How to Make $1000 a Week Selling Merchant Services

Recently I had dinner with an agent who’s been in the industry six months to a year.  We talked in-depth about his start in the industry, answering questions such as “How did he get started; how did he survive?”  This content today was initiated by that conversation.  I want to tell you how to guarantee you’ll make a thousand dollars a week selling merchant services.

I realize many of you are making much more than a thousand dollars a week –  congratulations to you!  But there are many agents new to the industry or new enough not to be at a point of getting a consistent thousand-dollar-a-week income.  A thousand a week in my mind is a minimum.  If you have a growing family in today’s economy, you need to make some money.  There are some rules about our industry I’ve found over the years which seem to be pretty accurate.

#1.  The number of businesses into which you walk on a daily basis where you have not yet spoken to the decision maker is going to be roughly equivalent to the number of sales you make in a month.  (I’ll mention telemarketing shortly.)  The average sales rep to whom I talk walks into about four to eight businesses a day for prospecting.  Even that number may be a little generous; usually there are two days when the average rep doesn’t do any prospecting.  So the average reps are walking into four to eight businesses a day, and they feel like they’re doing a pretty good job.

Then I get calls from these reps saying, “James, I’m really expecting to make 12 to 15 sales a month.”  Well, if you want to make 12 to 15 sales a month, you need to walk into 12 to 15 businesses a day where you have not yet spoken to the decision maker.  That number doesn’t include follow-ups –  not the ones you return to do the paperwork, the installation, or for customer service.  I’m talking about prospecting.  Those are business owners to whom you haven’t talked yet – the decision maker.

The way to make a thousand dollars a week in this business is actually pretty simple.  Go prospecting in the field for about two hours a day.  You can usually walk into 20 businesses where you’ve never talked to the decision maker yet in two hours.  That number may vary, depending on your location.  In a mini-mall, you can walk into 20 businesses quickly.  If you are in a rural area, driving from place-to-place will probably take more time.  But two hours of prospecting will average about 20 businesses into which you’ll walk for prospecting every day.  If you do that, you are going to make about 20 sales a month.  

I had lunch with another rep who is a top sales rep.  He’s got to be near the top of the whole industry as far as cash discounting right now.  He very consistently makes 20 to 25 sales every single month without any leads whatsoever.  I said, “Man, you must be working like a crazy man.  What are your hours?”  This was the gist of his answer, “I drop my kids off at school around 8:30.  Then I go to the gym for an hour till 9:30 or 9:45, get a shower, and get dressed.  I’m usually in the field around 10:00 a.m.  I have to stop about 2:30 to pick-up my kids from school.”  I asked if he was joking, but he assured me that was his schedule.  My next question was, “Okay, so when do you do your other stuff?”  He said, “I prospect from 10 to 2:30 every day.  In the evening, I catch up on paperwork or submitting applications, etc.”  He’s making 20 to 25 sales a month by working 4 or 5 hours a day.  He is just prospecting during those hours, though, very focused work.  He is walking into one business, then another business, then another business, then another business.  Interestingly enough, this is not an unusual result.  In talking to many reps, I’m often surprised at the level of work and time that it takes.

Sometimes a processor hires me to spend a day in the field with a good rep who is struggling for some reason.  One such time I went to a mini-mall with the rep.   I quickly understood the problem when the rep had a different excuse not to walk into business after business!  I heard, “Well, I think it doesn’t look like the owner is there;” (How could he tell??)  “I think I already talked to this one; I think this one is a national chain, so we couldn’t sell them; I don’t know if our processor works with that business type,” etc.
My advice was to start at one end of the mini-mall and walk into every single business.  That’s it.  The worst that would happen is spending a minute in there, and getting a “no.” No big deal!   More time is wasted trying to decide what to do than just walking in. 

#2.  Walking into businesses on a daily basis is going to guarantee your income.  Here is how the numbers break down.  The newer rep who I mentioned at the beginning of this article discovered making sales is a numbers game.  Although he didn’t know anything about payment processing, he knew if he walked into enough businesses, he’d find a percentage of merchants who were unhappy with their current processor.  He didn’t know how to pitch it and didn’t understand it very well.  But he used our quote tool (instantquotetool.com) to make all his proposals and just walked into a lot of businesses saying he was looking for dissatisfied merchants.  Then he switched them over to his company.

Now you might think, “Well, my goodness!  There are not very many people like that.”  And you’d be right.  There are probably about three to seven percent of the people who are upset with their current company.  If you go to 20 businesses a day, that’s 100 a week.  By walking into 20 businesses a day, you’ll come in contact with a few of those.  And you’ll make one or two sales every single week, maybe three.  If you are doing cash discounting, leasing a terminal, and making some up-front bonus money, getting to a thousand dollars a week is not that difficult.

#3.  Here is my challenge to you today.  Take a hard look at your prospecting.  Are you really working as hard as you could?  Do you honestly believe that if you spent two hours every day, five days a week, 20 days a month just prospecting (again, that means walking into a business where you’ve never yet spoken to the decision maker), you are not going to make a thousand dollars a week?  If you know that you would make a thousand dollars a week, then why aren’t you doing that?  Go do it.  Get it done.

#4.  My last tip concerns telemarketing.  What do those numbers look like?  Instead of using the number of businesses into which you walk, use your number of contacts.  So if you want to make 20 sales a month using telemarketing to schedule appointments for yourself, you need to talk to 20 business owners a day.

That’s your numbers.  Have a great day!