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
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For number two, I think a lot of number two comes from my background in customer success. Post-2022, retention has always been extremely important. Retaining your customers is now even more important. There's so much noise in the market. There's hot new tools. There's AI. There's shiny objects. There's so many distractions. Closing good deals up front is so important. “expansion and retention starts with that first discovery” call. And so making retention some component of an AE's comp plan, if they're going to own an account, cradle to grave, is controversial, but something I do feel strongly about and drives the team to sign better deals and to keep their head on a swivel on, are we setting this customer for success? One other reason is I think it's important to align pre-sales and post-sales and make
And so I'm wondering if you can talk about the structure a little bit more, zoom into, like, actually almost how it was written into the comp plan in some of the places that you've done it, because I assume there's a bit more detail there. And for folks who want to build this out on their own, I think it would be helpful. I don't think there is a silver bullet. There's so many cascading ways you need to think about it. “your comp plan is how you tell the field what to care about.” And if retention is important and if you are a company that's land and expand and NDR is important, then retention doesn't just fall on one team. It's not just the product. It's not just support. It's not just customer success. It is every one of the company's responsibility to retain and grow customers. But it's still important to make sure you're structuring comp plans
And if retention is important and if you are a company that's land and expand and NDR is important, then retention doesn't just fall on one team. It's not just the product. It's not just support. It's not just customer success. It is every one of the company's responsibility to retain and grow customers. But it's still important to make sure you're structuring comp plans “so that reps feel that the incentives are aligned” and that it's in their control. And so I don't know if these are the right two ways to do it. It's got to be tailored to the dynamics of your business, and I think you need to look at it every year and say, did this do what we wanted it to do? Did the taking away 15% of the variable, did we make sure that they had more generous accelerators to make sure that made up for that?
and expand and NDR is important, then retention doesn't just fall on one team. It's not just the product. It's not just support. It's not just customer success. It is every one of the company's responsibility to retain and grow customers. But it's still important to make sure you're structuring comp plans so that reps feel that the incentives are aligned “and that it's in their control.” And so I don't know if these are the right two ways to do it. It's got to be tailored to the dynamics of your business, and I think you need to look at it every year and say, did this do what we wanted it to do? Did the taking away 15% of the variable, did we make sure that they had more generous accelerators to make sure that made up for that? So you need to think through the implications of it,
The early stage ones are very focused on how do we nail the POC. 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.
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