What Stops This

In this layer

• If Revenue Only Enters One Way, You're a VP of Sales2 build on this

  Count the ways revenue enters the business. If the answer's one, and it's new business sales, you've got a VP of Sales with a better title.

• You'd Never Say Sales Doesn't Work2 build on this

  When a sales motion misses the number you diagnose it. Coverage, ramp, discovery, comp. When the expansion number misses, the category gets retired. Same evidence, opposite verdict, and the reason isn't laziness.

• Your Sales Trainer Will Say Yes to Expansion Work2 build on this

  Ask a sales trainer to build your expansion motion and they'll say yes, and mean it. They will help you sell anything to anybody, which is a real skill and the exact disqualification. Then the part nobody connects: the advice they gave on the call is what capped the account.

• Nothing Here Was a Mistake1 build on this

  Four separate failures, in four different parts of a business, all built the same way. Every step in each one was a reasonable decision, and the last step in each one removed the thing that would have shown anybody it was wrong.

• Part of Your Expansion Number Is Just the Calendar1 build on this

  A customer who joined two months before your base period ended contributes two months to the baseline and twelve to the comparison. The difference books as expansion. It isn't expansion, it's arithmetic, and the faster you're growing the more of it you have.

• Which Of Your Best Practices Assume Expansion Is Magic1 build on this

  A test for your operating decisions: is this correct, or is it only correct if expansion is something that happens to you rather than something you cause.

• “All I Want Is the Money”1 build on this

  Lay out readiness gates, triggers, orchestration and unbundling and people hear a list of constraints. A reader named the real objection: a gate takes away your ability to force the number. Correct. Forcing the number is the thing making you poor.

• Expansion Is Not One Motion

  New business is understood to be plural: sales-led, product-exposed, product-led, offers, partnerships. Expansion gets treated as one undifferentiated thing, and it is at least two.

• Firing Someone With Arithmetic

  Put someone's whole compensation on the size of their book and wait. It is an exit executed slowly enough that management never has to own it.

• The Diet You Tried While Eating Pizza

  'Expansion doesn't work here' is a verdict from an experiment nobody ran. It's a diet you went on while eating pizza, and the conclusion keeps itself true.

• Your Expansion Number Is Two Different Things

  You will not win the argument that a price increase isn't expansion, and you don't need to. Split last year's number into two columns, follow both groups forward, and let the churn and contraction rates settle it. The prediction is falsifiable, which is the point.