The National Processing Company is a merchant credit card processor that uses both a call center as well as road rep approach to make its sales. The road representatives will typically hire telemarketers to set appointments while they travel from town to town trying to get small to medium sized businesses to switch their service to NPC as their merchant processor.
Each road rep creates his own system of compensation for his appointment setters. As an example when I worked for Steve and for Mike, Steve would pay $ 50.00 on each qualified appointment that he went to. His qualifications were as follows:
1. All decision makers must be present at the appointment.
2. A current copy of a merchant statement must be provided by the decision maker (s) at the time of the appointment.
3. The person (s) had to be present at the appointment.
I began to write very highly qualified appointments based on Steve's criteria. He was required, under his conditions to pay $ 50.00 on each qualified appointment whether he made the sale or not. For the first week and a half, he did. He even made a mistake by forgetting to tell me the first day that one of the requirements was a merchant card statement needed to be available for his review and paid on it anyway, since it was HIS mistake.
Then Steve got tired on his road schedule. He told me with only 2 days notice inside of my first 2 weeks that he was heading home which is in Mexico near the border with San Diego to rest. He would be passing through Flagstaff, Arizona on his way and if I could book him some good appointments on his way he would stop there.
I booked him 4 appointments qualified by the rules listed above. Before he got there, he told me, that he was going to take the whole following week off and I needed to hang in there since he thought that if I did, I could easily gross 60-100k with him. He said his associate, Mike may or may not being going out the following week, and I was up front in explaining to him that as a single father wih 2 kids, I could not wait weeks at a time for paychecks, and if he believed in me, he would need to deposit some money in my account to retain my services while he was taking time off. After much negotiation, he agreed that the following Wednesday he would go to a Bank of America and deposit a $ 360.00 advance. He never did it.
His associate, Mike, who claims that Steve has ADD and forgets important details in how he instructs appointment setters, contracted me 2 weeks later. He was up front and honest in saying that he pays $ 150.00 for closed sales, and that his closing rate on appointments that are qualified is 40%. I worked a whole week for Mike and booked him 5 appointments, 3 which turned out to be excellent, 1 that was no good, and one that is rescheduled and is pending for after Thanksgiving.
Mike wound up paying me nothing even though he admitted to a costly mistake of his own from one appointment, and another where his "niche" of beating the rates of oher competitors was proved to be false, and that the appointment actually had a rate he couldn't beat, and another due to what may be his poor closing ability, he could not close.
Oh, by the way, the appointmens in Flagstaff for Steve, 3 were good, but I haven't been paid. Why? Steve changed the rules AFTER the appointment. It seems he forgot to tell me that he also wants a minimum transaction amount of $ 2000.00 per month by the merchant. He informed me of this AFTER he ran 2 of my set appointments, and a 3rd one he didn't pay me on was because the business was for sale, but to this day that is not a condition for being a qualified appointment that I was made aware of.
With both of these reps, I found the way they pay to be purely discretionary, if they want to. They really speak nicely, although Steve can get very negative and insulting, but at the end of the day they acted like they were doing me a favor to le me work for hem on straight commission. They did not take full responsibility for their errors and showed no good faith to me.
They were both dishonest in the way they handled things, especially Steve, in that they do things in their own way in their own time, and don't honor either their written agreements or verbal ones.
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