Internal Training

Sales Setter Training — The Core Model

This is the first thing a new sales setter at Medic Footprints needs to understand. It covers who we help, what your role really is, how you are paid, how the sales process is structured, and the rules you follow on every call.

The one idea everything rests on

You are not booking sales calls. You are booking fit interviews. And everything you do after the booking is about delivering a warm, half-decided doctor into the pipeline. You get paid when they close, so the quality of your booking and the warmth of the lead are your real job — not the raw number of appointments you put on the calendar.

Who we are

Medic Footprints, through The DII, is the number one community for UK doctors building non-clinical businesses and careers. The problem we solve is simple: doctors don't know how to build non-clinical careers on their own, so they struggle for years. We give them a route, a peer network of doctors already doing it, and hands-on help to turn their clinical expertise into income they own. You don't need the full company pitch. You need to be able to say who we are in one crisp breath.

What your job really is

You are paid on closed deals and show-ups, not on bookings. A rushed, unqualified booking doesn't just waste the closer's time. It costs you money, because your commission only lands when the deal closes. So the goal is never to book the most people. It is to book the right people and make sure they turn up warm.

How you are paid

You earn £120 for every closed deal. That figure is flat. It never changes regardless of how much the lead ends up paying. This matters: it means you have no reason to push a bigger package or over-promise on price, because your commission doesn't move with the deal size. Your only levers are the quality of your bookings and your show-up rate.

Deals from leads you pre-called before an event count as your deals too, and pay £120 each, on top of your monthly deal target.

Your base salary begins after a 60-day probation period. Probation itself is commission-only. Your earnings are uncapped — the harder and smarter you dial, the more you make. The full breakdown of your on-target earnings is in your contract and onboarding pack.

What the numbers demand

The pipeline works on a predictable funnel. Read it carefully, because it explains why quality matters at every step — every weak link you control compounds all the way down and shrinks your own pay.

Funnel stage	Rate
Pick up	~30%
Get pitched	~70%
Book	~20%
Show up	~70%
Close	~44%

To hit the 30% pick-up rate, every unanswered lead gets a second dial. That works out to about 1.9 dials per person, and it is non-negotiable.

Metric	Daily	Monthly
Dials placed	~67	~1,460
People contacted	~35	~770
Appointments booked	~1–2	~32
Deals closed (core target)	—	10

Who to book — your live scorecard

Run this as a fast mental check while you are on the dial, not as a form. At 67 dials a day there is no time for paperwork. A lead is a book if they are broadly all of these:

• Based in the UK
• A consultant or GP partner
• Has already tried something toward a non-clinical move
• Wants income, autonomy and control
• Open to being part of a peer community of doctors

The nine pains to listen for

Underneath the scorecard is a listening menu. Your skill is hearing which pain a lead is in and mirroring it back in their own words:

• Practising medicine but doesn't want to long-term
• Doesn't feel valued enough
• Sees opportunities in industry but is struggling to get there
• Has applied for jobs and is getting nowhere
• Has hit the glass ceiling in NHS career progression
• Wants income beyond clinical work without having to rely on it
• Wants more control over how they help people
• Doesn't have enough time with their family
• Tired of the day-to-day and wants more stimulation

The affordability question

Before you book, you need to softly establish that the lead can invest at our minimum. Frame it as commitment, never as a blunt price demand. A good version sounds like this:

"The doctors we work with typically invest from around £950 a month into building this properly. If the plan turns out to be right for you, is that a level you'd be in a position to commit to right now?"

A hard no on affordability is not a book. A yes, or a "depends," is a book — the closer takes it from there.

The pitch — four beats

You do pitch, but keep it short and phone-length. Four beats:

1. Problem — lead with the problem we solve, not the product.
2. One differentiator — just one, not a list. Pick whichever fits the lead: founder-led by Dr Abeyna Jones, for doctors by doctors; over 12 years in industry as a practising Consultant Occupational Health Physician; systemised peer support and non-advertised opportunities you won't find elsewhere; a personalised, holistic strategy and hands-on implementation built for long-term results; or a proven framework for any non-clinical pathway.
3. Mirror the pain the lead just gave you, in their words.
4. Book the call — the call is where the plan gets built.

The rule for the pitch is no depth. No programme structure, no mechanics, no exact pricing. Depth on the phone gives the lead reasons to talk themselves out of the call before they ever meet the closer.

The sales process has two stages

You are booking Stage 1 only, and Stage 1 is deliberately not a sales call.

