GPI 475 – Train your accounting staff these methods to help increase company sales and boost the bottom line.

All employees in a company can help the sales function.  This includes accounting and finance personnel who see various documents every day that may help their sales and marketing department. Here are some ideas your accounting personnel can try every day that will boost the sales and marketing effort.

How accounting/finance personnel can help boost sales:

1. Research sister divisions: When setting up new customers, look for and print a listing of all associated sister division addresses, telephone numbers and key contact names found on the customer’s website or during other company research.  Forward this information to the assigned sales representatives for follow-up for more potential leads. Once you are doing business with a company, it should be much easier to secure new business with its sister divisions especially when potential cost reductions and corporate discounts available for all are mentioned.
2. Sales announcements sent out free on inside and outside company mail: Your accounting personnel mail invoices and checks every day to many customers and vendors.   Adding stickers to the envelopes or mailers inside with the contents adds little or no postage cost and may generate sales interest when seen by a potential or existing customer.  Use exterior envelope stickers and labels or stuffed inside announcements to discuss new products, upcoming sales, new services, free freight specials, volume discounts, yearend closeout sales, reduced interest rate financing and other special events unique to your company.
3. Update shared system data (buyers’ names, numbers, email addresses): Because of documents arriving from customers, accounting personnel can update contact information, correct buyers’ names, addresses and telephone and fax numbers. These are found on incoming checks, ACH information, wire transfers, customer purchase orders, change orders and new contracts.  Accounting personnel can add additional names that come across in emails from the customers’ purchasing, accounting and legal departments. They can help build a good customer history within the company’s software program that is used by the sales department every day.
4. Research family groups (who is related to who?):  Group customers within the company that they belong in your shared software system.  Each customer may have a different name from its parent so it is important to group all the subsidiaries and divisions by the controlling parent. This will provide the total sales dollars with the customer in its entirety. Having this information also helps determine potential corporate discounts that can be offered.  Your current buyer may be very motivated to help you get into his sister divisions if he can get another price cut (corporate discount).
5. Research competitors through SIC Codes:  Find the SIC code of a current customer so you can obtain a regional or state listing of all of its competitors that can be targeted for new sales.  This can be done using a free local library card on line to gain access to company addresses, telephone numbers, fax numbers, email addresses, key manager names, sales volume, employee headcount and other corporate organizational chart data.
6. Follow-up on switchboard complaints: All your employees who take incoming calls on the firm’s switchboard should be trained to professionally handle customers who call in and seem angry or upset.  The call should obviously be forwarded immediately to sales or the customer’s contact information forwarded to the appropriate sales representative for a quick follow-up call. Train the receptionist to call back the customer within five to ten minutes afterwards to ensure the angry buyer was contacted as promised. This one small thoughtful action will be extremely helpful to your customer relations and help appease most upset callers.
7. Daily mail leads:  Scan the daily mail to look for competitor advertisements. Forward these to sales and marketing to let them know who is having a sale, dropping prices, offering new goods or services or even discover new competitors.
8. Customer checks: Retain incoming customer payment checks to note their bank name, routing and account numbers, address where the check was issued from and other information your sales department needs to know (telephone and fax numbers sometimes listed).  They also may be unaware of other company locations their customer has and those need to be added to your potential customer list.
9. Mail campaigns: Allow sales to create an individual sales letter and have accounting stuff the sales advertisements and brochures with those letters and business cards to mail out to designated potential customer lists.
10. Issue regular sales reports: Ask accounting personnel to issue customer reports on a regular basis (weekly, monthly) of all incoming sales by buyer. Issue these regularly to all the sales representatives regardless of where they are located.  Make sure to include all of the customers who did not order. The report needs the customer name, buyer name and telephone number to help the representative make calls.  You may want to include the last order date to help the representative as he calls a buyer from the front seat of his car while traveling.
11. Issue historical reports: Publish sales and gross profit margin comparative charts (over time period) to help representatives know immediately if customers’ orders are increasing or decreasing and if they are a profitable customer or not.
12. Track price increases: Have price increase information available and easily accessible for all of the sales representatives for all of their customers.  They need to know that when their customers had a price increase whether that was three months ago or three years ago.
13. Forward customer feedback, good or bad: Your company’s collections personnel many times hear complaints from the customers’ accounts payable departments. This will occur when shipments are rejected, prices are incorrect, part quantities are short or different than shipped or quality is questioned on incoming products.  These comments need to be forwarded to your assigned sales representatives. Accounts payable people are good sources of customers’ feedback. They are told internally they are not to pay invoices for various reasons. Your sales representatives need to know about customer problems so they can be fixed them immediately to retain the customer and keep him happy.
14. Thank customers on their anniversaries: Accounting can keep track of the first dates of business with all customers.  These anniversary dates might appear on all sales reports. On the appropriate day of the year, accounting employees can mail out “Thank You” cards or coupons in behalf of the sales representatives on the customers’ anniversaries.  These welcome reminders may say thank you for “six years of appreciated business” or “ten years of a great relationship”.  These employees can post every day of the year a list of all your customers in anniversary order (i.e. “Today the first shipment went out for” : ABC Co. 14 years ago,  DEF Co, 7 years ago, MNO Corp 1 year ago). Someone in your sales department might contact the customer and thank them for the business, hand them a coupon for the next order, offer a discount for a greater volume, etc.   These offers may be handled by mail to the customers’ buyers through the accounting department in behalf of your sales representatives.
15. Report timely payments: Collection personnel in accounting should not only report the customers which are poor payers but should emphasize the good and admirable customers that pay on time consistently.  Those are the clients’ buyers that need attention and special treatment. They are obviously financially secure by their payment history. Your company needs to do more business with customers like these demonstrated by their payment history.
16. Report margins, high to low: Cost accounting needs to report profitability by product within each customer.  These reports need to be designed to show the most profitable product down to the least profitable one.  This should help sales decide what and how much to raise prices and when it is necessary. Issue these reports on a regular basis.
17. Report negative GP (gross profit) customers ASAP: Cost accounting can report the highest margin customers on a list dropping down to the worst margin customers. On all losing gross profit margin customers, sales must automatically announce price increases before accepting any new orders.  Regardless of the answer, the company will make more money.  This is one of the best contributions that accounting can provide on a regular basis.
18. Report customer credit references to sales: Customers often give names out of their current vendors to new potential vendors as credit references.  Received in accounting, these requests are rarely passed over to the company’s sales department but they should. Your customers may be searching for secondary sources, accounting knows about it and your sales department does not. Let them know who your customers are talking to about doing future business. You want to know if the vendor is your competitor or worse, a vendor that you personally know out in the market to far cheaper than you.
19. Report credit references to sales that are negative or potentially negative: Customers often give their current vendors out to new potential vendors as credit references. Those vendors will contact your company’s accounting department and ask for a credit reference.  If the customer is slow paying or owes your firm a lot of money, your accounting department should not respond before clearing the response with the sales representative.
20. Do not lie or report negative information: Do not voluntarily report anything negative about your customer nor should you fabricate a good payment history to any third parties.  Let sales personnel work out any issues with the customer. They can use this incident to get paid past-due invoices if nothing else. They need to always be put in the role to help the customer in any instance.  Refuse to give a credit reference (unless the customer is a good payor).  Tell them when they call your firm does not give out credit references and do not expand further.