Most companies are really good at their craft, providing their products\/services to customers with excellence. Fewer companies are as good at selling their products\/services, most managing\u00a0to just get by. Even fewer companies are good at collecting receivables after the sales process is presumably complete. Collecting receivables is really a simple process, contrary to what some may think. I promised in my last blog that I would follow up on this subject, so here it is. The answer is really very simple. Please read on…<\/p>\n
One of my favorite movies is A League of Their Own<\/em> starring Geena Davis, Tom Hanks, and Madonna. It is a fictionalized account of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League during the World War II. In one scene, a young woman fails to throw to the cutoff from right field, allows the tying run to score, and is then chewed out by Tom Hanks, the grizzled coach. When she tears up, Hanks incredulously asserts, \u201cThere\u2019s no crying in baseball!\u201d Here\u2019s how I see the collections, or should I say the non-collections process play out in far too many circumstances. The company makes a sale and sends out an invoice, then waits 30 days hoping to get a check. When that doesn\u2019t happen, the company waits another 15 to 30 days, thinking that maybe the check\u00a0really is in the mail. Then, a mail or email is sent to the customer to identify the past due amount, but either is so benign that it does not spur action on the part of the customer, or has so much venom that it comes across as rude or threatening. Does this sound at all familiar?<\/p>\n Managing receivables is as simple as picking up the telephone, as low-tech and pedestrian as that may seem. Below is a simple, yet surprisingly effective 5-step methodology for managing your accounts receivable and speeding up collections, mostly based on the intellectual property invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876.<\/p>\n I have helped clients implement these processes in the past and found them to be amazingly successful in speeding up collections and avoiding bad debts. The resulting improvement in collections turns out to be a mix of metaphors – \u201cthere is no crying in collections.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most companies are really good at their craft, providing their products\/services to customers with excellence. Fewer companies are as good at selling their products\/services, most managing\u00a0to just get by. Even fewer companies are good at collecting receivables after the sales process is presumably complete. Collecting receivables is really a simple process, contrary to what some…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_editorskit_title_hidden":false,"_editorskit_reading_time":0,"_editorskit_is_block_options_detached":false,"_editorskit_block_options_position":"{}","cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shanes-really-deep-insights","tag-accounts-receivable"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nWhen it comes to accounts receivable, the analogy is: \u201cThere is no email in collections.\u201d No email? That is your answer to better collections, Mr. B2B CFO? Yes, absolutely. Why? Because difficult conversations are never effectively handled by email. It is my firm belief that email is our way of avoiding difficult conversations. We know we should pick up the phone or pay a personal visit to work things out, but we send an email instead because we want to avoid confrontation at all cost. Email is easy, impersonal, and effectively avoids confrontation, but fails to expedite the receipt of a check, which is the goal.<\/p>\n\n