The goal of account expansion is simple: maximizing revenue.

But solving this puzzle varies depending on who you ask:

• For product teams, it can be challenging to generate expansion revenue directly.
• For sales teams, it’s a struggle to close without having relevant data or contacts.
• For customer success managers, doing what’s best for the customer and reaching expansion quotas is conflicting.

So as a product leader or CRO, how can you optimize account expansion responsibilities across teams to maximize revenue?

Why account expansion matters more than ever

It’s well-known that retaining customers is easier than acquiring them.

But consider the fact that the cost of acquiring customers is increasing year by year.

Eventually, just customer retention won’t be enough. You’ll need to generate more revenue from existing customer accounts.

This is especially true for B2B businesses where sales cycles can take months (making customer acquisition even more expensive). And it’s also true for companies with investors and stakeholders who want to see predictable revenue in the bottom line.

Account expansion is essential for this, making it invaluable for any company that relies on YoY growth to survive (especially in SaaS).

Who is typically in charge of account expansion in SaaS companies?

Who’s going to be responsible for expansion revenue depends on your company’s makeup. For instance, some SaaS businesses are 100% product-led and don’t need a revenue specialist, while others rely on a revenue team to close deals with high-value accounts.

Here’s what account expansion responsibilities look like for each of them:

• PLG companies: Expansion is owned by the product team (and its leader). They are often in charge of identifying upsell opportunities within the product and approaching leads with low-touch strategies to make an offer.
• Sales-led companies: Here, the revenue team (led by a CRO) usually takes the responsibility. The team might assign an expansion quota to CSMs or have AEs to nurture customer relationships to find opportunities for expansion. They might schedule intro calls with decision makers, try to have a champion in the client company that advocates for them, and offer expansions when it’s most critical.

But in real life, most companies mix both PLG and sales-led strategies. So, we’ll go over how you can approach expansion from both sides:

How revenue leaders can leverage product data to drive sales expansion

One of the main obstacles to effective account expansion is the disconnection between departments.

In sales and revenue teams, for instance, this problem manifests in two ways:

1. These teams are incentivized to close the deals themselves to meet their quotas. Any other channel to generate expansion revenue (e.g. in-app upsell prompts) is often not even thought about.
2. They have zero visibility on product metrics to close deals effectively. They might have access to superficial data—like the number of users in a product—but they can’t get insights like “15 users in the company reached a paywall” which could potentially guide their sales.

Now, the solution to this is not to simply give salespeople access to a product analytics platform like Userpilot. Rather, you can send customer data to the system they’re already using (be it Salesforce or HubSpot) via integrations.

“Revenue leaders must set up systems to make jobs easier for sales reps. Salespeople have so much going on that if they can be spoonfed a high-intent lead at the right time they will execute on that 1000x better than having to go hunt for data in a system.”

For example, let’s say a customer has fully adopted your product and shows signals that it’s ready to upgrade (e.g. when it constantly reaches usage limits). Then, you can set up your CRM to send these signals to your sales reps so they can schedule a call with hot leads, show custom demos, and close an expansion offer.

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How growth teams can drive account expansion

Compared to sales, account expansion for product teams in PLG companies tends to involve a low-touch yet proactive approach.

Here’s our four-step process for it:

1. Identify accounts with high expansion potential

Proactive expansion means you can’t wait until a customer asks for more seats—you must take the first step.

To do this, you first need to identify accounts that signal some expansion potential. These include accounts that reach usage limits, are constantly adding new team members, or are simply being held back by their current plan.

Tip: If you don’t know what criteria to use. You can analyze accounts that upgraded naturally (e.g. using funnel or path analysis) to understand what behaviors signal readiness for expansion.

These can also include accounts with high NPS responses and customer satisfaction scores. Or users who have given positive feedback on your product on G2.

Once you’ve defined what gives an account its “high potential” status, you can use a tool like Userpilot to segment them based on these parameters. And with this, you’ll be able to target upselling strategies inside your app, and more.

2. Map out the customer journey to identify expansion opportunities

After segmenting high-potential accounts, don’t rush to offer them an upgrade right away.

You still need more context about their journey with your product. What are the inflection points in the journey? What behaviors lead to more upgrades? Which use cases require a higher tier plan to realize the full value of your product?

For this, I highly recommend mapping out the user journey. It won’t only help you understand the customer experience, but also discover common friction points that can represent an expansion opportunity.

An example of this is user seats. A customer might adopt your product successfully and grow their business with it, but eventually, they might need additional seats to scale their operations. With a customer journey map, you can anticipate this and adjust your customer expansion strategies to target this segment naturally in the journey.

3. Create personalized expansion playbooks for each segment

With all the resources ready, you can now build a targeted expansion playbook for each segment. This involves designing a messaging strategy and an offer based on the company size, industry, use case, etc.

As examples, here are some of our favorite account expansion strategies:

• Create an automated workflow that triggers an in-app upgrade tooltip when the user needs it. So if the user reaches the limit of invoices it can create per month, then the app would prompt them to upgrade their plan to access unlimited invoices.

• For user segments who’d benefit from adopting a premium feature, you can offer them temporary free access so they can experience its full value. They’ll probably end up upgrading if it’s valuable for them.

• If your product has a freemium plan and a free trial for premium features, you can pull off a reverse trial to incentivize users to keep the premium version. For this, you can trigger in-app reminders just before the trial expires so users are motivated to upgrade due to FOMO.

There are infinite ways to go around this, but what’s most important is to keep these playbooks tactful, relevant, and genuinely helpful for the user (any pushy attempt to sell something can quickly turn users off).

4. Monitor the performance of your expansion strategy and improve

Finally, before implementing your playbooks, you also need to keep track of their performance.

For this, you can simply track key revenue metrics like expansion MRR and LTV to see if your playbooks have an effect on them.

But you can go deeper than this. For example, Userpilot has a built-in dashboard for expansion revenue metrics (with customization options). This allows you to track more nuanced data that can help you iterate your expansion strategy, this includes:

• The conversion rates of your in-app upgrade prompts and A/B tests them to optimize their performance.
• Gross expansion revenue growth per segment to measure which playbooks have the highest impact.
• The number of downgrades coming from expanded accounts to see if the upgrades are delivering lasting value (and if not, figure out what would be a better expansion offer).
• Correlate the completion rate of your secondary onboarding flow with upgrades to track its effectiveness.

With these insights, it’s possible to not only monitor the performance of your expansion playbooks but also find ways to iterate on them. For instance, if your upgrade prompts are ineffective, you can change their trigger conditions based on the data of the accounts that upgraded successfully.

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