PUMP UP THE ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE – September 2012

Wow, can you believe that the fiscal year is almost over?  It seems like just yesterday we were out shopping for holiday gift giving and celebrating the start of 2012.  How time flies when you are collecting money.  Hopefully, we are all doing that.  It was pretty cool how good our overall AR looked after we did our writeoffs.  Even Fullerton was standing tall.  Now we just have to work extra hard to keep it that way.  Call, call, call.  Fax and email often to make sure your slow payers know that you are serious.

This month you can use the end of our fiscal year and you need to get this off the books as a very legitimate and not even lying excuse.  Some payables people may understand that better than just asking for your money.  I had one customer who paid me with a credit card just to be sure it would be accomplished.  Another  trick I am using, is letting them know I will be in big trouble, if they are still over 60, 90, etc., because that report gets generated with my end of month reports back to our corporate office, and my boss gets really cranky if she sees past due accounts.  Over ½ the time I use that one, it gets results, but you need to start early enough to allow for mailing time for the check to get to you and in the system.  Most payables people can sympathize with the cranky boss syndrome.  (Sorry to make you the scapegoat, Paula.)

Since we visit again and again the “how to’s” of AR, I won’t go into that in this issue.  Instead, I would like to touch on some of the stuff going on in the new system.  We all went through the exercises assigned in the last PUTAR, so we should all have a little knowledge of what is to come.  It seems a little scary when you first get started, but I noticed that as I did more and more, it really is not too difficult.  In fact, some of it is easier, and I think it will be better in the long run.  The call scheduling is a very cool feature, and reminders of payment promises should help immensely.  Just think the amount of paper we can save by not having to print the reports and keep notes on the paper and mark up your calendar with a schedule of who needs to be called when.

The manuals are there for your use too.  They were very helpful in providing a step by step procedure on how to do all the different functions of AR.  A big thank you to Elaina, Jenny and all team members who toiled for hours to make all that possible.  To me it was much easier to go through than the online classes from Epicor.  So, use the manuals, go through the things you encounter day to day and practice them in the play system, because before you know it, we will be embarking on a totally new system and we want to be sure to be ready.  To help in that, here is some more practice exercises.

Paula would like these done and sent to Jenny by September 12, 2012.  Please jot down your deposit numbers, invoice numbers and other computer generated numbers so Jenny can check your work.  As always, if you have any questions, call or email her.

• Enter 5 Miscellaneous Cash Receipts (Separate Deposits)
• Enter 5 payments where the customer OVERPAYS and create a Credit Invoice
• Write-off 5 small (under $10) credit balances
• Reverse 2 payments (when you make an error and post check to wrong account)
• Use CREDIT/REBILL to credit an invoice owing and rebill customer (for example, we forgot to add freight on the invoice)
• Credit pricing on an invoice using CREDIT/DEBIT Memos
• Process REFUND for credit on customer’s account (using QR REFUND CHECKS – branches will only do the AR portion of this)
• Do AR portion of the steps involved when you get an NSF Check (see QR BOUNCED CHECKS IN AR)

So keep your desks and AR clean and remember end of fiscal year is upon us this month.  Happy collecting.

C.J. Stoyka, Team Fullerton.

PUMP UP THE SALES – September 2012

For years we have been faithfully writing and faithfully reading our monthly Pump up the Sales; looking for ideas, looking for tips; looking for the magic bullet. I wish I could honestly say that there was a secret recipe to instantly increase sales (which, in this economy, has been about as easy as putting pantyhose on an octopus), but if such a recipe exists, no one on earth has found it yet.  So what do we do?   According to Lee Iacocca “Anything. Something. So long as we just don’t sit there. If we screw up, start over. Try something else. If we wait until we’ve satisfied all the uncertainties, it may be too late.” So, we try.  And then we try some more.  And then we try something new.  And then we try again.  Find something that works, and then do more of it.  Do the right things, and do things right.

Every day, with every call, with every client, we need to be giving it our all, and, preferably, a little more.  We need to find new clients, and we need to protect the relationship we have with our existing clients.  All day, every day.  And yes, I know, sometimes that’s easier said than done, we all have THOSE clients…the difficult, the needy, the time-suckers.  The clients that you sometimes secretly hope will accidentally call the wrong branch.  But in these times, we can’t afford to pass up a sale, so suck it up and give them your best.  And remember that sometimes the path to a nice, fat sale is paved with a hundred that barely meet minimum…I’m sure we can all think of at least one client who we had pegged as a “three-dollar Joe” who turned around months (or maybe years) later and bought a lathe off the floor. Never count someone out—an established and trusted relationship often pays off later.

So how do we land the big fish? By practicing on the little…once we have a fish on the hook, don’t throw it back, no matter how small it is. Treat every order as if it’s the most important order of the day and we can’t help but build a reputation as a company that can be trusted and relied upon. Our integrity as a company is of the utmost importance, and it is the sort of thing that word of mouth marketing thrives upon. Reputation will be a factor when clients are deciding where to spend their money; let’s ensure that ours is impeccable and use it to improve our chances of landing those big fish and those lucrative orders.

Some points to keep in mind:

• Understand what your customer is doing:  it’s very difficult to recommend tooling when you don’t know what they’re using it for.
• No more No Stock:  find a replacement, find a substitution, find a solution…don’t lose an order, don’t let someone walk away empty-handed.
• Avoid the backorder: see above.  Paying freight on backorders that could have been substituted on the original is literally throwing money away.
• Listen carefully and repeat it back:  catch the errors before they head out the door.
• Be polite, be positive, smile.
• Be a sponge: listen to what the customer is saying as well as what they’re implying.
• Seek knowledge from those around you; it will benefit you as well as the next customer that you assist.
• Be well rounded: everyone is very good at something…aspire to be pretty good at a bunch of other things too.
• Be informed: do you know what’s going on? The special? The spiff? The closeouts? You should.
• Communicate. With your clients, with your co-workers, with everyone. Good communication is imperative. Always.
• Relate to people. It’s the easiest way to make yourself likable and start to build a trusting relationship with a client.
• Do it well. If you’re going to take the time to do something, you might as well do it right, do it well.
• Upsell, upsell, upsell.
• Make your customers feel important & ALWAYS say thank you.
• “Do what you can to help customers walk away feeling better than when they walked in.”
• Have a little fun. Customers can tell when you’re feeling friendly and chipper, and they can tell when you woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Let’s always leave them with a good impression…let it go, laugh a little, lighten up.

Above all, remember the number one rule of customer service:  if you don’t take care of the customer, somebody else will.

To the future! May we have brighter days & bigger sales…

St. Louis