, right? So, like imagine you're like a marketing agency or something, or you're like a program or a coaching program that uh helps businesses with their lead gen. Okay. That's gonna be what this script is modeled after. But uh, I'm gonna give you some nuances at the end of how to adjust this for non-ROI offers, for BizOp offers, et cetera. So you can understand kind of how it works. Okay. So again, this is gonna be kind of an overview. If you want really the advanced sales stuff, the advanced sales psychology, uh, all the nuances, you go to YouTube channel, or there's a lot of stuff in SD8. There's obviously the full closure training. That's like the real advanced, advanced stuff. And a lot of that does apply for the setters as well. So let's start. So the first start and the first phase of the call is the introduction. So it'd be like, and again, again, this is an outbound call. So I'm outbound dialing somebody. Sorry about that. I'm outbound dialing somebody, and then they're gonna be answered. They're gonna hello. Okay, I'm gonna say, John, hey, John, just Cole here from closer.io. It looks like you responded to an ad about installing a lead generation system into your business. Does that ring a bell? Hey, well, I wanted to reach out to see if you found the help that you were looking for or if you're still looking. They're gonna say, I'm still looking. Okay, great. Well, look, I'm more than prepared to share with you a lot of the stuff we might be able to help with, but just so I can be respectful of your time, do you mind if I take a few minutes just to get some context on your business? And then that way I'll only share with you the parts about what we do that'd be useful for you specifically. Is that cool? And then you do a slight pause and then you just roll into the right next question. Okay, great. Well, the best place to start then is obviously you responded to an ad about getting more leads in your business and you want to learn about what we offer and all the information on that. But before we get into any of that, tell me a little bit more about what's happening in your business right now that made you want to reach out. Okay. So remember the framework in the very beginning, the flow, introduction, hook, agreement to move to discovery. That's what we just did. Okay. So what did I do there? Listen to my tonality. All right. So um, you know, when you're talking to a screen right now, when you're talking to a Google Doc, your tonality is not that good. I mean, so bear with me, but my tonality obviously is important here. And the thing is, is that I could have a terrible script. And to be honest, if I had a good tonality, you can just pull it off. All right. Most setters, when you're reviewing your setter's calls, their tonality is zero out of 10. John, John, just cole here. Close that eye out. I mean, I've seen the worst shit ever that you could see. I'm like, guys, how could you explain like you're asking why your setters aren't good? And if there's a problem with your script, your setter sounds like they're drunk. Come on. Okay. So listen to my tonality. Um, again, that's way more important than the script a lot of times. Now, the initial question here, you could also use uh instead of, hey, did you find the salespeople you were looking for? Are you still looking? You could also say, Did someone on our team reach out to you and speak to you yet? Or are you still waiting on information? Honestly, if you just say it with good tonality, either is fine. Um, so but if you have an issue with one, you can maybe try the other. The thing is, is this presupposes, there's actually a presupposition that they're that they want information, which they do because they've responded to an ad. Okay. Now, this is also important. Um, I take away in this script the hey, I just want to see what you do, get information, all this stuff. I take it away several times throughout. Okay. So I do it by, you know, I if you watch kind of how I go into the agreement aspect of things, I say, I'm more than prepared to share with you all the information about what we do. And then later on, I say, obviously, you responded to an ad about getting more leads in your business. And I know you want to get all the information about what you offer and how all that works. And we'll get to that. But first, tell me, okay. So the reason, and that's all right here, right? The reason, and then, you know, uh that the first phrase was right here, is because a lot of times, if you're like, hey, so what made you reach out? They're like, Well, I want information. So it's like, what made you reach out? You know, hey, why did you respond to the dead? Oh, I just wanted to see what you do. So, you know, in communication, if we first address it and we're proactive and we address it and take it away first, then what happens is they can't say it. So what I did here is I took away that objection by addressing it first, right? And the phrase here that's really key is what's happening in your business right now that ultimately made you want to reach out. Even that kind of like breaks in the tonality. So what's happening in your business right now that made you ultimately want to reach out? See, that's very key that you kind of like do that. I mean, if your sellers can't do that yet, that's okay. Mainly I just want to make sure they sound like they're not drunk. But um, these little things, they matter a lot. This is what, I mean, I can just pick up a phone and just say whatever. I mean, if you have good tonality, people are just gonna be like, wow, this person sounds, you gotta realize most people who get outbound calls and answer outbound calls, they have never once had a good sales experience from answering an outbound call to where the person was sounded smart, sounded smooth, sounded positive with good energy. Like it's so rare it even happens. If you just show up in a way that like you sound like an intelligent person, you can get 80, 90% of the way there because the baseline, your competition is so bad. Okay, which is why you're taking this training. So the other thing is too, is what I do with kind of like my frame the call here for my outbound call is what I'm always doing is I'm aligning their goal, which is information, with my goal, which is to get them to buy into doing a discovery with me. I'm aligning their goal and their goal. Prospects always just want the information. Once they have all the information, they don't need you. Right? You want to know why they're here. You want to know the pain, you want to know discovery, you want to get in all this information so you can create an angle. And so, and so if you look at the phraseology I'm using here, what I'm doing is it's like, hey, I'm more than the prepared to get into this, uh, but everything we do is a little bit customized. So, in order for me to give you the information that's just going to be relevant to you, let me learn a little bit about your business. So, probably the best way to start is you know, what's happening in your business right now that ultimately made you want to reach out. You see how that works, right? It's like I'm saying, hey, in order to get what you want, let's do it this way, it'll be way better for you. Okay. So now we're going to get into discovery. So the first part of discovery, again, if you look at the call flow, right? Is now we're oh, that's closers. Right. We did the intro. Now we're going to go into why we're here, right? Why are we here? Okay. And so the place we're going to start is right where we ended off, which is okay, but tell me a little bit more about what's happening in your business right now that ultimately made you want to reach out. Now, what's going to happen here is they're going to respond and they might tell you their problem or they might not. Okay. Anyhow, I'm just going to ask a few probing questions. Tell me more. What do you mean? Hey, when you said this, what did you mean exactly? They say, oh, I have a lack in sales. Oh, lack in sales, like in what way specifically? Okay. So this is not rocket science. You're just going to ask essentially some um probing questions. All right. So you also may get some vague general information, like, oh, well, I just wanted to see how I could improve. All right. So when you get that, you need to make sure you can get the problem. And so you have two options here. The first thing is you can press them and you can clarify. Well, hey, I get that. But when it comes to what's happening with your lead generation right now, like I guess what would you say is your biggest challenge? Or like, you know, what's not working at the level it could be that it should. Okay. That's a good phrase that you can use. I'd always try that first. And even the way I ask it, like, what would you say is your biggest challenge? Or like what's not working at the level it could be that it should? So I