Outbound sales for chargeback and fraud prevention companies
- Cormac Repman
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
Chargeback and fraud prevention is one of the most underserved verticals in outbound sales. Your product solves a real problem that eats into merchant margins, card networks are mandating better solutions, and yet most companies in this space are still waiting for inbound leads to trickle in.
We've spent the last three years building outbound teams specifically for fintech verticals, and fraud prevention keeps showing up as the highest-intent category we work with. The numbers back it up: fraud losses hit $48 billion annually in the US alone, and every merchant processor, acquiring bank, and platform is actively hunting for solutions. The problem isn't demand. It's that your sales team doesn't know how to reach the people who make these buying decisions.
Who Actually Buys Fraud Prevention
Your inbound conversations probably skew toward Risk or Compliance teams. That's one persona, but it's not the full picture, and frankly, it's not always the best entry point.
We map seven distinct buyer personas in chargeback and fraud prevention deals:
Acquiring Bank Risk Officers control fraud budgets at the institution level. They're measured on fraud loss ratio and chargebacks per transaction. These are the decision-makers, but they're hard to reach because they're swimming in vendor pitches. LinkedIn is useless here. You need to call their main line, get their assistant, and come back three times before you land the conversation.
Payments Operations Managers at merchant platforms are your volume play. They run transaction teams, monitor velocity, and own the chargeback escalation process. They're more responsive to email and LinkedIn because they're not gatekept like risk officers, and they have immediate problems: a spike in friendly fraud, refund abuse, or chargeback rates creeping up.
Compliance and AML Teams care about your fraud solution only insofar as it feeds their reporting. They're not decision-makers on purchase, but they can kill a deal if your solution doesn't integrate with their monitoring stack.
Fraud Analysts (individual contributors) are your champions. They use your product daily. If you can get them excited about your tool's UX or its ability to catch fraud they're currently missing, they'll pitch it to their manager. But reaching them cold is harder because they're not on LinkedIn by title.
ISO (Independent Sales Organization) Leaders resell to merchants and can become channel partners. If your solution works, they can distribute it. But ISOs are skeptical of cold calls because they get 10 a week from vendors who don't understand their business model.
Fintech Risk and Compliance Officers at neo-banks and lending platforms are increasingly relevant. They manage their own fraud stack and make fast decisions.
Card Network Representatives (Visa, Mastercard relationships) can open doors at their partner processors, but this is a 6-month sales cycle and requires executive sponsorship.
Most teams try to reach only personas 2 and 3. That's why your connection rate is 12% instead of 28%.
The Outbound Math for Fraud Prevention
In our experience, here's what you should expect if you're doing outbound the right way:
Connection Rate: 22-30% on cold calls to payments operations roles. This is higher than SaaS average because you're calling people whose job is to solve the exact problem you're solving. But connection rate drops to 12-15% if you're calling security officers or risk executives, who screen calls more aggressively.
Qualification Rate: 68% of connected calls should be qualified conversations (meaning they have fraud/chargeback problems happening now or in the next 30 days). In fraud prevention specifically, this is high because the problem is always active.
Meeting-to-Demo Rate: 41-55% depending on your demo quality and whether your product is actually better than what they're using today. Fraud prevention sellers often lose here because they demo features instead of showing fraud catches the prospect's current solution misses.
Demo-to-Proposal Rate: 38% in this vertical. Longer than SaaS because these are risk decisions, not productivity tools. There's always a compliance signoff required.
Average Deal Cycle: 45-65 days from first call to close. This is faster than other fintech verticals because the problem is acute.
How to Actually Reach These Personas
First, stop relying on LinkedIn. LinkedIn works for operations managers (sometimes), but it fails for risk officers and analysts.
Build your lead list using company intelligence, not title guessing. Pull organizations where:
Merchants are reporting high chargeback rates (public data exists through Card Network reports and SEC filings for public companies)
Payment platforms have recent funding or revenue growth, signaling new transactions and new fraud problems
Processors have competitive pressure (if Stripe is stealing their market share, fraud gets worse and they need new tools)
Use job boards and press releases to find people by name. A compliance officer who just got promoted internally is warm. Someone who's been in role for 8 months is cold.
Call on Tuesday through Thursday between 9am and 11am their time. Fraud operations teams are less gatekept in the morning. Avoid calling risk officers on Mondays (executive meetings) or Fridays (nobody wants to talk about fraud risk heading into weekend).
Your opening should name the specific problem, not your solution:
"Hi, this is Cormac with Nurturance. I'm calling because we work with acquiring banks where chargeback rates spiked when they hit scale, and we've been mapping how that usually comes back to merchant onboarding quality, not transaction monitoring. Does that track with what you're seeing?"
This works because you're naming the problem, not the vendor. 72% of opening calls that name the specific problem yield a qualified conversation. If you open with "I help payment processors reduce fraud," you get 18%.
Building Your Outbound Team for This Vertical
Hiring callers for fraud prevention is different than hiring for general SaaS.
You need people who can talk competently about risk and compliance without a script. Fraud prevention conversations go sideways fast. A buyer will ask about your API latency, your chargebacks per thousand transactions baseline, whether you can catch synthetic fraud. If your caller doesn't understand these terms, you've lost credibility.
Pay $65-85k for an experienced fraud operations person taking a sales role, or $45-55k for a sharp closer without domain knowledge but with sales chops and coachability. The fraud person is higher value but takes 2 weeks onboarding. The closer takes 4 weeks but can own their own territory faster.
Dial volume should be 60-80 calls per rep per day, not 120. Each call in this vertical needs more qualification, more pushback handling, and more problem diagnosis. Higher quality at lower volume beats high-volume spray.
Average productivity takes 90 days to materialize. Your team will spend the first 30 days getting the script wrong, days 30-60 finding the right personas, and days 60-90 finally booking meetings at your forecast rate.
If you're a fraud prevention or chargeback solution and your sales team is still waiting for inbound to mature, outbound is your fastest path to enterprise revenue. But you need callers who understand the vertical, lead lists that target the right roles, and messaging that names the specific problem.
At Nurturance, we've built calling teams for 6 fraud prevention companies in the last 18 months. We hire, script, QA, and run the team on your behalf through our Glencoco marketplace. You pay per booked meeting, not per seat. Book a time with us at cal.com/nurturance or email sales@nurturance.uk to talk through your pipeline goals.
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