How to hire a DM setter the right way is a 7 step process: build a screening form, post the role, sort applicants, interview them, rank them, make your decision, then hire and manage them. A lot of businesses fail simply because of bad setters, and that almost always traces back to a rushed hiring process. The other day I was speaking with an online coach who couldn't break past $60,000 a month. He was sharp, talented at building his brand, and generating millions of views and just as many leads as his competitors who were making over $60,000 per month, yet he was still struggling to convert those leads into high ticket clients. In the video above I walk through the exact step by step process for hiring an A level appointment setter, and then how to instantly scale your appointment setting process without hiring more setters.
Here is the 7 step hiring funnel in order, so you can jump to the part you need:
- Build the screening form
- Post the role and gather 100 applicants
- Sort through the applicants
- Run 30 minute interviews
- Rank every candidate
- Make your decision with a 2 week competition
- Hire and manage them
Why was he making leads but not money?
I looked at his business processes and everything seemed to be in place. He had a great looking website, a loyal community, a consistent content system, and paid ads generating leads every single day, and yet he was stuck. So we looked at his numbers and everything was solid except for three numbers:
- The booking rate
- The show up rate
- The closing rate
It was clear that his biggest problem was appointment setting. He was getting an average of 200 leads per day, which is a very decent amount, yet he was barely booking four to seven calls a day, and most of them were unqualified.
What were the main causes of this bad performance? His setter:
- Booked leads who weren't qualified
- Took hours to respond and move them through the pipeline
- Spoke broken English
- Followed a script instead of a real framework
- Spammed the same follow-up messages over and over
- Didn't take advantage of viral content lead flow
The list continues on and on, but here's the worst part. This coach spent hours training and micromanaging his setter, and honestly I don't blame him, because I've worked with a lot of setters before so I know the difference between a good and a bad one. This coach had only ever hired bad setters, so every single one he had before quit or failed, and over time his hiring bar dropped lower and lower.
Why "hire a setter in 5 minutes" is bad advice
The same problem has happened with countless other coaches I've worked with, and I've also made this exact mistake multiple times. Most bad hiring processes come from watching those YouTube videos that promise to help you hire a good setter instantly, or within 5 minutes. These videos are misleading because they ignore the fact that hiring the right person is a critical decision in every business, and your business cannot function without a good appointment setter. It's like feeding bad fuel into your Ferrari. You cannot do this, it's a crime.
So you need A players on your team. Those legends out there don't say "hire A players only" randomly. They say it because they know that if you want to build something great, you need A players. Yes, you can hire a setter in 5 minutes, but it's not a good long term strategy. If you want a setter temporarily, cool, do it. But if you want someone to work with you long term and be able to scale your business, then you need to hire an A player setter. The formula is simple: if you want to build an A level business, you need A level talent.
I learned this process directly from Charlie Morgan, who has hired more than 30 setters and has generated between $6 to 8 million with them. And if you don't know me, my name is Liam Skaff. I have experience as an appointment setter on the ground and have built multiple teams. I've worked with coaches including Alvin, Shod, Sharbo, and Frank, helping them build their teams and improve their appointment setting processes.
The single setter strategy
This is what I call the single setter strategy, and it all starts by you hiring an A level appointment setter. They must be A level. When you do, you can instantly scale your appointment setting process using automations and AI chatbots that act like you, the business owner. First, let me walk you through how to hire an A level setter.
This is what the hiring funnel looks like: we first post, then we redirect the leads to the form, then we have an interview with them, then we shortlist them, and then we hire the best candidates. For the first seven days, here is what it takes.
Step one: build the form
It's pretty simple. First of all you need their contact info, so collect their name, email, and phone number. Then:
- Age. They should be above 20, because according to Charlie Morgan a teen's emotional control tends to be in the bin. Hire someone who is emotionally stable.
- Country. This gives you good information, but more importantly we want to qualify their English. Is their English their first or second language, and do they speak it fluently and well? This is crucial because all of your texts and messages with your leads will be in English. If they don't speak English well, they're instantly disqualified.
