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Strategy Map›Layer 5 · Go-to-Market Strategy›Sales Motion/The first purchase+ from outside the named canon

Land and Expand

By Dave WhittemoreUpdated 28 company case studies

What is Land and Expand?

Land and expand is a sales strategy in which a company's sellers close a first contract scoped to part of a customer, such as one team, site or use case, then widen that same customer's contract once the product proves itself. A first purchase made without a seller is product-led sales instead.

Also calledland-and-expand salesaccount expansion

How Land and Expand works

A narrow first deal is easier to approve. It needs a smaller budget and fewer sign-offs, so the product gets inside sooner, and results inside the account give sellers the evidence for each larger contract. Okta sold the State Department identity for its outside partners and then extended it to staff in 2018. It landed Flex with a supplier portal and later covered 200,000 employees.

A first contract that already covers the whole company leaves nothing to expand.

Land a narrow contractState Department: identity for outside partners
Expand the same accountContract extended to department staff (2018)
Repeat across accounts1,950 customers above $100K a year (FY2021)
Okta's land and expand at the State Department, which began with identity for outside partners and grew to cover its own staff.

How companies won with Land and Expand

From the win chains in Strategy Canon case studies: what the winner did, and what its rival did at the same step.

vs. Cylance

CrowdStrike

Full scope on one agent: antivirus replacement, then modules

What it did
Cylance's marketing opened antivirus replacement, so CrowdStrike rushed Falcon Prevent out (Feb 2017)
Cylance
Two products (PROTECT, OPTICS); about $130M revenue when sold to BlackBerry for $1.4B (2018-19)
Read the CrowdStrike case study →
vs. Sermo

Doximity

Doctors free; hospitals and pharma pay for targeted reach

What it did
Recruiting from 200 hospitals, cash-flow positive January 2014
Sermo
Sold the doctors' conversation to hedge funds, then pharma
Read the Doximity case study →
vs. Omada Health

Hinge Health

Default MSK vendor, then enroll more members

What it did
4 in 5 digital-MSK employers chose Hinge (2020-22)
Omada Health
MSK a late add-on via video PT (2020-21); cross-sells several programs
Read the Hinge Health case study →
vs. SurveyMonkey

Qualtrics

Graduates pull it in; inside sales lands accounts

What it did
Over 2 million academic users brought it into employers (2018)
SurveyMonkey
Paying users in 98% of the Fortune 500 but rarely bought centrally (2019)
Read the Qualtrics case study →

Also tagged: Cloudera · Cloudflare · Confluent · Dynatrace · Epic Systems · Flatiron Health · Freshworks · HubSpot · Inovalon · LinkedIn · Okta · Palantir · Salesforce · Samsara · ServiceNow · Snowflake · Sprinklr · Tableau · Teladoc · Toast · Veeva · Weave Communications · Zendesk · Zscaler

Land and Expand vs. Product-Led Sales and Top-Down Selling

What it isHow to tell it apartExample
Land and ExpandSellers close a first contract scoped to part of a customer, then widen itThe first purchase was negotiated by sellers and covered less than the whole customerOkta: State Department partners first, then staff
Product-Led SalesUsers adopt through a free or self-serve purchase, then sales converts the baseThe first purchase happened without a seller, often on a credit cardSlack teams signing up free before company-wide contracts
Top-Down SellingField sellers win a senior executive who decides for the whole organizationThe first contract already covers the organization, so nothing is left to landSecurity chiefs buying Zscaler's cloud to replace appliances

How to tell if a company has it

  1. A sales-negotiated first contractSellers or a reseller closed it. A free or self-serve first purchase makes it Product-Led Sales instead.
  2. The first contract covered part of the customerScoped to one use case, site, team, workload, module or population, with the rest of the company left out.
  3. The same customer later bought moreMore users, sites, regions, workloads, modules or products under a larger or additional contract.
  4. Sellers drove the expansionAccount managers, sellers or customer-success staff pursued or closed it, or a negotiated enterprise agreement documents it.
  5. A named customer with dated stepsAt least one named account whose land and expansion are both dated. Aggregate net retention doesn't qualify.

Who names it

AuthorWhat they call it / where it appears
OpenView +Land-and-expand in product-led businesses
Mark Leslie +Selling into accounts
Christoph Janz +Expansion within enterprise accounts
← Self-Serve OnlyTop-Down Selling →