Finding a Winning Formula to Grow Your Merchant Portfolio
Whether you’re building your merchant portfolio valuation before selling it for an influx of capital or increasing monthly residual revenue so you can expand your business, you need to focus on two things: closing deals and customer retention. Without the combination of the two, your business can stagnate while you only service current accounts or constantly chase new business to try to replace accounts that churn.
The following 10 tips, divided between acquiring and retaining customers, can help you find the right balance that leads to merchant portfolio growth.
Enhancing Your Merchant Portfolio: 5 Valuable Tips for Account Integration
Your sales reps need a plan, training, and guidance to maximize their performance. These tips can help your sales team close more deals.
1. Listen
Top sales reps are great communicators. They can quickly share an elevator pitch and recall the speeds and feeds any business would need to know. But leading salespeople are also good listeners. A new contract often begins with a discussion in which the prospect does more of the talking, enabling the rep to identify pain points. Once reps identify the prospect’s pain, they can tailor their presentations and demos to address it, making their time with prospects more targeted and effective.
For example, brick-and-mortar merchants may struggle to keep up with the demand for mobile payments or need real-time inventory visibility. When you have a solution like Paradise POS that helps your agents overcome a prospect’s challenges, your sales team can shorten the sales cycle and find an easier path to closing deals.
2. Make the Best Use of Time
Your sales team must focus on viable leads. Even if sales reps have invested time into accounts they’d like to win but aren’t getting any indication they’re ready to sign, it’s better to walk away and spend time on accounts that are.
Sales reps can also save time by streamlining their workflows. Paper-based processes for managing sales activities take the time your reps could spend with prospects. Use a customer relationships management (CRM) solution, quote management system, or other systems that improve internal communications, automate reporting and follow-up reminders and increase sales teams’ productivity.
3. Update Your Website
Although equipping your sales team to identify top opportunities and close deals is essential to growing your merchant portfolio, you must also consider how well your website works for you.
A Gartner study shows that B2B buyers spend more than a quarter of their time researching companies online. Ensure your website is optimized for search so they’ll find your company on page 1 when they use keywords that describe your business. And when they do find your website, make sure it is updated, visually appealing, and contains all of the information prospects need before responding to a call to action and connecting with a sales rep.
4. Verticalize
You may think focusing on one market or niche might limit growth, but it is an effective growth strategy for many merchant services providers. By becoming an expert in one market segment, for example, QSR restaurants, convenience stores, or sporting goods retailers, you can learn the details and nuances of that space and perfectly tailor merchant services and solutions to that segment.
Additionally, when you focus on a specific market or niche, your time will be more balanced across industry events, and your sales team will learn and adapt to the evolving needs of the space more quickly. When prospects see that your sales team deeply understands their businesses, they’ll be more apt to explore your solutions.
5. Offer Value-added Service
Merchants will respond more positively to a solution provider if you can meet all of their needs. Merchant services are essential, but an integrated point of sale and payments solution with additional features, such as loyalty rewards program management, payroll, and inventory management, will provide more value and simplicity when it all comes from one company. Ensure you can offer all of the solutions your prospects need, which can help you grow your merchant portfolio and your business.
Mastering Account Retention: 5 Essential Tips for Your Merchant Portfolio
While converting leads is vital to a growing business, you’ll find that customer retention is equally, if not more, important. McKinsey & Company reports that among the world’s most successful companies, 80% of new revenues come from existing customers.
Consider these five tips for increasing the size of accounts in your merchant portfolio and customer success with your solutions.
1. Upsell
Schedule regular touchpoints with customers to see if their needs have changed and to make them aware of new, available solutions in addition to their current tech stack.
2. Interchange Management
Payment processing fees can change for various reasons—new regulations, a change in the merchant’s risk category, and a unique balance between card-present and card-not-present payments. Commit to your clients to help them control costs and maintain customer satisfaction.
3. Offer Dual Pricing
Ensure your clients know the option to discount sales when customers use cash, which can help decrease payment processing fees. This solution can help you build stronger relationships when you demonstrate that you prioritize their profitability.
4. Customer Service
This is the biggest driver of customer retention. Ensure you have account managers that have easy access to information on each client’s technology, their businesses, and information that can help them quickly troubleshoot issues, maximize uptime, and increase customer satisfaction.
5. Identify At-Risk Accounts and Intervene
Track activity with clients to watch for signs that they may churn. Data analytics can help identify those signs more quickly, giving you time to intervene and save the relationship.
A Partnership that Can Accelerate Merchant Portfolio Growth
Acquiring new customers and ensuring the success of current customers will require that resources from your sales, customer service, and account management teams work together to achieve merchant portfolio growth. But it would be best if you could also offer in-demand solutions and the support of your vendor partners.
If you’re ready to focus on growth, contact SPS to learn about solutions that will help you get your foot in the door with prospects and help you expand existing accounts.