soften it with my tonality there. Um, now, sometimes if they're a real hard ass, they'll be like, pull it, you know, there's there's no challenges. I just wanted to see how we could improve our leads. Okay, got it. So I know everything's working right now, and you just want to make it better. But like, just so I can help you the most here, narrow this down for me and get specific. So, like, what exactly needs to be working better? Like, if you think about your where lead gen really could be, what's the one or two things that, if improved, would take your lead gen to the next level? Okay. So, what we can do here is this allows us to get more clear on isolating the problem, right? Which is what we're doing in this section, before moving on to the next section. Now, the other thing that we can do is we can just chunk it down. So, like a lot of times they're just like, hey, you know, I want help with my leads. Oh, nothing's really not working right now. And they're just kind of being a hard ass. Well, certain in certain situations in certain offers, especially with B2B like this one, I can just bypass that and go through the chunking down framework, which we're gonna get to uh in a second. And I'll just find the problem myself, right? So it really depends on can you ask discovery questions in a way where you can just find the problem yourself by looking at numbers? If you can, you can just chunk it down. If you can't, you got to press them in really more clarify. And you can do both too, because we're gonna chunk down no matter what. Now, before we get to the chunking down, what we're gonna do is we're gonna ask for background information. So we're gonna be like, okay, great, you know, this is more for B2B usually than it is for B2C, but you could have some B2C stuff here too. Like maybe you're B2C and you have a medical offer, you might have to ask some medical questions, like, do they have cancer? Do they have this, do they have that, just to make sure you can actually even help the person. So with B2B, the reason we ask background information is because a lot of times, like we we don't really know who's coming on the phone. We kind of know why they reached out. But if they say they have a lead gen problem and they're a $10 million year company versus a company who's pre-rev doing zero, you know, those are kind of two different conversations. And we kind of need to know that context before going further. So I like to see where they're here, then go into the background information. So I'll say, okay, great, you know, what's your offer exactly? What and the way I like to break down their offer is so what problem do you solve for who and what price point? Okay, and who's the perfect client that you're working with, okay, or that you really want to work with. And is that the type of client that you're working with right now? Which they're gonna say no. Okay, well, why do you think that is? What's happening there? Right. And then sometimes I look at the delivery as well. I also uh do a little partner qualification here. And the way I like to do this is instead of being um a nerd and saying, well, you know, is there anybody else who needs to be on this call for you to make a decision later? I'll just say, how does your leadership structure work? And they'll be like, What do you mean? Well, you know, do you have partners? Who's on your leadership team? What does that look like? And so that seems like a very business context question. And it doesn't seem like I'm qualifying them, but I am. And then if they have a partner, I'm gonna ask, oh, you know, what's that name? Okay, and how I'm just curious, how do you guys divide responsibilities? Are you the marketing person and they're the fulfillment person, or how does that work? Okay, great. And you guys are 50-50. Um, okay, and are you guys on the same page about your lead generation being on the problem? Or what do they what do they think? All right. So a lot of these two, if you notice, um, like I said, how do you guys divide responsibility? Are you the marketing and sales person? They're the fulfillment person. I'm making an assumption and I'm allowing them to correct the record, that'll get me more information. Okay, and you guys are 50-50. So, you know, it's a lit, it's better to ask it that way than say, how do you who has what equity? It's kind of invasive. If we say, Oh, and you guys are 50-50. No, no, no, I'm I'm 80%, they're 20%. You see how like they have to correct the record in that case, especially those hard ass guys. So um, some key points here. I already kind of mentioned like it's really key to know. This is why in B2B we get a little background information, but you know, in B2C, like my fiance does gut health coaching and uh functional medicine. You know, she has to start off by asking, like, hey, do you have cancer? Do you have this? Do you have that? Like she has to get a little medical history. That's kind of her version after why are we here of the background uh information and history, right? So that's kind of the B2C version of this. And then um, the other reason that we do the background information first, okay, is that it's easy and it's non-invasive, right? So what that does is it gets them in a frequency and a pattern of just uh of answering our questions because they're easy questions, you know, especially like a medical question or like what's your offer, what do you do? It gets them in this pattern of asking questions. So that once we get to the real questions, which we're gonna get to in a second, they're kind of already in this pattern of of uh asking it and they can kind of like lull into it as the questions get a little bit more invasive. Okay, hopefully that makes sense. So once we um do that, we're gonna move on to isolating the problem, chunking down, and getting a need payoff. That's basically the arrest of discovery. So also after I go through background, I'll say, got it. So circling back, it seems like the main issue is lead generation. Is that correct? Okay, great. And how are you getting leads right now? Okay, you're getting leads through Facebook ads, this, that, and the other. Okay, is there any other ways you're getting clients? Okay, and let's see how that's working for you. So, in the last 30 days, how much did you spend on ads? And how many sales calls did you book? And how many of those showed? And then earlier you mentioned XYZ was your perfect prospect. So, out of the ones that showed up, how many of those fit the bill exactly of the perfect prospect you mentioned earlier? They're gonna be like, none. Okay, and why do you think that is? Because it could all really only be two reasons. It could be that the method or the funnel that you're using to attract those people is wrong, or it could be the messaging. So which one do you think it is? Maybe it's a little bit of both. Okay, and so you had X, Y, Z show, going back to our numbers here, how many closed? And at what price point? Okay, so last month you did X route and revenue? Okay, so great. X amount in revenue was your revenue last month. Now, also you closed 15% of the calls you took. You know, we typically see in your industry, like we have a client X, Y, and Z who's doing this, we typically see people like that doing 25 to 30 percent. It's usually either in our experience because it's either the lead quality or the sales process. So, which one of those two do you think it is? Okay, and why do you say that though? Okay. Now, at this point, if we isolated more problems, like they might have a lead gen problem and a recruiting problem or something, I don't know. We would go through that another sequence like that for the next problem. Okay, but one problem is fine. And so we'll cap it off by saying, okay, great. And so let me ask you this if you were able to solve your lead generation problem to where instead of talking with people who are 20% qualified, you're able to talk to the right amount of people or the right people at the right amount of volume. So imagine you had five calls a day of the exact X, Y, and Z prospect you described as the real person you want to work with. And so you had five of those a day, about 80 a month. What do you think you'd be closing at? And what do you think your revenue would be? Okay, great. And so you see how that's the need payoff question. All right. So a couple things here is in terms of key points of what I did, right? So in the shot across the bow, which is kind of the beginning, that's like the why are we here? Um, we should have identified the problem. If not, you need to identify ASAP. Okay. The reason why is business is about solving problems. When you solve a problem, you create value and people exchange money for value. And so if we know that to be true, sales is really just a demonstration you can solve a problem for somebody else. So if there's no problem though, there's no sale. So the entire