Sales Partnerships, Inc., Broomfield, Colorado, United States: Resetting the Merchant Processing Field

Written answers to the questions

Total 195 words used.

Sales Partnerships (SPI) is a multiple prior Gold Stevie winner in the top Field Sales and Sales Outsourcing Categories. We specialize in difficult selling environments while representing the brands of some of the largest and most respected companies in the world through turnkey sales outsourcing. Our client roster includes notables such as Google, IBM, American Express, Verizon, and Dow Chemical.

Sales Outsourcing means providing cradle-to-grave sales services under the brand of each of the clients represented. Our teams are recruited for and dedicated to just an individual client based on that client program’s requirements.

Our hallmark is using and inventing systems and processes that optimize all the important areas impacting sales: recruiting, diversity, technology, training, management, analytics, and strategy. We’ve won dozens of global awards (including Field Sales Team of the Year eight times), been recognized in national media (Selling Power, Sales and Marketing Management Magazine, Inc. Magazine, CNNMoney, etc.), and helped establish the standard for providing field based sales outsourcing services. Since 1997, we have generated more than $10B in gross profits for our clients. SPI historically has operated in every significant MSA in the United States as well as in select markets globally.

Our nomination is a written submission including attachments.

Sales Partnerships’ nomination for Sales Distinction - Financial Services focuses on our work as the field sales channel for one of the three largest credit card companies in the world. When their strategy changed to allow other processors to sell their card processing services (previously only sold by their internal sales reps), our client needed a solution to successfully nearly every physical US small business.

The strategy of allowing resellers to handle most new acquisitions while also interacting with existing accounts helped increase their acceptance rate from the 70% range to being accepted in more than 90% of US businesses. This dramatic increase in customers came at a price. Rather than one on one engagement with merchants where our clients’ value story could be made clear, their service was sold in bundles and often never mentioned. The result was merchants that, in theory, could accept the card but weren’t actively doing it. After marketing and telesales failed to change the lack of accepting their cards, SPI was tasked with a field sales mission to work all those accounts and convert them to active processing merchants. This meant working every major DMA and engaging with more than 4 million unique merchants face to face.

This became the largest field sales engagement by any company in more than 2 generations (deregulation of telephone services in the 1980’s was the only larger similar type of sales engagement.)

2023 marked the completion of this program. We successfully converted more than 65% of inactive accounts into actively processing merchants. For comparison, past Stevie nominees providing telesales services attempted to activate these merchants and yielded only a 5% activation rate. And, although our target account lists were nearing exhaustion in 2023 with low opportunity density, we still increased performance to 10% better than our 2022 results (that won a Gold Stevie for that work.)

Our core emphasis was in helping merchants better understand hidden demographics that they were missing and leveraging our work in the community with a more diverse sales force than competing channels. The demographic tools we developed demonstrated spending behaviors for individuals in their neighborhoods including with other companies in the merchant's specialty. The community work ranged from volunteering time from our teams to integrating our support for veterans, anti-racism, and support of the LGBTQ community into the sales. Diversity also played an important role in our success. Field sales, according to the US Department of Labor 2022, is 79.8% white - one of the least diverse professions. SPI’s work over the past decade to better mirror the national populace resulted in our diversity mirroring the US overall - making us twice as diverse as the industry average. That diversity pays dividends in having teams that better understand and reflect their communities. Those relationships help drive sales.

Please see attached supporting materials and case studies.

Thank you for your consideration of our nomination.

Total 238 words used.

SPI was tasked with running a massive national field sales campaign working more than 4 million merchants with strict time deadlines and billions of dollars at risk.

In 2023, we finished the project. In our last year, we successfully engaged with more than 500,000 merchants – converting more than 70% of those to increase revenue with our client. For comparison, all other channels (telesales, direct marketing, etc) delivered only 5% success. SPI’s engagements generated more than $100M in revenue for our client in 2023 alone. This was done while maintaining a 99.9996% customer satisfaction rate. The flow of new signings no longer justified a large sales presence and all the “house” accounts had been worked to resolution. The program was transitioned to low-cost marketing arms to maintain signage and supplies for merchants while we moved to higher priority engagements.

Over the 8-year project, we generated more than $3B in revenue for our client while helping them meet high profile promises made to Wall Street.

Although profitable for both our client and Sales Partnerships, Inc., where we take the most pride is the impact it had on the merchants we sold. The average merchant we worked showed an increase in revenue of more than 5% within the first 90 days. This is after all fees – a net increase in gross revenue without any loss of margin.

Please see attached case studies and documentation for more details.

Total 70 words used.

The following attachments and links are included to support our nomination:

●         Case study detailing the field work performed for the nomination

●         Documentation on SPI’s Territory Management Suite referenced in the nomination

●         Documentation on SPI’s Diversity and Inclusion Work

●         Link to the SPI homepage for more information about our organization

Thank you again for your time and consideration for Sales Partnerships for Sales Distinction - Financial Services.

Total 211 words used.

The overall program required us to work face to face with more than 4 million brick and mortar businesses distributed over every DMA and MSA in the US. Even more challenging was that the customer list wasn’t static. Because companies change processors frequently, our target lists could change by as much as 10,000 businesses in a single day. Every new signing had to be worked face to face within 21 days regardless of where it was. This became the most logistically challenging program in SPI’s 25-year history.

Over the term, we generated more than $3B in client gross profits, activated more than 65% of those customers, and helped the merchants we activated profitably increase their revenue by (on average) 5% in the first 90 days in getting more value out of what they were selling.

2023 we achieved 105% of goal – the highest result of any channel in North America. The average team for other channels missed their targets by 30%. We did this working the last scraps of the opportunity list – lower prospect density and 60% of the list was exclusively merchants who actively said no to multiple other channels.

The attached case study and supporting documentation provide important detail on how we succeeded where others struggled.