The stakeholder collaborative networking theory is not a new ‘on trend’ idea or a concept that is ahead of the curve or even rocket science.

It is a simple but highly effective teamworking function and has existed as a basis of hunting success since Mr Argh and his hunting partner Mr Ugh suddenly became the hunted instead of the hunters.

They learned the hard way that a duo hunting a lone mammoth for food was impractical and not economically efficient if their neighbours, Messrs Doh and Duh, were also out on the tundra hunting the same beast as food for their own cave.

The issue boiled down to which hunting pair would kill the animal and so win the right to transport the carcass home to their own grotto. Sadly the hunt would also determine which unfortunate cave would go hungry. Worse still, what happened if the mammoth escaped and fled? How would the four knuckle-dragging hunters explain this spectacular failure away?

Learning the futility of the ‘pairs only’ hunting technigue took a long time to dawn on Mr Argh. But dawn it did.

The lesson occured one day while Mr Ugh and Mr Argh were miles from home going about their hunting business. Mr Argh recalled that there was no flash of realisation that the hunters were now the hunted nor any indication that they could be in peril and about to ‘push up stone age daisies’ (die), when a pack of prehistoric wolves appeared from nowhere to surround our two hapless knuckle-dragging ancestors. It was the feral atmosphere, a crackle in the air that alerted them to danger. The hairs on their bodies stood rapidly to attention. On sighting the snarling, drooling, menacing and hungry wolves, Argh and Ugh merely stood still then slowly turned in a circle staring at the Canidae ring of death.

And in that moment, instead of the fright and flight reaction which you’d expect, and albeit at a time of imminent life-threatening danger, Mr Argh chose his moment to experience man’s first epiphany.

He saw a business solution.

THE EPIPHANY: The solution was one brimmimg with potential to improve the lot of all the Craterville cave dwellers and one which would bring his cave more food, furs and firewood than he alone or hunting as a pair with Mr Ugh would be able to supply in their lifetimes. You recall this was a life which at that time was ticking down extremely fast to a gnawingly messy close.

Argh’s vision had him replace the wolves with cave dwellers and in so doing, he hit on what we now term ‘collaboration’, ‘community’, ‘pack mentality’, ‘teamwork’ or better still, he’d invented ‘stakeholder participation’.
What this meant to Argh was that if representatives (hunters), from other caves came together to form a single team of hunters, the results of the hunt could then be divided equally as possible and so prevent one or more caves going hungry. In other words, the community would thrive and survive. Mr Argh’s future progeny managed to encapsulate this fundamental into a grand but hapless theory with an ism bolted onto something social.

By the same token, when the hunt went wrong then tasks to fix factors contributing to the failure could be rapidly assigned and focused at the point of breakdown for correction before the next hunt set out. However, the priority and essential ingredient to stakeholder collaboration was and still remains communication.

As all Mr Argh’s stakeholders needed to gather around a fire outside someone’s cave to feedback on progress made to fix failures and plan the next hunt, the requirement to expand their limited vocabulary arose. This was duly grunted about at length and at last consensus obtained. It was agreed and noted to be put forward for development and rapid deployment.

Difficult at this time in man’s evolving grunt vocabulary. But at least the communication development project got a much required boost as a result of Mr Argh’s stakeholder invention. Not a bad thing to have happened.

Today, the cave and fires are replaced by boardrooms, watercoolers, flasks of coffee or Starbuck’s and laptops. But stakeholder sessions do happen only not as often or at as many organisations as they should. My opinion is that businesses need to broaden involvement of the internal business neighbourhood in the collection process. Your neighbours are Billing, Provisioning and Engineering, Order Entry, Finance, Legal, Customer Services, Sales and Account Management. That’s a lot of stakeholder pie for any collector to salivate over and enjoy working with.

Why?

YOU, CREDIT MANAGER
The end game for a credit manager and his team of collectors is to get the customer’s to pay money by due date. Cleared funds on due date being the objective. No questions about that.

However, mitigating factors to repeating this task successfully time after time depends largely on the standard of the bills sent out and also on the quality of attention provided to customers. The standard of quality from post-sales service does have a material effect on how effortlessly and timely your customers pay their bills or not.

Staff within your customer’s business departments do measure their suppliers by their ability to meet their expectations. And if it takes months to resolve a pricing or product dispute, the liklihood of the customer transferring their business to your competition is increased.

Having your internal stakeholder tasked at a meeting to investigate, correct and resolve a customer’s issue within a certain number of days is the correct thing to do. Only when this occurs and gets measured at follow-up meetings will debt begin to decrease, payments increase and customers get satisfaction.

You need to get your stakeholders involved on a formal basis. They need to help you.

Only they can unblock issues that hold back payments. If this means you will need to spend time building relationships with the relevent department heads to get them to be involved, then do it. The investment of your and their time will pay off and the sooner you get started the better your and their metrics will begin to look.

Many thanks for reading and for visiting my site!

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