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Education

an issue and you're able to give necessary tools to succeed before sending them into the field. You can't
merchants free terminals, and send untrained sales agents into the field and expect them to perform
you can place them on a month- like seasoned professionals; that's just wishful thinking. Sales is a skill
to-month agreement, then there that must be learned.
really isn't much selling taking Unfortunately, most smaller ISOs don't take the time to train their
place. More and more sales agents. If you think training is expensive, I can assure you that the cost
agents without real training or of training is a fraction of the money untrained agents are leaving on the
understanding of how to build table. Train your agents to sell, and reward them for their performance.
a valuable portfolio flooded the In today's market, there are countless opportunities to sell or lease POS
market and drove prices down. systems, business and consumer financing and many more solutions that
merchants could benefit from.
Other factors have also contributed
to lower margins in our industry, • Focus on a niche market: Sometimes the best way to create a well-
including regulations and costs; trained sales force is to build a specialized team that targets a specific
however, this article is focused on market and becomes expert sales professionals in that market. Not only
selling as it relates to smaller agents will this help you to develop a better sales team, but soon enough you
and ISOs, and while every ISO has will also make a name for yourself in that market. Learn about the best
been affected by lower margins, it is technological solutions available in your specific niche so that your team
the smaller ISOs that have suffered may present those value-added services to the customers. If you train
the most. In fact, this market has your team to focus on solutions that will help their customers make more
enabled the larger ISOs to participate money, then saving them money on processing becomes a non-issue.
in very favorable acquisitions of the Aaron Nasseh is the founder and Chief Executive Officer at Finical Inc. His extensive sales
smaller ISOs. and management experience includes having previously served as the General Manager of
What we can do CardPayment Solutions and Vice President of Sales at iPayment Inc. He may be reached at
anasseh@finicalinc.com or at 818-330-4055.
Now that I've reviewed some of the
concerns, here are a few suggestions:
• Ask yourself what you offer
that is different: If you don't
know this, you're in trouble.
Hopefully, your answer is not
that you offer the lowest pric-
ing. If your goal is to improve
your margins and lower your
attrition, stop selling on price,
and start focusing on value-
added benefits for your cus-
tomers. Something has to dif-
ferentiate you from the other
five salespeople that have vis-
ited your prospects in the past
week.
Whether you're going to offer
them a POS or technology so-
lution that will help improve
their efficiency, financing solu-
tions to help them grow their
businesses, marketing solu-
tions, or a list of other services
that are available to a merchant
but you're simply not market-
ing them, you need to provide
a real value to the merchants.
• Train your agents to sell: Fo-
cus on training your agents to
sell and provide them with the

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