[Duvdevan]

Years ago, I sold printing to businesses, cold-calling, following-up, and repeat-visiting about a thousand businesses until my print and copy sales were over $50,000 per month.

So I'm wondering if I could do the same thing in the MCA industry? Are there any ISOs or salespeople on the forum who built a decent income cold-calling and canvasing businesses? If so, could you share how it worked for you?

-

Mark,

Another person from the print industry once asked me if he can enter the MCA field by simply canvassing and using yellow pages to generate leads and sales. While canvassing and cold calling works great with print, alternative lending is a different type of service. With print, you know you can walk in to any business and it is pretty much a given that they need the service, and more or less likely they already have a vendor or contact that they're working with. So your job is to build a relationship and convince that business to switch vendors.


In this business if you started canvassing and cold calling all day, you would drive yourself crazy. Not every business needs financing and not every business is looking for alternative financing. You wouldn't have enough time in a day to canvass every day and come back to the office make cold calls, and take in to consideration all the operational duties you'll have to deal with.

[mbradford101]

Mark,

Another person from the print industry once asked me if he can enter the MCA field by simply canvassing and using yellow pages to generate leads and sales. While canvassing and cold calling works great with print, alternative lending is a different type of service. With print, you know you can walk in to any business and it is pretty much a given that they need the service, and more or less likely they already have a vendor or contact that they're working with. So your job is to build a relationship and convince that business to switch vendors.


In this business if you started canvassing and cold calling all day, you would drive yourself crazy. Not every business needs financing and not every business is looking for alternative financing. You wouldn't have enough time in a day to canvass every day and come back to the office make cold calls, and take in to consideration all the operational duties you'll have to deal with.

I hear ya'. One lender told me to focus on restaurants, and I assume there's probably a top 10 list of businesses most likely to do these types of loans. So I may try canvassing just those types of businesses. Selling printing, I'd leave a flyer and business card (and sometimes a couple pieces of candy), then follow up with a phone call a couple days later, and just keep repeating the process until they'd try us with a print job or tell me to go away and never come back :)

I was 22 then, so it was alot easier to get away with being annoying. Now I'm 39 :) But I'd imagine that even in this business, there'd be a better response rate if you actually stopped in and left something in person (which you could mention when you called), rather than the hundred+ hang-ups you'd get cold-calling by phone -- never even getting beyond the gate-keeper.

For me, it's worth a shot, even focusing on just 1-3 types of businesses, since I KNOW I'll give up if I get a hundred hang-ups in a row calling by phone, and I don't have the budget to buy leads or do direct mail or anything else expensive.

But now I'm also wondering about what quickfunder said above -- that he's "sick of having to haggle with merchants who are being outright lied to by all the other guys." I had that same experience when I worked for a mortgage company before the crash. Calling leads, I was honest about the actual rate we could get them (even having dozens of lenders), but the deals always went to brokers who quoted rates well below what was possible, which I assume probably "changed" not long before they got to the closing table (or at the closing table, as I've seen happen more than once).

It's hard to win at that game :)