What’s really stopping you from consistenly growing your MCA

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Experiencing consistency in growing your MCA

Okay. I’m going to talk about four things that’s stopping you from experiencing consistency in growing your MCA company month in and month out, year in and year out. If you’re not watching this on my website right now, I’m the president and founder of local marketing stars. We’re the leading inbound lead generation company for merchant cash advance business loan and merchant processing industries.

Over the years, we have generated millions of dollars on commissions and revenue for our clients. And every month I talked to hundreds of business owners and I’ve dealt with thousands of them within the past six years and after dealing with so many of them, I got to be an idiot not to see some patterns as to what will work. Some companies be super successful whilst the other fail. So I wanted to gather my thoughts around four things that I can give it to you today, that you can start applying in your business that will take you from where you are and help you experience sometimes really consistent growth and some companies go wild with that and help them experience exponential growth.

But there are four reasons why you’re not there, you’re not where you want to be in your company. Maybe you started a couple of years ago, you have a nice team of five, six people, maybe 10 people but when you look back to your original and goals, have you hit your goals? Have you exceeded them or you kind of gave up on them because business is really difficult.

And being in merchant cash events and merchant processing industry doesn’t really make it easy. So super competitive landscape and you got to be up to date, you’ve got to stay sharp all the time and be able to bring more deals in, right? But I’m going to talk about four reasons why what is really pulling you back and no one’s really talking about buying lease from certain places and doing more telemarketing, the direction of the industry and all that stuff while there’s an elephant in the room and we got to talk about it.

Your online presence

Okay, so the step number one in growing your MCA is your online presence. Yes, I am biased. I’m an owner of a digital marketing agency. Of course I’m going to recommend that your online presence is strong, but just hear me out. Let me build my case and let me give you reasons why that’s the case. Okay.

It’s 2017. I’m actually surprised that I’m talking about this, but I have thousands of contacts on LinkedIn and our mailing list and whatnot and one I see really disappoints me that many of the companies who are in the business of selling merchant processing or merchant cash advance, have really weak online presence. Their website has been updated maybe in early two thousands and maybe they have a blog post from 2013 and their website is not mobile optimized. If you were to check in on your phone and all the content will be all over the place and you can’t really tell what this company does.

And I’m going to give you an example. So why that’s really important because the counterargument to my argument would be someone saying, you know what? Our website really is in bad shape, but we’re doing great in sales, so why would we invest in building our website or maintaining our website because we’re killing it here with telemarketing or other means of generating leads.

If you don’t accommodate, adjust to change, you die

I understand that, but don’t forget that times have changed and if you don’t accommodate, adjust to change, you die. That’s how nature works and business is the same way, especially when you are in this industry that’s getting more and more competitive. You’ve got to sharpen your tools constantly and do not think that your website is only necessary for someone to find you and you get inbound leads that way and you can rotate it into a deal. Yes, that works fine.

But when you’re in a competitive situation where you’re talking to a merchant, you’re trying to secure a loan of maybe a high volume like $100,000 or more, do not be mistaken that that merchant will do their due diligence. They’re going to go online and check to you versus a couple of the big guys and guess what will happen? The big guys have more content. Their website looks really healthy and they have a lot more references and testimonials. Whereas yours, you don’t have any of that. You might lose that deal and that’s an indirect way of your online presence helping you or damaging your reputation. And a lot of the times you will not even be aware of why you lost that merchant, why they did not sign up with you.

Accessing information right now

Because accessing information right now is really, really easy and when people are not really online savvy or savvy enough to go to Google and ask about you and if they don’t see anything at all or what they see doesn’t make them feel cozy and comfortable about your company, you’re going to lose that deal and you’re going to see more of that happening. That’s why number one is you got to have a working website.

Your website needs to be optimized. Your website needs to have certain features enabled in it so it not only allows you to track your visitors and collect enough data to make sense out of that. Where are they coming from? How much time they’re spending on the website? What pages are they really visiting? At what point do you lose them? Do they check out the content that you have? How do you look on Google? Have you ever searched your name on Google? If you do, just do that and find out what Google pulls for you.