sales conversation should be framed around a problem, right? So that's why we have to establish that in the very beginning. Think about it like the problem is you gotta have a map, you gotta find the problem on your map, mark mark X, and start digging. Okay. And so once you identify that, you can progress in the chunking down. Even if they didn't tell you much, they're just like, yeah, I'm here for lead gen, but you know, whatever, want to see what you can do. Like with that chunking down framework, we can usually identify what the real problem is, anyways, for them, which even paint us more as an authority. Okay. And so a lot of times, like what chunking down is, is chunking down is taking the vague and turning it into the specific, right? And so it's like turning it into something you could put your finger on or you could paint with a brush. So like they might say their problem is lead generation. Through chunking it down, we can figure out they had two calls in the last 30 days, right? So I use this all realtors. And I'd be like, hey, you know, what's your what's your problem right now? Oh, I need more leads. How are you generating leads right now? Oh, I'm doing everything. I get this and I get that and I get that and I get that. And be like, okay, great. Well, let's see how that's all working for you. Because I'm like, I'll be like, that's let's say all that's all that's working for you. How many leads or how many new appointments, listing appointments, did you get in the last 30 days? Uh one. Okay, well, you're doing all of these things, but you only have one appointment. Why is that? You see, I just got right to the problem because what happens a lot of times with these realtors is they, you know, I try to dig into the specific method and what's going on there. And they'd be like, oh no, it's fine. I just want to see what you can do, right? But now I've just gotten right to the problem. Okay. And so the other thing is too, people tend to generalize, delete, and distort and ultimately minimize their situation. So chunking down and getting specific, it reveals the truth, which is usually much worse. That's why they're on the call, but they have a defense mechanism. That's what I want to tell you right away. Okay. And the thing is too, is when you do that, it also surfaces the actual pain of the situation and how bad it really is. So to give you an example, when I get to that point, like, you know, with the real estate agents, where they'd be like really tough, really guarded, and they're, oh, here's all the ways I generate ladies all. Okay, let's see how that's working for you. How many in the last 30 days? One. I'm telling you, once they say that, you will feel the tone of the conversation totally change, right? Because they finally, it's like surface the pain. Okay, that's what's key about this. So adjusting this for other offers, just some uh pointers, right? So, like if you're dating, how many dates? How many were actually interested? Versus like immediate no's. Oh my gosh, like as soon as they walked up, I knew it wasn't it. How many moved to the second date? Oh, and then why did it end? What happened? You know, okay, what is generally the pattern of the problem you're dealing with? Oh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, well, give me a specific example of how that shows up. And okay, what was the last really bad date or experience you had? What happened? Okay. So these are all things to actually get to the specifics here because you want them explaining visceral situations like stories or numbers, okay? Like things again, you could write down or paint with a brush, right? You can't. I have a dating issue that doesn't mean anything. That's vague. You want to take the vague to the concrete. So weight loss, walk me through a day of eating. You know, what did you have for breakfast? What did you have for lunch? Okay, what about yesterday? Breakfast, lunch. Did you weigh yourself this morning? How much did you weigh? Okay, well, when was the last time you're weighing yourself? Why aren't you weighing yourself? What do you struggle with the most? Staying on track with healthy eating. Give me an example. Okay. With BizOp. Okay, well, what do you do for work right now? Do you like it? Oh, yeah, well, what don't you like about it? Oh, I don't like this, I don't like that. Okay, well, and when's the last time that happened? Okay, and give me a specific example. And what's the worst part about that? Right? So there's a ton of examples you can ask with Biz op as well. So uh key patterns of the questions you ask is like, give me an example. When's the last time X happened? Walk me through some sort of version of day in the life. How does that show up for you specifically? Give me an example, what happened? You see, you see the point, right? Everything's going vague to specific. So then once we do the knee payoff question, we move to the transition in tie down. So it sounds something like this Well, look, awesome, awesome. And we can definitely help you get to X, Y, and Z goal. And in fact, we have clients just like you, like John, in your industry who does what John does, doing X amount of X, Y, Z revenue of what John does in tons more. And I can actually send you a few examples in a moment. But look, independent if you work with us or not, let me pair you up with one of our advisors, Sam. He can share with you some of the some more about the frameworks and the methods that clients like John, who are in your industry, have used to hit whatever goal that the prospect told you. And in fact, way beyond that. So I have John's calendar or I have Sam's calendar open now. Is X or Y time better for you guys to chat? Okay, awesome. And to be clear, you'll 100% be able to make that time, or is there any chance you have to reschedule? Okay, and what's your best email? Okay, great. I sent you an email for that time. Can you log in and accept it right now? I just want to make sure that you actually have the email and everything's located and you actually have the uh zoom link in your call. Otherwise, there's it might be a confusion at the call. Okay, great. And you can see the zoom link in the description. Okay, perfect. And it's added to your calendar. Okay, perfect. Right. So that's the tie down. Uh that's pretty straightforward. Um, there's a few things I'm doing there. I think they're pretty obvious, like in terms of the tie-downs. I don't need to explain the psychology of tie downs and do blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, I use the will you language again, but just do this. Okay. This was a little clunky when I explained it because, like, you ideally gonna kind of seed a case study in here. All right. Then we move on to the qualifying. So sometimes we don't even do this, um, but sometimes we do. So, like in some offers, typically B2B, we we don't really need to do qualifying after the fact because, like, as we talk about their business and their lead flow and their revenue, um, these things essentially like we can kind of tell if they're qualified or not. So, most of the time, we like lightly and indirectly qualify them in discovery. But in certain offers, like you have to qualify for whatever reason, or like maybe you went through discovery and you're like, you know, this person just might not be that qualified. Then what I do is I qualify them at the end after they're already booked. Okay. Because a lot of times if you hard qualify in the discovery, what happens is is you derail the call because the prospects kind of got this resistance open. And if you project onto them that you don't think they're qualified for this, they're just gonna like buy right into your frame that, oh, I guess I'm not qualified for this. Oh, I yeah, I knew this was gonna cost a lot of money. And then they just disqualify themselves. And then you tell yourself, oh yeah, they were disqualified. No, it's just like you created a self-fulfilling prophecy. So the way you want to do it around that is just keep the discovery clean and then just do any hard qualifying at the end. And so how I do that is to say, oh, and by the way, Sam has me fill out a short form for anybody I put on his calendar. I'll do most of it myself based on our conversation, but can you give me like one or two minutes to tell me about like two or three questions so you can ask and hit the ground running? Okay, and I didn't ask this, but like how long you've been following closure.io or Cole Gordon, or do you just find out about us? Okay, great. Thanks. And your leadership structure is X, Y, Z, right? You have a partner, 50-50, whatever. And your goal was 100 grand a month. Okay, great. And last question on a scale of one to 10, one being like things are really, really tight right now, and 10 being like you have the resources to do just basically whatever you want. Where do you feel like you're at right now