Objection handling

When selling payments, we’ve come across several objections of small and medium business owners. The most common ones are shown below:

Commercials

Since most business owners see payments as a commodity and look closely at the price of every transaction, it will be the most common objection for your salesforce. The best advice we can give is that you're not in the market for selling standalone payments and hence shouldn’t try to compete with stand-alone payment providers in transaction fees.

In most cases, your blend rate will be higher at first sight than the rate a local bank or a standalone payment provider is offering. Several strategies can be successful to overcome this objection:

Focus on value: If done right, the combination of your software suite and embedded payments should warrant any difference in price. Additionally, Adyen offers a bouquet of features out of the box that are cutting edge in the payment industry (tipping on terminals, Apple tap-to-pay, network tokenization, Giving, local payment methods, digital wallets) that should make it easier to explain any higher fee.
Accept that your pricing for payments will be higher than any standalone offer, but make it compulsory for platform users to integrate into your payments offering as part of your software offering. This only works if the perceived benefits of a bundled solution outweigh the cost of higher transaction fees. If you haven’t created these benefits or allow other integrated set-ups, we highly recommend to deprecate all integrated solutions from 3rd parties.
Pre-approved rates: give your sales team pre-approved discounts that they can offer to customers without further approval.
Payment specialists: it may make sense to either train all your sales team on the specifics of payments or have a payments team ready to deploy once there are additional questions on payments specifically. Your general SaaS sales rep can bring them in if needed. That team can then look in more detail into the deal at hand and are trained to sell payments. They’ll be able to spot hidden fees that often get billed on top of the transaction (like monthly fee for feature x, y or z), are able to calculate the total cost of processing a transaction and then counter the offer either by a more educated line of defense or by offering a more custom price plan (either discount on blend fee or offer IC++ pricing).
Pricing tool: we see that successful companies have built pricing calculators where sales reps can input key variables such as volume, ATV, number of terminals, etc. and then get an overview how pricing compares to a typical bank-offer the merchant will likely see…
Refer if necessary: there might be the case that some of your customers are so big in themselves that they want to negotiate their own price with Adyen. In such a case, please reach out to your account manager. We can always discuss those scenarios case-by-case.
Simplicity: closely related to hidden fees, we see the value of going with a platform in the simplicity in pricing compared to offerings from traditional banks. Here are some of the most common (hidden) costs that banks charge for:
- monthly maintenance fees for terminal
- different fees per card region (domestic vs. regional vs. interregional)
- different fees per card type (business vs. consumer)
- additional settlement fees
- high chargeback or refund fees
- PCI fee
- Network assessment fees
- Authorization fees
- Reporting fees
- Early termination fees

Contract not up for renewal

Most payment contracts are for a certain amount of time (everything from monthly to 5 year contracts). If you run into a situation where your users can’t terminate the contract immediately, it's worthwhile asking if the contract comes with any contractual minimum transaction amounts or any penalties if users leave early. Usually, these exit fees are negligible compared to the lifetime value of a customer, so we advise to offer a buyout if it makes sense for the individual business case so that you can earn back your investment over time.

Objection handling