LTV:Max is where the expansion revenue work lives. Frameworks, workshops, consulting, and analysis, all pointed at one number: what a customer is worth over the life of the relationship, and how much of that a company is leaving uncollected.
It is a division of Sixteen Ventures LLC, the consulting practice Lincoln Murphy founded in 2008. Sixteen Ventures is the whole body of work going back 18 years. LTV:Max is the part of it that is still being built.
Why It Exists
Every company has a machine for acquiring customers. Budget, headcount, forecast, pipeline review, a named owner who loses their job if the number misses.
Almost none has one for growing the customers it already has. Expansion happens when a customer asks. That makes it inbound, unforecastable, and owned by nobody. So the company keeps paying full price for growth while revenue it already earned the right to collect sits in the base, unnoticed.
That uncollected amount is the subject. Not retention, which protects the base without growing it. Not churn reduction, which is the absence of a bad thing rather than the presence of a good one. The money that is already there.
The premise underneath all of it is that expansion is not selling. It is helping customers get more of what they already came for, which means the commercial result follows the value rather than replacing it. If it feels like a pitch, something upstream went wrong.
The Machinery
Expansion that works is built, not remembered. The parts have names, and each one is documented on this site.
Latent revenue is where it starts. The money already in the customer base that nothing in the company is built to notice, ask for, or collect. You measure it before you do anything else, because the size of it decides whether any of the rest is worth building.
Strategic unbundling decides what comes out of the initial sale. What the customer needs and can use now goes in. Everything else is held back on purpose and attached to the milestone that earns it. Timed properly, it prices higher than it ever did inside the bundle, so the account finishes above the bundled total rather than level with it.
The ascension path is the map: milestones that mean the customer is ready for something genuinely next rather than just more, with an earned offer waiting at each one, and readiness instrumented so it is observed instead of guessed.
Orchestration puts the next thing in the customer's head before they arrive. Introduce it, deny it against a condition they have not met yet, agree on the conversation happening when they do. The denial is the lever, and it is the reason the later conversation is expected instead of a surprise.
Unbundling and orchestration are halves of one motion. One decides what exists at the milestone. The other makes sure the customer is already waiting for it.
And the machinery pays twice. A customer who can see their next milestone and knows what it earns has a reason to stay that no save play can manufacture, so the offense ends up doing the defense’s job as a byproduct.
Who Is Behind It
Lincoln Murphy named Customer Success in 2010 and co-authored Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue, the first book on the subject, in 2016.
He has spent the 15 years since arguing that the discipline was built as a growth function and got implemented as a defensive one. LTV:Max is that argument with the hedging removed. It is not a Customer Success site and it is not a retention site. It is about the revenue that exists inside a customer base and what it takes to go get it.
The full biography is at lincolnmurphy.com/about. The consulting practice is at sixteenventures.com.
How to Work Together
A few ways in, roughly in order of commitment.
Read The Premise, which is the long-form argument, or The Expansion Canon, which is the working doctrine. Both are free and neither asks for anything.
Take the Latent Revenue Test to get a rough read on what is sitting in your base.
Then workshops, training, and consulting, depending on whether you need a team to build the motion themselves or you need someone to design it with you.
Email lincoln@sixteenventures.com.