Attract new salespeople to open new markets 

It’s one thing to train and manage a finely-tuned sales engine with agents that are fluent in the mechanics of payment processing and card schemes (in addition to having a high-level understanding of the myriad SMB types). However, in  the highly competitive merchant acquiring market, competing on professionalism, knowledge, personality and price can only get your ISO so far. Lost in these, albeit positive attributes, is specialization-led differentiation. It’s not that these qualities aren’t sufficient to compete, but are they enough to scale?

In most cases, the answer is no. One way of scaling your ISO is to actively recruit salespersons with unique backgrounds in “specialized business verticals.” In this case, specialized business verticals means businesses where there’s a significant knowledge barrier  for successful sales. Maybe it’s familiarity with a specific technology like a point-of-sale or ERP system. It could be familiarity with a certain culture, style, and language as in selling to medical providers. In both cases, scaling is a function of the talent the ISO brings in, and not on the size of a sales team or its marketing budget.
Finding payment processing agents with unique backgrounds in technology or specific verticals allows an ISO to open up new markets where they are protected from replacement by competitors without the same level of knowledge in the space. And opening new markets can be the difference between incremental linear growth, and exponential growth. The beauty of this strategy is that it isn’t cost prohibitive. It may take a bit more time to find the right people, but it preserves operating capital and can lead to higher margins and lower attrition rates.

Written by Anthony Malatesta