I check out companies and they have two stars on their reputation because two angry customers decided to leave a negative comment and their Google page is not owned by them. They had not claimed their Google page, so Google doesn’t even know if this business is still around. So you cannot let that happen to your online reputation. I’m sure for every two negative customers, you probably have 50, 60, really happy customers. You’ve got to leverage that. Okay?

You have two audiences

Because you have two audiences. One audience is the people pretty much who is looking for your services, looking for a credit card processing company or business loan. The second audience is the search engines, google, Yahoo, Ping and all the other online directories. You’ve got to keep them happy too because if they do not understand what it is that you do, and they don’t know whether you’re still around or not, they’re not going to support you. They’re not going to support your case. You’ve got to make them your friend. In order to make them your friend, you got to follow the rules that they laid out because they are making the rules. They’re the dominant force in this industry that will decide whether you’ll look good on your customer or you’ll look really bad.

So for that reason, your website has real importance. Now, the second part that’s more direct, these are all the indirect ways your website is impacting your presence, more direct is your search results. If someone is looking for a working capital loan, do you come up on Google? If you do not, why is that? While your answer might be, well, that’s not going to work. I’m competing against companies who are spending maybe half a million dollars a month to be on top of Google. I understand that. I very well know the industry and I know how much they all spend, but that should not discourage you because the search volume is really, really high.

In the beginning of 2017, the search volume for any type of business loan were over 350,000 searches. Now we’re approaching half a million and by the end of 2018 that number is going to probably go over half a million searches per month, and those searches are being handled by a handful of companies who are investing in their online marketing, on their search engine optimization where they show up on the search engine records.

It might not make it to page one of Google, but even if you can land on page two or three for certain keywords, believe me, that’ll be enough to feed your company because there is just a humongous amount of search online, so you got to do that. The way you do that is there’s so many different strategies. It’s like a 15 step process. This video is not about this, I’m not going to go through how you dominate the search engines for the keywords that you’re looking for, but it’s really, really important that you start from one place and that one place is having a real website.

You cannot have a one page website or you cannot have a landing page hoping that some people will come in and fill out a full application on your website. Please do not put a full application on your website. No one is going to fill that out unless you pre-frame, you talk to them. Then you can send them over to your website to fill out the application, but do you really think that someone’s going to come in and just without really knowing who you are and fill out a three page application and submit it to you with their bank statements?

No, that’s not going to work. Okay. You’ve got to get smaller commitments from your customers so they feel cozy about you, then they can give you a bigger commitment. Usually the small one is get an email address from them. You’ll follow up and ask for the phone number or have them fill out a short form like six, seven questions max. So they just get themselves qualified about what they can be funded for. If you’re in merchant processing, for you to give them a rate, have them fill out a quick form.

So those are important things and make sure that you have a live chat option on your website. So if someone lands, they are going to have questions and if the person, the first person answers those questions has the biggest chance of earning that customer. So that’s number one.

How you manage data

Number two in growing your MCA is how you manage data. So the first one is about an online presence. Your social media channels and I understand that you could be saying, “How in the world am I going to manage all of this? I’m not a designer, I’m not a social media manager. I don’t understand how Google works. I don’t understand how Yahoo works.”

That’s why you need to either hire someone in house or you hire someone outside who handles that, and this is not a plug for our services, but that’s what we do. Okay? So if you don’t have a website that’s a starting point, we built so many of them in the industry, specific industry you’re in right now, merchant cash advance and merchant processing. You need to get that done. Number two  is how you manage data. Managing data is really important. Many of you guys are purchasing data right and left like thousands of them, but what happens to them is really scary. Someone dials out and they get what they get and data is either good, bad or indifferent, it just stays somewhere.

There is no followup process for that data. You got to have a hub for your data. I talked about this in one of my earlier videos. Maybe you have a CRM system or a place where you hold the data. You create a followup system because if someone is not ready to get a loan from you, that doesn’t mean they will never be ready to get a loan from you or if someone doesn’t want to change their processing right now, that doesn’t mean they will never want to change their processing right now.

