Entrepreneurship is demanding. Moving your startup through day-to-day operations, staying on top of essential deals and details, keeping a keen eye on cash flow — every piece matters. It’s a lot to cover, so when it comes to payment processing, it’s good to have a partner you can trust.
Inovio has three decades of experience doing this. We built, innovated, and reimagined what online payments can be — and it resulted in the creation of a world-class payment platform and gateway.
For a new business like yours, it’s all about the “S”: Seamless and scalable. You need solutions that seamlessly integrate with existing infrastructure and payment needs. And you want them to be scalable, so they can easily grow from local to global as your startup grows.
The experts at Inovio have experience in the world of startups. We’ve seen a fair share of them go big — and there’s been more than a few who stumbled along the way.
Let’s talk payments — as well as a few tips for making your startup journey a smooth one.
Everybody loves lists. Let’s break down the things you should consider as you guide your startup to success.
Consider the requirements related to your payout process. That’s a priority. But it’s equally important to understand how you fit into the business world, particularly how you get paid. Are you what might be considered “hard to place?” It’s a category that can come with payment complexity and challenge, particularly if the risks associated with your business are on the high end.
Inovio is what’s known as an agnostic payment gateway. That means we allow you to plug in multiple MIDs and intelligently route your payment traffic. Not only does this help you avoid outages due to regulatory shifts and evolving sponsor-bank policies, it gives you higher authorization rates. That means more completed transactions, more reliable revenue for your business.
We’ve seen that classic “forest for the trees” situation many times: Companies so focused on big picture issues that important details get overlooked. Something as simple as knowing your ideal customer is critical — and often ignored.
In our experience, there are a couple major issues confronting startups when setting up their sales infrastructure: A) not having the correct Ideal Customer Profile (ICP); and B) Not understanding your ICP’s common pain points, the issues that really matter to them.
The solution is to better understand your product, the ways it solves an ICP problem and makes their life better. You can even reverse engineer the product or service around an ICP to better solve their pre-identified pain points. If you are trying to pivot into new verticals, there is no substitute for being around as many customers/clients in that vertical as possible. Learn their mindset and discover how your product can solve their needs. You cannot sell within a consultative framework without becoming an expert in your customer's business type.
One big key to client-side success is a great story told with clarity and purpose. And a great way to do that is to build that story with your team through open communication.
We’ve seen organizations struggle to simplify complex concepts on an internal level. If the reps aren’t able to articulate those concepts, chances are their merchants won’t get it either. Engaging with your sales professionals can help. Find out what’s important to them in making connections, making sales.
It’s a big differentiator if you and your team can take complex topics and make them easily digestible. It helps your reps tell the story; it helps their merchants understand that story.
We’ve also seen a “shotgun” approach to sales, a desire to be all things to every vertical at once. Maybe an organization hasn’t clearly identified an ICP, so they start targeting multiple verticals at once — and ultimately master none of them. Your team may have very specific, experience-informed ideas here. Listen to them. Sometimes tackling verticals means taking them one at a time.
We at Inovio want to know more about your startup. Let’s talk. The more we know about you, the better we can tell you how our insights and forward-thinking solutions — our suite of world-class payment service products and 33 years of market expertise — can help you achieve your startup goals.
Get in touch with us.