Ask a sales trainer to help you build an expansion motion and they will say yes.
They'll mean it, too. I've watched sales trainers take on customer success work because somebody asked them to. They will help you sell anything to anybody, and that's a real skill.
It's also the disqualification.
The Two Motions Point in Opposite Directions
Sales training is built to move a specific person to a decision now. Create urgency. Surface the objection and handle it. Get a commitment before the call ends. Against a stranger who has to be moved off the status quo, every bit of that is correct.
Expansion isn't that. It's one specific thing, offered to the one customer whose own progress just made it obvious, at the moment it became obvious.
So the central move runs the other way. You name the thing and then take it away, because they aren't ready for it yet. A sales trainer would call that leaving money on the table. It's the entire mechanism.
Now the Part Nobody Connects
The advice a sales trainer gives about the call is frequently the thing capping the account.
Discount to close, and you've taught the buyer your price is negotiable, so every renewal is a negotiation from now on. Lead with cancel-anytime, and you handed them the exit on day one. Stuff the bundle so the offer looks stronger, and there's nothing left to sell at month six when they'd have paid a premium for it. Say "give it three months and see how it goes," and that wasn't confidence, that was an instruction to decide at month three.
Every one of those closes more deals this quarter. Every one of them costs more than it made, later, in a number nobody traces back to the call that caused it.
Which puts you in an odd position. The person who trained your team to do those things is now the person you've asked to fix what those things did.
Not because anyone is acting in bad faith. Because the close lands this week and the consequence lands next year, and nobody in the arrangement is measured on the second one.
What Usually Gets Sold as an Expansion Program
Mostly it's post-close follow-on revenue with a diagram on it. A stage model saying the relationship continues after the close and somebody ought to sell more at some point.
That isn't wrong. It just isn't a motion.
It has no readiness definition, so there's nothing to trigger on and the timing defaults to your calendar. It has no inventory, so there's nothing specific to offer and the conversation stays generic. And nothing was ever held back, so there's nothing to withhold, which means the one move that builds trust isn't available at all.
Some of these models are a decade old and were never finished when they were new. They're still on the market.
You Don't Have to Take My Word for It
And you shouldn't, because this is checkable, which is more than most of the category offers.
You already have the evidence. Your team recorded it.
Take the sales calls from the accounts you lost and the accounts you kept. Read them for one question: did this call raise the ceiling on what that account will ever be worth, or lower it?
Not whether the rep ran a good call. Every tool that reads sales calls already measures that, and it's a different question.
Read them that way and you'll find the concessions nobody asked for, the evaluation dates dressed up as flexibility, and the next purchase nobody ever named. All of it delivered by people doing exactly what they were trained to do.
That's not a training problem. Training worked. It's a question of what the training was pointed at.
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.