Question two of the six: beyond what they bought first, could you list everything your customers could buy from you?
Not from memory. Not the pricing page, basically. An actual list, written down, of everything sellable into your existing customer base.
Almost nobody has one. In all the companies I've asked, the number who had ever actually taken the inventory rounds to zero. Executives can recite the product line, but the product line isn't the inventory. The inventory is everything a customer could buy from you, or through you, and most companies have never once written it down.
What Belongs on the List
More than you think. Products, obviously. But also services: implementation, training, advisory, managed delivery. Add-ons and capacity. Higher tiers. And the category almost everyone forgets: things your customers need next that you don't build but could stand behind, partner and affiliate offerings where you take the revenue or a cut of it.
Your customers are going to buy these things from someone. The only question the inventory answers is whether any of that flows through you.
The Company With Nothing Left to Sell
A cautionary tale, from a long time ago, details blurred on purpose.
A software company sold all-you-can-eat licenses. Everything, every feature, every future feature, unlimited, in the initial deal. It made the initial sales easier, which is exactly why they did it. Then they went looking for growth from their customer base and discovered the inventory was empty. Not empty because they had nothing of value. Empty because they'd sold all of it, to everyone, on day one, at day-one prices.
The fix wasn't clawing anything back. You don't renegotiate a customer's deal because you regret it; that torches trust and it's the customer paying for your mistake. The fix was a line in the sand: every deal from that day forward was structured differently. Strategic unbundling, applied to new contracts only. The initial sale contains what the customer needs now. Everything else is held back, attached to the milestones that earn it, and presented at full value when the customer is ready.
They didn't fix the past. They stopped selling the future for nothing.
The Empty Inventory Is a Choice
Here's the thing that company teaches, and it's good news. An empty inventory is almost never a catalog problem. It's a deal-structure problem. The value existed; it was just being given away at the front door.
Which means an empty inventory is a design choice. And design choices are reversible, starting with the next contract you sign.
Take the inventory this week. Write down everything your customers could buy from you or through you, including what's currently being stuffed into initial deals that shouldn't be. If the list is long, that's latent revenue with names on it. If the list is short, you just found the actual constraint on your growth, and it isn't demand.
Most executives can answer two of the six questions. This one only requires a document nobody has bothered to create. It's the cheapest one to fix, and everything you hold back starts earning full price with your very next deal.
Lincoln Murphy formally named and popularized Customer Success starting in 2010 and has spent 15 years connecting it to expansion revenue and commercial outcomes. Read The Premise.