Nobody says it quite that plainly, but it's the objection underneath most of the pushback I get on expansion, and I'd rather take it seriously than argue with it.
Because the people who believe it have usually watched it happen.
What They Watched
A customer who isn't getting what they already bought gets asked to buy more.
A salesperson raises an upgrade with someone still waiting on the thing that was promised in March.
An account that never got onboarded properly receives a renewal-plus-expansion proposal, because the quarter is closing.
All three of those harm the customer, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Anyone who has sat in a room where one of them happened is right to have drawn a conclusion from it.
None of which is new from me. I wrote this in 2015:
By forcing the CSM to sell something out of cycle, that is, when it's not actually needed or wanted by the customer, you not only hurt the CSM, you hurt the customer. Their trust and overall faith in you goes down, because you either don't care about their actual progress and success with your product, or you're clueless. Maybe both.
So this isn't a concession I'm making to an objection. It's been my position for eleven years. What follows is the part that got built after it.
But look at what the three have in common. It isn't that expansion happened. It's that it happened to someone who hadn't earned it yet. The opportunity was driven by the vendor's need for revenue rather than the customer's need for something more, which is the same failure I've written about as operating on the vendor's calendar instead of the customer's path.
A Correctly Built Expansion Motion Can't Reach That Customer
Expansion runs off readiness milestones: observable moments where a customer has achieved something specific that makes the next thing genuinely useful to them. A customer who's crashing out won't reach the next one. A customer still waiting on delivery hasn't hit one. The motion never arrives at their door, because the trigger never fires.
If your expansion motion is capable of harming a struggling customer, you don't have an expansion motion. You have a campaign with a revenue target on it.
Which is what most companies actually have, and the why matters, because the failure isn't a lack of care. It is usually a proxy.
Usage Is the Proxy That Causes This
Companies that do try to instrument expansion almost always reach for product usage as the trigger, and usage isn't readiness.
The known problem with usage is that it misses people: a customer can be flashing ready across four other channels while the usage graph sits flat.
The problem nobody names runs the other direction. Struggling customers generate usage. A team that can't get the thing to work logs in constantly, runs the same report six times, pulls in three more people to look at it. Thrashing produces activity, and activity is what a usage trigger is watching for.
So a company using usage as its readiness proxy hasn't merely built a weak signal. It has built one that points, with some reliability, directly at the customers who are struggling most. Then the expansion motion fires at exactly the wrong accounts, and everyone concludes that expansion damages relationships.
It did. The instrument aimed it there.
The Same Missing Piece Breaks the Number
Here's the part I didn't expect to find when I started writing this down.
An expansion forecast is customers approaching a milestone, times the share who take what's attached to it, times its value. No readiness definition means no way to count who is approaching, so companies size expansion by proxy instead: seats times an average, ARR times a target uplift, a benchmark NRR someone saw in a deck. None of those formulas contain a readiness term, which means all of them cheerfully count the customers who are on their way out the door.
One missing piece. Two failures.
Without a readiness gate, your forecast counts customers who will never arrive, so the number comes out inflated. Without a readiness gate, your outreach reaches customers who haven't arrived, so the customer gets hurt. Same hole, both times.
Why Nobody Connects Them
Because the two symptoms get reported to different people.
The inflated number surfaces in a board deck or a forecast review, where it reads as a planning problem and gets handled by lowering the target. The harmed customer surfaces in a CSM's one-on-one, where it reads as a judgment problem and gets handled by telling people to be more careful about when they bring things up.
Neither room has the other half. So a single missing definition gets diagnosed twice, as two unrelated problems, and gets two fixes that don't work: a smaller number, and more caution.
More caution is the worse of the two, because it looks like it's working. Fewer awkward conversations happen. Nobody notices the customers who needed something and never heard about it.
What This Does to the Gate
It changes what the delivery precondition actually is.
Read one way, it's a moral overlay: be decent, fix what you owe people before asking them for more. True, and it's also the least useful version, because every company already believes it's doing that.
Read correctly, it's a finding about your instrument. If a struggling customer can receive your expansion motion, then you can't see who is ready. And if you can't see who is ready, the number on your slide is wrong too. The ethics and the arithmetic aren't two separate arguments that happen to agree. They're one argument, and you fail both at the same moment for the same reason.
What to Do With a Customer Who Isn't Ready
Not nothing, which is the trap on the other side.
The answer is the same one that has always worked: name the thing, place it in the future, and tell them plainly that they aren't there yet. That is going to help you do this specific thing significantly better, most companies at your stage find it essential once they get there, you aren't ready for it yet, and when you are, we'll talk. Nobody has ever been harmed by that sentence. Nobody forgets it either.
The harm was never in the customer knowing what exists. It was in being asked to buy it at a moment that proved you weren't paying attention.
So When Someone Tells Me Expansion Hurt Their Customers
I believe them, and I don't hear an argument against expansion.
I hear a company that never defined readiness, ran an untargeted motion at a base it couldn't see, and got both of the failures that follow from that. One of them showed up in the forecast. The other showed up in the relationship. Nobody put them next to each other.
Build the gate and the harm stops, because the conversation only reaches people who have already earned the need. At which point it stops feeling like selling at all. It is just the obvious next thing, arriving when they need it.
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.