POS leads: reach new businesses before they pick a terminal
Auspector ·
To reach new businesses while their payment setup is still open, work a daily list: card-taking categories, your territory, records that arrived in the last 30 days, a phone number or an address. In the 30 days to October 23, 2026, 6,338 new restaurant records and 6,282 new hair and beauty salon records arrived in the United States alone.
Why the opening is the moment
A new restaurant, salon or shop usually takes its first card payment on the day it opens. That forces a cluster of decisions in the weeks around opening: a card terminal, a merchant account, often a till or POS system, and sometimes a booking or ordering tool that has to work with it. Once a terminal sits on the counter and the staff know the till, changing it means new hardware, a new contract and another round of training. The conversation moves from “choose us” to “switch to us” — and switching is the harder sale.
Not every new business you reach is still choosing. Some signed up with their bank when they opened the account; some took whatever was quickest to get through the first weeks. Both are worth a conversation, but not the same one — which is why the first question on the call matters more than the pitch.
How many arrive each month?
In the 30 days to October 23, 2026, 315,607 records entered our newly opened businesses section in the United States, 71.6% of them with a phone number; in the United Kingdom the figure was 56,319, 74.3% with a phone number. Four of the sectors we break down take their payments face to face — restaurants, cafés, hair and beauty salons, and auto repair shops:
| Sector | New records (30 days) | Phone (all records) |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurants (US) | 6,338 | 91.6% |
| Cafés (US) | 1,901 | 80.9% |
| Hair and beauty salons (US) | 6,282 | 89.6% |
| Auto repair shops (US) | 5,045 | 91.4% |
| Restaurants (UK) | 1,006 | 85.5% |
| Cafés (UK) | 669 | 68.4% |
| Hair and beauty salons (UK) | 2,039 | 83.4% |
| Auto repair shops (UK) | 1,295 | 89.4% |
The obvious missing row is retail: bakeries, florists, pharmacies, convenience stores, phone shops. Retail is not one of the six sectors we break down, so this post has no number for it — but each of those is a category of its own in the search, and seeing how many arrived in your territory this month costs nothing.
| City | Restaurants | Cafés | Salons |
|---|---|---|---|
| New York, US | 175 | 40 | 126 |
| Los Angeles, US | 82 | 36 | 59 |
| Houston, US | 72 | 10 | 64 |
| Philadelphia, US | 54 | 14 | 20 |
| Chicago, US | 51 | 16 | 35 |
| London, UK | 164 | 57 | 112 |
| Manchester, UK | 23 | 8 | 16 |
| Birmingham, UK | 15 | 7 | 18 |
Which businesses to call first
- Restaurants and cafés. Card payments at every service, tips, split bills — and usually a till that sends orders to the kitchen, so the terminal and the till tend to be one decision. A worked example of the list is in how to find new restaurants and cafés.
- Hair and beauty salons. Many small payments a day, deposits for appointments, products sold at the desk. The numbers by country are in new hair and beauty salons.
- Auto repair shops. Fewer, larger payments, usually against an invoice — and a customer who wants to pay before driving away.
- Shops and food retail. Search them by category: a bakery, a florist and a phone repair shop are three separate lists.
Two groups are worth filtering out. New branches of chains: a record is a location, so a 40-branch chain is 40 records, and its terminal is usually chosen at head office — you will recognise them by name. And service-area trades such as plumbers, electricians and cleaners, which rarely have a counter; if you sell mobile card readers, they are a list of their own.
Building the list
- Category: pick categories, not an industry. Each record keeps its own category and categories are not merged, so “coffee shop” or “nail salon” can be a list of its own.
- Area: city and district — the territory your reps actually cover.
- Time: arrived in the last 30 days; work this week’s arrivals first. The date is when the record reached us, not when the business opened.
- Channel: phone number on record for a call team; address and coordinates for a field team. Opening hours, where published, tell you when someone will be there.
- Count, then open: searching and counting are free on every plan. A credit is spent only when you open a record’s details for the first time, and an export counts as an open. Exports are CSV or XLSX with a stable ID per record, so a re-import updates your CRM instead of duplicating it (pricing).
- Watch: save the search and new matches arrive by email every day — your reps start each morning with yesterday’s new records.
The same steps for any seller are in building a lead list from new businesses.
Field route or phone?
Payments are a hands-on sale. Many owners want to hold the terminal, see the fees on their own takings and know when the money lands in their account. That favours a visit — and a new business is easy to visit, because in the first weeks the owner is often on the premises. Coordinates are on effectively every record, so a rep can plan a route district by district instead of crossing the city.
The phone works for large territories and for qualifying before a visit: one short call to find out whether the decision is still open, then a visit only where it is. Stay away from service hours — a restaurant at 12:30 or a salon on a Saturday morning has no time for you — and use the opening hours on the record.
What to say on the first contact
Keep it to the opening, one question and one offer: “I saw you’ve just opened on Elm Street — congratulations. Quick question: how are you taking cards at the moment?” The answer tells you whether you are selling a first terminal, replacing a stopgap, or should call back in three months. The full script, with objections and follow-up timing, is in our cold call script for new businesses.
Whether you may call or email a business without its consent depends on where you are and who you contact, and the obligation sits with you as the sender; rules differ sharply between countries. The short version is in our FAQ. Our records hold no email addresses and no named people.