Broadcast Your Credit Department's Brand This Coming Year

What is your Credit Departments Brand? As a Credit Manager, you are aware of the value your department brings to your company. Do other stakeholders have a clear understanding of the image and value you want to project? How do Sales perceive the department? How do your manager and other senior managers perceive your contribution and the value delivered by the department? How about customers? 

The first task in developing a brand is to identify your core values. What is the image you want to project? What does the department deliver? What values does your department adhere to?

Start with the following checklist. It is intended to help you determine what gaps need to be filled and ways you can broadcast your department's brand and value this coming year. 

What is on your list of core values?

Professionalism: 

• A well-trained staff with the domain expertise needed to deliver the results and support your company requires. 
• Consistent adherence to company policies and procedures.
• A strong sense of ethics and fairness.
• A willingness to adapt to changes in the business and competitive climate.

Proactive:

• Proactively address the needs of other departments and customers.
• Timely reporting of customer issues that will affect risk or revenue or customer care.

Excellent Customer Care and Service:

• A knowledgeable and helpful resource to internal stakeholders.
• Informative and accurate customer service.
• Timely response to both internal and external customer needs.

Timely Reporting:

• Early warning to Sales and other stakeholders before actions are taken on past-due accounts.
• Ongoing analysis and reporting of an individual customer, or AR portfolio risks.

Clearly Stated Policies and Procedures:

• Policies that are fair and consistent.
• Flexibility to address business needs exceptions.

Department deliverables and performance standards:

• Cash generation through effective collection results.
• Deliver Credit as a competitive product with a credit toolbox, enabling maximum revenue with managed risk. 
• A valuable resource of information and domain expertise.
• Accurately forecasting AR results enables the company to reduce borrowing.
• Works with Accounts Payable to maximize coordination of cash inflows and outflows.
• Manage AR turnover and quality to maximize lender confidence, leading to attractive loan formulas, and interest rates. 
• Ensuring the company remains in compliance with overarching legal requirements.
• Managing customer exposures to minimize bankruptcy risk. 
• Ensuring there are adequate credit lines in each channel of sale to meet the company's sales objectives. 
• Ongoing manager and staff education related to credit and collection practices and automation tools to increase efficiency and performance results.
• Regularly benchmark similar company performance, credit policies, staff levels, and compensation, to ensure your company remains competitive.

How do others perceive your department's brand?

You may assume that others understand the unique value your department brings to the company. That may not be the case. Start by meeting with your team for their feedback and refinement. Then meet with other stakeholders and your management team. Ask how they perceive your department. What does it do well, and where can it improve from their point of view?

Establish and broadcast your department's Brand:

Once you finalize your department's Brand, meet with those who need to understand it. 

Broadcast your department's value:

• Effective credit management is a product. It enhances revenue opportunities and growth. 
• Explain how the Credit Department generates the cash needed to sustain and grow your company.
• The Credit Department is not a cost center, it is a profit center.
• Your department has unique visibility into the inner workings of your company. Managing Accounts Receivable provides a window into every aspect of your company's operation and processes. You see the inaccuracies, delays, and logistics errors, that drive disputes, and deductions. 
• You understand your customer's business and trends. In this role, you can identify and report issues affecting customer or portfolio risks so that needed actions can be taken to protect your company.
• A well-trained Credit Department management and staff is the depository of domain expertise that can advise Sales, your management, and others on ways to get the sale done with options, and how to remain in compliance with regulatory requirements.

Watch our course on Cost vs Value: Credit Department in the Eyes of CFO to learn how your credit teams could maximize the A/R turnover and bring the best value proposition to the senior management.