- Device. What exact device do they use for work? An old phone or device is counterproductive. If you tell them to download a certain app for your workflow and their operating system rejects it, that's a problem. Slow devices also work against them.
- A one minute video. Say something like "please record a one minute video about something you have done consistently for 12 months."
What are we measuring with that video? First, their charisma and energy, because we need someone charismatic in the DMs who can emit positive energy to convert better. Second, consistency, because setting is a repetitive skill and it requires consistency. You cannot skip a single day or the tasks compound. Third, conciseness. If they can't record a one minute video, how are they going to send concise messages to qualify a lead? You don't want huge blocks of text or the leads get scared away. And finally, conviction. Are they convicted enough to work in this area of your business?
Finally, put your own email on the form. Write something like "use this email to follow up every day if you want the job." This shows you how convicted and consistent they are.
Step two: post
First, find communities or groups on Facebook, Skool, Reddit, or Discord. Once you do, send this message in each community or group:
I'm looking for a setter to make between 4 to 8K, remotely, full time. Reply here.
That number can be custom depending on you. Send the form to those who reply and show initial commitment. Your goal is to gather 100 form responses. Yes, 100. The reason is simple: when you get 100 applicants, you're going to disqualify a lot of them, and based on the interviews you do, you start to see the difference between a good setter and a bad one. The more interviews you do, the more you realize the common traits of the successful setters and the bad ones. The more you widen your scope, the more you're able to hire the best.
Step three: sort through the applicants
Watch their videos. In the first 10 seconds, if their video is not compelling, they're not going to be a good appointment setter, because those first 10 seconds tell you a lot. If they're good, check if they followed up with you by email. If they did, they're qualified. If they haven't followed up with you yet, disqualify them.
Step four: 30 minute interviews
The interview format looks like this. Start with an introduction, "hey, how are you," and build a bit of rapport. Then move to the discovery, where you ask a few questions:
- Their story. What does their past look like? This tells you a lot about them already.
- Their present. Why are they doing what they're doing right now?
- Their future. How much money do they want?
- Their why. They need to have a strong why, because if they don't, they're not going to stick in your business for long.
To give you the best example, say you get on a call with a potential setter and they tell you, "yeah, I want to make money online, I saw appointment setting as a great opportunity, I've never worked before, I just want some extra income and to live this laptop lifestyle." Now compare that with a parent who has a family to feed and would do anything to make extra money, especially if her income is based on commission. The why is a huge part that determines whether a setter is likely to stick with your business. If their why is vague and doesn't touch them emotionally, then the first or second time they meet difficulty, they will quit. This has happened a lot of times with clients I've worked with. They hire a setter who just wants the lifestyle, and a few months down the line they quit, and then the coach has to repeat the whole process of hiring, training, and managing setters. Everything you do in this hiring process affects the long term, so follow it strictly and accurately and you will get a long term reward.
After the discovery, you have the questions, where they get to ask you anything. This is your opportunity to judge them heavily on preparation. And throughout the interview, what we're looking for is the four C's: charisma, conviction, consistency, and conciseness.
Step five: rank them
After you've done all the interviews, listen back to all the recordings. Yep, you heard me, because you only do this once and you want to do it right. Then measure their scores out of 10 based on:
- Presentation. Did they wear good clothes, did they turn up on the call, did they look tired, how did they carry themselves?
- Story. Was it compelling enough, was it legit?
- Situation. How likely are they to succeed in the role based on their current situation doing it full time?
- The goal. The dollar amount they want and how fast. This matters, because if they want to make it as fast as possible and they're still a beginner with no experience, that's a red flag. They probably want short term money and are not likely to stick around.
- The why.
- The questions they asked you.
Step six: make your decision
Take the two to three best and make the hire. Put them in one group, make it clear that they're in competition, and let the games begin. After 2 weeks you'll have clear data on who deserves the spot. This works really well because it forces people to succeed. When you put competitive people in a single stadium, they fight to win, and the one who fights the most and shows you the best data is the one who deserves the job.
