You want to sign the merchant as soon as possible. You want to shorten your application sales cycle and help your customers accept payments seamlessly.
Guess what?! We are here to help!As a payment processor, we often help ISOs shorten their overall sales cycle so that their salespeople can close more business quickly. Here are five tips that will help you onboard new prospects rapidly and keep them happy!
5 Ways You Can Shorten the Application Sales Cycle
Educate Your Customer
The primary goal of your conversation with any new potential customer should be to educate them. If you are dealing with new business owners, it is critical to help them understand the different modes of accepting ACH and credit card payments. While educating your customers, do not try and pitch them. Instead, help them understand the pros and cons associated with the different types of payments like wire transfers, ACH, credit card processing, etc. Educated customers make solid strategical decisions when better positioned to select the correct payment method for their businesses.
Find a Reliable Payment Processor
To provide the best merchant services, you need to partner up with a reliable payment processor. With a Nacha-certified partner, you and your customers can rest assured that the data and transactions are in safe hands. The best payment processors will not only help your customer accept credit card payments but enable their business to accept funds through other modes too. They help you set up complementary payment solutions like hosted payment portals, SMS payments, Email invoicing, Recurring billing, and more. These payment processors can also scour the market to ensure that the business owners enjoy the lowest possible processing fees on their transactions.
Offer a Single Point-of-Contact
Customer service is a crucial piece of the puzzle for merchant acquirers. Did you know that more than 62% of customers expect companies to adapt to their actions and behaviors? Most customers would be willing to pay a slightly higher fee if they can get a better service elsewhere. You can ensure that your customer stays happy by creating a single point of contact for them in your organization. By allocating a single point-of-contact, aka, a relationship manager for all merchant account providers and business owners, we ensure that all their queries and concerns are solved in a timely fashion.
Find Upsell and Cross-sell Opportunities
Did you know that attracting a new customer costs nearly five times more than keeping an existing one? Some of the best businesses are built on a loyal customer base. So, while getting new customers should always be a priority, retaining the existing ones should not take a backseat. In fact, you should look at ways to increase the wallet share per customer. This will help you run a highly profitable Independent Sales Organization (ISO), even with a handful of customers. If you have already set up credit card payment services for your customers, it is time that you help them discover the world of ACH payments too. By helping your customers set up a new payment method, you increase your revenue and help them accept payments through multiple modes. Implementing more payment methods helps most business owners attract more customers.
Don’t Be Pushy
Salespeople are often known to be pushy and we understand your predicament. You want to close the sale faster. You want to onboard the prospect quickly before they change their mind. You want to ensure that your prospect does not waste time searching for alternate service providers in the market. However, you need to understand that the best salespeople are the ones that put the customers first. They are the ones that put customer satisfaction over quarterly targets and incentives.
Sure, these salespeople may lose a deal or two. However, at the bottom line, they are the ones that build genuine relationships with their customers. As all salespeople already know, referral leads are the best type of hot leads that one can get. If you invest your time building strong relationships during the sales process, you will eventually impress the customer who will come back to you with these hot referral leads!
Conclusion
Customer satisfaction and success should be your number one priority as an ISO. Remember, getting business once per customer is not your goal. Instead, in an ideal world, you should be running your business with ever-increasing brand loyalty and referrals. While helping your customers set up their business bank accounts,
- Take some time to understand their business model and their requirements.
- Help them stay up-to-date with the latest PCI-compliance for a seamless transaction process.
- Educate them on the best practices and the news of the payment processing world so that they can save more on transaction fees.
- Offer them easy-to-understand terms and conditions so that they can rely on you for all their payment processing needs.
- Partner with a reliable ACH solution provider to offer seamless services.
If you follow these few steps, you can shorten the application sales cycle and ensure top-notch customer satisfaction for increased year-on-year business growth. Want to learn more about ACH and credit card processing with a reliable payment gateway service provider? We help you offer the most robust and technically advanced payment gateway and cash discount solutions. Partner with us!
Date originally published: January 28, 2022