Here's a test worth running on your own operating decisions, and it takes about a minute each.
Is this practice correct because it's correct, or is it correct only if expansion is something that happens to you?
A surprising amount of standard practice turns out to be the second one. And it doesn't look like an assumption. It looks like rigor, which is exactly why it survives review after review without anybody noticing what it rests on.
Five that fail the test
Commission paid on new logos and not on expansion. Defensible if expansion arrives on its own, because paying for something that was going to happen anyway is waste. Indefensible the moment expansion requires somebody to do specific work at a specific time, since you've now priced that work at zero.
A forecast with no expansion line. Correct if the number is unknowable. But if you can count which accounts reach a readiness gate this quarter and what the thing at that gate is worth, then leaving it out isn't caution. It's declining to forecast something forecastable, and the number that gets left out is the one nobody is accountable for.
Excluding expansion from acquisition efficiency. Reasonable if expansion has no relationship to who you acquired. But whether an account has anywhere to grow into was decided during the sale, so excluding it deletes the evidence that one segment is worth more to acquire than another.
Quotas on new business only. Right if the two motions need the same treatment and expansion can't be quota'd. Wrong in a subtler way: the reason a straight expansion quota fails isn't that expansion is unmanageable, it's that the tactics required to hit a made-up number damage a relationship you already have. Different problem, different fix, and abandoning the number entirely isn't the fix.
Land and expand with no defined gates. The strategy names expansion in the title and then contains no mechanism for it. If expansion is weather, that's honest. If it isn't, the phrase is doing the work a plan was supposed to do.
Why the assumption is invisible
Because in most companies it's currently true.
Expansion genuinely does arrive unpredictably in a business where nobody owns it, nothing triggers it and no forecast contains it. So the practices built around that are accurate descriptions of the situation. They aren't errors, they're accommodations, and accommodations to a real condition are indistinguishable from good judgment right up until the condition changes.
That's what makes this hard to see from the inside. Nobody decided expansion was magic. It just behaves that way, so everything downstream got designed for weather, and the design is now the reason it stays weather.
The loop
Comp doesn't pay for it, so nobody works it. Nobody works it, so it stays unpredictable. It stays unpredictable, so it doesn't go in the forecast. It isn't in the forecast, so it isn't reviewed. It isn't reviewed, so nobody builds the thing that would make it predictable.
Every step is a reasonable response to the step before it. The loop is stable and it's made entirely of good decisions.
What to do
Take your five biggest revenue practices and run the test on each. Not whether they work. Whether they'd still make sense if expansion were something you could see coming a quarter out and count.
The ones that survive are real. The ones that don't are accommodations, and they're the ones holding the loop in place.
Then pick one and break it. The cheapest is usually the forecast, because adding an expansion line costs nothing and immediately makes somebody responsible for a number that used to belong to nobody.
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.