Two dunning notices deep, and the AE pitches expansion
The meeting is actually going well. Clean deck, the customer nods, the upsell offer is on the table. What the account executive does not know: this exact company has been sitting at the second dunning level for six weeks, the third notice is already drafted. The customer knows, of course. He sits in this meeting thinking: they want to sell me more while simultaneously threatening me with collections. Do these people even talk to each other?
No. And that is exactly the point: this embarrassment is not a character flaw of the AE and not a failure of accounting. It is a data problem, and a tiny one at that.
The solution fits into a single field. A traffic light on the account: green means everything paid, yellow means invoice overdue, red means dunning in progress. Fed from the billing system, synced once a night, visible to anyone who opens the account. Not a digital transformation initiative. One afternoon of work plus testing.
It gets interesting when the light does not just glow but has consequences. Red blocks new quotes until someone actively unlocks. Yellow creates a task for the responsible AE: clear this up before you call. Marketing pulls red accounts out of the upsell campaign, because nothing looks more absurd than an email about premium features to someone whose access is about to be suspended. All of this is standard CRM automation. Not a line of custom code needed once the status is there.
Sometimes, by the way, the thing flips around. The customer is not paying because he is unhappy, not because he is broke. Then the red light is the earliest churn signal you can get, months before the renewal conversation is even on the calendar. Accounting is sitting on information sales urgently needs, and neither has any idea about the other.
We have seen companies with fifteen tools in the stack, conversation intelligence, intent data, the full program. And the simplest data point of all, whether the customer pays his invoices, was completely missing from the CRM. Buying signals get purchased for tens of thousands a year while the one signal already in the building rots in the accounting system.
So, a quick pop quiz: how many of your open opportunities belong to accounts currently being dunned? If you cannot answer that in ten seconds, you now know what to build this week.
