Welcome to Issue #018 of The Outerchange, the weekly briefing for payment processing agents who want more leverage behind their efforts prospecting and closing processing deals.

The goal every Friday is simple: Give you angles, outside the box ideas, tools, and ammo that help you close more deals without adding more hours.

If you're looking for "is my dual pricing signage compliant"… wrong inbox.

In today's edition:

🚀 Build a custom GPT that role-plays sales conversations for new reps
🔥 Know the owners name before you knock the door
🎯 Resources, tools & useful things

Let's rock n roll 🚀

If you run a team, you already know the most expensive part of onboarding a new agent isn't the time. It's the door training.

Every green rep you send into the field is going to fumble live merchants while they figure out the pitch. They'll freeze on the "I'm happy with my processor" line. They'll talk past the buying signal. They'll pitch rate when they should've shut up and asked a question. And every one of those fumbles is a real merchant, a real MID, gone, because somebody had to learn on a live one.

The old way was role-play. You sit across from the new guy, you play the grumpy restaurant owner, you run him through it. Problem is that doesn't scale. You can't sit there for 40 reps or do it with reps that are not local to you.

So hand it to a trained AI.

You can build a custom GPT that takes on any merchant persona you want, runs full sales conversations with your rep, stays in character when they get pushed, and then drops the act and grades the rep on exactly where they lost the deal. Your new agent can run ten "calls" before lunch, against ten different merchant personalities, and never burn a single real prospect.

ChatGPT or Claude lets you build a custom GPT/project with a saved instruction set. You write the instructions once. Your reps use it forever. It is most important to spend time building this instruction set.

Here's the build:

1. Open ChatGPT and create a new custom GPT (Explore GPTs → Create). Or use a Claude Project. Same idea, different button and UI.

2. Paste in an instruction set that tells it three things: act as a payments merchant, run the conversation realistically, then grade. (Full sample below, written for a fictional shop you can rename.)

3. Give it your actual offer and objections. The more it knows about how YOU sell (dual pricing, free terminal, statement analysis, whatever your angle is), the more useful the grading gets. Feed it your foundation doc if you have one.

4. Set the difficulty. Tell it to play an easy merchant for week one, a skeptical one for week two, and a flat-out hostile gatekeeper for week three.

5. Have the rep run it daily and share conversations with you so you can provide more feedback.

Here's a sample instruction set you can copy, paste, and rename. I wrote it for a made-up shop called Wingman Payments. Swap in your company, your offer, and your objections.

That's the whole thing. Build it once, name it after your shop, train it very well and CONTINUE TWEAKING THE INSTRUCTION SET TO GET BETTER RESPONSES and you've got a 24/7 sales trainer that never gets tired of playing the grumpy guy who's "happy with Square."

The best part: it scales. One rep or fifty, they all train against the same standard before they ever touch a live merchant. You stop paying for onboarding in burned doors.

⭐ Run a rep through three difficulty levels for a week and you'll know exactly who's ready for the field and who needs another week of reps, before they cost you a single MID.

Here's a small thing that changes everything about a cold knock: walking in already knowing the owner's name.

"Hi, is Maria around?" lands completely different than "Hey, is the owner in?" The first one sounds like you belong there. The second one sounds like exactly what you are: a rep who pulled up to a strip mall and started knocking. Gatekeepers can smell the difference, and they screen the second guy out before he gets a word in.

This is the whole reason I built Leverage. You drop in a business (or search for leads in the area you’re in) and it pulls the owner's name, the review pain points, and a custom opening angle in about 8 seconds, right on your phone, before you walk in. No 12 open tabs, no digging through Google reviews in the parking lot. Pre-knock intel, done for you, on the way to the door.

One of the early adopters, Michelle, told me “it booked her an extra 2 appointments last week” just from walking in knowing the name. That's the entire edge: you stop sounding like a stranger and start sounding like someone who did their homework, because you did (well, your tool did haha).

It's $30/mo, it's built mobile-first for exactly this moment, and Outerchange readers get first crack at it.

If you're knocking doors without knowing who's behind them, you're making the job harder than it has to be in 2026.

Reply to this email with “Leverage” and I’ll get you set up with a starter account.

Before you go :