Land and Expand: Win the Beginning Game First

By Mitchell Schuckman, PCC | Founder, The Schuckman Group

In my first few months running The Schuckman Group, a prospective client asked me to price out a full year of training and coaching for their leadership team. I could have easily written that proposal. I had decades of pattern recognition behind me and a real sense of what the engagement should look like. Instead I proposed something smaller. Three months, with a narrow scope we could both evaluate honestly.

What surprised me was not that they said yes. It was what those three months gave me. I learned what the client actually needed by seeing it from the inside. I delivered an experience good enough to build greater trust. By the time the three months ended, the next piece of work was obvious, and I got to deliver that too. 

We Attend the Open House, Then We Go Home and Do the Math

Think about the last time you made a major purchase you were excited about. A house is a great example. You walked through a big beautiful home at an open house. You pictured your furniture in the rooms, the dinner parties with friends, the holidays with family, and you were ready to sign on the spot. Then you went home, ran the numbers on the mortgage, and started having second thoughts. The house did not change. Your relationship to the number did, and you began thinking that maybe you didn’t need such a big beautiful home.

The same thing happens with a car, a vacation, or a country club membership. The desire is real in the moment. The hesitation shows up later, once the actual commitment is sitting in front of us in writing. Professional services proposals work the same way, and almost nobody in our business stops to see it from the client's side of the desk before they write their proposal.

Why We Try to Lock In Everything at the Signing Moment

Here is the instinct, and I have felt it myself. A client is asking for a proposal because they are ready to buy. You know you can do the work and you know they are ready to spend money to get what they want. So the temptation is to ask for everything right now, because going back later to ask for more feels like starting an entirely new sales process, with all its uncertainty.

And, it’s not just the fear of a second sales process. There is the pressure to perform well enough on the first phase of the engagement to earn more. There is also the human discomfort of having to ask again at all, of sitting across from a client and saying the work went well, now let us talk about doing more. Most people would rather avoid that follow-up conversation by trying to have it once, up front.

That instinct treats the proposal moment like the only door that will ever open. It rarely is.

Overscoping Kills the Deal Before It Starts

The problem is the same one that hits the prospective house buyer once they are back at their desk crunching numbers. The client who was ready to sign sees the actual scope and the actual fee, and the number feels bigger than the excitement that got them there. They start second guessing the spend. Sometimes they walk away entirely. Sometimes they ask you to cut the proposal down so far that neither side is happy with what is left.

I have watched this happen to colleagues who did nothing wrong except try to capture too much value in a single moment. The work would have been good. The client would have been well served. But the size of the ask, presented all at once, triggered the same hesitation a mortgage payment triggers after the open house.

Sticky Relationships Are Built, Not Signed

The alternative isn’t modesty, it’s sequencing. Start smaller, and offer services at a size and scope that the client can most easily say yes to. Then, let the relationship get tighter before you ask for more. We call relationships like that sticky. Sticky relationships are the ones that keep producing work for years, because the client stopped asking for proposals every time a need came up. They just came back.

Nearly every long relationship I have built started this way. Small first step, deliver value, create more trust, and the client asks to expand before I ever have to bring it up. That is “land and expand” done correctly. It is not a technique for extracting more later. It is what naturally happens when you give a relationship time to get sticky.

Don’t Lose the Game Before You Start Playing

Overscope and overprice at the outset, and you are not protecting yourself from future uncertainty. You are risking the entire relationship before it has a chance to establish.

Start small enough to get a yes. Do the work well enough to earn trust and to get more work. That is how you get to keep playing. That’s landing and expanding. When you overscope and overprice, and you sometimes lose the game before it even starts.

Mitchell Schuckman is the Founder and CEO of The Schuckman Group LLC. He is a Professional Certified Coach credentialed by the International Coaching Federation and the author of I'll Tell You a Great Story. theschuckmangroup.com

Note on privacy: Names and identifying details have been changed. The experiences described are drawn from multiple client engagements and do not represent any single individual.