Expansion Playbook

Trigger conditions

Customer has been activated (FST achieved) with ≥ 8 weeks of active usage. Operations review account health monthly. Any of the following signal combinations triggers this playbook:

Signal	Threshold	Expansion type
Monthly tasks near tier cap	≥ 80%	Capacity
Per-user workflow count > 3	sustained 4 weeks	Workflow
Task completion rate	> 90% and stable	precondition
7-day return rate	> 60%	precondition
Repeated use of same workflow	> 50 instances/month	Workflow depth
Customer proactively asks “can we extend to team X”	inquiry received	Seat

Four or more signals together: sales reaches out actively. Fewer than three: avoid pitching; improve product experience first.

Roles and responsibilities

Role	Primary responsibility
CSM	Signal monitoring, expansion opportunity identification, initial customer outreach
Sales	Commercial negotiation, contract amendments, quoting
Product	Workflow enablement, new capability training
Engineering	Engaged when expansion involves new tools, private deployment, or SLA upgrades
Finance	Billing switchover (e.g., subscription → hybrid)

Three expansion paths — detailed procedures

Seat expansion

Trigger: customer internal inquiry; CSM observes seed users evangelizing to other departments.

Steps:

1. CSM discusses target departments and expected scale with the customer’s primary contact
2. CSM engages sales to evaluate contract structure (add seats vs renegotiate contract)
3. CSM initiates onboarding for the target department (follow the onboarding playbook; the Day 0-10 phase can be compressed to 5 days since the parent customer has already validated product value)
4. Sales drives contract amendment and billing adjustment
5. After 60 days, review activation rate in the new department

Completion criterion: FST coverage in the new department ≥ 70% within 30 days.

Workflow expansion

Trigger: per-user workflow count > 3 for 4 sustained weeks, with > 90% completion rate on existing workflows.

Steps:

1. CSM analyzes the customer’s current usage pattern, identifies adjacent workflow candidates based on product-side recommendations + industry use-case library
2. CSM pushes 1-2 candidate workflow examples to primary users, with 3-5 suggested starter tasks
3. Monitor candidate workflow initiation rate and first-task completion
4. Within 14 days: if candidate workflow activation ≥ 50%, confirm expansion; if < 30%, stop pushing and investigate failure causes

Completion criterion: per-user workflow count increases by 1, sustained for 4 weeks.

Capacity expansion

Trigger: monthly tasks ≥ 80% of tier cap, trending upward.

Steps:

1. CSM proactively contacts the customer 2 weeks before hitting the cap, to avoid hard-stop churn (see the overage behavior design in pricing/tier-design)
2. Offer a 30-day free trial of the next tier so the customer experiences the performance difference
3. If the customer exceeds 50% of next-tier capacity during the trial: sales follows up on upgrade
4. If the customer declines upgrade but continues overage: negotiate pay-as-you-go overage terms

Completion criterion: customer voluntarily upgrades to next tier, or agrees to overage billing terms.

Measurement metrics

Track quarterly:

• NDR (Net Dollar Retention) decomposed by expansion type — seat, workflow, capacity contributions separately
• Time-to-expansion: median duration from activation to first expansion
• Expansion success rate: percentage of triggered expansion processes that close within 90 days
• Customer segment coverage: how many heavy / medium / light users are currently in an expansion pipeline

Critical things not to do

• Do not contact the customer on the day they hit the cap — hard-stop creates 30-day churn risk; proactively engage at the 80% threshold
• Do not pitch workflow expansion as if it were seat expansion — the former relies on product value discovery, the latter on commercial negotiation; mixing the two talk tracks dilutes both
• Do not push expansion while churn signals are unresolved — pitching upgrade during declining usage reads as “extracting more before they leave”, triggers active churn (see churn-save)
• Do not pair expansion with large discounts — discount-for-expansion is one-time revenue, and it breaks the unit economics of capacity expansion (see metrics/unit-economics)

Cross-section connections

• Product logic underlying the three expansion mechanisms: growth/expansion
• Trigger signal metric definitions: metrics/overview
• Tier design for capacity upgrade triggers: pricing/tier-design
• Early identification of churn signals: churn-save