Small business owners have many worries, above all is attracting customers. Learn how to approach small business owners when it comes to selling software solutions and other business tools.

1. What Keeps Merchants Up at Night?
Toby Scammell - Womply

2. No matter what you sell, you need to
know the source of your prospects’ pain.

3. What keeps them up at night?

4. What do they need - or not have enough
of - than you can provide?

5. For merchant level salespeople (MLSs), understanding the
challenges of small business owners and operators has never
been more critical or more challenging.

6. In the past few years, technology has
changed the whole world, while most small
businesses have continued with business
as usual.

7. Today, merchants find themselves operating in a world
where the Internet has fundamentally changed consumer
behavior, and they are overwhelmed by adapting to this
new environment.

8. The widening gap between the world that
merchants remember and the one that now
surrounds them is a tremendous opportunity
for MLSs.

9. Selling payment processing alone is not
enough to create a value proposition
that makes merchants stick with you or
their processor.

10. However, if you can offer value-added
services that address their biggest worries -
well then, you’ll be on to something.

11. So, what are those worries? Womply recently
surveyed 3,000 merchants in all 50 states
and asked them to rank their biggest worries.
Here are the top responses...

12. Worry #1: Attracting customers

13. Worry #2: Having enough time for everything

14. Worry #3: Making enough money

15. Worry #4: Controlling costs

16. Worry #5: Hiring/retaining employees

17. These worries outranked options such as paying
for health insurance, tax concerns, cash flow
management, and the possibility of recession.

18. The simplest way to interpret these results is
that revenue and time loom very, very large
for merchants.

19. This makes sense: small businesses have always
struggled to keep customers coming through their
doors, and entrepreneurs obviously wear many hats
and feel overstretched.

20. Knowing these worries, you can appeal to your
clients’ pain, tailor your solutions, and
overcome objections.

21. Understanding how merchants rank their pain also
helps with resolving objections.

22. Worry comes from what’s at stake. For small
businesses, attracting customers is literally the
difference between staying open or shutting down.

23. It makes sense that revenue-focused worries rank
higher than reducing expenses.

24. Womply asked 2,300 merchants how long they could stay in
business if sales stopped entirely. The results were bleak: 1
in 5 would shut down within 30 days and 4 in 5 wouldn’t last
6 months.

25. Cost-cutting won’t solve that problem.
Only increased sales will.

26. Acquiring customers, making money, and saving
time are related issues.

27. Most merchants are stuck doing things the old way, which
means trying to attract customers through traditional
advertising or other “shout” methods.

28. They pour time and money into those channels
and don’t see an increase in foot traffic because
consumers have migrated to using their
smartphones to find local businesses to patronize.

29. Time and money wasted, and no customers to
show for it. You’d be losing sleep, too.

30. MLSs are in a prime position to really consult their
merchant clients on these critical changes and
provide solutions that help them attract more
customers, make more money, and save time
every day.

31. You just need to pair your value-added solutions to the
most critical problems, and present them through the
lens of what’s really worrying the merchant.

32. Everybody wins when this is done right. Agents make more money,
merchants solve their biggest problems, and they remain in acquirers’
portfolios longer, because they receive more value. It all starts with knowing.