“Your account will be a charge off,” he said.

“What is that,” I asked.

Got him!

He hemmed and hawed, eventually said it would be a bank charge off.

“What does that mean”, I asked again.

In time, he got around to the effect it would have on my credit, something of interest to me as the debtor and understood.

It is easy to get in the habit of using phrases and acronyms that we understand and use in our business. It is difficult to catch yourself and make the necessary adjustments.

Start a pool with your team and catch each other using a “banned” word or phrase. If you’re caught, a quarter or its equivalent into the pool. If you work on your own, catch yourself in ‘live’ or recorded calls and make the same donation to a local charity.

The doctor is IN!

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This month’s pithy quote:

“It is difficult to get someone to understand your position when
their bottom line may depend on their NOT understanding. Keep it
simple.”   …Tim Paulsen

"Whatever!"

Odds are your mood affects the words you use when trying to convince or motivate a client. But, do you want your success governed by how you feel?

What is your very best pitch, word for word? If it is the very best it can be it should be used all the time, no exception – until you have something better.

Here is an example that might be used after a basic introduction, short for a consumer call and somewhat longer for commercial:

“Will you please mail me a cheque today for $XX?”

Only ten words – but powerful:

• ‘Will’ rather than can. I want them thinking about a solid commitment
• ‘Please’ – Nothing wrong with please and thank you, no reason to not be polite, but we don’t beg for the money
• ‘Mail’ is specific. We think in pictures and this puts one in the debtor’s mind. If I don’t want it in the mail, I’ll be asking for delivery, pick up, etc.
• ‘Cheque’. Once again specific. I may want options of credit card payments for consumer and some commercial accounts.
• ‘Today’ a sense of urgency
• ‘$XX’.  The full amount due. I’m not looking for just a ‘payment’.  If we negotiate, we will do so based on the full amount, not a partial payment.

Would you like to hear a sample?

Over the years, I have honed a specific message that I leave to my potential clients. Send me an email with your telephone number and I will leave you a message in the off hours. I think you’ll be impressed.

Pithy Quote:

There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.
Thomas Carlyle

“Until we have your account brought up to date, your future orders may be placed on hold.”

However, for most of my clients, the objective is not “collections” but to create and maintain a customer. While that does include bringing an account to a current status, it also demands the focus on present and future sales. After all, if we collect, but the customer does not want to deal with us again, or they do so with a bitter taste in their mouth, it is not effective collections.

“Bob, I’m calling you today about expediting the sales process for your firm. I noticed an order received a couple of days ago but our system may throw a blocker due to an outstanding invoice that has just hit the 45 day mark. Can you help me clear that up today so I may expedite the sale?”

Some may say it is semantics and I am sure they could argue that point – but not successfully. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and go ‘walk about’ for a moment. Which one would you prefer to hear if you were the customer? Me too.

So, there is a new job title I suggest you add to your business card: Sales Expediter

The Stick…

or

The carrot?

Pithy Saying of the Month:

“People don’t change their behaviour unless it makes a difference for them to do so.”
- Fran Tarkenton

There is a saying: “Nobody on their deathbed ever said they wish they had spent more time at the office.” I’m not so sure.

Thomas Edison’s wife figured he was tired out and stressed, needing a vacation. She told him he should go to the one place he would rather be than anywhere else in the world. “O.K.,” he told her, “I’ll go tomorrow.” Next day, he was back at his office. Hugh Hefner was surrounded by the most beautiful women in the world and he went to work in his pajamas and a housecoat. Most of us, o.k., the men, will agree it’s not exactly a fate worse than death.  And what about Steve Jobs? Ignoring his Apple shares for a moment, he was worth between 6.5 and 7 billion from his sales of Pixar alone. This was not a man who went to the office and put in hours because he had to pay the rent.

A young professional woman was recently presented with a dilemma. She was involved in an outside activity that brought her excitement and a sense of accomplishment. The employers at her ‘day job’ could tell the difference. They told her she would have to choose. Claire tendered her resignation and decided to go with her passion. Good on you, Claire!

One does not have to be as drastic. You can find the work you need to stir your passion, but it may already be waiting for you when you next walk into your office. A month or so back, I was working with a client on the West coast of the United States. Some good people working for the receivables department of a utility thought they were collecting past due accounts. “No,” I told them, “you are bringing power to the people. If you are not able to work with them to clear their past due status, they won’t have any power.” Three brick layers on the same site. One says he’s laying bricks. Another is building a wall. The third is building a family home. Same bricks, same wall, but one has an attitude that will lighten his step to say nothing of his heart and his soul.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you have to be a doctor, actor or concert musician to be passionate. I have seen passion displayed in a credit manager. Two weeks ago a doorman at a hotel in Pakistan consistently demonstrated passion in his work and just the day before I wrote this blog, passion for their work was evident in two sales clerks at a 7-11 in Manila.

Perhaps you believe you need to be involved in a life saving operation in order to be passionate? Your wish is granted. We are all involved in a life saving operation – our own.

The philosophers Crosby, Stills & Nash said it best: “If you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with.”

What are you working on today, what about tomorrow?

Like I said, they have their challenges.

One of them I tackled head on was how they saw themselves. I asked the question straight out: “What is your objective?”

There is often some hesitation at this point of a program and it wasn’t any different with these folks.

Eventually, someone responded in a hesitant voice, “Our objective is to collect money.”

