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Education

Seven ways to build • Create a successful agent profile by identifying
your top agents and determining what makes
a stronger ISO them successful. If you don’t yet have agents, ask
yourself, “What has made me a good salesperson?”
and build a profile based on your own traits.

• Be specific about the skills, habits, work practices
and attitudes that contribute to agent success.
When interviewing new people, make sure they
have these same attributes.

• Develop standard interview questions for
each applicant and score responses to compare
individual answers. This will help you evaluate all
interviews fairly.
• Draft questions so they will give you a good idea
about the candidate’s core abilities and how they’ve
handled challenges in similar work environments.

Since most agent positions are phone-based, consider
By Matt Nern conducting the initial interview by phone to assess phone
SignaPay Ltd. etiquette and communication skills. By doing this, you’ll
be able to determine whether a second interview is worth
o matter what happens in the wide world, we your time and assess the likelihood they’ll succeed in your
can take actions to strengthen our businesses business.
and thereby improve the quality of life for 3. Keep the sales funnel full
N ourselves and others. This article offers seven
ways you can build a thriving ISO. It doesn’t matter how great your agents are if you aren’t
getting them viable leads. Drumming up your own
1. Focus on your niche leads and referrals is great but requires significant
Merchants are diverse in their business styles and effort. For faster lead generation, hit the list suppliers
processing needs. Restaurants might be higher volume, for phone numbers. Here are a few of the numerous
but you may have POS systems that are difficult to deal services available:
with. Petro merchants have gas pumps that complicate • telephonelists.biz: Offers a plan for $129 per
standard processing. Some medical businesses require month that allows 20,000 business lead downloads
HIPPA compliance of their business partners. Don’t spread and 24-hour database access. It also sells in bulk by
yourself thin trying to fulfill every type of processing for state area starting at $239 per download.
every type of merchant; focus instead on a few types of
merchants in industries with which you have experience. • Cole Lists: Only charges for what you use. For every
record you download you use a credit. The more
Many successful salespeople in the payments industry records you download, the cheaper the credits.
came from the industries they now serve because they are An annual plan for unlimited leads is restricted to
so familiar with the ins and outs of that business type and specific areas. Pricing starts from $0.11 per record
know their processing challenges. Your time is valuable.
Spend it wisely by prospecting merchants with whom • Hoovers: Is one of the biggest names in the business,
you know you will have a higher rate of success. Once only selling B2B leads. It is a bit more expensive but
you establish yourself as the expert payment processor offers more email data than most and more detailed
provider in that realm, your rate of referrals will rise for information on the business size/type/volume, etc.
that industry.
• InfoFree: Ideal for smaller businesses, InfoFree
2. Hire smarter offers a free contract manager as part of its package
and admin support throughout the telemarketing
Good sales agents don’t necessarily need payments process. Access to searches and lists costs $79.95
industry experience, but they do need to be able to talk to per month with limited downloads.
anyone at any time. This includes cold calling, a unique
skill. While providing training for your current team will When using phone lists, robocalls are a no-no. Be sure a
go a long way toward improved sales, hiring the right live person is dialing out. Recently, the Telephone Robocall
people to begin with gets sets you up for faster success. Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence (TRACED)
Here are tips for hiring new agents: Act was enacted. It prohibits the use of robocalls and
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