Stage 1 — first-stage interview with Samuel. 20 minutes. No payment is taken and nothing is charged. Its only purpose is to find out whether this is the right fit, both ways. This is what makes booking easy — there is no money moment for the lead to fear, which is why the affordability question earlier is just you pre-checking fit.

Stage 2 — second-stage interview with Abeyna. Up to 30 minutes. It only happens if Samuel judges the lead a fit and redirects them. This is the onboarding and closing call, where the payment is collected. By the time a lead reaches this call, they should already have made up their mind on why they are doing it. Stage 2 is confirmation and collection, not persuasion.

By the time you are reading this, the exact structure may have shifted. We may have a dedicated closer running the second-stage interview instead of Abeyna, and in future it may be a funding partner who is also a doctor. But the two-stage shape holds: a no-pressure fit interview first, a closing and onboarding call second.

The whole model depends on the lead arriving at Stage 2 already decided, and that decision is meant to be made before the call. You are the first link in a chain whose entire job is to deliver a decided buyer into a short closing call.

After the booking — protect the show-up and the warmth

A booking isn't finished when the invitation is sent. It is finished when the lead has consumed the proof. Two things run together after every booking.

Show-up protection: confirmation touches before the call, and chasing, confirming and re-booking any no-shows to keep the pipeline clean.

Warmth protection: at the moment you book, you send two things together — the Stage 1 calendar invitation, and the case-studies page at casestudy.thedii.global. Then, before the call, you confirm the lead has actually reviewed it. Not "did you get the link," but a real check that they've looked. A good version sounds like:

"Before your call, have a look through the case studies I sent — the doctors on there started exactly where you are. Have you had a chance to go through them yet?"

That page carries three real doctor stories — one who built a consulting contract, one who moved into advisory work, and one who moved into health tech — along with a section on who the call is and isn't for, and what the lead walks away with. A lead who reads it arrives already self-qualified and primed, which is exactly the warm, half-decided doctor the whole process is designed to deliver. It also gives you a genuine, welcome reason to check in: "just making sure you've seen the case studies" lands far better than "just confirming you'll show up."

The money rules — know, say, never

Know (internal)	Say (out loud)	Never
Price is £950 per month.	Only the affordability qualifier — doctors typically invest from around £950 a month; can they commit to that as a minimum.	Quote or explain the subscription tiers.
Default ask is the first three months up front, in one payment.	Deflect every specific to the call: "That's exactly what you'll map out with the team."	Decide whether a lead is upsold or downsold.
It can be split into two parts; sometimes we proactively propose that financing — but the default is one payment.		Negotiate the split or offer financing yourself.
There is a larger subscription and a smaller subscription.

Your entire money remit is one question — can this lead afford £950 a month as a minimum? Everything else belongs to the closer.

What you never get into on a call

Some things are for the closer, not the setter. If you wander into them, you talk the lead out of the call before the closer ever meets them. Don't explain how the programme is structured or walk through what it includes. Don't give any exact up-front total or financing terms. Keep the company mission to a single line at most. Anything that needs depth to explain is not your job on the phone — your job is to qualify, pitch briefly, and book.

Sales Setter Training — Know Our Client

This is the second guide. Its whole purpose is to help you understand the doctor on the other end of the phone — who they are, what actually hurts, what they secretly want, the words they use, and the questions they raise. You cannot mirror a pain you don't recognise, and you cannot book a warm lead if the doctor doesn't feel understood in the first ninety seconds. The better you know this client, the more you book and the warmer they arrive at the call. Everything here comes from real sales calls, in the doctors' own words.

Who our client is

Our client is a UK doctor — GP, locum, resident or trainee, and some consultants — who has decided they don't want to stay purely clinical forever. They have already tried self-directed exploration: browsing LinkedIn, going to events, joining WhatsApp communities, doing courses, consuming content. And it has stalled.

The single most important thing to understand about them is this: it is a method gap, not a knowledge gap. They know enough to feel frustrated but not enough to move. All that self-directed effort has produced what we call clarity debt, not clarity — more options, more confusion, less momentum. They have a route gap sitting on top of a confidence gap.

Three more things define them. They are moving toward something, not fleeing medicine — they want ownership, income, impact and autonomy, and most will correct any "escape the NHS" framing themselves. They are ambitious, not desperate — capable people held back more by their own head and a missing route than by the market. And they are still working clinically, so this transition runs in the background of a demanding main job. Their time and energy are tight, and failed attempts cost them psychologically, not just practically.

