Remove accounts that should not hear an offer
Before you look for signals, take out every account that is not healthy. That means an open complaint, an unpaid invoice, a champion who left last month, or onboarding that is not finished. An offer to an unhappy customer costs trust and rarely sells. The reasoning is in You cannot expand an account you have not made successful first.
Add one column to your list called "Healthy" and mark each account yes or no. Only the yes accounts go forward.
List your signals in three groups
Signals fall into three groups. You want at least one from two different groups before you act.
- Usage: the account has used 80 percent or more of a limit (seats, volume, projects) for two weeks in a row, added users in the last 60 days, or uses a feature that sits at the edge of its plan.
- Feedback: they ask for something that exists in a higher tier, their support questions point to a gap, or they ask you for a quote or an introduction to a colleague.
- Lifecycle: renewal is within 90 days, a new budget period starts, they are hiring or just raised money, a new senior person has joined, or they hit the goal you set at the start.
Why signals matter more than a calendar is explained in Expansion is a triggered motion, not a calendar event.
Put the data in one sheet
Make one row per account: name, owner, plan, renewal date, healthy yes or no, then one column per signal. Pull the data from where it already lives: a usage export, your support inbox and your CRM, for example HubSpot. A Google Sheets file is enough to start.
Begin with your top 30 accounts by revenue and fill the sheet by hand. It takes about two hours. Do not wait for an automatic feed. You learn which signals matter by doing it manually once.
Score each account with simple points
Give every signal points. A strong signal, such as a limit that was hit or an explicit request, scores 3. A medium signal, such as renewal within 90 days or a growing team, scores 2. A weak signal, such as curiosity about a feature, scores 1.
Add the points per account. Accounts with 5 or more points, from at least two groups, go on the shortlist. A usage signal alone can be one enthusiastic user, so the second group is your check.
Keep the shortlist to ten accounts. If you have more, raise the threshold. A list you cannot work is not a list.
Write the trigger line and the likely offer
For each shortlisted account, write one line that says why now, and one line that says what you would offer.
Trigger: used 90 percent of seats in two of the last three weeks, renewal in 75 days. Likely offer: the next tier, which removes the seat limit.
Decide whether it is an upsell (more of the same product, a higher tier) or a cross-sell (a related product or service). You design these in How to design upsell paths. Timing is covered in How to time expansion offers, and the conversation itself in How to handle expansion conversations.
Review the sheet every Monday
Block 15 minutes. Refresh the signals, remove accounts where the signal has faded, and add new ones. Pick no more than three accounts to approach this week. Log what happened next to each name.
After a month you will see which signals produce a yes and which do not. Change the points to match. If you want to find accounts that have the profile but show no signals yet, use Identify untapped accounts.
Common mistakes
- Treating every usage spike as a buying signal, when it is one person testing something.
- Scoring accounts without checking health first.
- Building a model with twenty signals before you have tried five.
- Keeping the scores in someone's head instead of in a shared sheet.
- Approaching ten accounts in one week and learning nothing from any of them.
- Reviewing only when renewal is two weeks away, which is too late to have a calm conversation.
How you know it works
After one quarter, look at the accounts you approached from the shortlist.
- At least a third accept an offer or agree a next step. If fewer do, your points are rewarding the wrong signals.
- Accounts you approached convert at a clearly higher rate than accounts you approached without a signal. If there is no difference, the signals are noise.
- Nobody on the shortlist complains that the offer came out of nowhere.
- Every approach has a trigger line you can read back.
- Your expansion revenue is moving up, which you track in Track expansion revenue monthly.