Somebody asked me a good question this week: how do you get an executive to accept that there's no expansion without additional commitment?
You don't, and you shouldn't try. Arguing a definition with somebody whose number is going up is a losing position, and it makes you sound like you're explaining away good news.
Split the number instead.
Two Columns
Take last year's expansion revenue and put every dollar of it in one of two places.
Column one: a customer added something they didn't have before. More seats, a tier they weren't on, an add-on, capacity beyond what they'd committed to, a service they hadn't bought. Somebody made a decision.
Column two: the price moved and the customer didn't. List increases. A discount lapsing at renewal. Contractual escalators. Currency. Anything where the invoice grew and the customer's commitment didn't.
Don't editorialize while you do it. The sorting is the whole exercise, and most companies have never once performed it, which means nobody in the room has seen these two things apart.
Then Follow Both Groups Forward
This is the part that turns a definition into evidence.
Take the accounts in each column and look at what they did over the following year. Three measures, all of which you already have.
Did they ever expand again? Did they contract at the next renewal? And did they churn?
That order is deliberate. Churn is the loud, late confirmation. A customer who simply stops buying more is the earlier signal, and nothing in your reporting has a line for it.
My expectation is that the column-two accounts look materially worse on all three, and that the gap surprises everyone including the person who ran it.
The reasoning is straightforward once the columns exist. A customer who chose to add something told you they wanted more of what you do. That's a signal, it repeats, and you can build on it. A customer whose bill went up told you nothing at all about their intent, and in the version where the increase forced them into a cutting exercise, what they learned that year was how little of you they could live with.
What Happens If I'm Wrong
Then you've learned something more useful than confirmation.
If the two columns behave identically over the following year, the distinction has no predictive power in your business and you should ignore me. That's a real possible outcome and it's worth saying out loud, because a test you can't fail isn't a test.
But run it before deciding, because right now nobody has. The reason the question feels philosophical is that the reporting has never separated the two, so there's no evidence on either side of it.
Why This Works Where Arguing Doesn't
Because it stops being a conversation about what expansion means and becomes one about what the data says.
Nobody has to accept my definition to accept that two things filed under one label are behaving differently, and that only one of them predicts anything.
An executive doesn't need convincing that expansion matters. They need to see that the number they're managing to is measuring two unrelated events and reporting them as one.
And while you're in there, check the period alignment too, because a third slice of that number is customers who were present for part of the base period and all of the comparison one. That isn't expansion either, and it's the same afternoon of work.
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.