The Gap Between “Would Switch” and “Will Switch”
PYMNTS Intelligence and Enigma’s Main Street Health Q3 2023 survey of 509 Main Street small businesses found 59% would switch payment processors for lower transaction fees and 42% would switch for ease of use, yet only 15% say they’re actually likely to switch within three years. The same survey found 85% report satisfaction with their current processor.
Those numbers describe two different mental states rather than contradicting each other. A merchant can genuinely believe a cheaper deal exists and still not be moving toward one, which is exactly the space this piece is about.
Why Stated Willingness Doesn’t Convert Itself
RAIN Group’s research on 489 B2B sellers found it takes an average of 8 touchpoints to land a first meeting with a prospect, with top performers needing only 5. A merchant telling a survey they’d switch for lower fees is roughly zero touchpoints into an actual switching decision, which is a long way from the point where inertia has genuinely been tested.
That’s the practical reading of the 59%-to-15% gap: most of the distance between “would” and “will” isn’t rate resistance, it’s simply that nobody has walked the merchant through what switching would actually require yet.
What Actually Sits Inside the Gap (Reasoning, Not a Cited Statistic)
No study measures the specific fears keeping a satisfied-sounding merchant from moving, so this is practitioner reasoning, not a sourced finding. The most common ones described by agents in this space: downtime fear, the worry that a switch means a day or two of processing trouble during a busy stretch; the hassle of re-training staff on new hardware or a new checkout flow; and simply losing a rep relationship a merchant has already built, even an imperfect one, for an unknown replacement.
None of those fears show up in a satisfaction survey, because satisfaction and switching-readiness are measuring different things. A merchant can be dissatisfied with their rate and still rank their processor highly on the parts of the relationship that make switching feel risky.
Why This Changes What a Statement-Analysis Pitch Has to Do
VA Horizon’s existing guidance on the statement-analysis opening pitch is built around showing a merchant the number left on the table. This piece’s argument is that the number alone rarely closes the 59%-to-15% gap on its own, since the gap isn’t primarily a math problem. A pitch that also pre-answers the downtime, retraining, and relationship-continuity questions is addressing the actual reason 44% of the survey’s “would switch” majority never becomes part of the 15% who do.
That’s a different conversation than proving savings exist. It’s proving the switch itself won’t be the disruption a merchant is quietly bracing for.
Where a Follow-Up Conversation Closes the Gap
A merchant who says “I’d switch for a better rate” on a first call is giving an honest answer to a hypothetical, not a commitment. Getting from that hypothetical to an actual signed application usually takes the multiple touches RAIN Group’s data describes, each one an opportunity to address a different piece of the inertia rather than repeat the same savings pitch.
Human + AI SDRs can carry exactly that follow-through over SMS, reaching a merchant on their own schedule instead of relying on one call to overcome fears a single pitch was never going to resolve.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- PYMNTS Intelligence + Enigma, Main Street Health Q3 2023
- RAIN Group, How Many Touchpoints Does It Take to Make a Sale?