The Seven Secrets of Highly Successful Collectors
How to Effectively Prod Customers to Pay On-Time
As with any other task, some people are better at debt collections than others. The good news . . . everybody can improve! This includes people who are not comfortable in a collection role, which is a common situation in smaller organizations, especially for those that doesn’t have formal credit and collections training or experience.
After observing top notch collectors doing their job you might come to the conclusion that personality is critical, or that strong negotiating skills are essential. The fact of the matter is that those are secondary attributes. Many, if not most, B2B credit and collection professionals tend to be introverts, rather than extroverts, and still do a fine job collecting debts. The gift of gab and strong negotiating skills certainly help, but you can still be more than competent collecting from business customers if those are not your strengths.
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The Seven Secrets
Successful collectors understand that persistence is critical to getting paid. However, persistence alone won’t get the job done. There are other factors that contribute to high performance. Here then are seven secrets of highly effective collections:
Collections Is a Numbers Game: You must reach a critical mass of daily (weekly, if you have a smaller customer base) contacts or you will not be successful. It’s all about maintaining full coverage of all past due items. If you don’t keep up, you are giving your customers leeway to go further past due. Effective collectors call early and often. They also know the number of calls they have made or emails sent, the dollar amount of payment commitments, and the contacts needed to be made tomorrow and the rest of the week. You need to hit your numbers every day, and you can’t do that if you put collections off while you address other issues.
Read on to learn:
The other six secrets of successful collectors
The role of integrity
The importance of removing barriers to payment
