Comment by safeimp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by safeimp | Hacker News Reader

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> In reality, 'land and expand' is almost universally hated by customers

Honest question but do you have any source for this or is it primarily your personal experience?

In my experience land and experience has been leveraged to help get a foot in the door sooner than later, it was never anything more than that. If we had the ability to walk into a shop and start with 100% of the clients environment we'd have done that but the problem was typically tied to the customer not being ready to rollout from 0-100 overnight. For us the best approach was to start small and work with the customer on gradually rolling out as they were comfortable.

Regarding your other point:

> How about neither of these - how about selling solutions that you honestly believe are right-sized, being transparent about the sizing/requirements assumptions you have made, and then being flexible contractually if reality turns out different? This is how you actually build trust and consumer satisfaction, not by deliberately underquoting.

I'm in complete agreement, this is the best case scenario and is certainly the best way to build long-term trust and relationships but universally it doesn't happen or when it does it's not transparent. The customer really has to push to make this happen only leading to anxiety, relationship damage, etc.

I think you may be talking about two slightly different things.

Land and expand in the sense of "land a small, right-sized solution for one group within a large company, then leverage that successful deployment to expedite expansion to other groups, and maybe eventually convert to an enterprise agreement" is great, and often the only way to get in the door at a large org. From the org's perspective, being able to adopt an "existing" solution/provider is often much faster and can even skip some RFP processes. I don't think anyone is saying this is bad.

Land and expand can also mean "deliberately undersell/underbid on a large RFP, take an initial loss, then as soon as the customer's locked in slap them with large change orders and annual increases". I don't think I need to elaborate on why this is scummy.

The article isn't very clear about which scenario it's advocating. In the simple case of per-seat licensing, I've seen it both ways. From the customer's perspective: If we're looking to buy your product, and say hey, this has some long-term upside, we think it might be used by 500 people within two years, but our initial group is 20 - that's an undersell of sorts. Typically the concessions we would be asking there are less around unit license cost and more around waiving migration/setup charges or sometimes even negotiating a new license category/SKU. (Hey we use 50 seats right now, we'd like to buy 200 more but they're only going to use this one new side feature you implemented, let's find a discounted rate to only license that feature. It's an ethical undersell because it was done with the customer fully aware.)

But I've also seen some groups get stuck with the reverse. Sales promised them that oh yeah, this tier will work for you, and then hit them with massive usage-based overages. That's "land and expand" too, but it's scummy.

> If we had the ability to walk into a shop and start with 100% of the clients environment we'd have done that but the problem was typically tied to the customer not being ready to rollout from 0-100 overnight.

On top of that, there's a handful of people, maybe less, who actually have the juice to be able to make this happen even if they wanted to in any given organization. You're likely not talking to them.

Teams who need to get shit done today and are ready to roll out are much quicker to transact and less of an organizational risk (time to value vs. contract amount)

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