Imagining Your “Ideal” Day as a Software Compliance Manager (Part 2)

In our recent post, we asked you to imagine your “ideal” day as a compliance manager – and we explored why too few compliance managers experience days like that. In this and future posts, we’ll take a closer look at what your ideal experience can look and feel like – and how to get there. (It’s easier than you may think.)

Getting great leads that are easy to act upon

What do compliance managers want most? Promising, actionable leads: reliable information about serious infringers, delivered in a form that’s easy to use. Sounds simple, but compliance managers have traditionally struggled to get this. Sometimes, they’ve had to rely on tips from disgruntled insiders that can only be verified by intrusive, uncomfortable on-site audits. Or they’ve captured IP addresses at installation, but they need to manually interpret this single data point. That’s slow and frustrating, and sometimes you can never be sure where the infringement is coming from.

You need to do two things to solve this problem. First, consistent with your licensing agreements, you need to automatically and continually capture a data stream that’s rich enough to be useful. Second, you need tools for automatically uncovering the infringing organizations buried in that data.

Capturing all the data you need (not just an IP address)

Which data do you need? Organization IP addresses, of course – ideally collected when the application is actually used (not just when it is first installed). Unique hardware identifiers such as MAC addresses. Detailed usage data, so you know when someone’s giving your software a vigorous workout, using multiple features and modules to generate revenue. And the richest possible mix of location data, to reliably – and often, precisely – identify where the infringement is occurring.

With Revenera technology, it’s easy to instrument your software to relay all this information, without disrupting either hard-working development teams or your customers’ experience. And if you sell multiple products, it’s easy to embed these capabilities in a library or wrapper your product teams can simply “plug in.”

Mapping data points to infringing companies

Compliance analytics data sets can get very large in a hurry. You need technology that’ll analyze it for you, and bubble up specific leads whenever you’re ready for them. If you’re working with Compliance Intelligence, you’ve got that.

As new data streams in, Compliance Intelligence works in the background to map it to specific companies. Revenera’s Data Optimizer draws on all the information we’ve gathered in tracking hundreds of millions of installations worldwide. When combined with new incoming data, Compliance Intelligence can confidently name infringing organizations.

For example, the system may see a domain name assigned by the company’s network administrator. Of course, such a domain name can be assigned arbitrarily and doesn’t by itself prove infringement. But if it matches a visible email domain, IP address, egress IP address, GPS location information, and everything else we already know about the infringing site, you can have high confidence for taking action.

When you get started in the morning, you can display a list of all the new opportunities that Revenera has uncovered overnight. Everything’s already aggregated for you, so you know if a company is infringing in multiple locations, worldwide.

What’s more, since it’s easy to link Revenera to your CRM systems, you can quickly filter to potential accounts you already know. That’s obviously valuable information for your sales teams. You can also immediately filter to prospect accounts: organizations you’ve never contacted, but are obviously interested in your software.

Drilling down, and expanding your reach

Once you have this top-level information, you’ll often want to drill down to understand the extent of the potential infringement. We’ve made that exceptionally easy: one click, and you can see how many machines have run your software, how often and how long they’ve run it, and even which modules they’ve used.

It’s easy to filter all infringing accounts to focus only on those that are most extensive. Conversely, you might want to filter for new infringing accounts that haven’t yet crossed a threshold you’ve set. That way, you can identify major prospects who’ve just begun to infringe, so you can keep an eye on them, and be ready to act if the infringements grow.

You might also want to explore additional infringing accounts that Revenera is tracking but hasn’t yet identified with high confidence. All this information is at your fingertips, too. Click the link to that screen, and you might see a recognizable infringer’s domain: someone you expected to buy your software last year, but mysteriously backed away. Suddenly, you have a pretty good idea why they changed their mind.

These aren’t the only opportunities to monetize unlicensed use. Since Revenera can capture data from all sessions using your product, it can also help you quickly identify overuse by customers who are already paying you. For example, a customer may have purchased a license for North America, but you’re seeing extensive usage in Asia (which would require a global license). Or perhaps a customer may have purchased six seats, but you’re seeing consistently excessive concurrent usage. Either way, you’ve just discovered a powerful opportunity to upsell – and all it took was a few clicks.

The next steps: assigning and managing leads

You can see how Revenera’s tools have transformed lead generation for the compliance managers we work with. But “ideal” compliance management, like any other form of sales, also involves efficiently assigning leads and then accelerating the sales cycle to booked revenue. We’ll turn to those issues next.

Read the entire Imagining Your “Ideal” Day as a Software Compliance Manager series

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