Land and Expand: Growing One User into Many

What is Land and Expand?

The concept of Land and Expand revolves around initially solving a specific problem for a specific group within a company and then growing with the company. This strategy involves expanding either the range of problems solved or increasing the user base benefiting from your product or service.

The Importance of Expansion

In businesses with over $100m in revenue, expansion accounts for 50% or more of their new revenue. This highlights the critical role of expansion. While there are various aspects to Land & Expand, our focus in this article is on increasing the number of users within a client's organization.

Sticking the Landing

Successful implementation of the 'Land' phase is key to the strategy. Essential steps include:

Securing a Champion: Identifying an influential advocate within the organization who believes in the value of your product. This is not only helpful in ensuring you land the product successfully and can quickly fix issues that arise during onboarding, but as we will talk about below is critical to expansion.

Ensuring a Positive Experience: Providing excellent service to ensure your champion and early users have a beneficial experience and that you are solving the problem they set out to solve.

Echoing Back Results: Regularly communicating the positive outcomes and benefits experienced by the initial user group.

Understanding Expansion Opportunities

To maximize the impact of your expansion efforts, it's essential to identify where the most significant opportunities lie within your client's organization. Here are some strategies to pinpoint these key areas:

Assess Current Departmental Use: Begin by evaluating departments where your product has already gained traction. For example, if the sales team is actively using your product, investigate the size of this department, what your current penetration within that department is and its potential for further adoption.

Explore New Departmental Opportunities: In addition to strengthening your presence in existing departments, explore other departments that could benefit from your solution. If your product is used in Sales, for instance, consider whether the Marketing or Customer Success departments might find it useful.

Leverage your Champion: Your internal champion is a valuable resource for insights into potential expansion opportunities. Engage your champion to learn about other departments, teams, or locations that might benefit from your product.

Strategies for Expansion

There are several tactics that can be employed for effective seat expansion:

In-App Collaboration: Let the product do it for you! Design your product to naturally foster collaboration, encouraging organic growth.

Domain Capture: Enable new users to discover and connect with existing users at their company.

Consolidation: Identify other users from the company that are already onboard and try to bring these parties together to a single team or organization within your product. People from other departments are great starting points to expanding within their teams.

Escalation: Engage with senior stakeholders for broader implementation, leveraging initial success.

Direct Outreach: Proactively connect with potential new users, some of whom might already be familiar with your product.

Champion Advocacy: Encourage your champion to make introductions to key contacts in other teams.

Leveraging Tools for Efficiency

Upollo simplifies this challenge by providing a powerful tool that swiftly uncovers major growth opportunities and identifies the most relevant users for your expansion strategies. With Upollo, you gain the insights needed to make informed decisions and effectively expand your reach within existing client organizations.