“No,” I said. “Collecting money is what you do, but your objective is to provide power to your customers. You are able to “make it so” thru effective collections, working with people who may be facing difficult times, perhaps under the influence of many pressures including financial. Gather information, help and redirect where possible, work out payment plans if that is a reasonable option and yes…sometimes to disconnect a service. Without the latter taking place on occasion, nobody gets any service.

In your situation, when you do your job to the best of your ability – it truly is, Power to the People.”

This is when we are needed the most and when dealing with one of these fire-breathing customers it helps to remember “when they are at their worst – you need to be at your very best”.

Back in about 1942, Lieutenant A. Zirnheld, a college professor before the war, was killed in action behind enemy lines in Lybia. This prayer was found on his body and has since been adopted by the French Foreign Legion. We may not jump out of airplanes or put our lives on the line, yet the sentiments are applicable to the unique challenges we face in the business of “Effective Collection Techniques”.

THE PARATROOPER’S PRAYER

I’m asking You God, to give me what You have left.
Give me those things which others never ask of You.
I don’t ask You for rest, or tranquility.
Not that of the spirit, the body, or the mind.
I don’t ask You for wealth, or success, or even health.
All those things are asked of You so much Lord,
that you can’t have any left to give.
Give me instead Lord what You have left.
Give me what others don’t want.
I want uncertainty and doubt.
I want torment and battle.
And I ask that You give them to me now and forever Lord,
so I can be sure to always have them,
because I won’t always have the strength to ask again.
But give me also the courage, the energy,
and the spirit to face them.

I ask You these things Lord,
because I can’t ask them of myself.

Early last month I was visiting a client and reviewing their training. I discovered their sales people received several weeks of classes, one-on-one and working with a senior and seasoned partner before they were allowed to call on a customer ‘solo’. One of their accounts receivable representatives went on maternity leave and was replaced by a young woman from accounts payable. When I asked what kind of training she received I was told, “She didn’t need it. She already knew the system.”

How many times have you walked out or at least didn’t return to an organization because of employee incompetence or worse, dealing with someone who didn’t care?

When you are dealing with a delinquent customer, they can be MORE valuable than a sales prospect. After all, they’ve already proven they will buy your product, now we just have to get them to pay for it AND want to return and do business with us again. Most of us know the stats. It can cost six times as much to replace a customer as to get a new one.

Professional and well trained collectors know that it is the money AND the customer.

We can help with a short video and a test and there is good news.

• It shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes
• The information is very good

Better news?

• It’s free!

You may want to call it a policy, guideline, a rule but implement the following for your business (even if it is just you and yes, it includes sales:

“Nobody is allowed to speak to a customer about a delinquent account until they have passed testing for Accounts Receivable 101.”

Here is a link to a video on YouTube where we cover essential telephone collection techniques as well as key elements of effective email.

You may develop your own quiz from the video or feel free to contact us for one.[1]

A surgeon once said that he could teach someone how to take out an appendix in less than a half hour. But, to teach them what to do if something went wrong, could take several years. Getting good in collections and staying that way takes more than fifteen minutes. You will find information on our site and I am sure you may find others offered in your area. But that takes a budget as well as time and a course may not be available for weeks or months and you need something now.

Fifteen minutes and free. Not a bad investment when you consider what can be lost.

Yet, there were two additional lessons from the classic 1996 Tom Cruise film.

1. Asking for the money in collections, using an assertive but not too aggressive approach is one of the most important skills to master. It is one of the most difficult balancing acts in business. Most times, we want the money AND we want the customers.

   Yet, even when we don’t want a customer to darken our door again, we want to avoid complaints.

   Saying it and how we say it is the most important task in collections. But, not the only one.

2. “You had me at hello.” Showing up, on time. If your customer has not paid you as agreed, don’t waste any time. Get in touch with them right now. Good customers? All the more reason to contact them and ask for the money. If they like you and they are in trouble, they figure they can pay you last…if at all.
3. “Help me to help you.” We can cajole, tell it like it is or it will be but we are not going to make a deal without the customer. Let’s try to sit on the same side of the negotiation table. “Mr. Customer, I don’t expect us to put our arms around each other and sing Kumbaya at the end of this, but both of us have to have a deal that we can live with and I’m hoping you’ll work with me on this. It’s your call, but here are some of the alternatives.”

Note: Based on Tim Paulsen’s Keynote and ebook: “Everything I need to know about collections, I learned from the movies!”

Do you remember Chief Brody (ably played by actor Roy Schneider) stepping back, cigarette dropping from his mouth and saying, “we’re going to need a bigger boat”.

You are not going to convince an accounts payable rep to pay you against their company policy or instructions from their boss or company owner. Sometimes, you need a bigger boat.

Get all the information you need from them and if you don’t have the title and experience, bring in your own Richard Dreyfuss (shark expert in the movie) to join your team. It may be that you need your Director of Sales, Controller, Vice-President of Finance or even
C.E.O. to help out.

Pithy Quote of the Month:

He who burns his bridges better be a damn good swimmer. 
~Author Unknown

With not many words, Rocco successfuly conveys a number of messages:

Rocco

1. You are getting an excellent price.
2. You feel special (there always seems to be some emphasis on the you from Rocco).
3. If for some reason, he can’t come in at that price (though he always has with me), he has forewarned the customer.

Quality craftsman like Rocco are hard to find. Those who can also share a negotiation lesson with you are rarer still.

Pithy Quote of the Month:

“The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that fits all cases.”
…Carl Gustav Jung

This tip was originally published in September 2009.