The three sub-segments

There is one common client, in three flavours. This matters enormously on the phone: you speak to one sub-segment's dominant pain at a time. Messaging that tries to speak to all three at once speaks to none. As you qualify, you're working out which of these three you're talking to.

Sub-segment	Dominant pains	Watch-out
Founders & coaches Building a business, or doing coaching, consulting or advisory work	Positioning & visibility; self-doubt & procrastination; pricing; no system	Money objection near-universal — often single income or childcare
Senior & experienced Consultants, GP partners wanting advisory, consulting or a venture	Access to the right rooms; fear of the wrong / "corporate" move; isolation & NHS taboo; wanting proof before committing	Deferrals cluster on financial security and a spouse conversation
Burned-out & stepping-stone Feel stagnant, want a route out of the clinical ceiling	Stagnation & misalignment; fear of the wrong move; can't translate their experience	Hard constraints appear — visa, childcare, capacity

Inside their head

What they actually want to feel matters as much as what they want to achieve. They want clarity and control, far more than more information or inspiration. They want confidence they're moving in the right direction, reassurance they're not making the wrong move, and to feel credible, not just informed.

The self-doubt spine — the most important insight in this whole guide. Self-doubt is the upstream emotional cause of their inaction, and it converts into procrastination, usually disguised as "more research." They will not lead with it themselves. Positioning problems are the visible symptom they'll talk about; self-doubt is what's really stalling them underneath. One doctor named it directly: her biggest downfall was the self-doubt, and the growing competition made it feel worse. Another admitted the truth of it — that it was just him making excuses because he was worried about what happens if it doesn't go the way he wants, and an idea slipped by roughly a year as a result. When you understand this, you understand why a doctor who "just needs to think about it" often needs something else entirely: to feel that their background counts.

Their core fears: wasting months on the wrong path and regretting it; discovering the effort they've already put in was in the wrong direction; being invisible or misread by a market that feels foreign; and staying stuck in research mode with nothing to show for it.

Their identity aspiration is the shift from employee and job-seeker to owner and expert. They increasingly see their clinical judgement as a commercial asset. And crucially, the destination is additive — most want to keep clinical work by choice, not abandon medicine.

Their emotional journey runs in four stages: awareness, when staying purely clinical starts to feel wrong; frustration, when research produces no clarity on what fits; seeking and self-doubt, when the lack of traction makes them doubt their background transfers at all; and finally relief and commitment, which arrives the moment the path becomes clear and they can see role fit, transferable value, and a realistic next step. A lot of your job is meeting them somewhere in the first three stages and pointing them at the fourth.

The pains they carry, ranked

Ranked by how often they came up and how much emotional heat they carried. Learn to hear which one a doctor is in — naming it back in their own words is what turns a guarded lead into a booked one.

#	Pain	Severity	In their words	What they're really asking for
1	Can't translate or position their experience	Extreme	"…translating that to commercial value and your visibility is zero. So nobody can find you."	A way to make their experience legible — a clear USP for CV, outreach and pricing
2	Self-doubt → procrastination	Extreme	"My biggest downfall is the self-doubt."	Proof their background transfers + social evidence; confidence through visible progress
3	No system, no clarity on the route	Extreme	"I need more of a kind of systematic structure to what I'm doing."	A structured, sequenced route with a defined next move
4	Fear of the wrong move	Extreme	"…taking a random job… and then I have to leave after 3 months."	A way to choose with evidence — de-risked, reversible, additive steps
5	No access to the right rooms	High	"I cannot seem to put my foot through the door."	Warm introductions and a community of insiders — people, not more content
6	Stagnation, misalignment, urgency	High	"I don't look at a single consultant and think — I should have done that."	A route to grow beyond the clinical ceiling now
7	Isolation & NHS taboo	Sharp where present	"Within healthcare everyone is protective… nobody's discussing business."	A peer community where the non-clinical path is normal and mentored
8	Recruiter / role language mismatch	Sharp	"The rejection came through minutes after midnight… I didn't tick enough boxes."	Translation into recruiter-legible language; routes past the form-filter
9	Can't price or position the offer	Moderate	"Doctors are terrible at putting a price on their service."	Pricing frameworks and the confidence to use them
10	Regulatory / compliance walls (coaches)	Moderate	"…I need to contact my indemnity provider… so you keep finding that wall."	A clear, compliant path to start

What they want

Some things are non-negotiable for any solution to feel credible: a clear view of which non-clinical role or route fits their background, and proof that their clinical experience translates into market value. They expect access to people already working in the target space who'll give honest, insider information, and a realistic next step they can take immediately rather than more information to sit on. And they desire an additive portfolio — a bigger career without abandoning medicine, broader impact beyond individual patient care, the confidence to apply and compete without second-guessing, and autonomy over their time and income.

