So, we have new technology, we have new ways of doing
business, we have a changing customer base that has new needs and desires of
our companies. It’s a darn shame we can’t
do a better job, because our business is modeled on a structure out of the 1960’s.
Let’s take a look at my good friend Steve (it’s not his real
name, but he may know who he is). Steve
owns a mid-size third party collection agency, and he has 40 collection agents,
3 administrators, 1 IT manager, 2 sales representatives, and himself. Steve has a problem because his company has
stalled in growth, and he’s feeling some pain points because his IT manager can’t
deliver on simple requests, and his sales representatives aren’t growing his
business.
Steve is watching too much Mad Men on television. This kind of structure doesn’t work anymore.
Your Staff
The fundamental basis of your company, the people who work
with you, has changed immensely over the years, and many companies are failing
to keep up with the cultural change.
People don’t stay in the same job for 30 years out of loyalty, and the
idea of building a human assembly line is gone.
If you want to retain your staff, you need to engage with them – this means
giving them the opportunity to be more than a button pusher, and to take on
responsibilities and risks.
My friend Steve has a high turnover, because he isn’t any
different from other collection agencies, and doesn’t pay as much as
others. However, it’s not the pay that
retains people, it’s a positive work environment. Steve’s collectors are told to collect more,
without being given the tools to do it, and aren’t told how their work impacts
the clients, or the company’s bottom line.
There are a couple of staff that have been there for years, and there’s
an informal pecking order based on seniority, but no effort is given to help
staff members grow or improve, or take on new roles.
Many staff members have aptitudes that are waiting to be
unlocked – some are writers, some are tech-savvy, some are friendly and
outgoing, some are analytical. These
qualities can be utilized outside of a one-paragraph job description, and the
people who work with you will thrive on challenges that you give them.
Retaining employees through empowerment isn’t a new concept,
but it is one that I believe is lost on our industry. Our workforce is aging, especially in
management, and millennials are stepping in to the empty spaces left
behind. If we don’t adapt our structures
to retain the talented, and intelligent people that will come to work with us,
our industry will suffer.
Sales & Marketing
In the good old days, a business owner would hire one or two
sales representatives to make cold calls, often out of the Yellow Pages (or
Vernon’s Directories – anyone remember them?).
That sales representative would try to call 80+ businesses, and when
they reached someone interested in their services, they would put together a
sales presentation package and hand deliver it to the target client, and try to
build rapport. The company was built by
landing individual contracts in a traditional manner, and the sales manager
would receive a significant commission for the clients they had built up over
years.
Steve has two sales representatives, who call about 150
leads a day, resulting in about 50 contacts, 2 client proposals, and maybe 2
meetings a week, resulting in 1 new client every other week. Outside of these cold calls, or the
occasional conference, no one has the opportunity to hear anything good about
Steve’s company. Compare this to a
company with a lively blog that gets 200 hits a day, or an outreach program
that allows allow staff members to engage with people on Twitter, Facebook or
Linkedin. How many positive brand
experiences are possible when you don’t limit your marketing efforts to one
staff member and their telephone?
In a perfect world, you don’t need a sales manager – you need
to encourage everyone who works in the company to be an ambassador for your
brand to the outside world. The old days
of dialing one call at a time are over, now a Linkedin post might be viewed by
hundreds of people. A Slideshare
presentation or embedded video can have an ongoing effect of a presentation to
anyone who is willing to click on it, and your staff can share those links. Everyone in your company has the ability to support
sales and marketing, and everyone at your company should.
IT and Technology
If your organization struggles because one or two IT
managers are responsible for your day to day operations, you are doing it
wrong. There could be a number of things
involved – outdated software, apathetic staff, or simply overloaded work on a
restricted number of FTE, there is a solution, and it’s not just dealing with
the symptoms.
Steve’s IT department woes are out of a Dilbert strip, and
sadly not different from anyone else’s pain – the IT manager can’t be found when
something crashes, and there are issues almost every other day with corrupted
databases, files to import, exports and reports that need to be run for
clients, and any other number of ongoing small fires that need to be put out.
There are thousands of brilliant IT folks out there, and
they don’t work 9 to 5, or are necessarily local to your company. They are freelancers, contractors, and
consultants. They are available to
launch an isolated project, finish it, and bow out of the picture. With start-up companies, corporations that
claim to be “nimble” or have “scrum” positions, there’s not really a need to
suffer through the traditional IT department woes.
By fixing woes, I don’t mean troubleshooting, I mean
building better tools. This weekend, I
shared horror stories with a business colleague, and between us we were able to
name a half-dozen companies don’t have CRM software for their customer service
or sales departments – some of these companies were large national firms! I may be a database junkie, but if I could
build a robust CRM in a weekend for less than $1,000 why can’t a multi-billion
dollar company provide that tool to their sales and marketing team?
By hiring an outside contractor, you can provide a finished
product to your company with relatively low cost and quick turnaround – after all,
if it’s not completed, the contractor doesn’t receive payment. This way, you can have start-up innovation
and energy for your larger company. For
ideas of where to search for these brilliant and efficient freelancers, I would
recommend starting with www.elance.com, www.guru.com , or www.project4hire.com.
Management
There are still in our industry collection supervisors,
collection managers, VPs and Directors – all in the same company. Literally layers and layers of management
over a core role in your agency or your credit department, which manages a
simple task – calling consumers or companies to resolve outstanding issues. Our industry no longer needs to be
complicated by bureaucracy.
In the old days, supervisors would sit on the floor and
overhear conversations held by collectors, and critique them based on one side
of the conversation. Or maybe they had a
conference line they could barge into a call and listen on a live basis. In this day and age, that really isn’t
necessary. Technology can be built to
filter, to easily access, and drive exception management, and the stacked
layers of supervision no longer are necessary.
Steve Jobs referred to Apple’s “startup” culture as part of its
success. Why? Because culture drives innovation, and
leadership evolves from culture. If you
look at successful technology companies like Apple, Hubspot or ValvE, or even
customer service companies like Zappos, they all have a strong culture that
empowers their staff to take on leadership roles and responsibilities to some degree
or another.
In the credit and collections industry, I’d recommend
empowering the base line staff (the collection officers and the CSRs) in your
company – handing them responsibility for project management, for acting as a
point of contact for the client, for managing portfolios with proper tools we
can provide them. After all, the
collection agents make up the majority of our workforce – why aren’t they being
involved in the big picture?
Conclusion
The whole point of Mitch Joel’s book, CTRL ALT DEL – Reboot Your Business, is in my opinion, is to not
accept the old way of doing business as the only
way of doing business. We have such
phenomenal tools at our disposal, and with the workforce changing, and the
customer base of our companies changing as well, we can’t afford to not be
innovative and make the change ourselves.
There are huge opportunities for the credit industry to
grow, and improve our reputations as a service industry, as employers, and as
an important component of business, and we need to innovate just as other
industries are evolving around us.
If you want to talk about business structures, innovation,
or technology solutions, this is something I’m very passionate about and would be
very happy to discuss with if you want to reach out to me – my direct line is
226-946-1730.
Thanks kindly,
Blair DeMarco-Wettlaufer
Kingston Data and Credit – www.kingstondc.com
Cambridge, Otario
226-946-1730
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