Land & Expand: How the Best SaaS Companies Turn Single Users into Enterprise Deals

More than a third of revenue growth for SaaS companies with over $3m in revenue comes from expansion and this grows to over 40% for companies with over $15m in revenue. Real growth comes from expanding within your existing customer base—a strategy known as "land and expand." This approach transforms single users into teams and teams into enterprise-wide deals, driving sustainable growth and increasing customer lifetime value. But how exactly does this strategy work, and is your product suited for it?

What Does Landing and Expanding Mean and Why Is It Important?

What Is Land and Expand?

"Land and expand" is a growth strategy where a company first secures a small initial deal—the "land"—and then gradually increases revenue by expanding usage within that account—the "expand." This method leverages satisfied customers as a foundation for deeper penetration into an organization, turning initial successes into larger, more profitable relationships.

An initial deal doesn’t have to be a formal sales deal, this can be individual users who signed up for a paid plan or a small team who has self-served. 

Importance of Scaling Within Existing Customers

The reality is you cannot have a successful SaaS business without expanding the revenue from your existing customers. The fastest growing and most successful companies are growing their existing customers revenue by 5% inclusive of churn which is also known as net dollar retention.  

The reason expansion is so powerful is that expanding within existing customers is often more cost-effective than acquiring new ones and it can quickly multiply a single user into hundreds or thousands of team members. It capitalizes on established relationships and demonstrated value, leading to increased revenue, stronger customer loyalty, and greater market penetration. By focusing on customers who already trust your product, you can drive significant growth without the high costs associated with new customer acquisition.

What does expansion actually mean?

Expansion is any increase in the recurring revenue from an existing customer, but in practice is generally is:

1. Seat expansion: Bringing more users onboard for a given customer 
2. Usage expansion: Have them use more credits, resources or another form of usage your product charges for. This can be natural growth of usage, expanding the people using the product or expanding their use cases for your product 
3. Cross selling: Expanding them across your product range. This could be solving more of the problem they can to you for or a related problem 
4. Upselling: Moving them to a higher tier
5. Increasing the price: A simple, but often overlooked tool. Generally comes after the remaining options have slowed in growth.

We cover strategies for #1-4 in this article, with a focus on seat and usage expansion. If you are interested in how to do price increases well, you can check out our Step-by-Step Guide to Raising Subscription Prices.

Is Your Product Well Suited for Land and Expand?

Assessing Product Fit

Before implementing a land and expand strategy, it's crucial to determine if your product naturally lends itself to expansion within an organization. Consider whether your product can seamlessly transition from serving a single user to accommodating entire teams or even enterprise-wide deployments. Assess if the value of your product increases as more people within the organization use it —a key indicator that it is well-suited for this strategy.

Indicators of Natural Growth

Look for signs of organic growth within your user base. Are single users inviting colleagues, leading to the formation of teams? Do usage patterns show small teams evolving into larger groups? If users are requesting features that cater to larger teams or if there's a trend of increasing adoption within organizations, these are strong indicators that your product is primed for a land and expand approach.

Implementing the Land and Expand Approach

Successfully implementing the land and expand strategy involves a structured process that ensures each phase builds effectively on the previous one.

Step 1: Landing the First User

Deliver Exceptional Value

The first step is to land the initial user by delivering exceptional value that addresses their core needs. This involves providing an intuitive user experience and ensuring that the product solves the problems they came to address. It's not just about acquisition; retention and satisfaction are crucial. Encourage users to share the product with others by making it easy to do so within the application.

Measuring Successful Landing

Success at this stage can be measured through engagement metrics, activation rates, and user satisfaction scores like Net Promoter Score (NPS). Additionally, converting users into paying customers is a strong indicator that they find tangible value in your product. It is difficult to expand or even do consolidation if none of the users from a given organization are paying. 

At this stage, the product and marketing teams play significant roles. The product team ensures the solution meets user needs and provides a seamless experience. Marketing focuses on attracting the right users and highlighting the product's value proposition. Customer success may begin light engagement to assist with onboarding, but sales involvement is typically minimal unless it's a high-touch product.

Step 2: Creating & Expanding Teams

Facilitate Team Formation

Once the initial user is engaged, facilitate the formation of teams by providing features that support collaboration and make it easy for users to invite their colleagues. Simplifying the onboarding process for new team members reduces friction and encourages broader adoption within the organization.

Setting team and collaboration expectations

If people don’t think your product is a product for a team, they will treat it as such. They won’t invite their colleagues, won’t share and invite and you won’t get to the expanding step. 

Communicate in your messaging and product design that your product is built for teams and encourage team creation and sharing throughout the product. 

Domain capture is a very valuable tool in doing this, it suggests users from the same domain join an existing team with other people from the same domain or if they are the first one, a default team is created. This gets all users in a team setting from day one.

While it's beneficial to group users from the same organization, be cautious with automatic domain capture when it comes to large organizations, schools, and users with public email domains. You don’t want to group users who have nothing to do with each other together or make it harder to collaborate.

If this is a sales led product, asking about and suggesting that they bring their team onboard is valuable even if they might not do it right away. 

Step 3: Consolidation

Consolidation is all about bringing together users and teams from an organization that belong together. Let’s say you had 100 real estate agents using your product who all belonged to the same organization, there would be great benefits in having them on a single bill, sharing their work and being centrally controlled. 

Identify Expansion Opportunities

With multiple users or teams within the same organization, it's time to identify opportunities for consolidation. Use data analytics to detect clusters of users who might belong together, focusing on companies with multiple small teams or paying individuals within the same department or location.

