Question five of the six: how many of your customers are approaching a readiness milestone right now?
Not hypothetically. Right now, today, while you're reading this. Some number of your customers are closing in on the moments that make their next purchase obvious. That number exists. It's a fact about your business at this moment.
You just can't see it.
The Question Nobody Has Ever Been Asked
There are two reasons this number is invisible, and they compound.
The first is instrumentation: no system in your company captures it. Your CRM knows pipeline. Your billing system knows renewals. Nothing anywhere counts customers approaching readiness, because nothing was ever built to, because the milestones in question four were never defined.
The second reason is stranger: nobody's thought to ask. I've asked executives every one of these six questions, and question five gets a reaction the others don't. Not embarrassment. Surprise. The idea that approaching-readiness is a countable thing, a number you could put on a wall next to pipeline coverage, has genuinely never come up. The most predictable revenue in the business, and the question itself is novel.
Put those two together and the blast explains itself. When you can't see who's approaching what, the whole base looks identical, so you treat it identically. Everyone gets the promotion. The few who happened to be ready convert, the rest learn to ignore you, and the results confirm that expansion doesn't work.
This Is Arithmetic, Not Forecasting
Here's what the number turns into once you can see it. Customers approaching a milestone, times the share who typically take the offer attached to it, times the value of that offer per customer. That's not a model. That's multiplication.
Run it and you're looking at live latent revenue: not the abstract number from the counterfactual, but this quarter's portion of it, with names attached. Sales pipeline is a probability-weighted guess about strangers. This is a count of existing customers, already paying you, already succeeding, mechanically approaching the moment the next thing becomes obvious. It's the most predictable pipeline you're not looking at, and it's sitting one report away from existing.
What It Looks Like as a File
The answer to question five isn't a report. It's a list of names that changes every week, and it's worth being concrete about the shape.
One row per account. Six columns.
The account. What they crossed, stated observably rather than as a feeling: they shipped the first result, hit the volume, hired the team, opened the second region. What that makes them eligible for, which is a specific item rather than a category. What it's worth. Whether anyone told them it was coming. And who owns the conversation.
It updates from where the signals already are: product data for progress they made rather than logins they performed, their funding and launches and fiscal calendar, their hiring and new executives and acquisitions, their support tickets and docs and pricing page visits, and stage changes in your own CRM. Those are the five channels, wearing work clothes.
Two of the six columns are the ones almost nobody can fill in, and each failure is diagnostic.
Eligibility requires an inventory of everything a customer could buy from you. If that column stays blank, the inventory doesn't exist, which is question two rather than question five.
And whether anyone told them is the gap between a customer who's ready and a customer who says yes. Ready and willing are separate conditions, and only the first one arrives on its own.
An empty file doesn't mean there are no opportunities. It means you can't see them, and the only motion available when readiness is invisible is presenting everything to everyone and hoping.
The Number Exists Today
Everything about question five is already true in your business. The milestones are being approached whether you've defined them or not. Customers are arriving at readiness this week and finding silence, because the moment is invisible to the vendor it should belong to.
Most executives can answer two of the six questions. This one might be the most expensive to leave unanswered, because it's not a strategy gap or a capability gap. It's a visibility gap with revenue behind it. The number exists today. You just can't see it, and what you can't see, you can't collect.
Where does your company stand? Take the Latent Revenue Test: the six questions, self-served. Ninety seconds, no email required.
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.