Land and Expand
Definition
A go-to-market motion where the vendor lands a small initial contract — one team, one workflow — then grows the account through seats, tiers, and use cases. PreSales matters twice: the technical win earns the land, and the documented value (POC results, win/loss evidence) fuels the expand.
The land is a technical win in miniature
A small first contract still has to clear technical evaluation — often more sceptically, because the buyer is deciding whether to trust you at all. The scope is narrow but the architecture questions, security review and integration checks are the same, and shortcuts taken to win the land tend to reappear as obstacles to the expand.
Expansion runs on evidence you have to have kept
Growing the account means demonstrating that the first deployment delivered. That argument needs the original success criteria, the measured outcome and a record of what was solved — captured at the time. Teams that treat the POC as a hurdle to clear rather than evidence to file end up re-proving value from scratch a year later.
Write the expansion case during the land
The numbers you will need are easiest to obtain while the project is live and the sponsor still cares. Retrofitting them after go-live rarely works.
Related terms
Further reading
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