#49: The Missing Ingredient in Your Land and Expand Strategy

"Land and Expand" is the bread-and-butter strategy of SaaS.

The idea is that you will sign up a small team or department within a business, demonstrate value and use that success to expand across the organisation.

But when we peel the onion, most businesses' operations are "land and hope for the best".

With no clarity on key customer outcomes, no tailored success plan, cookie-cutter onboarding and a weak value creation system, too many renewals are left to last-minute save strategies. Only to delay the inevitable.

When the business model isn't backed up by operational rigour, it falls apart.

That's why I wrote:

1. This guide to help you set standard outcomes
2. This guide to help you create great Success Plans
3. This 7-Step Customer Journey to help you engineer value-creation

But here's the truth... 

Even the most modern CS organisations - with robust value creation processes - can still fail in "Land and Expand" if they don't master one important (and often forgotten) task:

CHANGE MANAGEMENT!

I saw this unfolding in front of my eyes this week while visiting Brazil.

My mum is a primary school teacher working for the state. They recently rolled out a new system where teachers are expected to do two things:

• Manage their classes and students
• Manage important tasks related to them as employees

Both of which are mandatory, important, and sometimes urgent and sensitive. 

With no training in how to use the system, no how-to documentation, no community to ask questions, and no self-service support option for users, using this new system is a nightmare.

I watched my mum and her colleagues struggle for hours to get a simple task done.

Between a Whatsapp thread with colleagues and her school Principal and many Google searches, they gave up using the system and decided to go back to the old process for this cycle.

But that only happened after a lot of stress.

Some of the things my mum and her colleagues said in:

• "I have no idea why we changed to this system, it's useless"
• "The person who set this up is clearly not a teacher"
• "This process is making my work more complicated"
• "I spend more time trying to figure this out, than giving feedback to students" 

They hate the system.

But worse... the system is taking away from them doing their ACTUAL job. 

How many users feel like that about your system?

CS Lesson: Don't neglect the user-level change management.

There's a type of customer that will always thrive no matter how mediocre your attempt at delivering value is. That's because they have a group of extremely interested champions who will invest time figuring stuff out, experimenting, and training their teams.

And you are guaranteed to have a type of customer that will fail no matter how much you invest in them. That's because their organisation's dysfunction gets in the way (ie. overly political, terrible culture etc).

But the vast majority of customers will fall in the middle.

They are the people who need support implementing, onboarding users, driving adoption, tweaking their strategies and measuring success. 

Are your CS processes and programmes set up to support them?

If you are interested in Change Management, then you must listen to this episode of the This is Growth Podcast with Margaret Harrison, MSc in Change Management.

See you next Friday!