It has taken the Sales Manager in this organization several years to build a good client...

  

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It has taken the Sales Manager in this organization several years to build a good client base, but in the last six months since the new Finance Manager has come on board, several of his key accounts have experienced problems with the Finance department. The problems have been as follows: • Inaccurate invoicing was sent to a client's former address (even though the Sales department had informed accounts of the new address). . • One of the Sales Manager's clients had requested an invoice to be sent from his company prior to the end of their financial year so that they could pay for the services they had received within that year. One of the Account Managers in the Sales department had checked with someone in the accounts team and had been assured that this had been actioned. The Account Manager then heard from the client that he had not received the invoice in the time frame specified. She had complained to the new Finance Manager and received an inappropriately aggressive response from him, saying that he was short staff ed and no one had had the time to do it. • The final straw for the Sales Manager was when he heard that one of his major accounts was threatening to withdraw their business from the company because of the way they had been treated by a credit control person in the Finance department. The Credit Controller had handled a late payment of an invoice in an over-strident manner and accused the client's Accounts department of not paying when in fact the payment had been made in the previous month. All of these errors were small in their own right, but the end result was the possible loss of a substantial amount of revenue for the organization. The big mistake that the Sales Manager had made was to write a strident memo to the new Finance Manager giving few or no details of the problems that his department had experienced in the past few months. Instead, the tone of the memo accused the Finance department of putting sales at risk, and accounts staff of being rude to clients. This approach was not well received by the new Finance Manager, and a war of words continued for quite some time, all in writing, without the fundamental problems being resolved. How could this situation have been resolved in a more satisfactory way? It has taken the Sales Manager in this organization several years to build a good client base, but in the last six months since the new Finance Manager has come on board, several of his key accounts have experienced problems with the Finance department. The problems have been as follows: • Inaccurate invoicing was sent to a client's former address (even though the Sales department had informed accounts of the new address). . • One of the Sales Manager's clients had requested an invoice to be sent from his company prior to the end of their financial year so that they could pay for the services they had received within that year. One of the Account Managers in the Sales department had checked with someone in the accounts team and had been assured that this had been actioned. The Account Manager then heard from the client that he had not received the invoice in the time frame specified. She had complained to the new Finance Manager and received an inappropriately aggressive response from him, saying that he was short staff ed and no one had had the time to do it. • The final straw for the Sales Manager was when he heard that one of his major accounts was threatening to withdraw their business from the company because of the way they had been treated by a credit control person in the Finance department. The Credit Controller had handled a late payment of an invoice in an over-strident manner and accused the client's Accounts department of not paying when in fact the payment had been made in the previous month. All of these errors were small in their own right, but the end result was the possible loss of a substantial amount of revenue for the organization. The big mistake that the Sales Manager had made was to write a strident memo to the new Finance Manager giving few or no details of the problems that his department had experienced in the past few months. Instead, the tone of the memo accused the Finance department of putting sales at risk, and accounts staff of being rude to clients. This approach was not well received by the new Finance Manager, and a war of words continued for quite some time, all in writing, without the fundamental problems being resolved. How could this situation have been resolved in a more satisfactory way?

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

The Sales Manager should have approached the Finance Manager in person to discuss the problems that ... View the full answer