Question six, the last of the six: who owns expansion revenue in your company?
Name the person. Not the function, not the motion, not the philosophy. A name.
This is the question that ends the exercise, because it's the one where the hesitation is the answer. Ask it in a leadership meeting and watch. Well, sales handles the upgrades, and CS flags the opportunities, so really it's a team effort. A team, sort of.
A team, sort of, means nobody.
The Crack in the Org Chart
Expansion revenue is unowned in most companies for a structural reason, not a talent reason. Look at how the org is actually built.
Sales is comped on new logos. Every incentive, every dashboard, every pipeline review points at strangers. An existing customer's next purchase is worth a fraction of a new logo in commission terms, when it's worth anything at all, so rational salespeople spend their time exactly where you'd predict.
CS is comped on retention. Keep the customer, keep the revenue, keep the renewal green. The next purchase isn't the mandate; the current one is. Plenty of CS teams are explicitly told to stay out of commercial conversations entirely.
So new revenue has an owner and current revenue has an owner, and the revenue in between, the next thing an existing customer should buy, sits in the crack between two org charts. Both teams are doing their jobs. That's the problem. The crack is what their jobs were designed around.
Nobody Misses a Number That Was Never Set
Here's why the crack persists even in companies full of smart people: unowned expansion produces no evidence.
When sales misses quota, there's a number, a review, a reckoning. When churn spikes, it's red on a dashboard by Monday. But when expansion doesn't happen, nothing happens. No target existed, so no target was missed. No owner existed, so nobody explains the miss that isn't officially a miss. The quarter closes clean while the most collectible revenue in the business quietly doesn't arrive, again.
You can't miss a target that doesn't exist, and you can't hold anyone accountable to a number nobody owns. The two failures cover for each other, indefinitely.
The Name Is the Fix
This is why question six is where the whole series lands. Answer the first five and you have the number, the inventory, the pricing, the milestones, and the count of customers approaching them. Machinery, priced and timed. And machinery without an operator is still standing still.
The fix costs nothing to say and everything to mean: a person, with a name, who owns the expansion number, wakes up thinking about it, and answers for it when it's missed. The moment that name exists, the crack closes, because revenue that has an owner gets pursued and revenue that doesn't, doesn't.
Most executives can answer two of the six questions. If you can only fix one this quarter, fix this one. Unowned revenue doesn't collect itself.
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.