5 mistakes businesses make by not integrating credit data

Sales teams often prioritise their leads based on deal value, company size, reputation, and engagement, such as email opens or form fills. While a high-value deal with a keen customer sounds great on paper, without credit insights, you have no idea of their ability to pay you back. The impact of this is not only time wasted on low-quality deals, but a lack of payment all together.

Credit data directly integrated into a CRM platform means that leads can be segmented by risk profile, allowing you to focus on reliable customers that will pay on time and in full, not just chase the high-value deals. You can check their financial health, their group structure, key persons in the business and any negative events to understand if this is a trustworthy lead and one that will benefit your business. 

With Creditsafe, you can add another layer of protection with the ability to identify whether companies appear on PEP or sanctions lists, helping you to ensure your leads are legitimate and worth following up from the outset.

Many businesses set standard payment terms across the board, often due to a lack of resources and accurate data. However, not all customers carry the same level of risk, and this can result in higher-risk customers receiving overly generous credit terms. This increases the likelihood of late payments and defaults. 

With credit data embedded in your CRM, you can set tailored payment terms to suit the risk level of the business. For example, if they have a weaker payment history but have not defaulted on any payments, you may still want to sell to them and enforce stricter payment terms. This opens the opportunity to expand your customer base by working with a wider range of risk profiles that you wouldn’t normally consider.

Alternatively, you can also develop stronger relationships with reliable customers. You can offer more flexible payment terms with the confidence that they are able to repay, based on fact, not guesswork. 

Sometimes, it’s not until the deal has been closed that credit checks take place. Often, this is due to a lack of:

CRM data is often static, with sales teams tracking the latest interactions and the key events in each stage of a deal. However, financial health is far more dynamic and can change very quickly, so it is important that teams can see real-time data to track this. A customer that looked stable at lead stage may no longer be able to pay six months down the line. You could be extending credit to a business that is starting to deteriorate without even realising if you don’t have the right data.

Ongoing monitoring of financial performance is a must to protect your business. Creditsafe’s Company Monitoring sends you real-time alerts when a customer’s risk profile changes, which in turn can be used to trigger automated workflows in your CRM system. With this tool, you can be proactive and address issues before they escalate, so you can renegotiate terms that are beneficial to both parties.  

A deal may go through multiple teams to get over the line, and it is not unusual for sales and finance teams to work on different systems. This disconnect, however, can really slow down decision-making and onboarding, impacting customer experience. Data can also be scattered and duplicated across systems, so no one in the business has a complete picture on who they are reviewing.

Enriching your CRM system with credit data ensures that every team works from the same, real-time information. This results in faster, more informed decisions, and ultimately a happier workforce. Creditsafe also offers data cleaning, removing duplicate records and improving overall data quality so that as soon as your data is integrated, you can hit the ground running.