This article came about from a conversation with Doug Funk. Doug is a member of our team who runs our marketing platform and works with our sales people to help them more effectively use our technology solutions. Doug had twenty years in sales success before coming to our team. So we struck up a conversation about why so few independent sales people achieve big time success. One surprising enemy of success early on is creativity. Allow me explain why the strength of creativity can be such a weakness when building a career in a new field of sales.
The key to building big time sales success is to approach that success in two distinct phases. Phase 1 is foundation building, and phase 2 is creative improvement. Many of you reading this post have past experience selling other products and services. When you came to the merchant services industry, you were excited to leverage your creative sales abilities to experience that same success. Unfortunately, I have seen many in this category of sales people disappointed. Their experience is much the same as the disappointment of a builder who tried to build a beautiful sky scraper on mud without first laying a solid foundation.
There are three ingredients to building a successful foundation in merchant services. Let me encourage you to put your creativity on a back shelf for the next ninety days in order to lay a solid foundation using these three ingredients. Once your foundation is in place, you will be ready to build a truly successful merchant services business using your creativity.
- First Ingredient: Walk into twenty businesses per day. No matter what else you do; no matter how smooth your pitch may be; and no matter how much sales experience you have; you must walk into twenty businesses per day in order to build a successful merchant services business. Again, there is a lot of room for creativity about what you do and how you prospect in these twenty businesses. But you have to walk into twenty businesses, five days per week if you want to build your business.
- Second Ingredient: A solid opening pitch. I have probably asked 500 different sales people to give me their opening pitch; I almost never get a decent response. Memorizing a good opening pitch is vital! Go to our Video Training Courses to learn my pitch for starters. Again, you can get really creative with our opening. However, before getting creative you first need to have a memorized opening pitch which you say at each business in order to have a foundation to build on.
- Third Ingredient: Organized follow up and data management. Do you record what happens on every visit to every business in a CRM? If not, you are trying to build on a foundation of mud. Many reps exercise their “creativity” by using a paper system or no system at all. This is a huge mistake and becomes more costly over time. You can build a lot of creativity on the foundation of a well documented pipeline. But the pipeline, notes, and stage information must all be in good order for you to use your creativity down the road.
I hope you will invest in building the foundation to your merchant services business over the next ninety days. Then you can leverage your creativity to build true success on a solid foundation.
Have a great day in the field!
James Shepherd
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