How do you approach building a land and expand strategy?

I can’t speak for how a team at a company I haven’t worked for but here’s how I’ve seen land and expand work well in the past. The TL;DR is that your land strategy should be very focused on the initial purchase/use of your product and your expand strategy should focus on building on momentum from the existing product and making clear that expanding the use of your products will provide exponential value for your customers. With a “land” strategy, the big goal is to start small/manageable, especi ...Read More

I cannot speak to how the Slack team built their land and expand strategy but I can speak to how I understand and think about the strategy at Atlassian.  We have two methods of land and expand.  1) Product expansion - a user, let's say a product manager, lands in one product, Jira, and finds a ton of value. They then discover that Atlassian also offers Confluence, a knowledge management product that they can also use, so they expand into that. Then they discover one of the new products in our po ...Read More

I think PMM at Slack could help with land and expand in quite a few ways: Help understand the first user and their use case Help understand the first buyer and their use case Help understand the customer journey within your most successful accounts Develop a point of view on which personas and use cases are the most critical during lands and which ones are most critical during expansion—and start building what's needed to win them Slack can be used for many purposes—planning a major launch, team ...Read More

Thanks for sharing that article! Though I can’t speak directly to Slack’s land-and-expand tactics, we follow a similar strategy at SurveyMonkey, and I'm happy to share some insights into what makes it work. In a bottom-up SaaS expansion strategy, the end goal is typically to get to the IT buyer by growing an installed footprint in an organization that’s too large (for IT) to ignore. This is how Slack has grown, and it’s fundamentally different than a top-down strategy where you’re more typically ...Read More

Land and expand is music to my ears!  Growth for PLG companies focuses on word-of-mouth and peer-to-peer sharing, both organic and strategic.  Example of organic word-of-mouth sharing = mentioning slack in a product marketing discord group.  Example of strategic peer-to-peer sharing = slack prompting me to invite users during onboarding, and I do.  However, this can be utilized internally as well for a bottoms-up adoption movement!  I call these folks "champions" - they are deep lovers of the pl ...Read More