Plenty is said about customers, far too little is said to them — why that gets expensive in payment sales
On 21 September 2026 Vertriebszeitung published a practitioner piece by Hermina Deiana: companies analyse customers through metrics and dashboards but hold too few real conversations with them. In the terminal and payment business that hurts more than elsewhere, because satisfied and churn-ready customers produce identical numbers.
What happened
Vertriebszeitung published a practitioner piece by Hermina Deiana on 21 September 2026; she works in Strategic Sales Development at MarketDialog GmbH. Her argument: companies invest heavily in customer analysis, metrics and strategy discussions, but speak directly with their customers far too rarely. CRM data, she writes, shows turnover and activity, not satisfaction or future needs. The piece recommends deliberately including difficult customer relationships in such conversations, asking open rather than closed questions, resisting the urge to turn a conversation immediately into a sales opportunity, and documenting the findings and translating them into actions. This is an experience-based contribution from sales practice, not a study; the text cites no figures of its own.
Who is affected
B2B sales leadership, especially in businesses with long contract terms and recurring fees — payments, till systems, telecommunications, software.
Assessment
In the payment business this point lands harder than in almost any other kind of selling, for a structural reason: a satisfied terminal customer and one ready to churn produce exactly the same data. Both pay their rental, both run transactions, both appear in the report as healthy base. The difference between them appears in no dashboard, because it does not consist of numbers but of a sentence somebody should have heard — that the statement is incomprehensible, that the till has been sticking since the update, that a competitor called the week before last. The cancellation letter is then not an event but merely the late receipt for a conversation that never took place.
The second point in the piece is the more uncomfortable one: deliberately speaking with the difficult customers. That is exactly what does not happen in practice, because no salesperson voluntarily goes where they will collect criticism. Yet that is where the information advantage sits. Anyone who wants to know why merchants want out of a contract does not ask the ones who stay. I keep a simple rule for such conversations: they are not held by the account manager responsible. That person shares responsibility for the outcome and therefore systematically hears the friendlier version.
What to do now
- Pick ten existing customers, at least three of them with known friction, and set fixed conversation slots for them with no sales objective attached.
- Do not let the responsible account manager hold those conversations; give them to sales leadership or a neutral role.
- Enter every statement that is not already in the CRM, and attach an action and a date to it. A conversation without an entry is a conversation without effect.