Doing business is always a bit of a gamble, but that doesn’t mean it’s all up to chance.
Transparency in your accounts receivable department can help inform your company’s decisions, allowing your sales team to be ambitious and strategic. It also reduces the risk of poor customer experience, ensuring that you keep those clients your team has worked so hard to earn.
Manual processes can make your financial situation opaque but with an AR automation solution, you get the visibility you need to make all of your transactions a safe bet.
You gotta know when to hold them
How does your sales team decide if they should offer terms to a customer? A well-defined credit policy is important to have up front, but without internal visibility, how will they know if the customer has stuck to their end of the deal?
When working with existing clients, it’s important that your sales team have ready access to information like account history, so that they can see if late or non-payment has been a concern. From there, they can determine whether or not to amend the terms offered, or if it’s time to simply fold and walk away from offering them credit altogether.
The majority of small businesses in the United States say they have direct experience with late payments, with a quarter having to wait 20-30 days past the due date before they receive their money.
If you are using legacy systems, where information is still segmented between different software, spreadsheets, or even paper files, tracking down the data becomes time-consuming, and increases the chance of errors occurring. It could lead to the sale being lost, or the sales representative making an uninformed judgment call.
An AR automation solution like YayPay integrates your company’s disparate systems, like ERP and CRM, and stores the data in the cloud, making it easily accessible. It also contains complete payment history for customers, including communication history. By coordinating with your accounts receivable team, your sales reps can use this information to their advantage when trying to secure a sale.
This detailed data also gives your sales team the ability to say “yes” more often. When they have a comprehensive picture of a customer’s journey, they can tailor the terms and conditions that will allow a business relationship to continue, while protecting your financial well-being.
Keep the odds in your favor
It’s one thing to win a few hands, but holding onto what you’ve achieved is the real card trick. Today, 96% of customers are ready to leave companies they work with as a result of poor customer experience.
Fewer than 4% of customers express an interest to stay with a brand that doesn’t treat them well. That’s just a little better than your odds at winning straight up at a real roulette table.
Relying on manual AR processes can lead to customer dissatisfaction. Errors in invoices caused during data entry can result in disputes, generating frustration on the part of the customer, and delaying cash flow into your business.
Without full financial visibility, it is easy for the client to receive inconsistent information or conflicting responses.
When multiple, distinct systems are involved in the financial and sales process, it is easy for things to become siloed. Especially when access varies from team to team, and employee to employee.
The centralized data and cloud storage of an automation solution eliminates this problem, ensuring that the same information is readily available to anyone, no matter where they are located.
This enhanced access can also help your AR and sales team to work together on a softer touch approach to things like late payments. As the first point of contact for most customers, sales reps often develop a trusted, consultative relationship with their accounts, meaning they are able to reach out and provide friendly reminders when payments are coming due, or have gone past their date.
Risk and reward go hand in hand, but with the right tools, you can help ensure that the probability of success outweighs the chances you take along the way. To find out more about how automation can help your business, check out YayPay’s library of on-demand webinars.
