The growth and success of your independent sales organization – ISO depend on your ability to consistently bring in new merchants – and not just any merchants, but ones that represent high-quality, profitable, long-term partnerships. In many ways, it’s the skill of your independent agents and sales staff that drive the process, and the following are four ways you can help those members of your team do their jobs both more effectively and more efficiently.
Partner with the Best Processors
As a sales organization, you essentially act as an intermediary between merchants and payment processors. The level of responsibility you take on will depend on your service agreements with those processors, but in the end, you’re reselling the services of another company. That means that the payment processors you choose to partner with have a huge impact on your ability to sign new merchants. It’s crucial that you partner with leading processors – and preferably as many of them as you can – so that you can in-turn offer your merchants the widest possible set of service options, ensuring every single one of your prospects needs can be met.
Plug Leaks in Your Lead Management
One of the biggest factors in poor sales is leaky lead management. Your leads are the lifeblood of your entire sales process, so it’s incredibly important that you both keep a constant supply of new ones entering the top of your funnel, and also that you cultivate and nurture your existing leads in order to maximize their potential. One of the best ways to do that is to employ a customer resource management platform with a strong lead-management suite. Doing so will ensure that your lead management is as streamlined (and automated) as possible, so that no hot lead will ever slip through the cracks, and that each prospect will receive the highest possible level of personalization in the ISO sales process.
Approach Merchants as Long-Term Relationships
The residuals generated by your merchants are yours for the lifetime of their relationship with the payment processor you connect them with, so approach them with a focus on that lifetime value. One of the easiest ways to poison the ISO sales process is to treat it as transactional, rather than the start of a long, productive, mutually beneficial relationship. Ensuring your agents and sales staff never forget that prospects represent important relationships and not just commissions and deals to close is a great way to boost your long-term sales success.
Give Your ISO Sales Team the Technology Needed to Excel
Technology augments almost every aspect of our lives today, and sales are no different. In addition to improving your lead management, customer resource management software can also significantly boost the productivity and effectiveness of your agents and staff through a number of tools designed specifically to aid the sales process. IRIS CRM, for instance, comes with an industry-leading power dialer that supercharges your team’s ability to conduct phone sales – a largely numbers-based game. It also includes a full analytics suite enabling management to monitor and analyze each agent’s performance, strengths, and weaknesses, so that custom-tailored sales training can be offered to help your team meet their full potential.
From marketing to communications, to customer support, and beyond, IRIS CRM can improve almost all areas of your ISO’s operations, resulting in not only more merchants signed, but more profit per merchant as well. For more information on how IRIS CRM can help you get the most out of your team, contact us today.