Retail Merchant Services

Retail Merchant Services (RMS) was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Milton Keynes. The business provides card payment processing, online payments and point-of-sale solutions to small and medium-sized merchants across the UK and Ireland, operating as an independent sales organisation with merchant acquiring delivered through Elavon. RMS goes to market through a national field sales team, targeting independent retailers, hospitality businesses and SME merchants — a high-volume, high-activity sales environment competing against banks, fintechs and a long tail of other payment providers.

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RMS needed to expand a national field sales team of payment processing reps in a highly competitive and saturated market. The hiring brief covered three regional patches simultaneously, all of which required new business hunters capable of door-to-door merchant prospecting, generating leads at pace and closing on contract terms in the same visit.

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These roles tend to be high-churn with a low barrier to entry. The pool of candidates willing to attempt the job is large, but the proportion who last beyond six months is small. To protect RMS's investment in onboarding, training and patch development, we needed to put in place a recruitment process that would weed out candidates unlikely to last. The right hire wasn't simply someone with field sales experience — it was someone who had worked in genuinely comparable settings, who was used to high rejection rates, who had a demonstrable track record of staying in the role rather than churning out, and who had the resilience to keep prospecting after a difficult morning.

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We re-interviewed every shortlisted candidate against the specific commercial reality of merchant services field sales — not against a generic field sales template. The <a href="https://salesrecruituk.com/our-process/">SRUK Fit Score process</a> assessed candidates across the dimensions that actually predict longevity in this role: prior experience in comparable high-activity, high-rejection sales environments (typically payments, telecoms, energy or utilities door-to-door); evidenced resilience and tenure in those settings rather than three-month stints; new business hunter instincts versus account management leanings; and geographic fit to the specific patches RMS was hiring for. For each region we built a shortlist filtered against those criteria, with consultant commentary on where the candidates had previously demonstrated the resilience the role would demand.

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