So how you manage that data, that they is gold mine, no matter how bad it is or how low quality it is, there’s still gold in there. Don’t forget that 3% of the market is always ready to buy something from you. Whatever industry that you’re in, 3% of the market is ready to buy right now. So it’s a matter of finding out what that 3% is. It just happens to be a really, really large amount of clients for the merchant cash advance and merchant processing industry.

Diversify your lead generation

Number three in growing your MCA company is you have to diversify your lead generation. You cannot rely on your call center in the Philippines. You cannot rely on your guys on the field. Growing your MCA really fast can be as dangerous as not growing enough. So I see companies who hire massive amount of people and put them on the floor, put them on the phone, and that’s the only way they generate leads. And when they leave at five o’clock, their entire lead generation is gone. So if that’s your way of growing, that’s very dangerous. Okay, that’s very dangerous. So you got to have multiple ways of lead generation feeding into your funnel. One could be SCO, the other could be social media channels. The other could be paid advertising. The other could be telemarketing.

So once you sustain all of them, even a funnel that fails, if you’re A player quits on you and they take a bunch of team members because they think they can do a better job than you do, your company is going under. You have other sources to feed until you pick up where you left off and you build another team. That’s the only way to sustain your growth. And also different lead sources, different offers. I don’t want you to offer 10 different products, but if you’re selling merchant cash advance, if someone is a better fit for another type of loan, why not offer that? If someone is just, they just started out, they’ve been around for six, seven months, they’re not a good fit for the loans that you’re offering, why not offer them other services that we really can make a commission on? You might not sell all of that way but you might find partners who’s going to pay your commission on that, right?

The sales process

Last part is the sales process. It’s so important. The industry that you’re in right now is highly sales oriented. Well first any company in a business needs sales to survive, but primarily merchant cash advance and merchant process, you got to have hot lease company, you got to have a full pipeline all the time to be able to operate and growing your MCA company, right?

And for that, a lot of companies focusing on the front end, what I can close today. They don’t really have a system to build up what they can close tomorrow. They don’t really work on building future customers. Let’s not forget that you make your money on renewables, not the front end. The front end goes to marketing, your staff, your admin stuff, your rent and all that stuff. But when they renew, that’s where you’re really making profits but you got to have a system for them to renew. You got to have a system to build your referral partners.

You got to have a system to build ISOs to sell on your behalf. You’ve got to create an attractive environment enough for people to come to you. They want to work for you. They want to sell for you. And sales process, sales automation is really important. I can’t tell you how many times I talk to companies they think that have a sales process because they laid it out on the paper. They had a meeting, they have a CRM system. The process exists on paper or on their system but when it comes to application of that through their sales people, it’s not really working properly.

You can’t have a system and not being used. So if either you or your salespeople are not sold on that or there is something wrong with it, it’s not really working or you’re not being a good manager and following up and making sure they get it done, right? I told you this was going to be a really direct recording. I don’t want to take a lot of time but your sales process is really, really important.

If you don’t have a sales process, if you feel like you’re not in control of your entire sales process, I have news for you. You don’t have to rely on your sales person 100%. Your sales staff, they want to sell all the time and when it comes to doing follow up, when it comes to doing drip campaigns or nurture campaigns, we’re really bad at it. They’re not going to probably do a lot of followup, but if you automate that process, if you have put the right structure in place, you can manage them really well without just buying in to what they tell you. Okay, so that’s the last part.

And finally, if any of these interests you, and if you find yourself lacking in any of those categories, contact us. Go to our website, local marketing stars.com and schedule an appointment with one of our representatives, maybe one with me. Then we can discuss where you are right now to see if we can help you out. We only take three or four clients per month and we help them with their sales process, online marketing, search engine optimization, and generating inbound hot leads right away. So if that’s you, stay in touch and we’ll talk soon.

Take care now. Bye. Bye.