How to build an outbound pipeline for payment processing companies
- Cormac Repman
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Payment processing is a crowded category. Your product solves real problems for enterprise finance teams, but getting them to take a meeting has become harder every year. Inbound pipelines dry up. MarOps costs climb. You're left competing with five other processors trying to reach the same CFO.
The answer is outbound cold calling. Not spam. Not aggressive. Real conversations with prospects who have a specific use case for what you sell.
We've built outbound pipelines for over 40 fintech companies in the last two years. Payment processors consistently see 18-26% connection rates and 8-12% meeting acceptance when the list is clean, the pitch is sharp, and your callers understand payment processing operations.
This guide covers exactly how to build one.
The Payment Processing Buyer Map
You can't cold call everyone. The CFO doesn't care about payment routing. The VP of Finance at a mid-market SaaS company cares about reconciliation and PCI compliance and whether processing fees are eating margin.
Start here:
Enterprise buyer (500+ employees): VP Finance, Corporate Controller, Director of Finance Operations. They care about cost per transaction, settlement speed, and PCI requirements. Strong decision-makers but long sales cycles (60-90 days).
Mid-market buyer (50-500 employees): Finance Manager, Operations Manager, sometimes the CFO directly. Faster cycles (30-45 days), real budget authority, easier to reach.
Vertical buyers: Specific industries like healthcare billing, SaaS billing, e-commerce merchants, marketplace operators. They care about vertical-specific compliance (HIPAA, PCI-DSS, ACH rails).
Your first list should target one. Not all of them. One vertical, one company size, one geographic zone.
Building the List That Actually Converts
The list is everything. A great caller with a bad list converts at 2%. A good caller with a clean list converts at 8-12%.
Step 1: Define your total addressable market. How many finance directors are there in your target space? Use ZoomInfo, Apollo, or Hunter to get a real number. If you're selling to mid-market SaaS in North America, that's roughly 3,200-4,500 companies. If you're focused on a vertical like healthcare, it's closer to 800-1,200.
Step 2: Layer in intent signals. Don't call random prospects. Call companies that:
Recently raised funding or got acquired (financial event = cash for systems)
Announced headcount growth (operations teams expand, need payment automation)
Launched a new product or marketplace (new payment flows = pipeline need)
Appeared in recent press about fraud, compliance, or operational issues
Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Crunchbase, and regional business journals for this.
Step 3: Verify the list. Run emails through MillionVerifier or Bouncer before calling. Bad emails waste 15% of your calling time. Deliverability matters.
Step 4: Prioritize by geography and title confidence. If you're in London or US-based, weight your list accordingly. Call the cleanest 500 first. Test conversion rates. Don't load 5,000 names into a sequence if you haven't validated the first 500.
Writing the Sequence That Lands Meetings
Most cold calling sequences fail because they talk about the product. "We reduce processing fees by 18%." The prospect doesn't care yet.
Start with pattern interrupts and specificity.
Call one: The opener. You have 8-12 seconds to not sound like every other fintech salesperson.
"Hi [name], this is [your name] from Nurturance. I'm calling because I saw your team just hired a new CFO in [month], and I thought it might make sense to have a quick conversation about payment processing costs. Do you have 20 seconds?"
No script. No pitch deck talk. Just: I noticed something relevant, and I want to talk about it.
Call two (next day): Warm the relationship. You're not pitching. You're asking a real question.
"Hey [name], I had a thought after we talked. Most teams I speak with are either overpaying on processing fees or they've got a chaos problem with multiple gateways. Which one sounds more familiar?"
Call three (3 days later): Pattern interrupt from a different angle. Use a stat or recent news about their industry.
"[name], saw that [Industry News about payment processing trends]. Curious if that's on your radar at [Company]. Have you looked at [specific competitor or trend] yet?"
Email alongside calls. Don't call-only. Email the day before the call with one line: "I'm calling tomorrow about [specific reason]." Dual-channel works.
Running the Calling Operation
You can hire your own team (expensive, 4-6 week ramp). Or you can use pay-per-meeting platforms like Glencoco, where you only pay when someone books a real meeting.
If you go internal:
Target 40-60 calls per day per caller. This is realistic with good preparation. 100 calls a day burns out reps in 3 weeks.
Track these metrics religiously:
Connection rate (got someone on the phone / calls attempted). Benchmark: 18-26%.
Meeting acceptance rate (meetings booked / connections). Benchmark: 8-12%.
Show rate (meetings kept / meetings booked). Benchmark: 75-85%.
Average conversation time. If it's under 90 seconds, your pitch is too short. If it's over 4 minutes, you're pitching.
Route meetings to the right sales owner. Enterprise deals go to an AE. Smaller meetings might go to a sales development rep for a qualification call first. Don't dump everything on one person.
Measuring What Actually Matters
Most outbound programs measure call volume. Wrong metric.
Measure pipeline created. Measure meetings booked. Measure meetings that convert.
Set a baseline. If you're starting cold, expect:
500 calls = 80-130 connections = 6-15 meetings booked = 2-4 that advance to sales conversations.
That's month one. Month two, your conversion rates improve 15-25% as the team gets sharp.
Building an outbound pipeline for payment processing is different from other verticals because your buyers care deeply about operations, not marketing. They don't respond to growth hacks. They respond to specificity, to callers who understand settlement timelines and PCI-DSS compliance, and to pitches built on real patterns in their business.
If you're not getting traction with inbound, or if your CAC is climbing, outbound works. We've helped payment processors add $2-4M in pipeline per quarter using these methods.
Ready to run calling but don't want to hire a full team? Nurturance runs outbound calling through the Glencoco marketplace. You only pay per meeting booked. We handle sourcing, calling, and scheduling. Let's talk about your target list.
[CTA: Book a call on our calendar at nurturance.uk or reply to this post]
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