Payment processing is a competitive industry, and to ensure your independent sales organization’s continuous growth and the health of your residuals portfolio, it’s crucial that you provide your team with the most modern tools available to help them succeed. IRIS CRM, the payments industry’s leading customer resource management platform, is designed specifically to help agents and managers at ISOs reclaim lost time, streamline administration and daily task management, and, most importantly, deliver a better, more effective sales process.
To provide that enhanced organizational productivity and sales quality, IRIS CRM offers a full host of tools covering everything from sales, to communication, to marketing, to billing and payments, customer support, and beyond. But while IRIS CRM covers organization-wide operations, it’s arguably your sales team who stands to benefit from it the most, because, at the end of the day, customer resource management is all about creating better relationships in order to drive sales and revenue generation. The following represent just a few of the sales tools included in IRIS CRM that your team will use every single day to help better serve your prospects and existing merchants, and to build the strongest possible residuals portfolios for themselves and your ISO.
Lead Acquisition and Management Tools to Keep Your Funnel Full and Flowing
Leads are the fuel that keeps the engine of your business – your sales process – running. Not only is it important to keep the top of your sales funnels full of that fuel, but it’s also crucial that you use it as efficiently as possible. IRIS CRM includes a full lead management suite to help your agents deliver a more effective sales process from first contact all the way through to the finalization of a new merchant agreement. The result is fewer leads slipping through the cracks, an elevated level of service in each lead interaction, and more prospects converted into signed merchants.
Lead Acquisition Tools:
IRIS CRM helps to keep the top of your sales funnels full by automating as much of the lead acquisition process as possible. New lead accounts can be automatically generated and populated in a number of ways, including web forms, email links, inbound telephone calls, and more. For instance, when a merchant submits a quote request on your website, rather than just capturing that information in an email as you would with an autoresponder, IRIS CRM can use the submitted data to automatically create a new lead account, eliminating the need for an agent to do it manually.
You can also use IRIS CRM’s lead importer to migrate leads on masse, with field validation and email validation automatically built into the process. Finally, your agents can manually add new leads to the system from their desks or even from their phones in minutes by clicking on the “new lead” button from anywhere within the CRM and filling out the fully customizable and configurable set of lead information fields.
Lead Management Tools:
Once you’ve acquired new leads, it’s crucial that you nurture those prospects through each step of the sales process in order to ensure the highest possible conversion rates. IRIS CRM’s lead management suite is designed specifically to enable and enhance that relationship building so that your team can provide the level of personalized sales and service required to make each lead feel like they’re the only lead.
Leads within the system can be categorized at a number of levels. At the highest level, you can categorize your leads by their position in the sales process, with out-of-the-box options including qualifying, urgent, closing, long-term follow-up, and more. Those categories are fully customizable, enabling you to track each lead’s journey from pre-qualified to a customer in any way you wish. You can also sub-categorize leads by custom group types, campaign types, lead sources, and more. As each lead moves through the process, your agents can easily update their status, ensuring no lead ever gets forgotten or lost in the noise.
Because all areas of the CRM are fully integrated, from the lead management suite to the power dialer to the marketing tools and beyond, every touch between your agents and a new prospect is automatically logged to the notes section of the relevant lead account. That section of each lead’s account also includes information on attachments, call recordings, support tickets, and payments – all of which the system updates automatically as new interactions are generated. The result is that the vital details of every phone call, every email, every SMS message, every in-person meeting, every payment, every support request, even every website visit, are automatically captured for your agents’ future reference. Agents wishing to add manual notes to flesh out that customer information further can do so with an easy-to-use text editor in the lead notes section. Finally, that entire wealth of lead data can be easily filtered and searched, ensuring that your agents can find the information they need to provide the best sales experience possible in a matter of seconds.
Web Visitor Tracking for Real-Time Prospect Insights
When it comes to delivering an effective sales pitch, the more your agents know about any given prospective merchant, the better. Pre-sales homework will always be important, but reducing the amount of time it takes for your agents to gain important insights into a prospect’s needs is a great way to make their jobs easier and improve the overall success of your team. IRIS CRM’s lead management suite is all about streamlining agents’ access to important customer data, but the platform’s web visitor tracking takes things to another level by giving agents a real-time glimpse into which products and services individual leads are scoping out on your website.
Once a lead account has been generated in the system, your agents can then send that lead customized links and QR codes via email (or even through the mail on a postcard) that are unique to that individual user. When the lead clicks through to your website from their custom link, that visit is logged in IRIS CRM, which then provides real-time insights into how the prospect is interacting with the site. Every page the lead visits, every on-site link they click, will be automatically saved to their lead notes. If the lead has cookies enabled – which most web users do – each time they come back to the site, the same thing will happen.
Your agents can use that treasure trove of lead data to both gain insight into where a prospective merchant’s interests lie, and to inform the creation of more tailored, customized solutions for their proposed merchant services. It essentially removes or minimizes one stage of the sales process, because rather than agents going in cold and asking a merchant what services they’re in the market for or where their pain points lie, the agent can instead go into the earliest interactions knowing which of your services and solutions the prospect has already spent time researching. Not only does that speed up the sales process, but it impresses the prospect, giving your agent a leg up and showing the merchant that your team understands their needs right out of the gate.
An Advanced Proposal Generator to Speed Up the Creation of Sales Materials
One of IRIS CRM’s most powerful tools is the built-in proposal generator, which enables your agents to quickly create detailed price comparisons for your prospects. The proposal generator guides your agents through the simple generation process step-by-step, prompting them for certain key information and outputting an attractive final document based on your choice of easily selectable proposal templates. The result is higher quality sales materials that paint a clear picture of the savings you can offer to your merchants, with less time spent struggling to create them.
