The best expansion conversations I've had never really felt like expansion conversations. They felt like the next logical step in something that was already moving in the right direction.
I've been thinking about why that happens sometimes and not others, and I keep coming back to the same place. It starts on day one, or even before that.
When a new partnership launches, there's a tendency to treat it as the destination. The contract is signed, the onboarding begins, everyone takes a breath. But most entry-level partners at that point are using a fraction of what they've bought, and if that's where the conversation stays, the renewal becomes a negotiation and the expansion becomes a pitch.
Yes, it's only day one. But I genuinely believe that anyone managing enterprise accounts will feel the effects of their decisions in the first couple of weeks in the boardroom at the end of year two, in how much they have to fight for that renewal.
A launch has to be treated as the start of something rather than the end of it. Not in a vague, aspirational way. Practically.
What does full adoption look like? What would it mean for the business if they were using everything available to them? What's the cost of leaving that on the table? Those questions don't need to be asked aggressively. They just need to be on the table early, as part of how you and your partners think about working together.
The other thing I know to be true is that expanding an existing partnership almost always costs less than starting a new one. The trust is built, the processes are understood, the relationships are in place. So from a purely commercial perspective, growing what you already have makes more sense than starting fresh. But that argument only lands if the partner can see what they'd be growing towards. Making that visible, early, is the job.
One thing I'd add, and this is something I feel strongly about: the partnership mindset needs to start before the contract is signed. If a partnership manager is only brought in at the handoff stage, you've already missed a big chunk of the window to set the roadmap properly. The conversations about where a partnership could go are much easier to have before anyone has committed to where it starts.
I don't think there's one right way to do any of this. But in my experience, the expansions that happen smoothly are almost always the ones where the groundwork was laid long before anyone called it an expansion.
