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Education

What keeps merchants up at night? Top five merchant worries

So, what are those worries? Womply
By Barry Davis recently surveyed 3,000 merchants in
Womply all 50 states and asked them to rank
their biggest concerns as business
o matter what you sell, you need to know the source of your pros- owners. Here were their top five re-
pects' pain. What keeps them up at night? What do they not have sponses:
– or not have enough of – that you can provide? For merchant level 1. Attracting customers
N salespeople (MLSs), understanding the challenges of small busi- 2. Having enough time for every-
ness owners and operators has never been more critical or more challenging. thing
3. Making enough money
In the past few years, technology has changed the whole world, while most 4. Controlling costs
small businesses have continued with business as usual. Today, merchants 5. Hiring/retaining employees
find themselves operating in a world where the Internet has fundamentally
changed consumer behavior, and they are overwhelmed by adapting to this These worries outranked options
new environment. such as paying for health insurance,
tax concerns, cash flow management
New landscape means new opportunities and the possibility of a recession. The
simplest way to interpret these results
This widening gap between the world that merchants remember and the one is that revenue and time loom very,
that now surrounds them is a tremendous opportunity for MLSs. Selling very large for merchants. This makes
payment processing alone is not enough to create a value proposition that sense: small businesses have always
makes merchants stick with you or their processor. struggled to keep customers coming
through their doors, and entrepre-
However, if you can offer value-added services that address their biggest wor- neurs obviously wear many hats and
ries – well then, you'll be on to something. constantly feel overstretched.

What's interesting about these find-
ings is the top two worries – attract-
ing customers and having enough
time – don't change when you filter
the results by business owners who
feel optimistic or pessimistic about
their business outlook. In other
words, these two quandaries are uni-
versal for small business owners.
Tailored solutions
dissolve objections
Knowing this, you can appeal to your
clients' pain, tailor your solutions and
overcome objections. If I were selling
a POS system, for example, I would
frame the entire pitch around the
technology's potential to impact these
two pain points. I would explain that
many people won't patronize a busi-
ness that doesn't accept credit cards,
so you'll attract more customers with
a modern payment portal than you
would without one.

Then, I'd extol the many efficiencies
of swiping a card over making change
for cash payments, including the time
saved on the accounting side. Time is
money, after all, especially for busy
merchants.

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