I used to have a simple, much nicer, "fake":

Call as yourself, and call the bloody customer CEO or as high as you get, and start out "Hi Joe! Hey, i'm walking the accounts dept. today and i've just found out we've got a bug in your account . . . it could be our end screwing up & not chasing you or something but I'm pretty darn sure your statement says you owe us $$$$$$, can we fix that one whilst i'm down here?"

Devised originally because my partner was unavailable to make a call, then used even for normal business if i felt there was a cflow hurry up needed.

Point being, it's a contrivance, not a fake-out, and you're calling them personally.

IMMEDIATELY after asking for the money, drop in other Q's as to how the account's going. THAT'S WHY YOU ARE WALKING YOUR FLOORS, RIGHT? Do that if they pause or go silent as in "yeah i was thinking too blah blah about how you're doing with x and i really want to meet/talk/discuss with you personally next week if i can about blah blah, but darn i'd sure like to know we're all square between us, can you call your accounts & get them to process our outstanding?"

CLOSE - -

NEVER LIE - -

CLOSE - -

UP-PITCH - -

PAY PERSONAL ATTENTION - -

CLOSE AGAIN - -

CLOSE THE TIMESCALE AGAIN - -

REPEAT WHAT THEY SAID TO THEM AND TELL THEM HOW COOL IT WAS HEARING THEIR VOICE & PROMISE THAT CALL - -

(do NOT separately deal with any other matter on this kinda call)

First job outta school, a sorta ethical boiler room which was a fast growing public stock at the time. They lost the talent, collapsed in zero time. The talent was good, company shitty. Just saying this was the gold standard for calling on delinquents in a $100mln rev business. (like to think i added my own flair, but how to improve a decent algo?? :-)

Final tip: collecting is selling too, unless you're pretty big. Even when you're quite darn big, c.f. above para.

EDIT: formatting and below note

This whole call should take 30 - 45 seconds. Any more & you're abusing your customer's time. Anymore & it sounds desperate. You've other things to do, right? It's just routine huh? But always add in the personal touch, you don't know if your customer is in trouble. I chased an account once where the VP level guy of a three letter acronym had just been pushed out into early retirement, so all his most recent decisions were being gone over. He wasn't at all happy. But he was a customer at his next company.

Oh, and if you deal a lot on the phone, seriously consider call logging. Whether you just dump SIP packets or get a SEC "certified" device, provided you advertise the fact wide and loud, you're likely in compliance with most laws, and i'm not ever starting on "he said, she said" debates when it comes to money. It may seem silly, but much of business is avoiding loosing. (you already have great product, right, supposing it's being bought??) THE BIGGEST freaking companies will try to post deal haggle if they think they can. In some fields, they do it as policy. That's a whole other story. But basically, i am just freaking amazed how supposed old - school definition hackers totally fail, and i mean fail fail fail, at sussing the social way around burocrasy. Heck, OG hackers (just had to mess with that context with "OG", sorry) had to blag the buros to be able* to hack. Check with your roots boys & girls! :-)

Edit: disambiguating between "devised .. my partner" and bigger company origins, which appears on re-reading to be contradictory, i claim a little ingenuity in both scenarios to make this sufficiently "mine" insofar any idea might be anyone's. What i mean in the "my . . partner" sequence is referencing technique to get the higher exec at customer on the line and opener style. Which can be very hard, if they're big honchos. For brevity, that's omitted but implied. At the big company mentioned we often had to chase our own sales. Thanks MLM for the early education! (real initials). Much later i perfected my own style in this kinda call. Damn i feel rusty now! All the basic components of any good call are about in companies everywhere, but compositing them ought to be a personal process, and it is, often an embarrassing painful one. It's so easy to get right and so bloody easy to screw it up. That pain is why i spoke proprietorially about this thing :)