financially? And if they're like, uh, probably like a five. Okay, and just to be clear, like what does a five mean to you specifically? All right. So that's how I would do it. Long story short, what I did here is two of these questions basically don't matter. Two of them matter. I just kind of, you know, I don't wanna, I don't want to be like, hey, the short form, and then just hit them with like one mega question. Okay. So key points here is most setters, they overdo qualification because the closers yell at them and no one is managing them to tell them any different, right? So this is like very common. Never have your even really even your closer manager management setters. I like to have a separate setter manager because when your closer manager manages them or the closers start managing them, they just become like the closer's assistant. And then the closer's telling them basically only set me people who are ready to show up with an Amex. You know, like that's not what they're saying exactly, but they might as well be. And so overqualification, which happens all the time when you let stuff happen like that, leads to lower show rate and lower lead per set. And because a lot of times people don't show up because it puts too much buying pressure on the on the prospect. Like when they're overqualified on an initial call, it really sets this tone and this frame of like, this has to be a come to the call to make come to the call with a decision, come to the call ready to buy type of thing, which is not really what the call is for. The closer is supposed to get them to buy, the setter's not supposed to do the closer's job. Okay. So um, ideally, like you want to qualify, like I mentioned previously, covertly in discovery, right? So, like for B2C, you ask about occupation, you ask about how much money they'd have to make just to replace the amount of income full time for like B2C offers. Um that's a that's a clever one. And then, you know, assessing the quality of their business for B2B, like revenue and profit and all these things. And then if you need to qualify harder because you're a little unsure, you just do that at the very end in the example that I gave. Okay. Um, so I already mentioned this, but again, if you qualify too hard, especially financially in the discovery, it can just derail the entire thing, create a freaking, you know, self-fulfilling prophecy and so on and so forth. Okay. And then to end the call, what you do is you say, okay, great, I'll send that all over. One last thing. I also just short, uh, I also just shot you over via text or via email. A short video to watch prior to the call. Did you get it? Okay, hey, and will you watch that before the call? It'll really help you when Sam hit the ground running. Okay, great. And any questions they'll call about Sam tomorrow? Okay, perfect. I'll put you in a group chat with him now in case anything comes up. Bye. You know, there you go. So that's how you end the call. So you get this last little commitment that they're gonna watch the pre-call video. If you don't know what that is, separate training and SDA. So now we're gonna walk through adjustments. So this is an adjustment for the triage call. So again, um, this is for like direct bookings, two great apps, prospects who book through the setter link via text and email, and so on and so forth. So this is like if we're moving the appointment, or I was texting them and they showed up on my Zoom link and it's a set appointment for the setter. Okay. So really 90% of the call is the same. All right. We just got to have a little rapport and frame the call. So like they're gonna show up on Zoom and it's like, John, John, good to see you. Hey, is that X, Y, and Z in your background, right? Because what I what I try to do is be in the moment, maybe notice something in their background. Maybe they're they're at the airport, maybe they have this crazy, you know, freaking like thing in their background and make a comment on it, or they got dude as an insane beard. I'm like, dude, growing a beard like that is like my life goal. Like, I, you know, I got the peach fuzz here, but whenever I can do that, I'm gonna do it. Okay. So I'm not always gonna force that, but that's a good way to sort of break their pattern during rapport. It's just like with a quick one-liner about something you notice about them, but don't force it and be weird. Okay. And I'll be like, okay, well, anyways, how's the week been? Oh, it's been busy. Oh, is that a good busy or a bad busy? Oh, it's you know, it's good busy, we got this going on. Okay, great. Hey, well, let's dive in. Do you have a piece of paper or something to take notes with? Okay. Now, I only ask this if it's a phone triage. Um, the piece of paper notes with thing. And I I obviously don't ask that as well if it's an outbound call. But the reason I do that is just to get an idea if they're driving or if they're on the road or where they're where the hell they're at. Like if I'm giving them a call for a set appointment, obviously an outbound call, I'm not gonna do that. But for a set appointment, if I'm giving them a call, I just want to know where they are. Okay. And so it's a little clever to trick to know where they are is let's dive in. Do you have a clean sheet of paper or something to take notes with? All right. Let's me know. Are they driving? Whatever. I don't end the call. It's a it's a triage call. Okay. I don't end the call if they're driving or whatever. So then I move on the frame. So I'll say, got it. So look, I know you originally responded to the ad about getting some new salespeople in your business. And I'm more than prepared to dive into all of that, give you some information, give you about what we offer, all of that stuff. But since what we do is a little bit customized, what's probably gonna make the most sense is for me to get a little bit of context on your business first, like how your offer works, um, how your lead generation is working right now, and kind of the system, the acquisition process that your business is running. And then based on that, I'll just share with you the parts about what we do that'd be relevant and useful for you specifically, which will save you a lot of time. Does that make sense? Okay, cool. So I know again, like you were reaching out about getting some salespeople in your business, and you obviously want the information about that. But like, what's happening in your business right now that potentially has you looking and bringing some new guys on? Okay. So again, I already explained the psychology here about taking away any potential objections, aligning the goals, yada, yada. So uh I'm not gonna go through that again, but I'm doing that again here. So let's move on to the buyer lead adjustment. So this would be an outbound call. Again, this is for only outbound calling buyer leads. If you're doing an implementation call, training is right here, which I accidentally clicked on. So the introduction of this would be John, John just Cole here from closure.io. I'm just calling about the unlimited leads program that you purchased for $27. I think it was a few hours ago. Hey, so included in your purchase is an onboarding call that every new member gets. And really the purpose of it is to give you a specific roadmap so you know at exactly every single different level of revenue, what lead generation model that we should have you implement in your business now based on your business, revenue level, all that stuff. Since there's a lot of so, and plus, Cole wanted us to make Sure, he gave you an additional training from a higher-end program after the call, depending on whatever you need help with. So, are you available to have that call right now? Or do you want me to put something in the calendar? It's only going to take 15 minutes. Okay. So then they respond whatever they respond. Great. In order for me to give you the right implementation pathway, let me get some context. You know, best place to start, what's happening that made you purchase the thing. Okay. So uh that's basically it. So now after that, what I will say for buyers is the transition is different. Like the um the discovery is the same, but well, the discovery is even a little bit different too. But how you run the rest of this for buyers is different because they bought something and you need to sort of separate that so that they get them interested in a higher ticket thing. So you'd want to go to this link to figure out how to do that. Okay. So then we have a revised script for calling no shows. So John, John just cole here from Close.io, hey, you originally scheduled an appointment with us at XYZ date and XYZ time. Ring a bell. Hey, so we have it in our system that that call didn't happen. And you know, it could have been an issue with our system, or maybe somebody mixed up the time, and that's totally fine too. I just wanted to reach out