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Education

StreetSmarts SM

“Starting in the Street

and ending at the

Merchant’s front door”
Steve Norell

A better way to reach merchant prospects

By Steve Norell every week on Business Monday, which cost $2,000 a
US Merchant Services Inc. week. Guess what the ad said? The Best Things In Life
Are Free. Get a free terminal when you process with US
fter all the years that I have been in this busi- Merchant Services. And this was in 1999 and 2000 before
ness, I am still at a loss about the best way to the free terminal thing had really hit full speed. Well, you
advertise when attempting to obtain new mer- can guess what happened. The phone rang nonstop, and
A chants. Advertising is not just expensive, but we wrote more merchants than we expected, but it never
also many times inefficient and frustrating. was cost effective.
Tried and true failures Then along comes the Internet age, and advertising takes
on new dimensions. Before the free terminal phenomenon
So first, let's take a walk down memory lane to the various took hold, companies began selling terminals at close to
ways many of us, including me, have attempted to find cost as long as you opened a merchant account with them,
the magic solution to advertising. When I first entered the and we all know how that turned out.
business I was told to take out a very small add in the
local papers and put it in the classifieds. I was assured Now we come to the present, and we are all experiencing
this was a time-tested method proven to be successful. So the pain of robo-calls done by offshore telemarketers
I gave it a shot, and guess what? It produced very little. I looking to accomplish only one thing: to set up
concluded that whoever time tested it should have spent appointments for their clients. These calls have become
more time testing it. so invasive that most merchant either don't accept them or
just hang up. Now I know what most reading this must be
The next thing I did was to devise campaigns that used thinking: if no one answers the calls or just hangs up, why
flyers and mailers. As most of you know, mailers will do they keep doing it? The answer is simple: it works. If
produce maybe a 1 to 2 percent success rate, which sounds you throw enough spaghetti against the wall, eventually
low but is really quite high. Back in the late '90s when some of it will stick.
the Internet was not what it is today, this seemed to be
the best method. However, I still felt that there must be So where do we go from here? After trying most of the
something better. advertising methods available today, I have decided
Big effort, small results I've had enough. It is a waste of money and time to try
advertising methods that have no future and produce
So I reached out to Verifone, which chipped in on an ad lackluster results.
campaign, and I ran a half-page ad in the Palm Beach Post

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