In Focus Commercial Credit


Left-right: Nirmal Noteha; Paul Gordon; Sally Nolan; Sara Souyave >>


personally, I think it is a commercial role rather than a financial role.


Because if you put it in a financial role


only, then what you then do is find yourself to be fire-fighting at the very end. But if you are at the front of the business, then you are setting in place the processes and procedures, and you are part of the entire journey.


ABR: Smart customers can infer a certain amount of predictability from an e-mail: ‘I have had the polite dunning letter then I know that in 15 days, I will get something a little bit sterner, so I can factor that in if I wish to delay systematically’.


PG: The large value and volume of our work is business-to-business – the scale and size of your business will dictate that you need to work far more by way of telephone calls, but your volume dictates your need to rely on technology.


Do you feel that you have the tools available that you need? RW: Nowadays, if an email is undelivered, a notification of this should be received by the sender. It is not often however, that such notifications are received. And with Royal Mail, I gather that in reality under 1% of letters go missing, yet we find, that a lot of customers deny having received any communication relating to outstanding sums.


AV:With my sales team, we would have a meeting and share where the problems were, and where the customer would say to the sales team ‘oh, I am not happy about this’, then the sales team would always have this up their sleeve to be able to say ‘actually, I have noticed that your payments


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If the company is aiming to retain customers, then your credit management is going to be that way, but if your focus is just to collect money and do not worry about retaining customers, because that is a sales function, then you are geared that way


are getting a bit later’, and the customer would realise that we were talking to each other. So I think that, if you have got a good


sales team, then you do not use it to collect money, but it certainly can influence it. But ultimately, it is a question of the focus of the business, rather than the department.


LW:When we are dealing overseas, then I would rely on the sales person, it is very much integrated within the financials. If we have a high-value, low-volume part of the business, then I would try to go through sales and ask them what relationships they have, and how we can build things together. This is not a question of getting them


to do our job, but rather it is a natural extension. But on the low-volume, high- value cases and one-off purchases, you have to go automated.


AV: I have worked in a number of different industries and, in business-to-business, we have tended to be product-based and the relationship with Sales has been very important, as has been their knowledge of


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what is outstanding, as well as knowledge of who is paying well and badly, and where your risk is. I have been very fortunate that we have


been encompassed as part of the export team, which included sales and the reps, so we were there as part of sales because we looked at margin, and that partnership was crucial. But another industry, where I have just finished, is hospitality and that is very different. That industry, with billing, is very customer-facing so you have to be so nice, so polite, and so non-judgmental, but then you have to deal with the details afterwards. But at the front desk, the customer is


always right. Then you look into the issue and try to resolve it; so they are just two different areas and sales and credit very separate. So it comes down to the specialisation


of your industry and your customers, and, most importantly, the focus of your company. If the company is aiming to retain customers, then your credit management is going to be that way, but if your focus is just to collect money and do not worry about retaining customers, because that is a sales function, then you are geared that way.


IS: Sales, Credit, and the customer should be working together to jointly drive growth and profitability. I have worked in the farming industry – it is changing, but there are still farmers who will only hand over a cheque to the salesman going down the drive; it happens. In the construction sector where Karndean partially operates, a lot of our customers are small operators, so the mobile phone and regular use of card payment is the common choice. You have to deal with customers in different ways depending on their needs and realities. CCR


March 2020


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