How to Sell One Merchant Services Account Per Day

Today I want to share 3 tips with you on how to achieve to holy grail of merchant services, one sale per day.  Most sales people can’t imagine achieving 20 merchant services sales per month.  This means your residual is growing by $600+ every month, you are bringing in $5,000+ in up front compensation and within 12 months you would be pretty well set.  The truth is that this goal is difficult and challenging but not as tough as you might imagine.  Here are 3 tips on how to achieve this goal.

#1 – Think about making 1 sale per day.  At its core, this is a very doable activity.  It probably takes 30 to 45 minutes to make a sale and get the paperwork done.  It takes another 30 minutes for paperwork at your office and then you might spend an hour helping with the installation.  This means it would take at most, about 2 hours each day to actually make a sale and install the terminal.

The part sales reps struggle with isn’t the 2 hours per day that it takes to make a sale and get the account active, it is the other 6 hours of the working day.  The key is to think of the other 6 hours as the time you spend preparing for, and setting up your 2 hour sales time.  Sales people love to go close a sale and do the paperwork but they fail to realize that it really does take about 6 hours of time to set yourself up for that one sale.  So, change your thought process about your day.  Think about these two separate time frames.  2 hours of each day should be spent writing up a deal and activating an account but, in order to do that, the other 6 hours must be spent prospecting and preparing for the sale.  Think through this process and start tracking your time.  How much time are spending finding prospects and nurturing leads so you have at least two solid prospects to try and close each day?

#2 – Walk into 20 businesses per day.  One question I get asked all the time is, what is the closing ratio for merchant services sales?  Here is how the numbers break down.  If you walk into 20 businesses per day, you will make 7 or 8 good contacts.  Usually, you will have about 10 follow up visits and 10 first time walk ins to accomplish this.  If you have 7 or 8 good contacts, you should collect 2 to 3 statements.  If you are collecting 2 to 3 statements per day, move on to tip number 3.

#3 – Learn how to close sales.  I am always amazed at how many sales people don’t know how to close a sale or even write one up.  Most sales people spend hours working on overcoming objections but, most sales are not a result of overcoming an objection.  Most sales are a result of recognizing buying signs and moving someone intentionally towards a purchase.  This is important to understand.  Most sales people feel really good when they “talk someone into buying” after they had an initial objection and they look at most of their sales as just “luck of the draw.”  This is not true.  In fact, when you spend an hour overcoming objections and pull out a sale, you probably just created a problem client who will eventually cancel.  The best sales people don’t spend their day arguing with prospects, they spend their day finding interested prospects and taking them through a smooth sign up process.

Here is a good role play for you to try with a friend:

Tell your friend that they  are an interested prospect and that you are going to walk them through a cost analysis and at the end they are going to give you buyer signs like, “I don’t have any other questions.” or “That looks pretty good.” or “How long does it take to get set up?” or “Is there any way we can get the price down a little bit?”  Make sure you not only have a good answer for these buyer signs but also make sure you can roll with them and go all the way through the paperwork.  The best sales people spend more time perfecting the way they go through the closing process and the paperwork than they do memorizing rebuttals to objections.

Do you know what to do if someone says “Yes”?  Most sales people end up looking surprised which is the worst possible emotion and gives your prospect a real reason to be nervous.  They think to themselves, “I think I am the only person that is deciding to buy from this sales person, they must not be very experienced or provide a good service.”  So, don’t look surprised, instead, expect them to say “Yes” and know exactly what comes next.

I hope these three tips will help you get closer to the goal of 1 sale per day!

James Shepherd

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