Prospecting is the engine that drives your merchant services business. If you are not actively seeking new business, your client base will begin to shrink; your income will drop; and you will eventually be out of business. Today I want to share five powerful prospecting tips with you. But before I do that, I want to ask you a question: A
re you Prospecting? If you want to improve a system, you must have a system on which to improve. Here are some questions you need to answer to build your system. Remember that any system will be better than having no system at all.
-
How many hours per day / week do you spend prospecting for new merchants?
-
What is your opening pitch?
-
What information do you gather, and what do you do with it?
-
How do you track good prospects for follow up, and what is your follow up offer?
-
Do you have a good prospecting system, and do you follow your own system?
Below are my top five most powerful prospecting tips:
-
#5 – Choose a target market and decide who you are not going to try and sell. You can select your target market based on geographical location, business type, business size, or a combination of all three. But you need to identify who your target market is.
-
#4 – Use LinkedIn to gain connections, referrals, and references.
-
#3 – Memorize, rehearse, and track the results from your opening pitch.
-
#2 – Learn the skill of “Active Listening.” This is not some general idea, but rather a specific skill that you need to develop.
-
#1 – Learn the art of the block schedule. If you really want to succeed in any business, you must learn to create and keep a block schedule. Start each week with a blank calendar. Schedule in everything that must be done, including personal time. This should leave you with your available work time. Next, block out time for prospecting and other important projects. Use the remaining time to go through your inbox of tasks. Lastly, you must keep your schedule and track your actual activities in a journal. Or you could use another schedule for your “Actual” time usage like I do.
I hope this short blog post will help you improve your prospecting skills!
James Shepherd
The Top 3 Reasons to Build a Merchant Services Business
Read the next post: Quick Marketing Tip – How to Sell Merchant Services
Quick Marketing Tip – How to Sell Merchant Services