Nobody made that sale. Somebody took an order.
That distinction is the answer to a question I get every time expansion compensation comes up, and the question is who gets credit for the expansion.
Credit is the polite word. What people mean is who gets the commission.
Why the question feels obvious
In new business it earns its place. A seller is producing revenue out of nothing, from somebody with no commercial relationship to the company, and that is genuinely hard. Credit and commission follow the difficulty, correctly.
Even there it isn't one person. An SDR opens, an AE closes, both take a cut, and whoever brings it home is paid most. But there's a clear chain and a clear moment where something happened that wasn't going to happen otherwise.
So the instinct transfers. Revenue moved, somebody must have moved it, find them and pay them.
What actually happened
Look at what an expansion looks like when the machinery is working.
The AE named the next thing on the first call and told the customer they weren't ready for it yet. The onboarding lead set the same expectation at kickoff. The CSM or AM moved them through their milestones. The customer arrived at the point where the thing became useful, expecting the conversation, having had months to want it.
And then somebody activated it on their account.
Nobody worked a deal. Nobody overcame an objection. Nobody closed anything, because there was nothing to close. The whole system was built so the customer would want to give you the order, and then they gave it.
If a seller is working hard at that moment, something upstream is broken. That's the finding, not the commission question.
So pay for the thing that actually happened
Comp the growth, not the event. If the customer expands inside an AM or CSM's book, their Revenue Under Management goes up and their variable compensation goes up with it. No separate commission. No attribution argument. They made customers successful, moved them through their milestones, and their number rose.
Spiff the people without a book. Onboarding, delivery, anyone whose work set it up but whose pay isn't tied to a book of business. This is traceable and it should be traced. Go back to the onboarding call, find the moment somebody said "when you get to this point we'll add this to your account, you don't need it yet," find the moment the customer got there and took it, and pay a bonus for doing exactly what the deck scripts.
Make it a formula, not a favor. Consistent generosity is an operating model. Discretionary generosity is a lottery.
Use accelerators. Book grows past a threshold and the percentage itself rises. That's the difference between growing with the company and being audited by it.
In the real world, where sales runs everything
The clean version above assumes the expansion is a button press. Plenty of them aren't.
Adding something to an account can require a process, a negotiation, a contracts person, or a conversation with the original AE. It doesn't matter that the customer hit the milestone and the next step is obvious. If the company's machinery says a human works the transaction, a human works it.
When it routes back to the AE, that AE usually gets a commission, and most companies pay less for the expansion than for a new logo. Which is exactly backwards given what each dollar costs to acquire, and is nonetheless what most comp plans do.
Work inside what exists. Nobody rebuilds a compensation model before they can run an expansion motion. What matters is the direction: away from treating expansion as a new-business event, toward treating it as its own motion.
And tell the customer what's coming
If the next step involves somebody they haven't dealt with, say so in advance. "When you get there, I'll introduce you to the person who handles that." Use the name.
An expansion that stalls because the customer got handed to a stranger at the exact moment they were ready is a failure nobody writes down.
The trap in that handoff
There's a cost to routing an earned expansion through a new-business seller, and it's the same cost that shaped the first sale.
A seller working an expansion the way they work a new deal will bundle more into it, discount to move it, and de-risk it with a timebox. Every one of those caps lifetime value. Apply them to an expansion and you've capped the account twice.
That's the loop. New-business mechanics set a ceiling at acquisition, then the same mechanics get pointed at the expansion that was supposed to lift it. The motion runs, the number moves, the ceiling never rises.
Which is the actual argument for expansion being a different conversation, run by people measured on something other than closing it.
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.