Let prospects know you want them to be your next success story.
If your sales processes are growing stale or have noticeably slowed down, it might be time to think beyond the way you “have always done things.” Consider how building referrals earlier in your sales process can help you be more successful in selling merchant services.
Selling merchant services the traditional way.
Your current merchant services sales process probably aligns closely with the following steps.
- Make a contact.
- Get an appointment.
- Make a presentation.
- Set up a demo or prepare a proposal.
- Follow up.
- Customer makes a commitment.
- Account activation (revenue begins to come in).
- Ongoing support, upselling.
- Ask for referrals.
Each step is crucial to winning and retaining clients. However, a small adjustment to your sales process can pay off in big ways. Simply moving step nine higher in the process could change everything.
Building referrals while you sell.
While it’s important for salespeople to focus on offering a solution at the best price, it’s even more important to stress the value the solution provides to your clients. For example, you can share how updating payment experiences leads to greater loyalty or stats that prove smoother transactions lead to increased efficiencies. However, the best way to communicate that value is actually through real-world outcomes with your current clients.
Your sales team can share case studies, testimonials, and user-generated content that confirm why your clients are satisfied and successful with your solutions. Additionally, they should also tell prospects that your goal is to make them success stories that you can share with other businesses.
Ensure your sales team talks to prospects about your experience in the industry, including years in the business and area expertise, to build trust to complement information from current customers.
Presentations, demos, and proposals.
Three tools you can use to reinforce value are presentations, demos, and proposals. They’re tangible, so prospects can reference and share them after your initial meeting. Each may share the same basic information, but you can make each specific to the prospect’s pain points, showing them how your solution can help them overcome challenges and support their business goals.
Again, at these stages of the sales process, be sure to let your prospects know your goal is their ultimate success. The information you leave with them can be used in follow-up calls and meetings, and your attentiveness to their needs will build a positive business relationship and make it more likely they will refer your business to their peers.
Make the most of a decision to use your solutions and services.
A salesperson’s job shouldn’t stop at the sale. Your new customer will make a substantial investment by choosing your company, and it’s up to you to keep growing the relationship and validating their decision to work with you. Steps for your sales team to take at this point include the following.
- Be a liaison between the customer and the maintenance and support staff. Pass along the information about their business so the support team knows how to best help when the time comes.
- Welcome the new customer as a part of your company’s “family.” Give them a shout-out in your newsletter, on social media, or on the customer page of your website.
- Document the relationship from day one for the marketing team to use later for a case study/success story and other marketing materials.
- Let the customer know you want them to be so successful that they’re willing to share that story
- Share your referral program with the client, including tangible benefits they’ll receive for sharing their story.
The benefits of referrals.
The effort you put into building referrals will pay for itself and prove to be the best form of advertising for your company. In fact, 92% of businesses say they trust referrals over any other forms of advertising, which translates into increased customer loyalty, higher lifetime value, and a bigger investment into your solutions.
Research also shows that when one company shares information with colleagues in their industry, they “speak the language” and can share your message in a way that resonates with them. In essence, your customers do the legwork for you, lowering customer acquisition costs and increasing customer retention due to greater trust in your business.
Rethink the process of selling merchant services.
Sales teams often have a “one and done” mentality, focusing only on making the sale and ignoring valuable steps to endear customers and gain strong referrals. Make building referrals the endgame, and your company will achieve more satisfaction on both sides of the business.
One relatively small change in your sales process focused on building referrals can make a big difference to your bottom line.