In the first step of proposal generation, your agents select the plan comparison they want to show the prospect. If your ISO is offering the prospect tiered pricing, your agents can generate a tiered-to-tiered comparison. If you’re proposing moving the merchant onto interchange-plus pricing, your agents can select two types of tiered-to-interchange comparisons, providing exact or estimated comparisons depending on the type of tiered plan the merchant is currently on. Finally, interchange-to-interchange allows detailed pricing comparisons to be created for merchants already coming from interchange-plus environments.
Once a comparison type has been selected, your agents simply fill in the merchant’s vital business contact information, plug in the comparison volume, current rate, and proposed rate for each different card type, enter any standard or additional fees, and then complete the proposal. The system will output an overview for your agent to check before finalizing the proposal, and, if everything is correct, the final proposal will be generated covering volume, current and proposed rates, current and proposed fees, and savings for each card type, with a summary of the total overall savings a merchant can unlock by switching to your ISO.
The proposal generator makes it possible to put together accurate, detailed pricing comparison in a matter of minutes, making it easier than ever for your agents to create convincing, credible sales documents that merchants will appreciate.
Electronic Signature to Minimize Friction in Deal Closing
Once a merchant is convinced that your ISO is the right choice for them, it’s in everyone’s best interest to get the deal closed as quickly as possible. For the merchant, a fast close means they can get started with their new merchant services – and the associated savings – as quickly as possible. For your ISO, it means reducing the risk of the merchant having second thoughts, and it also gets the residuals flowing with minimal delay. IRIS CRM’s built-in e-signature functionality is designed specifically to streamline and accelerate deal closing by making it easier to produce and retrieve signed contracts, regardless of how far away or remote your new client may be.
With e-signature, you can map your standard documents into digitally-fillable PDFs that can be legally signed right on the screen, without the need to print or scan anything. That enables your team to send secure, uneditable documents to prospects anywhere in the world, and retrieve them fully signed, with full form completion ensured, and with maximum convenience for all parties involved. The result is a faster transition from the close of the sales process to the beginning of a merchant’s services with your ISO.
Better still, because IRIS CRM’s TurboApp boarding tool is designed specifically to handle e-signed documents, you can then import those signed merchant agreements directly into the CRM and let TurboApp handle the vast majority of the data entry involved in merchant onboarding. Your agents will no longer have to manually transfer data from a paper or scanned merchant application, accelerating boarding, and reducing the chances for costly data entry errors that could potentially sink an application.
Full Salesperson Calendar Integration to Streamline Daily Workflows
IRIS CRM offers full calendar integration and a host of tools to help your agents manage their schedules, including a built-in appointment board, and advanced task management. In fact, because IRIS CRM’s scheduling and calendar management suite is so fully integrated with the rest of the CRM features, many salespeople use the calendar area of the CRM as their home base, managing all of their tasks, communications, customers, and sales activities from within that space.
IRIS CRM enables full two-way calendar integration with both Outlook 365 and Google Calendar, so your team can manage everything from inside the CRM or from the native application, with full synchronization between the two. From within IRIS CRM’s calendar page, your agents can view all of their tasks and appointments by the month, week, or day, and they can easily add new events with the click of a button. They can also launch emails, SMS messages, or phone calls, access internal chat messages, and submit help tickets directly from within the calendar area.
Management of the calendar from elsewhere in the CRM is equally as easy. Agents can add tasks or appointments to their calendars from within any lead’s profile through the embedded event management panel, and thanks to permissions-based access, it’s even possible for users to add and manage events on other users’ calendars from within their own CRM accounts – a necessary feature for most busy managers and executives.
IRIS CRM also comes with a built-in weekly appointment board to make it easy for agents to track and manage their important sales appointments and for managers to ensure appointments are being kept and sales team productivity is high. The appointment board can be configured by users or user classes, and displays the full week ahead, including each day’s confirmed, reset, completed, and total appointments. Agents can see the details of each scheduled or completed an appointment with a single click, edit the events, listen to recordings of phone appointments, and link back to the relevant leads all from right within the appointment board.
Thorough Sales Metrics to Drive Better Training and Decision Making
You can’t manage what you can’t measure, so, as a manager, it’s important to have access to key metrics on sales activities when and where you want them. IRIS CRM’s sales metric dashboard provides key insights into a wide variety of sales activities, including lead updates, taken notes, status updates, tasks set, telephone talk time, emails and SMS messages sent and received, and appointments set, confirmed, and completed. The result is rapidly available data on your team’s productivity, better management decisions, and better direction of training resources.
Sales metrics can be viewed by user groups, user classes, and individual users, ensuring that you can drill the data down to the exact level you need to. You can easily select from a range of pre-set date ranges or select a custom range, and the sales data can be exported in Excel or CSV formats for use with other applications with a couple of clicks. Permissions-based access enables you to select whether sales agents have access to the historical sales data – both their own and their peers’, should you wish to stoke some friendly competition among your team.
These represent just some of the incredible sales features included in IRIS CRM, but the platform doesn’t stop at sales. It also includes a host of tools designed to streamline and enhance all areas of your ISO’s business, from daily communications to billing and payments, to customer service and support, and beyond. Best of all, there is no limit on users, or on the leads or documents, you store within the system.
To find out more about the full suite of tools included in IRIS CRM, including the platform’s industry-leading sales tools, contact us and a member of the IRIS CRM team would be more than happy to answer all of your questions or to provide you with a guided demonstration of the software. Or, if you’re ready to put IRIS CRM to work in your ISO, you can start your free, no-commitment 14-day trial of the fully functional platform today.