Assume innocent, not guilty. What a concept, huh? But think about it for a moment. If you approached all overdue accounts on the phone as if they had good intentions about paying the account, or, better still, that it has been paid on time and that you simply can’t find their payment, how different would your approach to the clients be?
Very different I suspect. Try using this phrase when you phone someone about an overdue account …..
I was doing the accounts today.
We don’t appear to have received payment for May yet.
Has it been sent or is it on the way?
Notice here, that we assume that payment’s already on the way. In the list of “to be paids”. Or in the post. Well, either that or – it’s been sent. Which, of course, is exactly the same thing. Because if it’s been sent, it must be on the way. And if it’s on the way, it must have been sent.
But, by giving your debtor the illusion of a multiple choice question to answer they get confused if neither of the ‘choices’ are true. And then, they tend to blurt out the truth, which is, after all, the main point of the call.
We want to know when they are going to pay. We know in fact, that they haven’t, but when we speak to them, we assume it’s on the way – or been sent … at the very least! Try it. It works. Allowing you to remain the Good Guy even though you’re chasing payment of an account. How do you think debtors would respond to this approach in this 39sec YouTube video clip? (The answer is … “NOT very well!”)
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