The Sponsorship Collective

How changing the way we all see setters in business can get us better leads, for LESS money.

Today, we’re going to see how hiring setters, and truly taking the time to integrate them and make them a part of the team helped Chris Baylis, the president and CEO of The Sponsorship Collective to generate $40K a month from high quality leads on easy-mode – and how we can do the same for you.

First though, let’s see why setters are so overlooked…

Setters: “The Neglected Stepchild of the Sales World”

We’ve seen it time and time again in our industry, setters get no respect.

But switching and fixing your mindset when it comes to hiring setters, and how they actually slot in within your team is the difference between leads that are high quality, and excited to work with you versus no shows and “ghosts”.

“We started to think of our setting team as part of our closing team. How can we have our setters interact with the closing team? What are good leads to send to the setters so that we're guaranteeing success? How can we kind of bring them into our world and turn them into what they really are?”

See, everyone in the industry wants closers – but where do you think closers get their experience from?

The problem is, most people don’t actually know what setters do, even less what they could do for your business. Rather than seeing them as “the comedians of the sales world”, it’s time to open up our eyes and minds as to the kind of value setters can bring to the table.

Chris Baylis from the Sponsorship Collective joined forces with Coaching Sales around a year ago to do just this; and his experience just goes to show how important setters can be in a business when they’re hired, managed and treated right.

So what did setters do for Chris?

Setters: Your First Line of Defense Against Poor Closing Rates

“We got a ton of inbound leads. The problem is that they're not always super high quality leads. Setters are a great first line of defense. Setters can breathe magic into leads instead of just scrapping them or putting them on a closer's calendar and then having a bunch of pissed off closers cause you're putting shitty leads on their calendar”

They are key to the consistency, and quality of leads going on your closer’s calendars:

“We want to make sure everyone that enters our world gets a phone call, gets an email, gets a text, or gets welcomed into Facebook. Setters are kind of part of a customer service team. Also they help warm up leads. They do a lot of functions aside from just cold calling strangers and putting them on the phones”

Understanding what setters do, and the value that comes with it, is the first step to being able to onboard them and give them the support they need and deserve to do their job the right way.

Understanding Your Team is the First Step to Creating a Culture of Success

“I know how to coach closers. I did the job for a long time but I did not have experience coaching setters. At that point we realized we're actually not really the experts on this particular role. What I came to realize over time is that it's not on the first call that people agree to jump on a closer's calendar. It's not the second call. It's the mix of followup content, building a relationship.”

The first big insight for Chris came from changing the way he saw setters within his business.

“Ask a setter, ‘Hey, what do you want to do with your life?’ I'm 95% sure the answer is ‘I want to be a high ticket closer.’ It's a big path from setting to closing. Our understanding changed to actually treating them like part of the closing team – half of our closers were actually setters for us at one point.”

Instead of seeing setters as an outside group, just paving the way for closers to come in, Chris started seeing them for what they really are: closers in training.

As a result, he started investing in them accordingly – and the shift in quality of leads was just mind-blowing.

It’s not a Setter Problem. It’s a You Problem.

What happens with setters is that nobody knows who manages them.

Are they in sales or marketing?

It seems like they're just a kind of weird third wheel that is like floating in outer space at times.

And what happens when people don’t understand the problem they have?

They tend to pretend the problem doesn’t exist.

So there is never a proper solution.

In the Marine Corps they have a saying: “You must first do a job in order to know how to lead the job.” With a lot of entrepreneurs, they never actually set full time so they don't know what the job looks like – so they can’t lead efficiently.

“If you're a business owner and your setters are setting unqualified leads, you have a marketing problem. You haven't coached or trained your setters to get the people excited for the call.”

Your Team WILL Succeed When You Give Them What They Need

“The fact that you don't want to do something as a business owner should not be an indication that the job has low value. It's that you're recognizing your role as CEO. But as CEO, when you take a particular attitude towards a position, you create a culture in your company and it is really easy for your VA, who vets appointments at night to be forgotten. What I found anyway is when you create an environment to succeed, people succeed.”

But Won’t the Closers Feel Some Type of Way If the Setters Are Stepping on Their Toes?

To keep it short and sweet, no.

There can sometimes be an element of tension between setters and closers, because closers often see setters as “less than” them, or because they don’t like the kind of leads that come through onto their calendars, which have been placed there by setters.

But it doesn’t have to be like this.

Chris was able to resolve this by implementing two; very simple strategies.

The first was to change the way he paid his setters. Previously, they were paid per appointment set. This didn’t incentivize them to add high quality appointments to the calendars, so he switched to a base rate plus commission on the closes.

The quality of leads coming through skyrocketed.

The second change was to refer to setters as “junior closers”.

The setters integrated better with the closer team, and started to become more involved in the process. They would ask the closers: “how come you didn't close? What can we do better?”. They actually acted more senior on the team because Chris’ team was coaching them to do so.

This led to far better working relationships between the two teams, which worked wonders in terms of successful closes for the closing team.

Why Choose Done-For-You Setters™?

Not only had the quality AND quantity of sets gone up, but for Chris, the costs associated had actually gone down.

“Within two or three days, the team was active in our Facebook group. And within a week we started having sets show up on our calendar. It was significantly faster for me than hiring someone in house, which was a nice surprise. You guys could handle the volume. They were getting close to 300 new Facebook joins a week. And we get 70 to a hundred new leads with phone calls a day into our system. We did 39K in revenue from sets in month one, we're getting the result of three in-house setters for the cost of two in-house setters. The number of sets has gone up probably 20%, 25%. Costs have gone down by a third, the quality is significantly better, which I did not expect.”