Field note · 2026-04-08
How to talk about unused paid seats without blaming the customer
Seat waste is a fact on the invoice. The briefing still has to leave the account team able to phone someone they respect.
Most account health packs treat empty seats as a morality tale. The chart goes red, the CSM is told to “drive adoption,” and the customer hears that they bought badly. That conversation rarely produces a true-up and often produces a quieter renewal.
In the briefings we run, unused seats sit on their own board, separate from whether the people who do log in are getting anywhere. Those are different stories. A finance team that bought 400 seats for a rollout that stalled in legal is not the same as a team that invited everyone and then ignored the product after week two.
Before the board goes in front of leadership, we ask the CSM to annotate three seats clusters in plain language: waiting on an internal project, waiting on us, or genuinely surplus. If they cannot annotate, the board stays grey. Grey is more useful than a false red.
The spoken line we prefer in the room is specific: “Eighty of these seats were purchased for the warehouse roll-out that procurement paused in January. Twenty-two look like people who were invited and never returned.” That sentence can be checked. “Adoption is low” cannot.
If your current pack only shows a percentage of seats touched in thirty days, you are not yet ready for a commercial conversation. Bring the pause dates, the named project, or admit you do not have them. The briefing will be shorter, and kinder, for it.