Suneera Madhani worked in the merchant service industry and hated everything about it.

She disliked the nickel-and-dime, disdainful attitude her company had toward customers. She didn't like the way the products were delivered. She didn't like the way the company, and every one of their competitors, marketed their services. She didn't like the lack of transparency and honesty about the products, prices, and services. She hated the fact that customers never knew what was going on in the black box that the merchant services company presented. She didn't like the environment she was working in. She didn't like the impact she was having—or not having—on her customers.

She felt that customers deserved better.

She took her ideas for a new way of providing merchant services to her boss. Her ideas were rejected out of hand.

She channeled her frustration, ideas, and innovations into building a merchant services company she could be proud of—and hoped her customers would love it too.

She started Fattmerchant in 2014 with the idea that any business should be able to access merchant services and accept credit cards regardless of their size. She believed that a customer's experience using the service should be simple, powerful, and fun.

She knew she had to have a different approach to building her company, culture, products, strategy, team, and how they went about scaling their business while servicing their customers.

The approach she chose was inbound.

Madhani believed in a subscription model versus the fixed cost approach of the old-school merchant services industry. Because she had seen many customers' frustrations with the poor customer experience inherent in the old model, she believed buyers would be quick to adopt a more customer-centered approach.

“We exist for small- to medium-size business to help them grow; everything else about our growth, our profit, and all of our success flows from that focus,”¹ says Madhani.

She believed the pay-as-you-go subscription model was modern and matched the way people wanted to purchase merchant services.

Liz Connett, marketing manager for Fattmerchant, explains it this way: “We build Fattmerchant's technology around the relationships formed with our customers, who we call members of the Fatt Family, and the feedback they give us. Inbound thinking pervades everything for us from product development to customer service to technology. We built the product based on the specific feedback of our members and the problems they wanted to solve and the relationships we have, and how we make their lives easier, so we end up having a sticky connection with them and their struggles. It all goes back to the inbound idea. It's all about people and relationships.”²

Fattmerchant's business model is built on the concepts of being easy to use, providing education, and delivering a superior customer experience. They realized that owners and managers of small- and medium-size businesses were no longer willing to pay what they were told to pay by the big banks and old-school payment processors. They wanted a different way.

The value of Fattmerchant's service is putting the customer at the center of the relationship. They base the relationship on radical transparency and opening up the direct cost of the merchant services puzzle. The users of the service wanted to know what they were getting, why they were paying for it, and how the service helped them grow their businesses by giving their customer the payment options they demanded.

Other key service and product attributes that Fattmerchant identified included:

• Easy-to-understand tools
• Flexible pricing with options
• Services matched to their needs
• Low barrier to commitment and short-length agreements
• Self-service learning and usage

As Connett puts it:

We think that customer experience plays into everything we do for our company. One of our strategic pillars is the best damn experience. We want everyone, throughout their entire journey with Fattmerchant, to have a positive and easy experience. It is something that we are always actively thinking about in our marketing and sales processes even before they become a member. How is that experience going to look to them? Is it easy? Is it simple? Is it clear? Are we talking to them in the tone that they like and appreciate?

Every campaign we run, every strategy we put in place, we build around the customer experience. We ask how can we give our potential new members, our advocates, our partners, our employees, or whatever they might end up becoming—how can we give them the best experience?

Fattmerchant focuses on a few specific personas and matches their messaging and content to the specific needs of that persona.

For example, Joe's Pizza Shop needs a good experience at the counter for his customers, easy and fast. He also wants to connect to a traditional terminal and have few technical details to worry about. He wants the reporting and accounting to be simple and easy to understand. And he wants to save as much money as possible.

Lawyer Linda has other needs. She wants to simplify transactions for her clients and integrate with the firm's existing accounting systems for detailed reporting and financial analysis. She cares about how the product works and wants to know where costs are coming from but not necessarily use the lowest cost service. She is prepared to pay for more features that provide seamless payment options for her as well as robust integration with their internal systems.

With a huge potential market and many types of personas, Fattmerchant believes detailed persona development is critical because “if you are talking to everyone you are talking to no one,” says Madhani.

Personas do not just inform the marketing and sales process at Fattmerchant. Everyone at the company, including legal, finance, operations, service, and engineering, is aware of the target personas and their role in delivering on their mantra of “the best damn [customer] experience.”

Fattmerchant views their marketing team as the voice of the customer. Marketing is integrated into every area of the company to make certain the personas are understood and represented in everything they do.

Connett says, “My team sits in on almost all company meetings. We are the voice of the customer.”

Connett describes how Fattmerchant uses personas:

We always preach how important it is to dig deeper when you think you understand a customer. Everyone has a target audience, but most companies don't necessarily sit down and have a real buyer persona completely fleshed out. We think a detailed persona makes all the difference in being successful. We recommend that people have a clear understanding of their buyer: where they go online, what they read when they wake up in the morning, what they watch, where they go for help, where they live. And what they want from their merchant services provider.

