The ‘Land – Expand – Explode’ strategy could also be described as a ‘foot in the door’ strategy. It supports the approach of first achieving the initial deal quickly and reliably and then penetrating the customer company further with repeat purchases, cross-selling and up-selling:
Land: The land approach is about winning the customer and placing the ‘initial order’ in one area of the company. All aspects and options that could interfere, confuse the potential customer or complicate the process are deliberately hidden. Companies can also use special offers with low-threshold parameters such as
favourable entry pricelow complexitylittle effort during implementation
that can be added to in later stages. If the customer wants to add additional order components of their own accord, they will of course take them with them. However, the activities for additional sales are deliberately postponed by the sales department until after the deal has been finalised. The land phase lays the foundation for successful cross-selling and up-selling activities.
Expand: Once the first order has been placed, the aim of the expand approach is to penetrate the customer company. This can take several forms:
Place more complementary products or services in the same area (department, division, sub-company).Gain access to other areas (divisions, group, subsidiaries/sister companies) to place your entire offering
In the Expand phase, you start your cross-selling and up-selling activities. It is important to receive all ‘signals’ from your existing customers. These sales signals are left behind by various contact persons from your client company at the various customer touchpoints:
Personal contact: On-site appointment, telephone, trade fair, event, etc.Your company websiteYour newsletterYour blogYour webshopLinkedin Online seminarsYour systems: marketing automation, CRM system, ERP systems, etc.
Every movement and every activity of a contact person from a company that you have reached in country mode can be a sales signal for your repurchase, cross-selling and up-selling activities. It is therefore essential that your systems and touchpoints are integrated and that the data is kept synchronised across all systems and touchpoints. This allows you to recognise the sales signals and initiate the corresponding activities. This can be an action at the personal level by the sales team (call, visit) or the start of an automated process (nurturing process in a marketing / pre-sales automation platform).
Explode: At the start of the business relationship, you immediately position yourself as a strategic partner of the target company. In this constellation, you often do not talk about individual components of your offer for the customer, but about a strategic partnership with a larger scope. Here too, the integration of all relevant marketing and sales systems is an important guarantee of success, as this allows you to pick up as many ‘sales signals’ as possible from the partner company and incorporate them into your planning and implementation.
If you want to reach and penetrate dedicated desired/target customers, you can supplement this approach with another method such as account-based marketing.
You can find a video on the Land-Expand-Explore approach on YouTube ‘Land, Expand, Explode: How to Win the Long-Game in SaaS’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmyfpPH_sO8
