Where do ISOs look when they want to hire sales agents from outside the acquiring industry? Just about everywhere.
Recruiters agree some occupations serve as good training grounds for merchant services sales, including any business-to-business outside sales job where the customers are merchants.
Candidates for the acquiring business who already sell to merchants can bring a Rolodex of contact information that gives them a head start on a new career, sources say.
Some recruiters also draw upon the lessons of their own work experience when pursuing candidates. That can lead to searches in unlikely but rewarding places.
Proponents of hiring from outside the industry say recruits fresh from other jobs do not carry an industry veteran’s burden of bad habits. Being free of that baggage can compensate for the time and expense of training and hand-holding beginners, they say.
When placing people new to the industry with smaller ISOs, Curt Hensley, CEO of Impact Payments Recruiting, a Phoenix-based payments headhunter, looks for candidates with experience in much the same B2B sales roles that other recruiters favor.
Those fields include selling copiers, printers, office supplies and Yellow Pages advertising to merchants. ISOs that specialize in selling to doctors might consider sales people experienced in pharmaceutical or medical supplies sales, Hensley suggests. Sales people for food and beverage distributors have a head start on selling merchant services to restaurants, he says.
Simply having contact with a large number of merchants can outweigh sales experience in some cases. Certified public accountants, for example, work with lots of retailers and earn their trust, says Naomi Mastera, senior account manager for iPayment Inc., a Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based ISO.
CPAs became a source of merchant referrals to sales agents and then got wise to the possibility of collecting residuals for signing up merchants themselves, Mastera says. Soon, she began signing up CPAs as agents, who typically close four or five deals a month, just setting up their clients for merchant services.
Another job title seldom associated with selling has become a source of merchant accounts for iPayment, Mastera says. She has been taking on Web page designers as sales agents because they work with many merchants.
Anyone who sets up point-of-sale systems has enough merchant contacts to qualify as a potential agent, but Mastera is finding especially promising candidates among those who set up POS equipment in parking garages, she says.
She also has a friend with a company that sells website advertising to spas. Now the friend is calling advertising clients and asking to see their merchant card statements to see if she can save them money, Mastera says.
While looking beyond the usual outside-the-industry categories, Mastera still pays particular attention to one of the common outside sources of potential sales agents: copier sales people.
“If you’re a copier salesperson—and I did it for five years out of college—you get thrown out of buildings,” she says. “It’s a numbers game, and that type of salesperson understands this type of sales.”
That kind of hard-won experience means a lot to recruiters in the acquiring business. Besides experience in other B2B sales jobs, however, candidates should display a set of characteristics that any recruiter can cite.
Those qualifications include outgoing personalities, a strong ambition to make money, the ability to develop rapport quickly, the capacity to become a trusted advisor and a willingness to take care of the merchant after the sale, says Tannon McCaleb, an industry recruiter and a managing partner of Cardgigs, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based payments industry job board with an emphasis on the acquiring business.
“We look for the type motivated to get out of bed and go knock on the doors,” says McCaleb.
Those traits qualify a candidate for a salaried sales job but not an independent contractor’s role at Priority Payment Systems LLC, an Alpharetta, Ga.-based ISO, says Duayne, Haskett, vice president of ISO/agent business development.
Priority seeks independent agents who have the entrepreneurial spirit and have run their own businesses, says Haskett. “They understand what it means to work for themselves,” an important part of becoming a successful independent contractor, he says.
The best candidates for independent status also have the financial backing to withstand the lean days at the beginning of a career in acquiring, Haskett continues. “Someone who’s financially struggling in the early going in our industry is going to have the most difficult time,” he notes.
But without experience, even candidates with the most sterling qualities may not warrant a shot at selling merchant services to the giant national retailers, says Impact Payments Recruiting’s Hensley. At that level, sales people make presentations to C-level executives and have to understand how to integrate payments with point-of-sale and accounting systems, he says.
While agents may wrap up a sale the first time they call on a small merchant, the sales cycle for the top 2,000 national chains takes much longer, Hensley says. The specialized knowledge required usually prevents sales people from other specialties from making the transition to acquiring, even if they have been selling other services to national retailers, he says. The most successful transitions to selling the nationals usually come with agents who have been in the acquiring industry at the middle levels, Hensley says.
Whatever the level, the nature of recruiting changed during the Great Recession, sources agree.
Hard Times
The industry continued to add agents during the recession, finding it easier-than-usual to lure sales people away from struggling industries, says Hensley. The commission-only or nearly commission-only model keeps the cost of hiring low for ISOs, he notes.
Hiring agents for salaried positions posed no more problems than usual during the recession, says Haskett, but finding independent contractors proved more difficult. In hard times, fewer agents can live sale to sale, he says.
“Maybe they have a mortgage that hasn’t been paid in three months or their electricity is about to be shut off; that individual doesn’t want to hear he’s not getting a salary,” Haskett says. “They want to hear guaranteed money. The entrepreneurial spirit is much stronger in good times.”
Good times or bad, agents new to the industry require plenty of support. About 15% of the independent contractor candidates that Priority signs up come from outside the industry, Haskett says. After his four-person recruiting staff spends long hours of networking and cold calling to find and sign an agent without industry experience, the company want to leave as little as possible to chance, he says.
“Once you get that diamond in the rough – you need to do all you can to ensure that’s going to be a successful investment of time and effort,” Haskett says.
That effort includes three days of classroom training in everything from Bankcard 101 through merchant pricing, terminal technology “and everything in between,” says Haskett. New independent agents are welcome to come back and repeat the sessions.
Priority also sends an experienced sales person out on a sales call with agents new to the industry and keeps someone ready to answer the phone when new agents call with questions, often during a sales call on a merchant, he says.
The transition can take six months as the agent “warms” to the industry, says Harvey Loewenstein, who now works for Merchant Data Systems, a Miami Beach, Fla.-based ISO. “The operative word is patience.”
Merchant Data Systems bought a 51% interest in Loewenstein’s old company, Delray Beach, Fla.-based ISO Merchant Services Inc., because of the relationships Loewenstein builds with agents, says Drew Freeman, Merchant Data Systems president.
“What we saw was an ability to engage agents and develop a relationship,” says Freeman. “They know when the families have weddings, funerals. (They know) the kids’ names, the grandkids’ names, and they take a genuine interest.”
Those values can pay off for ISOs when dealing with agents of every type, he maintains.
“Regardless of whether they’re from outside the industry or inside the industry, the very most important thing is to embrace them and understand them and show them some love,” Freeman says. “And to show them you appreciate their business because without sales coming in we have no business.”