and see what prompted you to book a call in the first place. And if it makes sense, just potentially reschedule a new conversation. Cool. And so then I just go, what prompted you to book a call in the first place? And so you might want to adjust this too. Like you could say, hey, you know, there could have been an issue, or somebody might have mixed up the time. Either way, no worries. Do you happen to know what happened? Oh, you just forgot. Hey, no problem. Just wanted to reach out and see if we could get you rebooked and see if that would make sense. But before we do that, I'm curious, you know, what had you booked a call in the first place? Okay. So short combo. Uh, this one, you don't need to go way back into discovery. I would just kind of touch on it lightly, especially if it was an ads call. If it's if it's re if it's a setter call that no showed and the setter's already talked to that person, I mean, it's gonna be pretty simple. You're just gonna give them a call, be like, hey, what happened? Okay, let's get you back on. If it's an ads call, you may want to just re-qualify them a little bit because they have never spoken to somebody and they might not be qualified. Just because they came from ads, it was direct booking, doesn't mean they're qualified. So then this is the revised script for pipeline setting. Again, this is the old leads. So if it's like less than um, so here's the thing. If it's like less than seven days or even like eight or nine days, you could just stick with the original script. But once it gets to like an older lead, like 30, 60 days, especially, you're gonna want to use this. Okay. So, John, hey John, just cool here from closers.io. Uh, about two months ago, you reached out to the company, you know, our company, closer.io, and it was about an ad that was a potential about getting some setters or closers in your business. Did you ever talk to our team about um that offer and get the information you were looking for? Or are you still looking? Okay. They're gonna say, I'm still looking, or they're gonna say no. Okay. And so that's pretty much it. You just say that. And then after they say, Oh, I'm still looking, or no, nobody reached out to me. Hey, great, no problem. Let me get an idea of your business, then I can get you over some information. So, first, like what was happening in your business originally that you know really prompted you to reach out and look into getting some setters, right? So that's how that would work. Uh, now, when closers take setting calls, I do want to just mention this big general mistake. So, closers, you always need to think about the closer needs to reconnect and like connect the dots from where the prospect last came from. So, closers always need to reference at the beginning of the call when they're starting in and they're like setting the frame and all that stuff, that they understand the context of what led the prospect to them. They've reviewed any information that the prospect's already given them, and that this won't be repetitive. Okay, because like a lot of times from a prospect's standpoint, if they spent, let's say, 30 minutes with a setter, and then like you don't really acknowledge anything that they talked about in that conversation, and you dive in and your first initial questions are the same. They're like, What's this company doing? Like, I already gave them this information. So you have to kind of like set the frame properly, and it's gonna sound something like this. So, hey, you know, um, before we get started, I just got re done reviewing John's notes about the call you had earlier. And I'm just curious, like, how was that call? Oh, it was good. John's really smart, whatever. I learned some new things. Okay, perfect. Well, just so I understand, um, you're in the plumbing business, you're doing about $3 million a year, and you're looking for some more field technicians because you have a decent amount of lead flow in the truck capacity to fill it, right? Okay, and I also understand that you're looking for people who can increase turnover and actually be selling field techs and ultimately generate more leads for replacement revenue in your higher ticket stuff, right? So, with all that being said, what I really found works best in these calls, just so I can make sure uh I don't assume anything and I 100% understand your situation, is like I know everything that so and so said or told me from the last call, but I kind of just really want to wipe a slate clean and really hear it from you just to make sure we're not playing telephone. Okay. And so then that way nothing's taken out of context, there's nothing lost in communication. Make sense. So the best place to start is you know, I know you're looking for more field technicians and was hoping we could recruit from that. But tell me a little bit more about what's going on in the business now that has you looking for one now, though. Like what's happening? Okay. So I kind of was a little redundant there. I've been recording for three hours, but you get the point. Okay. You need to just reference what they actually said. Reference that, hey, I talked to this person. If you as long as you do that and then you use the wipe to slay clean, I want to make sure nothing gets lost in communication, they're gonna be fine. Okay. So now we're gonna move on to setter troubleshooting and common mistakes. So the first one is no baseline. What does that mean? So a lot of entrepreneurs, when they're hiring their first closer, they find it easier in terms of success rate than their first setter. Okay. Despite closers are like, uh, you know, it's harder to be a closer. It's higher skilled. So why do people have a harder time hiring their first setter than their first closer? Well, that's because with closing, there's usually always a baseline set before the person hires, right? Because the founder was closing themselves. There's proven call recordings, proven processes, and the entrepreneur has actually done the role. With setting, a lot of times it does not happen. And as a result, I hear a lot, my setters aren't performing and I can't figure out why. Is it a lead quality? Is it the answer aid? Is it the setter skill? I have no idea because I have no idea what good looks like. Okay. So um, the easiest thing to do is simply just set for like a day. Okay. I put one to two days. You might figure out all your problems in like three hours, okay? But just be a setter for one day or two days. And you're probably not even gonna need to do that. It'll probably be obvious in like three hours. Okay. I prescribe this many times in this situation of like people who are like, I don't know, my setters aren't performing and I don't know why. And usually 99% of the time, about four hours in, you have all the information you need. You're like, oh yeah, like I get it now. Like I was not even training my setters the right way. Or, oh my gosh, like we had discovery total totally wrong. You totally need to pitch it and position the call with the closer in this way, or you need to dig into this pain, and we weren't doing that. Or sometimes even it's rare, but sometimes you're even like, man, like I could not get anybody to answer. I could like, you know, these leads are really bad. I didn't realize how bad these leads were. That can happen too. It's not as common. It's usually like your setters just suck, but you had no idea what good looks like and what the right process should be because you've never done it. And look, you can find out, like a lot of people are like, oh my gosh, you're asking me to get back on the phone. Dude, I'm asking for like a day to basically find out all the systems and processes in terms of your scripting that'll really build you. It's like building an asset. Okay. So the call recordings you gain from doing this act as assets that you can use to train your team in the future. Also, the knowledge you gain from it is an asset that allows you to train in QC and all that stuff for the team in the future. So, you know, don't bitch about having to do it for a couple of hours. Get over yourself. It's gonna work. Okay. Now, the other big mistake is that setters get no love. Okay. So 99% of companies in this industry do not give their setters enough attention. I've even made this mistake many times. And so you'll see this happen that they'll combine the sales meeting with the closers, and then on that meeting, only focus on the closers. So, like you have the setters and the closers on the same meeting, and then everybody's focusing on the closers on that meeting. Okay. Or they'll dish setter management to a setter lead who's like a player coach. And inevitably, because they're a player coach, they're doing a bad job. And partly that's because they're a player coach and like their performance is how they're paid, not actually coaching. And then the other reason is they're usually