What to ask to acquire a billion dollars of revenue

The Billion Dollar Question.

Type a company or pick one below. The tool renders the one diagnostic question that turns a latent need into an active one: the question, the loss it exposes, the answer to steer toward, and both a sales and a marketing version.

Modelled on Tanium's "how many endpoints do you have?"

Loaded live

Showing Cohesity. Pick another, or type a domain.

01

Latent need, made active.

At its core the question does one thing. It takes a latent need — one the buyer has but isn't acting on — and by shining a light on it makes it an active need they have to solve now. That is the light-bulb moment. A benefit question ("do you know how much you're overspending?") gets waved away. A diagnostic question the prospect cannot answer, in front of a peer, flips the switch. And it demands a number, a percentage or a one-to-ten, because a figure the buyer says out loud commits them in a way a feeling never does. The five tests below are what make a question capable of doing that.

01

Foundational

Any competent leader should be able to answer it. Not knowing is indefensible, not excusable.

02

Board-assumed

Leadership already believes it is handled. That belief is the latent gap you open.

03

Rarely tested

Almost nobody has run the check. The gap is real, not hypothetical.

04

Provable in the room

The gap can be exposed right there. This is the wedge, and where most copies break.

05

Embarrassing

Not knowing is quietly humiliating. That is what turns curiosity into urgency.

02

The motion it sits in.

The question is not a standalone line. It is the pivot of a discovery motion that moves a buyer off the status quo.

  1. 1

    Find the pain

    Ask what happens if the problem stays unsolved. Surface the latent need.

  2. 2

    Measure the loss

    Tie the gap to lost money or a lost metric. This is where the question lands and the loss gets named.

  3. 3

    Define the target

    Confirm this is a buyer the loss actually applies to. A clear ICP keeps the question sharp.

  4. 4

    Create the pressure

    Show why waiting costs more than acting. The active need now has a clock on it.

Where the question sits: between pain and pressure. It converts a felt problem into a priced one, which is what earns the answer you want back.

03

Worked live: Cohesity

Cyber resiliencecohesity.com

Cohesity's promise is that after ransomware you recover clean and fast, so the wedge lives where that promise is assumed but never tested.

The CISOReadiness

"What percentage of your critical systems could you restore clean and malware-free inside your recovery-time target, and when did you last test it end to end?"

Two missing numbers. A real recovery time, not a backup SLA on a slide. And a test date: most teams have only ever done file-level restores, never a full coordinated recovery drill.

The CFO / BoardExposure

"What would you pay in ransom, and how do you know that number, if you had to decide tonight?"

An unpriced risk. Almost nobody has costed true downtime against the ransom. The gap opens the conversation on resilience economics and cyber insurance.

What the gap costs

Enterprise downtime runs into millions a day, and the average ransomware recovery now stretches past three weeks. An untested recovery plan isn't a backup line item, it's a multi-week revenue outage nobody has priced.

Provability-max variant

"Do you know if ransomware is already sitting in your last clean backup?"

Binary and checkable. Most teams genuinely don't know, because standard backup verification checks integrity, not malware presence. The closest analogue to Tanium's endpoint count.

Where it's honest

You can't stage a live ransomware recovery in the room, so the spoken questions land on trust. The binary variant restores the on-the-spot proof.

The answer you're steering toward · the BDA

"Honestly? We back up nightly, but I couldn't tell you how long a real, coordinated recovery would actually take."

This is the admission that flips the latent need to an active one. When you hear a version of it, the question has done its job and the conversation is now about solving it.

Spoken — the exec conversation
Discovery opener
"Before we talk product: when did you last time a full ransomware recovery, end to end?"
The follow silence
"So the honest answer is you don't know how long it would take."
Written — the marketing hook
Headline
"Your backups are tested for corruption. When did you last test them for ransomware?"
LinkedIn opener
"Every board assumes they can recover from ransomware. Almost none have ever timed it."
The follow-through, once the gap is admitted

"That gap is the entire reason clean-room recovery exists. Want to see what your real recovery time looks like?"

§ Coming next

How to stage it.

The delivery method — how you ask so the customer gives the answer back — is the dimension that turns a good question into an admission. The staging framework, as delivered by the question's originator, is written up in full on the set-piece page.

Read the set-piece
Your turn

Share your web domain.
Get your BDQ, PDQ.

We'll read your site, work out who you sell to and what they're pretending is handled, and send back one question built to the five tests above — plus the BDA we expect you'll hear.

Submitting opens your email client pre-filled to m7g@larks.io. One question back, with the answer we expect you'll hear.