Customer Stories: Millionaire Mentor
Motivational speaker and author enlists QuickBooks® Merchant Services to help inspire customers to achieve
Since 2001, the founder of the Millionaire Mentor Corporation has been inspiring thousands of people to achieve more in life through his motivational books, CDs, and speaking engagements held coast-to-coast. Filled with life lessons learned during his first career helping small businesses reach their goals, his messages of positive living have found a growing audience. Seeking a more reliable way to better serve his growing base of customers in their quest for personal and business success, his organization enlisted QuickBooks Merchant Services.
"Sales and marketing are our biggest challenges," said Julie Boerman, Operations Manager for the enterprise. "Our founder is a really exceptional speaker and an engaging author. Raising awareness of the tools he's created to help people succeed and getting those tools into their hands are two key jobs we do."
Seminar tickets, books and CDs are sold over the phone and the Internet, and are almost always paid for by credit card said Julie.
"Time is the issue," she said. "At a seminar, seating is limited. We have people from all over the U.S. wanting to attend a presentation but most aren't going to be able to come into the office and buy their tickets. They can pay with a check, however, it might take two weeks just for them to mail it. Then we have to wait for the check to clear. By that time, all the tickets could be gone. So, to make sure they can get a seat, they want to pay with a credit card. Plus, accepting credit cards protects us from bounced checks. With a credit card, we know right away if it's going to be accepted. With a check, it might be three weeks before we discover that there were insufficient funds. As a result, we don't have the customer's payment, and, we have banks fees coming out of our account."
Since their customers never come into the company's offices in San Diego, California, she needed a way to process those "cardless" transactions quickly and reliably. In addition, there may be up to 16 motivational speakers at a seminar, all selling materials. Since all sales go through Millionaire Mentor Corporation, Julie says she doesn't want to have to handle checks from people she doesn't know. It can be a real headache, according to her. Needless to say, finding the right solution wasn't easy.
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I really like how well QuickBooks and QuickBooks Merchant Services integrate together. You could have three or four programs do all these things, but if you can have just one program do it all, that's the smartest way to work.
"We tried several merchant services," she said, "but we ran into a lot of problems. With one firm, there would hold-ups getting cards processed and getting money into our account. Another provider made it confusing to reconcile bank statements because they were taking their fees up front, so the amount we showed as being paid by the customer was not the amount that went into the bank. Another company would take the information and send the customer a receipt before the card had been processed. We would get customers who thought they had paid, but our records indicated that we hadn't received the funds. It was a mess."
Seeing their dilemma, a business consultant got Julie started with QuickBooks Merchant Services. "The number one benefit was, it was the most convenient to use," Julie stated. "We can use it with our QuickBooks Pro software and we only have to enter information once; our records and payment information are all in one place—we can go to a customer file and see the payment history because it's automatically recorded after the card is processed. Plus, we can keep customer payment information on file to process future payments. We don't have to enter anything at all; it's all on file. That alone has saved us a lot of time. An added bonus: we can use the database to see which customers have purchased a book or CD and invite them to a seminar.
"Benefit Number Two, QuickBooks is well-known," she continued. "We felt that they were secure and dependable—that they weren't going to process a card and then leave the money floating out there somewhere. The third benefit is that QuickBooks Merchant Services is very competitively priced on the processing fees, so it wasn't like we were going to have to pay more to use them. Ease of use, dependable service, and competitive discount rates are our main reasons for going with QuickBooks Merchant Services."
