There's a meeting that happens at a lot of companies. Leadership decides expansion matters this year, and the decision rolls downhill until it lands on the CS team as a training initiative. Commercial skills for CSMs. How to spot opportunities. How to have the conversation.
Six months later expansion hasn't moved, and the quiet conclusion is that the CS team wasn't commercial enough.
Wrong diagnosis. The initiative failed the day it was scoped, because it started below the altitude where expansion actually gets decided.
The altitude problem
Look at what a CSM actually controls, and what expansion actually requires.
Expansion requires an inventory of what customers can buy next. CSMs don't decide what gets built, bundled, or held back. It requires pricing that rewards the earned moment. CSMs don't set pricing. It requires compensation that pays someone to collect the cheapest revenue in the business, and the comp plan is usually running backwards: the biggest commissions on the most expensive revenue, and often no expansion number in CS comp at all. CSMs don't design comp. And it requires a named owner of the expansion number, which is an org-design decision that belongs to exactly one altitude: the one where the CEO, CRO, and RevOps sit.
Every one of those levers lives above the people who got the training. So the initiative asked the CS team to drive a car while the steering wheel, pedals, and keys stayed on another floor.
No training fixes an org-design problem
This is why the commercial-skills push keeps failing in the same way everywhere. The skills aren't useless; plenty of CSMs are genuinely great in the expansion conversation once the moment exists. But training changes what people can do, not what the organization decided. If nobody owns the number, if the offers were all stuffed into the initial sale, if comp pays for renewals and new logos but not the next purchase, then a better-trained CSM just watches the same machinery not exist with sharper eyes.
The people it's hardest on are the CSMs themselves, who get handed a goal without a mechanism and then wear the miss. Nobody did this wrong; there was no playbook for the altitude question. But there is now, and it starts with putting the decision where the levers are.
If you're reading this because someone sent it to you
Then you're probably the person with the levers, and the person who sent it is telling you something they can't fix from where they sit. Here's the short version of what they're asking for: a named owner of expansion revenue, an inventory decision about what customers can buy next, and comp that pays someone to collect it. Those three decisions cost a meeting. The absence of them is currently costing the gap between what your base produces and what it should.
The diagnostic takes ninety seconds and no email: the Latent Revenue Test. If the answers come back thin, the problem was never the CS team. It was the altitude, and the fix has always been yours to make.
