The Good, The Bad and The Amazing

I had a crazy week!  Last week, I spoke with about 75 of our sales people on the phone, and then drove out to Chicago to meet with the CEO and CFO of Integrity Payment Systems.  I have never been more excited about the future of our company and I want to share some statistics and success stories with you today as well as share a little insider information on some upcoming improvements / additions to our program.

First of all, we have finalized our cash advance program!  We are partnered with one of the most well respected institutions in the small business capital market and our sales team will be able to provide both traditional merchant cash advances and ACH loans based on total revenue.  This is the most lucrative commission opportunity in our industry and of course, as usual, we are going to provide the best reseller program in the industry for the sales partner.

We are going to provide merchant cash advances and working capital with longer terms than our competition to help our clients grow while preserving their cash flow.  If you are like me, you have always looked at most cash advance companies and the 3 to 4 month cash advances in particular as a negative.  This is why we never offered them before, but the program we are rolling out has much longer terms and will help your clients get the cash they need to grow without killing their long term profitability.

*If you have a cash advance in the works right now, email me the specifics, and I can get you a custom quote / commission while we are waiting for the official roll out.

Secondly, I am in talks with Integrity Payment Systems to make some important enhancements to our sales partner program, processes and compensation.  I can’t share the details yet, but get ready for a live event next week that you will not want to miss!  I will be rolling out these enhancements to our merchant services program as well as our new cash advance program.

Lastly, I want to share some statistics on our marketing platform and give you the inside scoop on how that is going.  So, here is the “Good the Bad and the Amazing” for our marketing platform.

The Good – We are starting to hear some success stories from the prospecting / lead nurturing and that is only going to grow!  I had several sales people tell me that they went into a business and were not able to sell on the first visit, but after adding their email address to our marketing platform, they were able to return the next week and make the sale because of the content we provided.  On April 1st, we are rolling out a series of eBooks and live events to our small business email subscribers.  These will create even more interest in what we have to offer, and most important, it will create more opportunities for the sales partner to return and make a sale!

If you have been using the “Lead Nurturing” field in the marketing platform, that is about to pay off in a big way!  In April we will be placing every client into a “Persona” where we will be specifically targeting them with eBook offers and Live Event opportunities based on their “Persona”  If you used the “Lead Nurture” field, that will be their default persona.  If this field wasn’t selected, we will look at their online activity to identify the service they are most interested in.

The Bad – The telemarketing leads started out as appointment scheduled leads at a cost of $30 each.  What we learned very quickly was two things.  First of all, the true cost of creating a quality appointment is about $75 in payroll and even then they are not really that solid.  The truth is that in our industry, telemarketing leads just aren’t that good because everyone is calling saying the same thing.  So, what was our solution?

We cut the price in half and guaranteed something we could actually deliver!  We now call and speak to a decision maker or someone with authority at the business, but instead of asking for an appointment to meet one of our sales people, we ask them for permission to send and introductory email to our local sales partner and enroll them in our small business email tips.  We confirm the correct email address and get the name of the decision maker and then send them an intro email for our local partner as well as start them on our daily email small business tip.  We charge as little as $15.00 per lead for these subscribers and we are already seeing the results as we let our content do the heavy lifting by creating the interest!

The Amazing – We are now consistently adding 60 to 100 new business owners to our subscriber list every day!  If this was the only thing you knew about our company, you could determine that our strategy will be successful over time.  About 70% of these new subscribers come from our call center but many of our sales partners have also picked up on the power of our model and they are adding emails to the system as well!  Our pace will increase during the year, but even if it stayed the same, that means in 12 months, we will have roughly 30,000 small business email subscribers.  What does that mean for our sales partners?

First of all, it means we will be producing 300 to 600 quality, inbound leads per month from our email list.  More importantly, it means that when we make a new blog post or video on YouTube, we will immediately have more views than anyone else competing for the attention of small business owners, sticking us at the top of the search results for Google and YouTube.

CLICK HERE to schedule a phone consultation about our marketing platform.

Today’s post was just me sharing some of my optimism about our company and its future.  This month alone, we are projecting to add 80 new marketing platform subscribers which means we will fill another 10% of our national territories in one month!  If you are waiting to join our team, I wouldn’t wait much longer because our territories are filling up fast and once they are full, you can still join, but all of the leads we generate from our efforts on the phone and online will be going to the partner that owns the territory.

Have a great day in the field!