There's a move I've written about twice now. On a sales call you name the next thing, then take it away. You're not ready for this yet, and when you are, we'll talk.
It closes more deals now and it's the most fair thing you can say to a customer.
It also requires something I skipped past both times.
It requires a this.
If Everything Is in the Initial Sale, There's Nothing to Point At
A rep can only take away something that exists and isn't included yet.
So if your initial sale contains everything you make, the move isn't available to them. There's no held-back item, no next thing, nothing to name. The best they can offer is more seats later, which nobody finds aspirational and nobody budgets for in advance.
That's the connection I've been making in my head and never on the page. Strategic unbundling and orchestration aren't two tactics you could pick between. They're two halves of one motion, and each one is close to useless without the other.
Unbundling decides what exists at the milestone. Orchestration puts it in the customer's head before they get there.
Unbundling Without Orchestration Reads as a Bait and Switch
Hold an item back and tell nobody, and you've built a trap rather than a path.
The customer buys, uses what they bought, hits the point where the held-back thing becomes necessary, and discovers it exists and costs extra. From their side that's indistinguishable from having been sold an incomplete product on purpose. Which, without the orchestration, is roughly what happened.
They're right to be annoyed, and the annoyance is entirely self-inflicted, because the same item introduced eight weeks earlier as something they'd eventually want would have landed as planning.
Orchestration Without Unbundling Hits a Ceiling Fast
Run it the other way and the failure is quieter but just as real.
You can absolutely orchestrate against whatever your catalog already contains. Tiers, seats, whatever add-ons exist. It works, and it's the version I recommend starting with because it costs nothing.
But your ceiling is your catalog. If the only thing above the current plan is a bigger version of the current plan, orchestration has one note to play. You'll run the motion well and produce modest results, and the natural conclusion will be that orchestration doesn't do much.
The motion was fine. There was nothing worth orchestrating toward.
The Whole Motion Has Three Parts
Put it next to ready, willing and able and the machine resolves into something simple.
Unbundling creates the object. There is now a specific thing that exists, is priced, and isn't included yet.
The milestone creates readiness. An observable moment arrives where that specific thing becomes the obvious next step rather than an upgrade.
Orchestration creates willing and able. They heard about it early, so they've had time to want it and time to budget for it.
Three components. One motion. Take out any one of them and look at what's left.
Without the object, orchestration has nothing to name and the milestone triggers an offer of more of the same. Without the milestone, you're guessing at timing and the whole thing is a campaign. Without orchestration, the object exists and arrives as a surprise invoice.
Which One to Build First
They're not equally hard, and pretending otherwise is how this advice gets ignored.
Orchestration is cheap. No repricing, no packaging decisions, no committee. A rep can start doing it on their next call using your current catalog, and the only thing standing in the way is that nobody is paid for it.
Unbundling is the bigger lever and it costs more to pull. It means deciding on purpose what comes out of the initial sale, which is a pricing decision, a packaging decision, and a direct challenge to anyone whose job is to maximize the first close. It needs somebody senior enough to care about the revenue after that close, and honest enough to admit the current bundle was assembled to win deals rather than to serve customers over time.
So start with orchestration. Run it against what you have. It'll produce real money and it'll teach the motion.
And then you'll hit the ceiling, and the ceiling will be specific. You'll watch a rep have a genuinely good conversation with a customer who's obviously at a milestone, and realize there's nothing meaningful to offer them. That moment is the argument for unbundling, and it's much more persuasive than anything I can write, because it happened to you.
The Thing People Get Backwards
Unbundling gets resisted as though it's about charging more for less.
It isn't, and the arithmetic says otherwise. What it actually does is give the relationship somewhere to go. A customer who bought everything on day one has no next step available to them, which means every conversation after that is about renewal, and renewal conversations are defensive by nature.
Hold something back, tell them it exists, tell them when it'll matter, and you've replaced a flat relationship with a direction.
That's not a pricing trick. It's the difference between a customer who has somewhere to go with you and one who doesn't.
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.