Here Are 3 Important Reasons Why Propane Gas Companies Should Employ Outside Debt Collection Agencies (online incorporation)

September 30th, 2009 admin Posted in business |

By David Montana

Propane and butane gas companies all over the country offer much-needed services to both consumers and businesses. Many people, principally in rural areas, use propane for cooking and/or to heat their homes during the winter.

While propane businesses might supply their customers year round, their busier season is obviously during the colder winter months, when fuel usage peaks. And while billing procedures can be different from one company to the next, customers usually sign a contract for delivery service, and are invoiced at 30 days.

Due to the seasonal nature, with greater need and activity in the winter, debt collection problems can grow. As businesses get busier with more frequent deliveries, their accounts receivable problems also snowball, especially if in house debt collection efforts are erratic and inconsistent.

These delinquencies are further magnified as propane companies are averse to suspend service for non-payment, because heating is such a vital need. Maintaining a positive image in the community is important. Smaller businesses tend to know most of their clients. Larger companies with a much bigger client base can get even further behind on their difficult receivables.

Business owners also deal with needing to get a handle on their ever-increasing accounts receivable challenges, while trying to avoid losing their customers to competitors.

Below are 3 Crucial Reasons Why Propane Businesses Should Consider Debt Collection Agencies:

Early Intervention Is Crucial

Typically, propane companies bill and invoice clients at 30 days. However, its not unusual for unpaid accounts to go beyond 60, 90 days or more.

As demanding winter delivery schedules take priority over one’s bad debt, hiring a debt collection agency becomes even more essential. It becomes harder to collect delinquent accounts the more they mature.

If these accounts are placed early enough, at around 60 to 75 days, not only are the collection success rates much higher, its also early enough to get customers back on good terms with the fuel supplier, and before the late balances grow even larger.

More Cost Beneficial Than In House CollectingLess Expensive Than In House Efforts

A lot of propane companies dont have the requisite staffing, resources and expertise needed to successfully and consistently collect on their past due receivables. Several end up writing off a percentage of their bad debt due to the inability to collect. Debt collection agencies are the ideal and cost effective answer for going after these late debts. There are agencies that will charge a small preset cost or flat fee to collect. Because many of these debts tend to be smaller balances, using a fixed fee agency will cost a great deal less than trying to recover on these accounts in house.

Propane businesses might also use conventional percentage fee agencies, but some percentage based agencies might treat these smaller balance debts with lesser importance than their larger account customers. This is called “skimming.”

Third Party Influence Makes A Huge Difference

Being contacted by a third party collection agency will have a greater psychological impact and be treated as more serious than hearing from an agent of your organization. Most also worry about harming their credit score, so a debt collection agency can act as a better inducement for honoring their debt.

As diplomacy is very important, and you dont want to distance your clients, collection agencies can employ more tactful and diplomatic methods to persuade customers to bring their accounts current. Because they act as a neutral third party, this removes you from having to be the bad guy in pursuing your past due clients.

David P. Montana is a widely publicized writer, expert and business consultant in collection agencies services for three decades. David offers much more valuable tips and information in relation to internal debt collection strategies for propane gas companies.

The Changing Face of Web Marketing

By Francesco Pratt

Almost everyone from interactive advertising agencies to any web advertising agency worth its salt to business owners who are looking to turn their online presence into a revenue-generating business venture has heard of “search engine optimization”, although they all may have half baked ideas about what exactly it entails.

The earlier practice was to select some keywords, place them (or stuff them, as was the norm earlier) in the web content, throw in some meta tags (again stuffed with keywords), submit the website in directories and exchange of few links with other sites.

But that practice has for long been on its way out. Neither is it enough to make your website search friendly enough, not is it looked upon favorably by either the search engines or your customers.

Typical search engine optimization is not enough any more to established your online presence or your brand. With Web 2.0 firmly in and Web 3.0 peeping on the horizon, these are times to let people, the end users take the decision, take your message forward in so many shapes as Web-video, web-audio, web discussions, articles, blogs, forums, postings in social networking sites (SNS) and what not.

SEO in these times is about delivering the marketing message to the targeted audience, not just make it SE friendly. If latter is your choice, or you are still stuck in the old method of SEO, you will end up corrupting or distorting the message by techniques aimed at attracting search engine robots. This way you will drive away real people who may actually be potential customers.

8 Milestones To Success

With Web 2.0, audio and video content have become very effective method of delivering marketing messages over the Web. But before you as a web

marketer jump on to the bandwagon, do go over following points to ponder:

(a) These multi media messages should not be cost prohibitive so that even small and medium-sized companies could afford professional Web-audio and Web-video. They are the real revenue earner for you.

(b) Remember the website design is about delivering the marketing message effectively and unequivocally and not just search engine optimization. This point is particularly important for web design firms who double as web advertising agencies.

(c) Professionally done Web-audio and Web-video requires more than just the ability to use a video camera. So avoid a rush job as professional multimedia story-telling requires a unique set of creative skills and technical ability.

(d) Make sure that all messages whether on the web or offline confirm to each other whether you have been developer of all these messages or not.

(e) Evaluate business opportunities in the broader sense of marketing. Build viable partnerships by sitting down and taking a hard look at how various factors might complement your message.

(f) Don’t ever forget that the web is used by 87% of Internet users today to research goods and services and that extra knowledge is not available anywhere else. So do give the visitor something worthwhile. Ask yourself while designing a website or any marketing campaign, what as a user am I getting and will it add value to my life, career, business, etc.

(g) Spend considerable time to analyze what the competitors are doing. If they are successful you would know why, and if they are not you would know what to avoid.

(h) Do spend time to make a beautiful web site that is attractive and add value to the visitor, but it will all be wasted effort if it does not make it easy for people to contact your client. Take time to build a site that lets people communicate with the client. Very fundamental, but equally necessary and ignored many a times.

All this sounds great but how and who can implement the strategies. Pay attention to what those old marketing warhorses are saying. Web or not, the fundamentals of marketing remains right there, and companies with experience in marketing and advertising along with providing web development services are best equipped to show you the right and time tested way to do things.

These guys may not flaunt the latest PDA or be rather old fashioned in their sense of fashion but they have years of experience building successful campaigns behind them.

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