The sales and marketing department loves to get orders from new customers and then beat on the credit department to grant credit to those customers, no matter how shaky their finances may be. After all, getting a commission is important to the sales staff, and the collections department will be stuck with obtaining payment – at least, that appears to be the case for many companies. The credit manager would prefer to prescreen prospective customers before the sales staff even tries to make a sale – but how to get the sales and marketing people to see the light?
One approach is to run a cost-benefit analysis that compares the cost of credit prescreening to the resulting reduction in marketing costs. If the credit manager can show that a company failing the prescreen can then be excluded from all marketing mailing lists, the marketing budget will benefit from reductions in expensive mailings and follow-up contacts. The marketing manager may find that this represents a significant cost reduction, and will then support the prescreening concept. To achieve these cost reductions, this approach requires that prescreen failures be retained in a separate file which is then subtracted from the marketing database.