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made the adjustment. Next, we had to reconfigure how we I do believe we reacted well in protecting our staff and
were going to deploy some of the terminals we work with moving everyone to their homes. By the time we resume
and solved that by shipping terminals to someone’s home. going back to our offices, I know our people will be ready
Boarding applications and rearranging of agent support for that and will be glad to be back.
required some major adjustments as well.
Challenges that lie ahead will be no different than what
The biggest issue was getting our sales partners to un- we have experienced for years. There will always be new
derstand why application approvals, equipment deploy- companies out there to compete with. There will always
ment, and overall customer service and technical fixes be new technology to learn. The key for current and new
would take longer. Both processing entities that most of people entering this industry is to find a comfort level
our business goes to also moved their peronnel to their with a company that is open, has full reporting, has a
homes. Due to this change, customer service and technical simple way of doing business, but is willing to continually
support response times increased. The concept of same- educate you and present products that help grow your
day approvals and deployment turned into next-day. Re- residuals and commissions.
ceiving VAR sheets, and gateway setups also went from
one day to a few days, so setting new expectations created We all have different business models, and ours is focused
disappontments, and the word “rush” disappeared. on the long-term residuals. At least for the foreseeable
future, we need to continue being patient and not beat up
Most of our sales groups are face-to-face folks, which led the customer service person or tech person on the other
to a drop off in new business, given that lots of businesses end of the phone conversation. We need to remember that
either closed or didn’t wish to have visitors. Given that we everyone is dealing with family issues associated with
couldn’t solve the business closure issue, we focused on COVID-19, whether it is someone being sick, children
developing in our Betterpay portal a user friendly e-sign doing remote schooling, a loss of a job or the lack of
capability for all applications and forms. This gave all of normalcy. If we focus on helping each other, and continue
our people the ability to send out a completed application to push hard in business, we will be fine.
for signature and avoid the face-to-face time spent hand-
writing an application. Adoption of using the e-sign pro-
gram is increasing, but of course we wish everyone would Jared Isaacman
use it. Shift4
We also spent considerable time developing marketing 1. When COVID first hit, we quickly adapted our
materials on all of our product offerings that our sales operations and shifted development efforts to focus
groups could use. We made a conscious decision not to on products that would help our customers address
compete with our agents with a direct sales force, so all pandemic-related challenges. This included the release
of our literature is designed with only our sales partners of QR Pay for contactless payment, QR Ordering for
contact information. contactless restaurant ordering, SkyTab for curbside
Additionally, we realized that by growing our
agent base, and educating and training some A Also find us on lso find us on FFacebook, acebook,
qualified new people, we could make up for L LinkedIn & inkedIn & TTwitter for the witter for the
some of the loss in application volume that we
mos
hoped was only a temporary situation. most up-to-date stories, t up-to-date stories,
can’t miss events and newest an’t miss events and newest
Our company is on solid ground due to cutting c
industry announcements.ustry announcements.
back expenses and increasing revenue from our ind
new sales partners. I do expect until we get past
at least the first quarter of 2021 that we will not
see any positive change in our production.
Our plans call for continued recruiting and
training. Most of my day is peronally spent in
that area. We also have plans to increase our
marketing, and after the holidays, to hire addi-
tional people because, based on the response we https://www.facebook.com/TheGreenSheetIncttps://www.facebook.com/TheGreenSheetInc
h
have received from our agent/office program, h https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-green-sheetttps://www.linkedin.com/company/the-green-sheet
we need to be prepared to be able to handle an
expected large influx of new business starting h https://twitter.com/The_Green_Sheetttps://twitter.com/The_Green_Sheet
in the second quarter of next year.
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