What Keeps Merchants Up at Night? Toby Scammell - Womply
No matter what you sell, you need to know the source of your prospects’ pain.
What keeps them up at night?
What do they need - or not have enough of - than you can provide?
For merchant level salespeople (MLSs), understanding the challenges of small business owners and operators has never been more critical or more challenging.
In the past few years, technology has changed the whole world, while most small businesses have continued with business as usual.
Today, merchants find themselves operating in a world where the Internet has fundamentally changed consumer behavior, and they are overwhelmed by adapting to this new environment.
The widening gap between the world that merchants remember and the one that now surrounds them is a tremendous opportunity for MLSs.
Selling payment processing alone is not enough to create a value proposition that makes merchants stick with you or their processor.
However, if you can offer value-added services that address their biggest worries well then, you’ll be on to something.
So, what are those worries? Womply recently surveyed 3,000 merchants in all 50 states and asked them to rank their biggest worries. Here are the top responses...
Worry #1: Attracting customers
Worry #2: Having enough time for everything
Worry #3: Making enough money
Worry #4: Controlling costs
Worry #5: Hiring/retaining employees
These worries outranked options such as paying for health insurance, tax concerns, cash flow management, and the possibility of recession.
The simplest way to interpret these results is that revenue and time loom very, very large for merchants.
This makes sense: small businesses have always struggled to keep customers coming through their doors, and entrepreneurs obviously wear many hats and feel overstretched.
Knowing these worries, you can appeal to your clients’ pain, tailor your solutions, and overcome objections.
Understanding how merchants rank their pain also helps with resolving objections.
Worry comes from what’s at stake. For small businesses, attracting customers is literally the difference between staying open or shutting down.
It makes sense that revenue-focused worries rank higher than reducing expenses.
Womply asked 2,300 merchants how long they could stay in business if sales stopped entirely. The results were bleak: 1 in 5 would shut down within 30 days and 4 in 5 wouldn’t last 6 months.
Cost-cutting won’t solve that problem. Only increased sales will.
Acquiring customers, making money, and saving time are related issues.
Most merchants are stuck doing things the old way, which means trying to attract customers through traditional advertising or other “shout� methods.
They pour time and money into those channels and don’t see an increase in foot traffic because consumers have migrated to using their smartphones to find local businesses to patronize.
Time and money wasted, and no customers to show for it. You’d be losing sleep, too.
MLSs are in a prime position to really consult their merchant clients on these critical changes and provide solutions that help them attract more customers, make more money, and save time every day.
You just need to pair your value-added solutions to the most critical problems, and present them through the lens of what’s really worrying the merchant.
Everybody wins when this is done right. Agents make more money, merchants solve their biggest problems, and they remain in acquirers’ portfolios longer, because they receive more value. It all starts with knowing.