The shape of the outcome is worth knowing: they're pursuing one of three routes — a venture, consulting and advisory work, or a coaching and expert business — with stated income targets ranging from roughly £1,500 to £10,000 a month, plus contracts and equity. Picture the doctor as the owner of monetisable expertise, not a job-seeker. That's how they want to be seen.

Why now — their triggers

The personal trigger is what actually drives the decision, so listen for it. Ranked by how often it showed up:

1. A training or exam milestone freeing up capacity — the most common why-now.
2. The cost of inaction — "not making that step is becoming too expensive for me in my personal life."
3. Family and life stage — young children, a new baby, wanting to be present.
4. A taste of success — a contract, an interview, or a paid Q&A that proved it's possible.
5. An event or talk that lit the fuse and released the pressure to act.
6. Settling into a new role and realising "this is not it."

When you hear one of these, you've found the why-now, and it's your strongest reason to book the call while the feeling is live.

The frictions they raise

These are the hesitations that come up again and again. For a setter, the value is recognising what each one really means — deep handling happens on the call with the team. You never quote or negotiate price; you recognise the friction, understand what's underneath, and keep the lead warm and moving.

• The money / spend nerves — often a single income or genuine squeeze, and usually a sign they're taking it seriously rather than a real "no."
• A worry about the salary drop — they're comparing it like-for-like against a GP salary when the real picture is additive, portfolio income.
• Timing and life admin — usually a real trigger like an exam, not a brush-off.
• Needing a spouse or partner's sign-off — a second stakeholder at home.
• "Does it actually work?" — they've been burned before and want proof, which is exactly what the case studies you send are for.
• Capital (for the venture-minded) — they think they need millions, when advisory, equity and partnering routes need reputation, not capital.

How they talk — and the framing to avoid

Mirror their language and you clear their guard instantly.

Use — moving toward	Avoid — running away / generic
Additive / alongside your clinical work	Leave / escape / get out of the NHS · quit medicine
Translate · position · make your value findable	Fear · scarcity · desperation
A structured route / method / system	Health tech as the only destination
"The right rooms" · warm introductions · community	Generic inspiration · "follow your passion"
Proof · doctors like you · case studies	"Starting from zero" / throwing away your training
Build · own · monetise your expertise	Pure job-seeker "how to get hired" framing
Your expertise is a commercial asset	Treating them as passive or desperate

One nuance: a minority of doctors do use leaving-the-NHS language themselves, so it exists in the market — but the additive frame is safer and reaches a far broader audience. And remember this audience spans coaching, private practice, advisory, consultancy, medico-legal, policy and recruitment — never assume health tech is the whole world.

A few of their exact words

Keep these in your ear; their own words outperform anything you paraphrase.

• Positioning: "translating that to commercial value and your visibility is zero. So nobody can find you." · "I feel I have experience that I can leverage but I don't know how to leverage it in the right way."
• Clarity: "Too many ideas. That's always my problem. Choose one thing and commit." · "I need more of a kind of systematic structure to what I'm doing."
• Fear of the wrong move: "taking a random job... and then I have to leave after 3 months."
• Access and isolation: "I cannot seem to put my foot through the door." · "Within healthcare everyone is quite protective... nobody's discussing business."
• Stagnation: "I don't look at a single consultant and think — I should have done that." · "Even not making that step is becoming too expensive for me in my personal life."
• Self-doubt: "It's me just making excuses because I'm worried what happens if it doesn't go the way I want."

How you use all of this

You are not expected to solve any of these pains on the phone — that's the whole programme's job. Your job is to recognise them. When a doctor tells you they can't translate their experience, or they're scared of the wrong move, or that they never look at a consultant and feel they made the right choice, you know exactly which pain you're hearing, which of the three sub-segments they likely sit in, and what they're really asking for underneath. You reflect it back in their own words, and you show them that a conversation with the team is where that specific thing gets worked out. That feeling — being truly understood by the first person they speak to — is what makes a doctor book, show up, and arrive warm. That is the entire point of knowing our client this well.