Step seven: hire and manage them
Pay them per qualified appointment, usually between $25 to $50, or pay them between 2 to 5% up front cash on deals. Choose whichever suits your business model best.
Then the management process. On a daily basis, get the end of day report from them, which contains the volume, how they're feeling, and the results they've achieved, plus the important metrics like follow-ups and touch points. Do a daily call with them to revise your conversations. The more you do this, the faster they improve, and later down the line you can do it once or twice a week. This is the full proven process to hire a great setter. Follow it accurately and with precision, and if you do it once, you won't need to do it again.
How to instantly scale appointment setting with AI
The problem of scalability comes after you've hired your first A level setter, because that's when you'll be producing more content and have more time to scale the business, which brings a larger volume of leads through your DMs every day. In 2023 this would have been a nightmare, because you'd have to repeat the hiring process again and again. But since late 2024 a new mechanism has emerged that lets you skip the whole process of hiring more setters. You don't need three average setters to manage a huge volume of DMs while maintaining quality. You can have one great setter who does all the work with leverage from a system, which is exactly the call I help coaches make when they ask is an AI DM setter worth it.
First we need to understand the core SOPs the appointment setter needs to follow. This includes, but is not limited to:
- Outreach
- Lead qualification
- Follow-ups
- Post booking workflow
- Data tracking
Outreach
This mainly consists of Instagram follower outreach. We automated this part by scraping the followers of our account using a Chrome extension. We could automate the actual reaching out too, but we don't take that risk, because the automations for that are often risky. By automating the scraping, our setter does more because they don't waste hours on manual generation. If you do this, scrape the followers or likes using an alternative account.
Lead qualification
This is most of the work, because it's the part that requires the most feedback, improvement, and iteration. It includes messaging the leads, qualifying them for your offer, and handling objections. Funny enough, we've dedicated more than 90% of this process to AI Persona chatbots. A Persona is basically an AI chatbot trained on previous conversations done by the business owner or the setter, to imitate their exact tone, thought processes, and even knowledge of the business. The lead receives the freebie, the AI reaches out and starts qualifying them, and when the lead responds the AI acknowledges their response and qualifies them for the offer. All the setter has to do is handle leads who behave oddly or raise objections that deviate from the flow. In 90% of cases it's the AI chatbots sending those messages. This is the same model behind AI appointment setting for coaches, and it's why I'm careful about the AI DM setter mistakes that make leads disengage.
Follow-ups
Follow-ups are divided into two parts. First, short term follow-ups, within the first week of lead inactivity, like sending "hey [name], are you still there," a gif, or a voice message. Then long term follow-ups, where you reach out after a couple of weeks if they ghosted you mid conversation, or didn't have a strong pain point when you first spoke. You re-engage to see if that's still the case. AI handles most of our short term follow-ups through an Instagram DM follow up automation, and soon we'll be integrating long term follow-ups too. As a result, our setter focuses on higher ROI tasks instead of spamming leads with the same messages, so our leads and setter love us more.
Data tracking
I won't go deep into this, but we've automated the full process, and it has helped us a lot with data accuracy.
A real world example
Let me show you a real example of AI saving the day for one of my clients. Alvin uploaded a reel that went viral, receiving 3,390 comments, half of them from people struggling with hip pain and seeking his help. Half were sent by leads who commented the keyword "hip," and the other half was the ManyChat automation responding to tell them to check the DMs. Now guess who handled all of these incoming leads. It's not Alvin, it's not his setter. It's the AI Persona chatbot plus other automations. It sent them the freebie, qualified them for his offer, and followed up to resume the conversation, all the way to pitching the offer.
So this is the full strategy: first hire an A level appointment setter, then instantly scale your appointment setting process without having to hire additional setters or repeat that whole time consuming process. Adding more employees requires more management resources, and if we can do the same job with AI for cheaper and faster, then why not? Today we have this amazing technology in our hands that can make our lives way easier.