Podcast episode
How To Run a "Land & Expand" The Right Way (Eleanor Dorfman, ReTool)
30 Minutes to President's Club28 Nov 202435 min
Description
ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS: Segmented Team Structure: Down-market teams focus on landing new logos, passing them to expand teams, while up-market AEs handle both acquisition and expansion with retention-based comp. Enterprise Sales Strategies: Use top-down (sell wall-to-wall) or land-and-expand approaches, with the latter yielding higher LTV by scaling through business units first. Deal Inspection Triggers: Monitor $50K deals at stage 3 for POCs and access to power, and stage 5 for mutual action plans and the paper process. Consistent Review Rhythm: Reps update pipelines Monday, managers review Tuesday, deal reviews happen Wednesday, and Eleanor finalizes calls Thursday. ELEANOR'S PATH TO PRESIDENTS CLUB: - Head of Sales @ Retool - Global Head of Commercial Retention & Regional Director of Commercial Sales @ Segment - Global Head of Commercial Renewals and Retention @ Segment - Head of Customer Success and Solutions engineering @ Clever Inc RESOURCES DISCUSSED: Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal
Show moreShow less
Listen
Loading the recording
This recording could not be loaded.Open the audio file
Quoted on this wiki
Every place a page here uses this source, in the order the words come in it.
deals, but not your smallest one where it's worth the time to inspect. When a 50K deal hits stage three, I get a Slack notification over 50K and I schedule a deal review with the rep, the reps manager, the sales engineer, sales engineering manager, and myself. We do an early stage review. Are we ready for the POC? “Do we have access to the economic buyer?” Do we know the required capabilities? Do we know the competitive landscape? Are we set up for success in that POC and how do we know and have that confidence? Similarly, when a deal hits stage five, I get a Slack notification, a deal over 50K hits stage five. We schedule a late stage deal review. We have different templates for each.
and it's one and done. It's, all right, this is going to impact their base commission rate. And so if that impacts that, then we need to make sure we're putting some sweeteners or some kickers on the other side to offset any implications of reducing that base rate with retention. So that being said, I still think it's extremely important, and it's tactically figuring out how does this drive the right behavior. “I recommend thinking about it from an NDR perspective,” in addition to a retention rate perspective, because expansion feels a little bit more inside of the reps' control. But fundamentally, it's making sure when you're closing a deal, are you thinking about, is this a good deal? Is this customer going to stay with us? When you're handing off a deal to professional services or your success team or implementation team, are you setting that up for success?
And so if that impacts that, then we need to make sure we're putting some sweeteners or some kickers on the other side to offset any implications of reducing that base rate with retention. So that being said, I still think it's extremely important, and it's tactically figuring out how does this drive the right behavior. And so I recommend thinking about it from an NDR perspective, “in addition to a retention rate perspective,” because expansion feels a little bit more inside of the reps' control. But fundamentally, it's making sure when you're closing a deal, are you thinking about, is this a good deal? Is this customer going to stay with us? When you're handing off a deal to professional services or your success team or implementation team, are you setting that up for success? Are you staying involved? Do you care?
And more importantly, you're more in lockstep with post sales throughout because it is a shared responsibility to retain and grow that customer. So very tactically, I think it's a very important thing to keep in the comp plan. You just need to make sure that you think about the downstream implications and that you're offsetting it in other ways so that reps still “that there's an opportunity for them” to have outsized rewards and achievement. There's always a debate about when do you split into land and expand? What market segment do you do that? For me personally, in the way we run it today, our 0 to 1,000 customer segments, we've split up into AEs and then expansion reps. So a land team and an expand team.
It's pretty similar because it's still an early-stage and a late-stage deal. Sometimes you just move a lot faster. And again, why I care about retention so much is expansion is a lot cheaper once you've done it right. “You've got internal champions who are doing the selling for you.” And usually when you've done it, expansion deals are larger. The ASP tends to be larger, and that is so much more efficient, and efficiency is so important right now. So a lot of it is, how do I look at this and figure out how to maximize my efficiency here?
For smaller deals we can usually get through without a POC, but for a 50K plus we will typically have to do a POC. So that one's very focused on competitive landscape and we do the prep. We have a template that we use. It's what are the key mid-pitch fields before stage three? What are the top three use cases? Who is the EB? “Who is the champion?” We use a lot of command of the message. So what are the positive business outcomes? What are the negative consequences? What are those things we're looking for? So they have to fill out a one-page template before the deal review. If the reps do the prep, the managers need to do the prep. So review it before so you can focus the deal review on actually let's not repeat everything we already know. Let's actually talk through what's in this template.