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Tools like Upollo can show you a breakdown of users by organization, how many teams they have, what departments and locations they are from. This ena

Strategic Outreach

Within the clusters you have identified, find any champions you might have. These are people who are very active within the product, recommend it together, give lots of feedback or have really helped share it across the organization. These might not be the most senior person but they are a good person to start with to start the conversation before finding the senior decision makers. 

Clearly share  the benefits of consolidating accounts, such as streamlined management, cost savings, and enhanced collaboration features. These discussions are most effective when it's tailored to the organization's context and demonstrates a clear understanding of their use case.

At this stage, the sales team takes a more active role, collaborating with customer success to reach out to key stakeholders, if customer success is already working with the customer.. Sales focuses on presenting the business case for consolidation, while customer success provides insights into user behavior and needs. Together, they work to facilitate the transition to a unified account.

Step 3: Scaling to Enterprise Deals

Identify Expansion Opportunities

There are two high level types of opportunities, consolidation or pure expansion. 

Consolidation

Consolidation is the best to start with as instead of creating demand you are optimizing existing demand by bringing users and teams that belong together onto the same team / account. 

Let’s say you had 100 real estate agents using your product who all belonged to the same organization, there would be great benefits in having them on a single bill, sharing their work and being centrally controlled. 

To discover consolidation opportunities, use data analytics to detect clusters of users who might belong together, focusing on companies with multiple small teams or paying individuals within the same department or location.

Tools like Upollo can show you a breakdown of users by organization, how many teams they have, what departments and locations they are from.

Pure expansion

Pure expansion is focused on growing within an existing organization by either expanding within a department or finding new opportunities to jump to another department. 

Most land and expand strategies will start with an existing department before expanding. 

Discovering which departments to focus on can be difficult, you first need to understand all the existing users and their departments and then understand all the people at a company you don’t have onboard. 

Many companies do this manually or pay companies to do it for you, you can use Upollo to do this for you and see how much penetration you already have and how much opportunity there is for expansion by location and department for every company. 

Engage with Champions

Once you have a set of opportunities to go after you need to identify who to speak to. Starting with a champion is the most effective way to start. 

Internal champions are users who are passionate about your product and have influence within their organization. Provide them with resources and support to help advocate for broader adoption. Their endorsement can be instrumental in gaining traction with decision-makers.

Connect with Decision Makers

Engaging with decision-makers is critical for scaling to enterprise deals. Understand that their concerns may differ from end-users; they often focus on ROI, security, compliance, and overall organizational impact. Present data-driven insights and case studies that demonstrate the value your product brings at an enterprise level. Tailoring your messaging to address their specific pain points is essential.

Collaborate with IT and Admins

Work closely with IT departments to ensure your product integrates smoothly with existing systems. Reducing friction through features like Single Sign-On (SSO) and meeting security standards can alleviate concerns that might otherwise hinder adoption. Providing administrative controls and governance features also addresses the needs of IT and compliance teams.

Sales teams lead the engagement with decision-makers and IT departments, often involving senior account executives or enterprise sales specialists. They craft proposals, negotiate terms, and address high-level concerns. Customer success supports these efforts by providing usage insights and facilitating technical discussions, while technical teams may assist with integration and security compliance inquiries.

Step 5: Continuing Expansion

Ongoing Customer Success

After securing the enterprise deal, it's essential to continue identifying opportunities for growth. Customer success teams should proactively engage with the client to explore new use cases, departments, or features that can bring additional value. Regular check-ins, training sessions, and feedback loops help maintain a strong relationship and open doors for further expansion.

Customer success takes the lead in ongoing account management, focusing on retention and identifying upselling or cross-selling opportunities. They ensure that the client continues to derive value from the product and address any challenges promptly. Sales may be involved in negotiating expansions or renewals but rely heavily on the insights provided by customer success.

Real-World Examples

Monday.com

Initially targeting small teams for project management, Monday.com scaled by adding features suitable for larger organizations, such as advanced reporting, integrations with other enterprise tools, and customizable workflows. By addressing the needs of various departments and providing robust collaboration features, Monday.com became a staple in enterprise environments.

Zoom

Zoom gained popularity among individual users and small teams seeking reliable video conferencing. Its ease of use and high-quality service led to widespread adoption within organizations. Zoom capitalized on this by offering enterprise-grade features like administrative controls, enhanced security, and integration capabilities, facilitating the transition from small teams to company-wide deployments.

Google Workspace

Originally offering free tools for personal use, Google Workspace allowed individuals within organizations to adopt its suite without needing administrative approval. As usage spread organically, Google provided pathways for enterprises to consolidate accounts, offering enhanced control, security features, and centralized administration. This strategy enabled Google Workspace to expand from individual users to become a core productivity platform for many large organizations.

Conclusion

The "land and expand" strategy is a powerful approach for SaaS companies aiming to grow organically within their existing customer base. By focusing on delivering exceptional value to the initial user, facilitating team expansion, and strategically engaging with key stakeholders, companies can transform single-user accounts into substantial enterprise deals. This method not only drives revenue growth but also builds stronger customer relationships and a more significant market presence.

Implementing this strategy requires coordinated efforts across various teams within your organization:

• Product and Marketing Teams ensure the product meets user needs and is discoverable.
• Customer Success Teams play a critical role in supporting users, facilitating onboarding, and identifying expansion opportunities.
• Sales Teams are essential for engaging with decision-makers, negotiating deals, and driving enterprise-level growth.

Ready to Transform Your SaaS Growth Strategy?

At Upollo, we specialize in helping businesses identify and capitalize on expansion opportunities. Our tools provide penetration insights by department and location, offering a comprehensive view of all users and teams within a company. With filters designed to highlight opportunities for consolidation and expansion, we empower your sales and customer success teams to execute a successful land and expand strategy.

Contact us today to learn how Upollo can help you land and expand.