# Use case: Driving Expansion **The situation** Most expansion motions are driven by the wrong trigger. A renewal is coming up, so the account executive reaches out about an upsell. The CS team hits a revenue target deadline, so they push add-ons to whoever seems receptive. The expansion conversation happens because someone on your side needs it to happen — not because the customer is ready for it. Customers feel this. An expansion conversation that arrives before the customer has achieved meaningful value from what they already have feels like a sales call. It erodes trust. And it almost always fails. The teams that consistently grow revenue from their existing customer base do something different. They watch for the signals that tell them a customer is ready — deep adoption, goals being hit, stakeholders who are vocal advocates — and they start the expansion conversation at exactly that moment. Not because the calendar says so. Because the customer's own data says so. Expansion that comes from customer success is the easiest sale you'll ever make. Expansion that comes from revenue pressure is the hardest. *** **The approach** Expansion readiness has a pattern. It shows up in the data before it shows up in a conversation. A customer who has adopted your core product deeply — high user activation, consistent usage, features being used in sophisticated ways — has extracted value and has headroom to do more. A customer who has hit their business goal ahead of schedule is already in the mindset of what comes next. A customer with multiple stakeholders who are actively engaged and vocal about their results is one conversation away from becoming a reference and a candidate for a broader rollout. The problem is that most CS teams can't see this pattern across their full portfolio. They know their top accounts because they talk to them regularly. But the expansion signal in account 47 of 80 doesn't surface unless someone goes looking for it. The shift is from account-by-account intuition to portfolio-wide signal detection. The AI reads every customer, continuously, and identifies the ones showing expansion patterns — so your team can act on them at the right moment rather than missing the window. The second shift is from expansion as a sales motion to expansion as a CS motion. The CSM who has built the relationship, tracked the goals, and demonstrated the value is the right person to have the expansion conversation — not an account executive who re-enters the relationship at renewal. When CS owns expansion, the conversion rate goes up and the customer experience improves. *** **How to do it in Startdeliver** **Let the AI identify expansion signals** Startdeliver reads every customer continuously and flags expansion opportunities automatically. The signals it looks for include: deep and growing product adoption, business goals being hit ahead of schedule, strong and consistent experience health, high stakeholder engagement in Shared Space, and usage patterns that suggest the customer has outgrown their current tier or configuration. When the AI identifies an expansion signal, it surfaces a recommended action — not a generic "consider upsell" note, but a specific suggestion grounded in what the data shows about this customer's situation.

→ [How health assessment works](https://docs.startdeliver.io/health-and-metrics/how-to-set-up-health-metrics-and-assessment) · [AI Assessments](https://docs.startdeliver.io/jecta-agent-and-ai/ai-assessments) **Build an Expansions list** Create a saved list in the Customers view filtered to customers the AI has flagged as expansion opportunities. Sort by ARR — the largest accounts with expansion potential deserve attention first. Review this list regularly and assign CSMs to initiate the conversations.

→ [Lists & filters](https://docs.startdeliver.io/platform-settings/lists-and-filters) **Track goal achievement as the expansion trigger** When a customer hits their business goal — or is clearly tracking ahead of schedule — that's the moment to introduce what comes next. The Customer Goals view in Ongoing shows you which customers have completed goals or are close to completion across the full portfolio. This is your expansion pipeline, grounded in customer outcomes rather than revenue targets.

→ [Customer Goals & Success Plans](https://docs.startdeliver.io/managing-customers/customer-goals-and-success-plans) · [Ongoing — Your actions](https://docs.startdeliver.io/managing-customers/ongoing-your-actions) **Use Shared Space to plant the seed** The Business Review is the natural moment for the expansion conversation — but Shared Space sets it up. When a customer can see in their own portal that their goal has been achieved, their usage is strong, and their team is getting value, the expansion conversation feels like a natural next step rather than a sales pitch. Add a Goals section to Shared Space that shows progress toward the original business outcome. When the customer sees they've hit it, ask what they want to achieve next. → [Customer Goals & Success Plans](https://docs.startdeliver.io/managing-customers/customer-goals-and-success-plans) · [Setting up Shared Space](https://docs.startdeliver.io/managing-customers/shared-space) **Identify advocates alongside expansion** A customer showing expansion signals is also likely showing advocate signals — strong feedback scores, engaged stakeholders, vocal about their results. The AI flags both simultaneously. Before the expansion conversation, a reference call or a case study conversation builds the relationship further and makes the expansion ask feel like a continuation of the partnership rather than a transaction.

→ [Experience health](https://docs.startdeliver.io/health-and-metrics/experience-health) **Let Jecta handle the signal, your CSM handle the conversation** Jecta identifies the expansion opportunity and initiates the first touchpoint — a message acknowledging the customer's progress and opening the door to a conversation about what's next. The CSM picks up from there. This means expansion signals get acted on immediately rather than sitting in a list until a CSM finds time. → [Jecta: AI Agent](https://docs.startdeliver.io/jecta-agent-and-ai) *** **What good looks like** * Your team knows which customers are ready for expansion before the renewal conversation — because the AI surfaced the signal weeks or months earlier * Expansion conversations are initiated at the moment of customer success, not at the moment of revenue need * CSMs own the expansion motion — they have the relationship, the data, and the context to make it feel like a natural next step * Every customer who hits their business goal has a follow-up conversation about what they want to achieve next — and that conversation happens automatically, not only when a CSM remembers to initiate it * Expansion revenue is visible at the portfolio level — your Head of CS can see which accounts are ripe and which CSMs are converting --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.startdeliver.io/use-cases/use-case-driving-expansion.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.