just not even a good manager. Okay. Um, the other thing that happens a lot is having their sales manager hire their setters. A lot of times, good closer managers are not good setter managers. And a lot of times they're really bad because they're so biased to the closing or to the closers. And sometimes, like, the closer manager has never done any real setting. They don't know the process, all that stuff. So either just hire a separate setter manager, or you do have to take your closer manager and have them start setting for an actual week to really learn what the setters are going through and get the process down. Uh, because otherwise, you know, and you got to watch what they're doing because they'll just start to buy into the closer's frame and then they're telling the setters to only set people who can show up with an Amex ready to buy right now, to overqualify, then your show rates are down. It's just a mess. Okay. So I just like to have a setter manager, and then those two people report to me, okay? Or report to my uh sales director. I mean, I have to be candid in my own company, my sales director does both, but you know, he had managed several setting teams before he was a closer manager. So he sees both perspectives quite well, but that's quite rare. So ideally, you'd have a setter manager, um, a separate closer manager, a separate setter manager, that's a typo. And then um, you would uh treat the time and attention and training you give to your setters the same as your closers. That means they have to have a separate meeting, okay? That means the same amount of call reviews you give to a closer, you need to give to a setter throughout the week. Okay. So all the stuff that I have in terms of how to manage your salespeople that's in all in the sales management training, just apply that to your setters as well. Okay. Um, now there's some exceptions. Like if you have one setter and one closer, you could just combine the meeting. It's like not that big of a deal. If you have two and two, you can probably just combine the meeting. Just make sure you separate um the like you balance out the training and you train both on the meeting. A lot of times, like, don't tell your closer to train your setter. Worst idea ever. Okay. Next common mistake is lack of lead flow. So I already mentioned this before, but 50% of the time the setters aren't performing. I usually end, especially in beginner level companies, not as much in the top level. I usually figure out that literally they don't have enough leads. It's like they need 800 leads per month, they have 200. Okay. So start with the initial benchmarks that I gave. It's very, very common. Next thing is the rule of two. Okay. So always hire two if you have the leads for it. So this is mainly for your first hire. I mean, you can apply this logic at scale and might not be two, it might be three, it might be four, whatever. But where I really recommend this is like your first hire. Because when you're making your first hire, whether it's a setter, whether it's a closer, the problem is you usually don't know what good is. And so what happens is if they underperform, you're not sure if it's your training, your management, you're not sure if it's a talent and you made a mishire, and you're not sure if it's the leads. So if you hire two, it's much easier to tell because the human brain kind of understands understands things through comparison. And also it kind of adds this competitive feel that tends to help because they're competing against each other. And you can group train them simultaneously. So it doesn't take you as much time. Okay. But the caveat is that for this to work, you have to have enough leads for two people. Okay. So, like, I know that sounds like common sense, but uh you can't expect this to work if you don't have enough leads for them. Okay. And then also that might, you know, that's gonna mean you might need to increase leads temporarily and then cut back down if you only hire one, or you increase leads temporarily, increase ad spend temporarily, and if both are good, you keep both. Okay. Um, another common mistake is no texting. So this is simple, but it comes up all the time. Like, I don't know why, but I'm like, like my setters aren't working. Do you text your leads? No. Okay, well, like 50% of our sets came through text. So text your leads. So we already covered that. Just make sure you do it. Same thing with speed to lead. You can manually spot check this. There's obviously dollar.io, there's other stuff that you can do. Um, but there's tons of studies that show that leads are 10 to 25 times more responsive in the first five minutes. And again, like if you think about it, it's a graph like this, effectively, to where you have an exponentially higher chance um the sooner you call the person. Like ideally, it's immediate, and then it's exponentially lower as time goes on. Okay. So um the other one is not monitoring work time. So we also talked about this as well, but um, any performance positions operate off the principles of diminishing returns. So you're gonna understand in a second why this is so important. This is very advanced. So any performance position, closer, setter, uh account manager who's doing upsells, whatever, they operate off diminishing marginal returns. In other words, the effort required for the next additional set, okay, at the margin, they operate super linearly. Okay. So the additional effort required for each additional, the effort required for each additional set at the margin operates super linearly. I know that doesn't make sense, but this graph makes sense. So this is what this uh this is think about this graph, and then here's what it shows. So every additional qualified set that the setter makes takes more time and energy to get than the previous one. All right. So, like here's how I want you to think about this. If you have a hundred units of time and energy in a single day, and let's say eight sets is the theoretical max, I know that's not realistic, but let's say eight sets is the theoretical max of what's possible, right? Like that getting eight sets is gonna take all a hundred units of your time. Based on this graph, what this shows, which is kind of hard to see, by the way, because I didn't think this would be black and white, but based on what this graph shows, the last set alone is gonna take 30% of their entire effort and time of that day. Okay. That's this example. It's not hard science, but the framework and the way of thinking about it is true. The last two sets in this example takes 53% of your setters time and energy in the day. All right. And that's because every single additional set at the margin has a diminishing marginal return, right? It operates super linearly. It's much more harder to get the next additional set. It's very easy to get one set. It's hard to get eight sets. And going from set seven to set eight is exponentially more effort than set six to seven. Hopefully that makes sense. You're gonna see why this is so important because oftentimes setters will hit like five to six sets in a day. And you know, most teams, that's pretty good, right? But oftentimes what you don't understand because your setters are working remote is to hit that five to six sets in a day, they're actually only working like four to five hours a day. Okay. So you have to monitor working time. This is why it's so important. And the thing is, is they actually worked a full eight-hour day, they're not gonna hit double the sets. But what they might do is hit two more sets, right? Because again, those additional sets at the margin take way more effort. So if they double their working time, they might only get two more sets. So in their brain, they're like, ah, it's not worth it. You know, the marginal cost exceeds the marginal benefit. But for you, it's worth it because you're like, dude, I'm paying you, I'm hiring you to work all day. Like work a work a normal workday, dude. But they don't do it unless you monitor it. That's why you got to monitor it. Okay. So again, for them, working literally twice the time for two more sets, it's not a great return on investment. So a lot of times they don't do it. But this is why it's important. Let's say you have a team of six setters. If they all get two extra sets a day, because now they're working full days opposed to half days, even though you didn't know they were working half days. That's what they were doing. That's 12 extra sets per day, which is two extra full closures calendars and 264 extra appointments in a 22 working day month. It's a massive improvement. And I mean, two calendars could be in some in some companies 100 grand a month in spend less you have to spend. Isn't that crazy? Okay. This is huge. So, how do you make sure they're working full days? Again, you have to have a system that monetize monitors working time unless you have an office, right? So