Building the buyer personas has been huge for us. But once you have the persona, then you need to make sure that whatever content you're creating is what that buyer is looking for. If your buyer persona is someone who's looking for a very specific kind of content, make sure that's the content you're creating, and that's what you're offering, so you're attracting the right buyers. We think a big benefit of inbound thinking is the ability to get the highest quality leads, as opposed to just the whole fire hose of contacts that you've got to sift through. Truly understanding our buyer personas and making sure that they are driving our decisions is critical.

We are always looking back and asking if we are creating stuff for the optimal buyer, because we think it is easy to be distracted by what we want to write about, or what we think is cool, or what we think is new, or what we think is relevant. But if it's not going to be something our persona is looking for, then it doesn't make sense for us to spend our time talking about it.

Early on Fattmerchant focused on building top-of-the-funnel awareness content to attract prospects to their website and build trust in the subscription idea. Top-of-the funnel refers to content that is used to educate and inform people searching online for solutions and answers to their questions. They also offered valuable resources such as a savings calculator to show prospects how much they were spending using their current merchant services along with opportunities they had to save by switching. Video is another big piece of their content marketing strategy. Videos helped make the complex simple and helped to explain the products and how Fattmerchant customers can use them to help their customers.

“From the moment we started the company we were 100% inbound marketing and sales,” says Connett.

We were a really small team at the time, and completely bootstrapped. We hadn't gone through any sort of investing yet, or any rounds of funding, so at the time inbound was what made sense for us. Inbound thinking allowed us to reach so many more people than if we were to do traditional outbound marketing. Merchant services is a very traditional industry, so it was very different that we were practicing inbound. Everyone else in this space is very outbound in their approach, including doing a lot of door-to-door cold calling. It's a lot of walking into a business with flyers, sending mailers, things like that. Our inbound strategy let us reach so many more people and have a bigger impact than anything we could do with the number of people we had on our team or the dollar amount that we had at the time.

Everybody from the CEO to the finance team, to product development, to service, every single person in the company is aligned around the idea of using content to educate and help buyers. All content is built based on the buyer journey and persona research discovered by talking to the people that are having issues with old school payment-processing companies.

Relationships with Fattmerchant customers are built on conversations that uncover ongoing opportunities to solve more of their problems.

“We keep a really open dialogue with our customers, whether it's attending events with them or going to have coffee with someone. Or, if they're on the other side of the country, getting on the phone with them and talking to them. Keeping that open dialogue always top of mind for everyone on our team really drives the success of our inbound effort. Inbound thinking allows us to really understand our target audience and their interests, what they're looking at, what they want to know,” says Ms. Connett.

Fattmerchant thinks the process of making their customers successful starts the moment the decision is made to work together. Marketing works alongside the customer success manager (a service manager in a traditional payment processor company) to make sure onboarding is done properly and that the promises made and expectations set during the buying process become a reality.

The customer success manager has a responsibility to follow through until the customer sees results.

Fattmerchant develops automated workflows and tools to map the steps to ensure each persona's success with their specific solution. This process includes calls and one-on-one interactions as well as educational videos, downloadable PDFs, and how-to guides. Fattmerchant finds both increased engagement and higher rates of success when key concepts are delivered using video in place of long text manuals. Videos make onboarding and setup fun and engaging for the customers and results in customers using the services and tools to process transactions successfully.

After onboarding new clients, Fattmerchant continues to reach out proactively to see how customers are doing with the products and if the promises made before the sale are in fact being realized. Fattmerchant monitors tool usage automatically and talks to the user regularly to generate a full picture of the health of the relationship.

Ongoing messaging and communication play a key role in developing deeper and more beneficial relationships. Fattmerchant has typical branding and style guides, but also a messaging guide. Their goal is to simplify technical language and facilitate open communications. Messaging and language are important to Fattmerchant's users since merchant services technology can be confusing and convoluted for busy business owners.

As Connett says:

The better members understand what we are talking about, the better they will be able to implement the solutions. Our goal is to take complicated technology and processes and make them simple—unlike the approach of big banks.

We all want to make sure we speak the member's language and use the terms that our members use. We believe messaging and communication must be consistent and transparent to quickly solve problems for our members. Tone is also critical. We want them to feel that as members we are in this together and that we are always available to help in a friendly and understanding way.

“We believe that our customers are not just a number or a transaction but a member of something special, and that means they should be treated in a special way. By choosing to have a relationship with Fattmerchant, people have access to our technology and services, other members of the Fatt Family, our partners, associations we belong to, and our business partners. We consider the Fatt Family to be a learning group that builds best practices and improves payment processing to improve our members' businesses,” says Madhani.

Fattmerchant is an inbound organization.