Hi, my name is James Shepherd.
Today I want to talk to you about leads, referrals and cold calls, and how to sell merchant services.
I get the opportunity to speak to literally hundreds over the years, thousands of agents
that sell credit card processing.
I talk to ISO’s.
I do consulting.
As a result of that, I see a lot of different approaches to selling merchant services, just
some very unique ones.
What I thought today I would do is I thought I’d take a few minutes to summarize kind
of the three main categories of prospecting strategies in the merchant services industry
that I see as being successful.
The first one I want to talk to you about is leads.
I’ve really seen a lot of kind of change over the years of leads.
There is two main shifts I’ve seen.
The first thing is still definitely with telemarketing.
That’s still a very valid lead source.
However, what I’ve seen work with telemarketing is actually the individual agent getting their
own telemarketer through a freelancer network like upwork.com.
We recently just tested something out.
We’re still in the middle of testing it.
We are going to roll out a whole training program to our ProClub subscribers on how
to hire your own telemarketer, but we actually ran through this.
I invested a couple thousand dollars in kind of trial and error, and we used like a phone
burner dialer and all this stuff.
The thing that is great about having your own telemarketer when you are doing telemarketing
is that they can also double as your kind of scheduler and they can do follow up appointments
and things like that.
That’s very successful.
I would say if you are an individual agent right now and you are like, “Hey James,
I’ve got two to three hundred dollars a week that I want to put into lead generation
to dramatically increase my sales numbers.”
My advice to you would be to hire your own telemarketer.
Again, you got to be careful and you can’t just hire them and just throw them out there.
Like this has got to be somebody who is almost like a partner with you, and you have to go
after specific verticals and really try to segment the market a little bit in order to
get the right pitch.
And you’ve got to be willing to drive a little further.
Obviously, if you are just going out in the field walking down the street going into every
business, you know it’s a little more efficient, but you can definitely get a good telemarketer
that is going to make some appointments for you every day, handle your schedule for you,
help you figure out where to go and things like that.
So again, I’ve seen that as a trend where individual agents working with individual
freelancers is working really, really well.
Telemarketing at the company level, I’ve seen that become less and less effective.
I just have.
Over the years, when I got into the industry, that’s how I started.
I had leads from a telemarketing company the first month I was in it.
They were okay.
You know what I mean.
Now the more and more I see it, the worse they are which makes sense because it is the
same people calling through a whole area and just calling and calling.
They are going to burn through an area really, really quick.
Okay.
Now the other kind of lead that I’ve seen be really successful is online marketing leads.
Now that there is so much better targeting specifically with Facebook for retargeting
and then LinkedIn for just general targeting.
If you have a budget of I don’t know let’s say you’ve got a budget of maybe a thousand
dollars a month, five hundred to a thousand a month and you’d like to try something
out, get a book and read up or go online and get a course and read up on LinkedIn paid
advertising.
LinkedIn paid advertising allows you to target people now based on, it used to be you’d
have to spend thousands of dollars a month to even have a LinkedIn campaign, but they’ve
now kind of mirrored Facebook, but the difference is that on Facebook there is really no way
to say, “Show an ad to all the people who are business owners.”
There is really no way to do that because on Facebook, people don’t say in their profile,
they don’t have like a title of business owner.
Whereas, on LinkedIn, they do.
You do have your title.
So LinkedIn has gotten pretty good at finding people.
Now it’s still a little bit expensive in my opinion for LinkedIn ads.
So it takes a lot of trial and error.
You are going to waste at least a thousand dollars.
Let’s be honest with you.
If you’ve never done it before and you are like, “Yea, I’m going to try LinkedIn
advertising.”
You are going to waste probably a thousand dollars literally and get very little results
because it’s going to take you awhile to figure it out.
Do you do a video?
Do you do an image ad?
What is it?
If you are company looking to do it, I’d be glad to consult and help you out with that
strategy, but it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, but it is really successful.
The other thing I’ve found is Facebook retargeting is really successful.
You are out there in the field.
You are collecting email addresses, or you are sending people to your website with say
google ad words and then you are putting a Facebook pixel on there and retargeting those
people.
Leads can be successful, if you go after again, having your own telemarketer as an individual
agent, or exploring some of the newer mediums like LinkedIn advertising to go after paid
leads or Facebook retargeting.
So that’s leads.
Number two is referrals.