again, $1.io or $OS is what I would use. And also you can incentivize a small bonus for extra sets. So like you can have, because again, it's like marginal cost exceeds marginal benefit for them and their brain as time goes up and they get to set set six, seven, eight, nine, ten. So you could have like, let's say, hey, if you know, you get a bonus if for your seventh set, six, eighth set, ninth set, and ten set at a day, and it kind of goes up a little bit, right? And so it would be a small bonus. It wouldn't be like crazy, but you'd be happy to pay it, is how you got to think about it, if they were able to really hit that. So you can do that, or you can just monitor their working time and make sure they just actually work. That's fine too. So um, you could do a small bonus for those like higher numbers of sets. You could do a small bonus for um people who make the most dials or work the longest in terms of working time. You could do a small bonus for the most uh sets for a setter in that one day, like the number one setter who has the most sets gets gets the bonus, et cetera. So the next one, common mistake, is underpaying your setters. So it's a quick story. Uh I was looking at my setter's performance one day. This was a year ago. And like many people, I was like, man, I wish my all my setters were as good as my best setter. And then I was like, dude, I run a sales recruiting company. Like, I think I should think I should be able to probably do that. And so I asked myself, I was like, well, what would it really take to make sure every person on my team was as good as this one person? And all I thought about was like, oh, it's super easy. All I got to do is I got to increase the comp and then hire closer level talent who want to ramp as a setter for six months. Now, that framing, hey, like I'm gonna recruit you as a closer, but you're gonna start as a setter for six months. That can work for my company because we have the brand. It can work for a company like acquisition.com. I wouldn't say, like, if you're if you're hiring your first setter, it's probably not gonna work for you. You're just gonna have to hire a setter, okay? And you're just gonna have to deal with it. But um, increasing the comp will work for everybody. And so what we did is we increased the comp by about 30%. You got to realize that's way, way better talent because that might only be taking somebody from five to like eight grand a month or something. But that doesn't like three K a month might seem not seem like a lot to you. That gets you an entirely different trough of talent. And so we got way better talent by increasing the comp and we also increased our expectations of who we were bringing on. And then we ended up turning over the entire sales or uh not sales team, but the entire setter team over the course of like the next three or four months. And as a result, we were able to get, and we also added in the pipeline setters. We did that at the same time. And as a result, we were able to get 250 grand extra revenue per month because of the increased set volume, and we were able to cut 200 grand of ad spend, or vice versa. You get the point. But we basically made 450 grand a month from that. Pretty cool. And so the lesson is increasing the pay, it doesn't mean like you know, a few grand doesn't mean like much to you. It gets you an entirely different trough of traffic, a trough of talent in the recruiting marketplace. Um, a lot of people like they just think about setters like like VAs. They're like, oh, you're a setter, like you're just like a grunt, you know, you have no skill. Don't hire a setter, hire a salesperson. Okay. You see how that feels different? Like, hire an actually good salesperson. And I'm telling you, they're gonna pay for themselves. Like it's gonna make a huge difference. So, next common mistake sending everyone to triage first, just don't do it. We cover why it's dumb. If you don't remember, just go back up and watch that part about why it's dumb again. Um, my setter show rate stinks. Okay. So what do you do in this case? Well, in B2B, just to be clear, I would want to see 80% show rates plus. We've had 90, 95%, but 80% show rates plus B2C, 70%. And so it should always, uh almost always to be higher than your ads show rate. If it's not, again, usually your setters aren't talented enough, or they're just not, you're not training them very well. But usually it's just talent, right? They just stink. Okay. But um, a lot of times people, especially in their early phases of their setter team, you know, it's different if you're like, dude, I have a setter manager, we have six setters, could be a talent thing. In the early phases, like if they have one or two setters, it's usually the manager is just not training them enough. And usually it's talent too. Um, so more specifically, if you want to get tactically on like diagnosing why setters usually have low show rates, is they don't sell the value of the call with a closer or making the prospect think differently. They're not giving the prospect an insight, they're not kind of interweaving that nice case study, they're not selling the value of how that call with the closer is going to be awesome and they're gonna get these insights. That's usually missing. The setter call usually isn't long enough and they don't agitate enough pain. They usually miss like the tie-downs, like we did in the script, or their tonality is just terrible, right? They sound like a zombie. That happens a lot. And the person's like, yeah, I'll book the call to just get you to hang up. Okay. So a lot of that can be poor training, it could be poor talent. Uh, I would recommend looking inward at your training first because, you know, a lot of times people under-index their training on their setters by a lot. All right. Now, last thing we're gonna cover is how to compensate your setters. So uh I'm gonna teach you how to think about compensation from the ground up, the same way I taught you about how to look at leads per setter per month from the ground up. So I'm gonna teach you how to fish, then I'm gonna kind of like tell you what to do. All right. So when approaching comp for any position, the first thing you want to do is first look at established comps of on-tracked earnings in your industry based on the position, right? So on-tracked earnings, what that is, is really a sales term for like how much an expected earnings can this person make if they hit KPIs, since the position is largely performance. And so um, look, I mean, you should look up comps, but since I run a sales recruiting company, I'll just kind of tell you what the comps are. So the on track earnings for setters can range from five to 12K a month. Now that might seem like a big range. So I'll break it down like this lower tier, low skilled setters entry level, four to six grand, mid tier, six to nine grand, which you can get some decent people. Mid tier upper tier, seven to 10. Elite level, eight to twelve. Like I pay just eight to twelve. Okay. So the lower you go in the pay, the more training you have to give, the higher churn you're probably gonna have. And the more it's gonna be kind of like, I got to find some diamonds in the rough, right? And it could also be fine to pay that low if like you're like, man, my leads are so good. Like I just don't need that good of people. That's fine. But I would still argue, even in that case, if you hired better people, you'd probably make more money. The higher you go and pay, less training you have to give. They're gonna churn less, rant faster, perform better, easier to find too. Because you can even like with good pay, I mean, you know, uh eight to 12K a month is a setter. Like some that's more than some closers make on bad offers. And so, like, you'll get some like closer level people as setters, which is nice. And so here's some things to decide or consider deciding when you're or uh to consider when you're deciding your on-tracked earnings, is you don't want total sales labor, um, which is your setter plus closer labor percentage to exceed 15% of your frozen uh front end gross margin. So even 15% is high, right? Like ideally, 13% is uh what I would call standard, because that would mean 3% for the setter, 10% for the closer. 