The salesperson has been responsible for bringing in the account. Now, you’ve made some shipments to the account and suddenly it appears that you have a collection problem taking place.

Should you get the sales person involved?

I have seen it work both ways. I’ve seen some companies where they would say, "Yes, let’s get the salesperson involved," because one they have the relationship, so they know best what to do to go ahead and collection. And secondly, it makes them aware the sale isn’t a completed sale until the money has been collected.

On the other hand, the opposite school of thought is that this might be sort of adversarial and let’s just keep our salesperson involved on the forward reaching stuff. In addition, you might say our salespeople have better uses of their time. They’d be better off calling on some more new accounts and brining them in, rather than tackling the collection issues of just a few accounts.

You come back to the classic answer, "It all depends." In this, like other things, there’s not one size fits all. There could be a right time to have the salesperson involved and there could be other environments where it doesn’t make sense.

What are some of the factors to consider?

1. What are the particular margins involved? If it’s a high margin product and there’s significant dollars at stake, it could be very worthwhile to get the salespeople involved in the transaction.

2. What’s the size of the average transaction? If the average transaction is pretty small, you might be better off just using somebody in the accounting department to keep motoring through these and get them collected.

3. What gives the best investment on the salespersons' time? How does the payback on making collection calls compare to the payback of landing a new prospect? Which will bring in the greatest amount of additional money to the bottom-line?

So as you can see, this can be a very sensitive to the margin information and the number of transactions, as well as the outside opportunity. All things being equal though, I tend to have a biased towards getting the salespeople involved. One, I like that it helps keep them abreast on what’s really happening with the particular accounts, it can be a single that maybe there are some other problems brewing within the account that the salesperson might very well want to know about. It can be an opportunity to show that you care about the particular account and once you have some of the problems solved it could be a chance to have the door open for some up selling.

So think hard ahead of time before the events come up. Should you or should you not get the salespeople involved in collection calls? What situation best fits your company?