A customer recently drew this on the whiteboard as we discussed land and expand strategies. 

In sales “Land and expand” usually refers to a strategy to land a customer with a small deal, and then sell into the organization to expand your footprint to more seats, additional departments or more products & services.

Nowhere does this make more sense than in SaaS. In a typical low-touch SaaS “sale,” an individual user signs up for a free trial, then converts to a paid user. Then you get as many other users in that company as you can. That’s land and expand.

If you have a great product this will happen organically to some degree. User number one will tell a colleague, and now you have two users. They invite some more colleagues, and you have a few more users. As teams collaborate, share information, send data and manage workflows, this organic user growth inside a company is what happens.

What land and expand isn’t

It’s a beautiful thing when you have this sort of network effect inside an organization. It’s the best kind of growth—the kind that happens naturally from the value of your product.

But, organic user growth of this nature is not a land and expand strategy. It’s just a by-product of product-led growth. It’s bottom-up growth, and it’s great.

But it’s not enough.

Too many SaaS companies leave dollars on the table by relying on the natural ‘radiate’ effect of their product and failing to back it up with people and processes that solidify the relationship between the customer account and product.

The best way to complement bottom-up growth is to have a top-down account sales strategy. Let the users spread your solution across the organization. But while that is happening, you put in the work to develop deep, long-lasting, strategic relationships with the customer organization.

What land and expand is

A land and expand strategy isn’t having one user naturally lead to ten users. A land and expand strategy is having persistent, deep connections with high-level decision makers in the customer’s company. It’s working to transform your product from a tool that some employees have adopted to a solution that the organization has prioritized. It’s working at the account level, not the user level.

Real land and expand requires people and process. It doesn’t just happen. The number of users inside of a customer account may grow, but they are a loosely held together tribe. At the first whiff of “consolidate tools,” budget cuts, or new leadership you are tenuous ground. What you want is buy-in for adopting and deploying your SaaS at the highest-level inside of your customer’s organization.

You want the company to select your product, not just the users in the company.  

The SaaS land and expand strategy

So, in SaaS, the strategy should be to complement bottom-up growth with a top-down sales effort. There are lots of names for this—account development, customer development, sales. The name doesn’t matter. Executing consistently and putting enough muscle behind the initiative is what matters.

For “low touch” SaaS this may mean monitoring new user signups to spot those who are employed at your ideal customer accounts and then immediately kicking off a process to begin the land and expand efforts within that customer account.

For higher touch SaaS that use sales teams, the process is mostly the same. The process gets kicked off as the deal closes, and you continue to work on maintaining close ties with your primary decision makers and forge new relationships across the organization.

Who you need for land and expand

Customer development isn’t a sales strategy or a customer success strategy. It’s a business strategy.

In some companies the development function sits on the sales team. In others, it’s part of the customer success organization.