For anyone who was on yesterday’s webinar will confirm, there is a difference between good collectors and great collectors. Great collectors not only make you — and themselves — a lot of money, but they do it compliantly, they enjoy mentoring newer, less-experienced collectors, and are willing to go above and beyond. Mary Shores, in her newest Training Bytes video, calls these collectors, “Level 10” collectors.
Level 10 collectors are empathetic, positive, and use positive language when talking with individuals, Shores said. Instead of talking about consequences, a Level 10 collector will reframe the conversation and talk about the opportunity for the individual to take care of a financial obligation and remove that burden from their lives.
While great collectors may appear to possess instincts that other, less successful collectors might not have, it is not necessarily the case, Shores said. “What appears to us to be instinct is actually like step by step processes that we’ve just taught ourselves over the years,” she said. “And so I really like to just teach my collectors step-by-step processes.”
The key to developing Level 10 collectors is to get them to focus on the outcome of a conversation, Shores said. That can be done in four steps:
- The first step is to have the collector gather all the facts. Eliminate the hyperbole and the emotion and focus on the data.
- What is the outcome you want?
- Determine the path. How can you get the outcome you want?
- Plan the call accordingly.
“Collectors, just like consumers have a lot of fears,” Shores said. “They have internal fears of asking for that money; they’re worried that the consumer is going to freak out on them at any moment; they’re worried when they don’t know what to say next — it causes a little bit of anxiety. And some collectors might even feel a little bit guilty, or they feel like they’re a bad person for having to ask for money. So when they’re really ready to go, and they understand inside, outside, backwards, and forwards how to manage those calls, it will help them stay in control, and put them put their communication on autopilot.”
