Revenue leakage is one of those operational gremlins that quietly erodes your topline. It doesn’t blow up in a board meeting. It doesn’t trigger a Slack fire drill. It just hangs out in the background, draining dollars in slow motion.
It’s the ghost in the machine.
Revenue leakage is the gap between what you should be earning and what you actually collect. It might be invisible, but it is absolutely not theoretical. It’s…
Missed invoices,
Unintended discounts,
Zombie accounts still getting service, and
Pilot pricing that never sunsets.
And it’s probably happening in your business right now.
This playbook is for the RevOps leaders, finance managers, deal desk pros, and anyone who’s ever tried to reconcile bookings, billings, and collected cash… and thought, “something feels off.”
Together, we’ll walk through:
The four most common causes of revenue leakage
How to spot signs it’s happening in your org (with help from experts)
Tactical moves to stop the drip
Let’s dig in.
What Causes Revenue Leakage
Leakage is usually a systems problem disguised as a people problem. It lives in the cracks between handoffs between sales and finance, CS and engineering, contracts and provisioning.
I. Breakdowns in the Billing Process
Just because a deal is Closed-Won doesn’t mean the dollars are rolling in. Common billing failures include:
Failed Renewals:
Auto-renewals break more often than you'd expect.
One integration misfire in Salesforce and suddenly a renewal clause gets ignored.
No alert, no invoice, and three months later someone’s using your product for free.
Pricing Mismatches:
What starts as a first-year discount turns into a lifetime annuity.
One customer was supposed to revert to standard pricing after their first year, but the discounted price was hardcoded into billing.
Three renewals later, they were still on the same plan, smiling all the way to the bank.
Uncollected Invoices:
The invoice was sent... to the wrong person.
Or the billing contact left.
Or the PO never made it out of procurement purgatory.
All plausible. All preventable.
Invoices Never Sent:
A “quick pilot” closes fast and gets implemented even faster.
But it bypasses finance entirely.
The invoice sits in draft… forever. You only realize it after someone asks, “Did we get paid for that?”
This tends to happen in EOQ rushes and to smaller deals, high velocity deals that come in before the clock strikes 12
Inaccurate Usage Tracking:
If you charge by usage—API calls, seats, consumption—it’s easy to underbill.
I once saw a customer using double their allocation because our metering script hadn’t run properly for months. Engineering flagged it. Finance didn’t.
This murdered our cloud costs on a unit economic basis. We were running gross margin negative on this customer.
II. Churned Customers Still Getting Service
If churned customers still have access, that’s not a retention win; it’s a cost center.
A customer churns in your CRM, but no one cuts off access. Support keeps supporting. Infrastructure keeps serving. And no one notices… until the AWS bill goes up or a data breach risk surfaces.
Ghost accounts are real, and really expensive.
III. Pricing Decay
Pricing isn’t set-it-and-forget-it. Without guardrails, it erodes:
Legacy “Sweetheart” Deals: That strategic logo from two years ago? Still renewing at a 50% discount.
Because no one put a time limit on the deal, or remembered to revisit it (the sales rep already got comp’d, what’s the incentive to circle back?)
Excessive Discounting: Reps discount to win deals.
But without clear rules, approvals get buried in Slack, and non-standard pricing becomes the standard.
Pilot Pricing That Never Graduates: A POC was supposed to last 60 days.
It’s still going 18 months later, and nobody flipped them to full rate. Oops.
Inconsistent Renewal Uplifts: Without automation, one CSM applies a 10% uplift, another forgets, and another avoids the conversation altogether.
That inconsistency hits your Net Dollar Retention rate hard.
You know who never misses a chance to hike prices? Salesforce. Three things are for certain in life: death, taxes, and Salesforce hiking 8% y/y for the same bill of goods.
IV. Credit Memo Mismanagement
Credit memos are useful…until they aren’t.
Too Many, Too Easily: Credits are meant for exceptions.
But when they become a customer service crutch… “onboarding took too long,” “the UI is confusing”… they stack up fast.
No Tracking or Analysis: If you don’t track why credits are issued, you can’t improve.
Are they tied to product issues? Process misses? Repeat offenders?
Covering Up Systemic Errors: Sometimes credits patch bugs, like broken usage tracking, that should’ve been fixed.
When that happens, leakage compounds silently.
🔒 How to Spot the Drip Before It Becomes a Flood
Revenue leakage rarely throws a red flag. More often, it’s a slow trickle… out of view, across disconnected systems, and without a clear owner.
To spot it, you need a disciplined lens on where money should be moving, and where it quietly stalls out.
Start with these five investigative threads:
(The steps to FIND revenue leakage, as well as tried and true FIXES, are included for paid readers below. Finding one drip will save much more than the $15 / month or $150 / year it costs to read this newsletter)
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