Cool Heads Win the Day
A number of years ago when the dot.com boom was at its craziest, the company assigned me the responsibility of covering a customer poised for significant growth. I worked with them to evaluate their business plan, and we executed the appropriate contracts. It wasn’t long before they gave us our first big order, which of course they needed yesterday. I booked the order and started working on an immediate ship date. My customer service rep could see the booking in our system, but she could not get it scheduled – it was on credit hold! I had something like a $350K order and our credit department only extended $70K of credit to this company (that needed their product yesterday!!). I called our credit people, who obviously did not understand how reliable these folks were at paying their bills and how badly they needed the equipment, to set them straight. I was fairly livid at that point. Our credit department said the credit limit was the credit limit, the only way we could ship the product was if the customer paid in advance or if my finance director agreed to raise the credit limit. That meant I had to call “Dr. No”.
Here’s where we look at the proverb of the day found in Proverbs 15:1-2. It reads, “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up trouble. The tongue of the wise makes knowledge acceptable, but the mouth of fools spouts folly.”
It was when I was in the Air Force that I first started trying to deal with anger, but rank has a way of obscuring the need. I remember Chief Master Sergeant Cornett sitting behind his large desk while a young Airman with one stripe stood shaking before it as the Chief shouted out, “Parker, I’m going to rip your lips off!” The Chief was very poetic. That is also how he cursed. It made me somehow want to emulate him. But that didn’t work well when I got home and suddenly rank was left at the door. “Honey, I’m going to rip your lips off…” didn’t go over so well with my wife. We were both learning the truth of the proverb above that when things were getting heated, a gentle answer could defuse the situation. Also, that good communication involved listening to the other to understand their concerns or feelings, so that you can then explain in a way that also gives them understanding of your concerns or feelings.
When I started calling on this credit-challenged customer, I went back to these verses (and others) to remind myself that what was needed when dealing with credit and finance was first of all, “the tongue of the wise” to make knowledge acceptable. In a calm process of listening and communicating I had to present the business case to credit and finance of why this made good business sense. I had to listen carefully to understand their concerns and realize that they had an agenda for the good of the company. As far as I can remember, each time I was about to get on a call with either credit or finance I would say out loud, “Cool heads win the day.” And then I would repeat it to myself throughout the calls. The following two years were amazing years. I developed a very good friendship with the manager of collections as we grew this customer’s credit limit to over $3M. I became a pretty good collections guy myself, so if I ever get fired, I’ll have something else to fall back on (but that’s another whole blog). We also did around $50M in business with that customer over the following two years before they went Chapter 7 and stuck us for $2.6M.
In the end, I developed one of my life sayings, “Cool heads win the day”, and have been much richer for it.
Posted at 06:59AM Aug 15, 2007 by George Miller in Personal | Comments[0]