11% would be elite, right? But that higher that's probably gonna require a little bit of higher price and velocity, which is rare. What I mean by high price and velocity is like, you know, 15k plus price points, but you're selling like them, like uh your closers are still selling 15 to 30 units a month, right? So there's a good velocity there, but the price is still high. Like that it doesn't do it doesn't do you much good if the price is high, but you sell like, you know, the sales cycle is like two months. You see what I mean? Um, and then you also want to assess. So, number one, you want to make sure that it fits within 15% front-on-risk margin, ideally 13, 11% elite when you combine setters and closures. See, this is very key. I want you to think about this so you don't set yourself up for failure and you have terrible PL, you know, two years from now. And so you also want to assess how hard the job actually is. I kind of already talked about this, but like, you know, I've worked with Dean and Tony. They have insanely good leads. I still would recommend, you know, you probably make some more money with better setters, but they could get away with not having that good of setters, okay? Um, now if you have more complex leads, like a raising money offer, you probably want to invest in better setters, okay? But the most important thing here is the PL margin. All right. So I'd err on the side of being stingy because you can always be the good guy later and give everybody a raise, right? Like you always make if you're gonna make a mistake, you might as well end up being the good guy and giving it giving it, giving everybody a raise, opposed to making a mistake and like, oh, now you're the bad guy, I gotta give everybody a pay cut. You know, it doesn't work, cause a lot of churn. So, how do you actually set this up? So, in the beginning, what I like to do, this is me personally, I like to give these guys a four to six K a month draw. Okay, four would be on the lower end of OTEs, six would be on the higher end, right? But like you're gonna pick a number. It's not four to six K a month, it's like five K a month draw, six K a month draw, whatever. And I give them that, I give that to them for 60 days. And then what I recommend doing is going 100% commission after that, and then back out a percentage that allows them to hit their on-tracked earnings. Okay. So again, a draw is a guaranteed floor pay, okay, for a certain amount of time. So, like let's say in their first month make 2.5 commission and the draw is 5K, you got to pay an extra 2.5. And then if they exceed and their commission's 5K, they just get whatever their pay is. Now, you might be adverse to this and you might be like, well, you know, that's that's money out of pocket, whatever. But this helps massively with churn with ramps or with reps as they're ramping. It also, if you're hiring your first or second setter, it'll help massively with churn, right? Because especially like they're not dumb. They they're like, hey, I'm the only setter on this offer. I don't even know if this is real, right? This might not even be a real thing. It might not even be, hey, he said I could make seven grand, but I don't even know if that's possible. So the draw kind of like quells their fears for 60 days. And the thing is, is like you're thinking, like, oh, that's like a bunch of money out of pocket. I mean, look, if they stink, you're just gonna let them go. And then you prorate the draw, anyways. So it's not as costly as you think. I mean, you're not gonna be out. If they're not good, you're not gonna be out that much money. But it does help you recruit somebody better from the very beginning because they know they're getting that guarantee. But they don't, you know, you could just let them go in a week if they suck. So I'm gonna break this down. So let's say my setters can take 80 sets per month. Okay. And I know my closers convert it 25%, right? That's 20 closes a month based on 80, you know, 80 divided by 25 is 20. Or sorry, yeah. Um, 25% of 80 is 20. So let's say my price is 7800. So then it's 156K in revenue, right? That might be about 70 to 80 percent or 70 to 80k in upfront cash. So 20 closes, let's say I deem that is exceptional performance. So that's gonna be the top end and end range of my OTE. In other words, if a setter gets 20 set closes a month, that's like my top end range of my OTE, which is that's kind of like what I do. Okay. So let's say my top end range that I decided previously is gonna be 8K, right? Depending on the tier I wanted to pick. Okay. So then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pay 400 per close set, which is 8,000 divided by 20. I got 400. All right. Okay. So I just backed out that number. And then what I want to do is before I commit to telling my setter that's the number, I want to check and see how this impacts my gross margin. All right. So 400 per close with a 7800 price is 5.1% commission per sale. If my closers are at 10%, I'm about the max I want to pay. And what I might do in this scenario is I might consider leaning down the commission here or just going with it. Maybe I see if I can go a little bit lower. Maybe I see if maybe I'm like, dude, I need to just raise my price, but then keep all of these things the same. Okay. Which brings me to another thing is oftentimes if you're operating below 10K price points and you know in the future you're gonna raise the price, you haven't done it yet. Give them flat rates and tell them, look, the price is gonna go up. I want to get you paid more right now. So I'm kind of eating the cost to pay that to you. But long term, I want you at 12K price, earning, you know, 8% commission if it's a closer, right? But I'm gonna give you actually 10% on 78, but there's no one I raise the price. Okay, I'm not giving you a percentage raise, right? Because I'm giving you an advance right now on your pay. Does that make sense? Okay. You have to you have to phrase it as you're giving them an advance on their pay. Because otherwise they're gonna view that as a pay cut. It's more work. But what you're doing there is as your price goes up, you're kind of building in with your team and letting them know, hey, the price is gonna go up, but your pay is not gonna go up. But I got to do that for the company margins. So I'm really giving you an advance on your pay right now because I want you to make at least blank. Okay. Now, for the setters, the reason I like a hundred percent commission after a draw, if you do an initial 100% commission with no draw, it's much harder to get them to say yes. Okay. But 100% commission after the draw, the reason I like that is you're gonna find out you end up paying a uh similar amount in total team labor is the higher base plus lower commission. However, your best people get paid way more and your worst people don't. So it's better for your higher level people's retention. Okay. So that's why I like that. And in fact, in some cases, you end up paying less because, like the duds, like you know, if you have people who are ramping who suck, you know, you either just cut them or they just don't, you know, they don't um, they're not gonna get they're not gonna earn as much because there's less base, right? So um the other thing that you can do, we already kind of mentioned this, is if you remember how I was talking about the increasing marginal cost of time to get the uh additional production in terms of sets. So a way to incentivize the team to push harder is to increase the commission um as they get closer to their target. So if like a 20 is exceptional, you could maybe have like 12 to 15 sets closed, get a small bump, and then 15 to 20 sets closed, get another bump. And so in this case, you'd have to lower the commission down a little bit as the baseline, and then you balance it out. So at the end, you still get the 5%, right? So you can play with the math a little bit, but that that makes them go harder into the month. Okay. The other thing is too, is we always want to pay on set closed. So don't pay on sets, don't pay on shows, because you want to incentivize a high volume of quality sets, right? And so that's the best proxy for sets closed. And so that said, we do, and then we'll talk about this in the management section, but we do KPI them both on sets and set closed, right? Because you have to KPI them on both, but that's more of a management conversation for pay. It just simply sets closed. Okay. So common comp examples that I'll give you is the first one is a four to six K a month draw for 60 days, then three to five percent commission on closed set. That's kind of the one we already talked about. The other example that's totally fine is three to four K a month base and then two to four percent commission per closed set. So some people do this. I like the above, but honestly, both work. And especially when you're just starting off and you're kind of like getting your business going and all that stuff at your first or second setter, sometimes the higher base and lower commission percentage is just a little bit easier. So those are like two foolproof ones that you can pretty much use, but just make sure they fit within your margins and then you're getting the right OTE from your setters, which you can talk to your account managers about and they'll just make, they'll just tell you what to comp your setters. Okay. So again, the formula, if you want a little graph here, kind of explains it here. And that's it for the training, guys. We'll see you in the next training.