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.
Changing payment preferences are a fact of life in the merchant services business. Take the paper check. They used to be standard — but try handing one to a teenage sales clerk now. Payment changes occur over time, but what causes different types of payments to rise or fall out of favor? New technologies often spawn new payment possibilities, and providers push these into the mainstream for consumers to adopt.
In just a few days, the next Western States Acquirers Association event will be back with more content and more connections than ever. The event is planned for Nov. 1-2, at the Omni La Costa Resort & Spa in Carlsbad, California, convenient to both Los Angeles and San Diego. More than 1,400 attendees will gather at the acquiring industry’s marquee conference to learn what’s new and next in the payments space.
People want easy experiences everywhere they do business, especially when it comes to how they prefer to pay. Entrepreneurs in the business of automotive sales and repairs didn’t have many good reasons to upgrade their payments technology when onboarding was clunky, costly, and not user-friendly. But all that’s changing.
Experts believe self-service technology will be a $77 billion market by the end of the decade, and payments might be the biggest part of it. The stigma around self-service has diminished as people realize that it’s not replacing employees, but rather performing jobs that may never be filled. As of July 2023, there were 800,000 job openings in the retail industry alone.
You can’t manage what you can’t measure. And if Peter Drucker is right, if you aren’t measuring it, you can’t improve it. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics that show progress toward a goal or comparative performance. KPIs help your company look forward by measuring “leading indicators,” or looking back at historical performance through “lagging indicators.”
If you’re like most providers offering payments solutions and services, you’d probably like to have more control. At RSPA RetailNOW 2023, The Strawhecker Group shared results of a study that confirm that solutions providers would like to have more say over merchant onboarding, processing fees, support, and customer experiences. Solutions providers can gain more control over merchant relationships when they become payment facilitators (PayFacs).
An effective business strategy for merchant services providers, ISVs, VARs, and other solutions providers is to specialize in a specific vertical or market. Doing so allows them to become experts in the needs of their customers in that niche and the solutions that prove to be the most valuable. However, if a provider focuses on restaurants, it might not be that simple. Different restaurant models operate in very different ways.
