Regional to National, Merchant Services Company

Context

This was a merchant services company selling payment processing hardware and software into small and mid-sized businesses. When I took over national operations it was a regional player with a regional sales force, and the owner wanted national coverage. There was no budget behind that ambition, which is the constraint that shaped everything I did next.

The Situation

Going national in a business like this one is a recruiting problem before it is a sales problem. You cannot sell payment processing at any scale without feet on the ground in the market you are selling into, and the company had feet in one market. The obvious answer is to hire a national recruiting firm and fund a hiring campaign, and the obvious answer was not available to me. What the company did have was a lead generation call center, which is a room full of people who are already good at getting a stranger on the phone, qualifying them quickly and moving them to a next step. That is most of what recruiting actually is, and nobody had ever looked at that room and seen it.

What I Did

Converted the lead generation floor into a national recruiting center. The same people who had been qualifying merchant leads got retrained to source, screen and onboard salespeople instead, which meant the skill transferred and the payroll did not change. The communication technology and the databases were already paid for and already in place, so the recruiting operation stood up on infrastructure the company owned rather than on a line item somebody had to approve.

Standardized the hiring process before scaling it. I wrote detailed job descriptions and candidate profiles so the floor knew exactly who they were looking for, and I put data-driven screening criteria behind it so the qualification was consistent from one recruiter to the next instead of depending on who picked up the phone. Automating the repetitive stages of the process, from first contact through onboarding, took average time to hire from 28 days down to 18, which is a 35% reduction on a cycle we were about to run several hundred times.

Ran the recruitment campaign on multiple fronts at once. Job boards and social platforms gave reach, industry events and career fairs put us in front of experienced sales professionals directly, and a referral program turned the people we had already hired into a sourcing channel of their own. Each one alone would have been too slow. Running all three together is what took the sales force up 150%, which is 120 salespeople recruited and trained, and put the company into more than 20 states from the one it started in.

Rebuilt the operating protocols for a distributed workforce. A sales force spread across the country does not run on the same standards as one sitting in a single office. I built the onboarding, the training and the ongoing development to work at a distance, and put retention programs behind them, because recruiting somebody into a territory and then leaving them alone out there is how you end up recruiting the same territory twice. New hire retention finished at 92%, and sales productivity across the team rose 40% with average revenue per salesperson up 25%.

Results

What It Proved

Scaling is not about adding people, it is about building the system those people operate within, and the two get confused constantly. The company went from one regional market into more than 20 states, grew the sales force 150% and annual revenue 23%, and did all of it without additional funding, because the capability was already sitting in the building in a room that had been pointed at a different problem. The productivity numbers are the part I would point a skeptic at, since a 40% lift in sales productivity and a 27% lift in operational productivity say the growth came from the system working better and not just from more bodies carrying the same load.

The Transferable Part

Before you go outside for a capability, look hard at what you are already paying for. A lead generation floor and a recruiting floor are the same floor doing the same work against a different target, and the same is true of a lot of functions that sit in different boxes on an org chart. The second thing is sequence, because standardizing the process before scaling it is what let this run at volume without quality falling apart, and doing those two in the other order is the mistake I see most often.