It is no surprise that the maturing merchant-services industry constantly needs smart, well-trained sales agent. Agents leave the industry for a variety of reasons.
One way ISOs are trying to replenish the stock of salespeople is through offering free training and information programs.
Merchant Warehouse Inc., a Boston-based ISO, is among the latest to offer such a service. Troy, Mich.-based ISO North American Bancard is another touting a “university” approach to educating sales agents.
Merchant Warehouse on Sept. 23 launched its Merchant Warehouse University, an website that offers Web seminars on topics such as taxes and being an independent contractor. The site includes tutorials on using lead-management tools and how to use Google maps to generate leads.
Different Approaches
North American Bancard houses its NAB University within its agent website, a location that ensures only the ISO’s approved sales agents have access, says Marc Gardner, North American Bancard president and CEO. The service is designed for the ISO’s contracted agents, he says.
Merchant Warehouse’s effort is broader. “Merchant Warehouse University is a program that is not only for our agents, but the general industry,” Henry Helgeson, Merchant Warehouse co-CEO, tells ISO&Agent Weekly.
Merchant Warehouse wants to share knowledge its staff accumulates and tap into expertise from other industry professionals, he says.
“It’s our chance to show what we know to the world,” Helgeson.
It also is an opportunity to persuade agents not already selling for Merchant Warehouse to consider the ISO, he says. “We’re trying to get the Merchant Warehouse brand out there,” Helgeson says.
Merchant Warehouse intends to use the online capabilities of its university website by not only hosting the Web seminars, but also by providing archival storage of those presentations, Helgeson says.
The Web seminars, sometimes called webinars, last about an hour and include a short message about Merchant Warehouse at the end of the presentation, Helgeson says.
North American Bancard, similarily, wants to help its merchants. It has constructed a library of video presentations detailing various products and selling methods. About 14 hours of online videos are available with another 40 scripts in various stages of production, Gardner says.
Historically, North American Bancard presented training programs via an online meeting service, he says. “The problem is doing a massive presentation for independent contractors; no one time works for everybody,” Gardner says. “It’s a good way, but not the best way, to deliver content.” Based on the feedback from the ISO’s sales agents, video surfaced as the preferred medium, he notes. North American Bancard’s first video went online in 2008.
The ISO writes its scripts in-house, and a professional video service handles video production.
The effort for either company has not been cheap, though neither would disclose their costs.
The cost of providing the service is not insignificant, Gardner says. The return on investment is measured in “squishy” dollars, Helgeson says. No well-defined metric exists to measure the success of such efforts. “It’s part branding and direct responses. In the long term it will be a win for us, getting our name out there.”
No methods exists to measure the return on investment from these efforts, Gardner agrees. “It’s not a direct-response commercial,” he says. Instead, it is part of an overall effort designed to increase an agent’s knowledge and skills, which can help improve sales, Gardner says.
Defining Return On Investment
The payoff will be in better-educated sales agents, which will make them better salespeople, he says.
The drive to find and educate sales agents is a matter of concern every ISO, regardless of its size.
Such an effort is one many ISOs may consider as they contend with finding and recruiting sales agents, especially trained ones, David Fish, senior analyst at Mercator Advisory Group Inc., tells ISO&Agent Weekly.
“As the industry becomes more complicated, the opportunity for untrained agents to get into bad situation is more likely,” Fish says. “A lot of ISOs have recognized the risk associated with untrained agents on the street selling card-acceptance services.”
Many ISOs have dealt with the fallout from those incidents and would like to avoid future ones, he says.
That said, ISOs also see such training and education programs as marketing opportunities, Fish says.
“The largest ISOs are in fierce competition for merchants, even more so for agents,” he says.
ISOs of all sizes are in the hunt for qualified agents, Fish notes. Smaller ISOs may not have formal programs and websites dedicated to the programs, but that does not mean they are any less interested in finding qualified sales agents.
And the Internet may be the distribution method that can work for all ISOs, Fish suggests.
“As ISOs put more agent services online, the level of agent and ISO communication has taken on a new dimension,” he says.
