Updated 6/6/2023. Originally published 9/14/2022.
Dive into this blog to learn how monthly payments benefit you and your customers and how to easily implement a financing strategy into your sales process.
Why should you offer financing to your customers?
Think about a few of your favorite brands that you use on a regular basis, what are some of the things you love about them? Successful companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Apple all have something in common; they offer monthly payment options for their products and services. Why is this so important?
What if instead of paying $15 a month for Netflix, your only option was to pay $540 upfront for a three-year subscription? This would probably make the decision to have a Netflix subscription much more difficult even if it’s a service you use often. It may lead you to contemplate things like switching to a different streaming service or cancelling your streaming service all together.
The same thing could happen to your customers. Providing more ways for your customers to buy helps you close more deals because it creates flexibility for your customers. Monthly payment options help to avoid certain pain points in the sales cycle, such as delayed purchase decisions or cost negotiation.
You are much less likely to hear things like “an upgrade isn’t in the budget for this year” or “we aren’t ready to buy” as there isn’t a large hit to their capital budget. Instead, they have a predictable and manageable monthly operating expense for their technology. This makes upgrades seamless and hassle-free.
How do monthly payments benefit your customers?
There are many benefits your customers enjoy when taking advantage of monthly payments, so here are four main benefits:
1. Conserve working capital
Using monthly payments allows your customers to conserve the cash they would have paid in an upfront cost and use it for other areas of their business like hiring, advertising, and more.
2. Easier to approve and consume
With monthly payment options, there is a lower barrier to entry, so clients have an easier time envisioning a payment that fits within their monthly budget.
3. Fewer resources required for decision
Compared to large capital expenses, monthly operating expenses typically require less resources to approve and sign off on, as there is no need to dip into an already approved capital budget, which means fewer hoops to jump through for you and your customer.
4. Proactively manage obsolescence
Simply put, monthly payments help keep hardware up to date. Financing creates a perpetual monthly technology budget. Because the customer has a predictable monthly IT budget, upgrading/refreshing their technology becomes more manageable as they replace their equipment and continue making payments they are accustomed to.
How do monthly payments benefit your sales team?
Adding the option of monthly payments will help your company sell more technology equipment, and here are a few reasons how:
1. Easier to justify ROI
Offering financing decreases sales friction. When offering a monthly payment option, it’s a lot easier to explain the ROI and steer away from cost-negotiation conversations.
2. Predictable refresh cycles
With monthly payment options, you are eliminating sticker shock by showing a more affordable option that is easily justifiable in a client’s budget. This helps avoid waiting months and sometimes years for room in a customer’s budget.
3. Compete with cloud competitors
Cloud competitors are already offering everything as a service. By presenting clients with a one-invoice solution, you now have a similar offer.
4. Larger transaction sizes
When offering technology financing, you can capture more in one sale as it is more manageable for your customers to consume.
Related: As-A-Service Financing Trends [2022]
How are the best salespeople implementing monthly payment options?
The first way the best sellers are implementing monthly payment options is to plant the seed early on in conversations. Instead of waiting until you deliver the final quote to the client to let them know they have payment options, let them know right away. Taylor McDonough, a Vendor Relationship Manager in our Connected Technology Group, shares, “by the time you deliver a quote the customer has already organized how they are going to pay, and they might wish they would have known about this option sooner.” Even if they don’t choose a monthly payment option right away, at least they know it’s an option for future purchases.
So, how do you plant the seed? Here’s a list of ways to start a conversation about monthly payments with your customers:
- “Would you benefit from paying for this overtime vs. all upfront?”
- “How do you consume your office technology/equipment today?”
- “Do you have any strategic initiatives this year that will require capital?”
Another way the best sellers are implementing monthly payments is by not assuming they know how their customers want to pay. You never know how your customers prefer to leverage their cash until you ask and offer all available options.
At GreatAmerica, we know it’s in a customer’s best interest to own appreciating assets and to finance depreciating assets. This way they can keep their credit lines and cash open for areas of growth that they will see greater ROI in.
You have a customer in mind… What are the next steps?
If you are interested in how to implement monthly payments, here are the steps:
1. Initial conversation
This can be something as simple as asking, “would you benefit from paying for this investment overtime?”
2. Customize your payment
This is your opportunity to customize things like refresh cycles, and consumption preference. We know that one size does not fit all customers, which makes customization incredibly important.
3. Quote and present payment options
Use integrations like QuoteWerks and ConnectWise CPQ easily add monthly options to your quote or you can also use our Info-Zone.com online calculator to easily quote an online payment.
4. Get approved
Using publicly available information like name, address, and phone number, we make an approval decision in an hour or less in some circumstances.
5. Signing day
Finance documents are ready upon approval. It’s a simple one- to two-page document that can be sent via PDF or DocuSign.
6. Deliver & get paid
You are paid in full just like a cash sale.
Offer monthly payments for technology equipment today!
Update more technology equipment at once and decrease delays in purchases by implementing monthly payments. To learn more about how to start offering monthly payments, visit our technology financing page and contact us today.
Relate: Watch - Finance 101: Everything You Need To Know About Flexible Payments
