Land and Expand Great Demo! Tactics

Here are a number of Great Demo! tactics that folks have reported have been working particularly well for teams doing “Land and Expand”:

-          Transition Vision and tracking through Value Realization:

Customers will only expand their licenses once their original license has been successful, in their eyes.  This is certainly not the date the order is placed (although many sales teams are only concerned with this)!  Interestingly, deployment into production use is also not the key event on this timeline, although very important.  Rather, it is the date when the customer is able to declare a victory (can be a small victory) with some kind of Value Realization event. 

Successful Land and Expand practitioners work with their customers in Discovery to determine what and when define a Value Realization event – and then track progress all the way through that date.  It is at that point in time that, if successful, the customer becomes willing and able to help expand the licensing more broadly.

-          Asking, “Who else might find this useful?” in Discovery and related pre-expansion questions:

A number of Land and Expand teams have reported that they include expand-oriented questions in their initial Discovery conversations with customers.  Examples include:

“Who else might find this useful?”

“Which other groups have similar challenges?”

“Who else is impacted by your current problem?”

-          Applying the Menu Approach:

Finally, a large number of Land and Expand practitioners are singing the praises of the Menu Approach – it is proving a terrific way to do vision expansion both at the Land and Expand stages:

o   Using the Menu Approach in Discovery to give the customer ideas of where else the tool(s) can be applied

o   In Lunch-and-Learn sessions

o   In Webinars (and before webinars, in the invitation emails)

o   At customer-specific “trade-shows” (very similar to lunch and learn, but less structured)

o   At EBC presentations (Executive Briefing Center) – a very good tactic for working with executives, who may simply want a high-level understanding of what is possible

In addition, combining the Menu with accompanying Illustrations for each Menu item is proving very effective at accomplishing crisp, engaging Vision Generation.

Any other ideas to suggest?