The recovery call nobody wants to make

The analysis is the easy bit. Give a decent analyst your contracts, usage data and billing for a few weeks and they'll find the gap. In most software businesses it's a meaningful number.

Then nothing happens.

The spreadsheet goes to the account management team. A few of the big ones get looked at. Most sit there. Three months later someone asks what happened to the recovery project, and the real answer is that nobody wanted to make the calls.

Why account managers avoid it

It's worth taking their reasons seriously, because they aren't wrong.

They're measured on renewal. A customer who feels chased for money is a renewal risk, and the account manager carries that risk personally.

They don't have the evidence. "Our records suggest you may be over your licence" is an awful opening. If they can't show the customer exactly what's being used against exactly what's contracted, they'll lose the argument and they know it.

They've never been taught how. Most account managers learned to be helpful. A commercial conversation where you're asking for money the customer hasn't budgeted for is a different skill.

And nobody pays them for it. If the comp plan rewards renewal and new logos, recovery work is unpaid effort with downside.

Why not hand it to someone else?

The obvious answer is to send in a third party: an audit firm, a recovery agency, a "compliance team". Some vendors do. I spent years designing compliance programmes and I'd only do it as a last resort.

The customer stops seeing a supplier and starts seeing an adversary. Procurement gets involved. Legal gets involved. You might collect the money, but you've changed the relationship, and your account manager has to pick up the pieces at renewal.

The person who should make the call is the one who owns the relationship. The job is to make them good at it.

What makes them good at it

An evidence pack for every account. One page. What the contract covers, what's being used, the gap in units and pounds, and the relevant clause. The account manager should never be guessing.

The right accounts first. Don't start with your biggest, most sensitive customer. Start with accounts that are clearly growing, where the renewal is a long way off and the relationship is good. Early wins build confidence, and the stories spread around the team faster than any training.

A conversation built around a choice. Not "you owe us". Here's where you are, here are two ways to put it right, one of which gives you more for your money over a longer term. I covered this in Don't send the true-up invoice.

Somewhere to take the hard ones. A weekly review where the bigger or trickier cases get worked through: who to approach, what to offer, what to trade. Account managers stop feeling alone with it.

A comp plan that pays for it. If recovered and expanded revenue doesn't count towards their number, you're asking for goodwill. Goodwill runs out about three calls in.

What changes

Once a team has done this for a quarter, two things happen. The account managers get better at commercial conversations in general, not just recovery ones. And customers start to expect a proper review of their contract, which turns what felt like a confrontation into a normal part of the relationship.

That's the point. A one-off recovery project brings in some cash. A team that knows how to have the conversation keeps bringing it in.

Veridian doesn't make the calls for you. We find the gap and train your team to close it. Read how contract monetisation works.