Referral networks are right now just extremely valuable.
I mean they really are because again, with credit card processing, you really need to
have that network effect.
It can be very difficult to just go in cold turkey sometimes and make that pitch.
The good news is with credit card processing, if you get even just a little bit of an edge,
people are not really that loyal to their credit card processor as a general rule.
Mainly they don’t want to switch over to you because they don’t want to get screwed
is really what it comes down to.
It’s just a risk thing.
Right, like the last time they switched their price was supposed to be lower; it was higher.
The time before that they switched it was supposed to be lower; it was higher.
You know they are like they just don’t believe you anymore.
It’s really that trust factor that actually is what is keeping most merchants from switching
to you.
That’s why when you go in there and offer them savings or offer them a good value, they
still say, “No.”
So the referral network is powerful because now you’ve got just that little bit of an
edge that says, “Well, this person recommended me,” or whatever, right?
So referral networks can be very, very powerful and something I’ve been looking into a lot
more lately and building up.
So I would definitely recommend you look into that.
A couple ways you can do referral networks that are really powerful, one of them is just
to go after non-profit organizations.
Reach out to a veteran’s organization in your area, or a school and say, “Hey, my
company would like to help you raise money for your football team,” or “for your
veteran’s organization.”
They are like, “Okay, cool, yea, sure, that’s awesome.”
So you say, “Great, well here is the way it works.
You guys, you can give us leads of any business owners that you know.
They are already processing credit cards.
They can keep processing credit cards just like they are now, but if they process with
me, I’m going to give 30% of the profits to your organization.”
A lot of times you get a school interested in using that like a fund raiser, or a veteran’s
organization is great because you can just go out in the community and now you go in
and say, “Hi, my name is James Shepherd.
I’ve partnered with XYZ veteran’s organization that helps veterans with PTSC,” or whatever
it is that they do.
And you say, “The reason I’m stopping by today is we’ve formed this partnership
and we would like to see if you are interested in supporting the troops by doing exactly
what you are doing now, not changing anything about what you are doing now.
All we are going to do is switch out the credit card processing and we are going to donate
a portion of it to this veteran’s organization as a way to give back.”
That could be very powerful.
Also, obviously, it’s a great thing to do.
It’s exciting to do stuff like that.
A couple ideas that have been working pretty good with referral relationships.
The last one is cold calling.
Cold calling always gets kind of short shrift and it’s kind of “Oh, cold calling doesn’t
work anymore.
Prospecting, that just doesn’t work anymore.”
That is absolute baloney.
I’m sorry, but it is still the most effective way to get business.
It is.
It’s the way that people like the least, right?
It’s the most difficult.
So it’s the one people like the least and that’s what makes it the best.
Because if you are out in the field walking into one business after another pitching merchant
services, depending on the market that you are in, there is just not as many people that
do that.
There is a lot more people on the phone.
There is a lot more people trying to get people online and so you have a lot more competition.
When you are walking in, if you can perfect that skill of walking in, you are going to
be really successful.
One trend that I’ve seen over the last few years that has made an impact there is segmenting
the market.
This segmentation really grows all the way across all three approaches.
If you are on LinkedIn advertising, it’s a lot better to go after all the pizza shop
owners in your area, you know.
Segmenting the market is really powerful and when you are prospecting out in the field,
you can segment the market and still go into every business on the street, but what you
do is you take all the different businesses in your area and you put them into several
buckets, right?
Auto repair, high ticket retail, fine dining, quick service, specialty retail, whatever,
right?
You put them on these buckets.
Prepare your value proposition for each one of those buckets, okay, and then when you
walk into that business, you can prepare.
You have a pitch ready to go.
You have a value proposition, a presentation for that particular business type.
So segmenting the market is very, very powerful, but in general prospecting still works great.
I know lots of sales people who are making 10, 15, 20 deals a month out prospecting just
walking into businesses cold turkey.
It still works.
Leads, referrals, and cold calling, just some trends I wanted to share with you today that
are impacting the merchant services market.
If you have anymore questions for me, make sure you go to ccsalespro.com/proclub, all
one word.
ProClub, ccsalespro.com/proclub and that’s where you can go in and get into our community,
exclusive community.
Ask me questions.
We have marketing materials there.
We do monthly workshops, exclusive training, all kinds of cool stuff.
So check that out.
My name is James Shepherd.
Have a great day!