Brian LaMannaAE @ Gong | Closed Won 🦙 | 7x President’s Club

Growing an expansion deal by $70K #enterprisesales #techsales #Tech #saas #sales

13 Jun 2026 · 2 min

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1:53

In this first‑person sales story, Brian LaManna describes how his team discovered a customer was using seven more SaaS seats than they had paid for—a mistake caused by the platform’s overage protection. Brian immediately took responsibility, sent a friendly note to the main contact, and asked to understand the customer’s needs rather than pushing a hard deadline. The customer confirmed they needed the extra seats for ambitious 2025 growth plans. Brian scheduled a live discovery call, learned the customer was hiring aggressively in Q1, and proposed a ramped seat agreement that would automatically add seats as the company scaled, avoiding repeated finance negotiations. Two weeks later the customer signed a $70,000 expansion contract covering the growth. Brian distills three key takeaways: (1) never deliver bad news via email—use a friendly tone and prioritize live conversation; (2) discovery is continuous, even with existing customers, and digging deeper can unlock larger deals; (3) cultivating strong customer champions through ongoing help and training makes expansion conversations easier. He encourages salespeople to watch for usage signals like hiring and seat additions as indicators of future expansion opportunities.

Chapters

We noticed a customer was using 7 more seats than what they'd paid for. 2 weeks later, we turned that into a $70,000 expansion. See, normally our platform prevents overages, and this was actually a mistake on our end. Here's how the story unfolded. Me, I sent my main customer contact a nice note about how I noticed the overage, and we take full responsibility. No hard deadline or do this right now type of attitude. My goal was just to understand if they needed the additional 7 seats and how we can right-size it for the customer. Here was their response. Yes, we definitely need the 7 seats. We are planning some big things for 2025. How I responded. So exciting. Let's find 15 minutes to see how we can best support you all next year. And they said, sure thing. Once we got on the call, we went back to running discovery and I wanted to learn more about what those big things really meant. It turns out they were accelerating growth and they had massive hiring goals in Q1. So we worked with them to build in a ramped seat agreement so it minimized having to go back and forth with finance every time they wanted to add a couple more seats. 2 weeks later, we inked that agreement for $70,000 to back all of their growth in 2025. So here were some of my lessons and takeaways. Number 1, never deliver bad news via email. Keep a really friendly tone and always push for a live conversation first. Number 2, discovery never ends, even if they are a customer. And it would have been really easy in this case just to take down those 7 seats for a small deal. But digging into NexTier allowed us to grow this by quite a bit. Number 3, building strong customer champions really pays off. Our help and training throughout the year made it an easy conversation due to all the ROI they were already realizing. Hiring for roles, adding more seats. These are all signs of big growth. See what else might be there next time this happens to you.