One of the biggest challenges CSMs face today is that Customer Success is more responsible than ever for upsells, renewals, and expansions—but they aren’t necessarily equipped to identify and act on those opportunities.
Now, part of tackling this challenge is about upskilling CSMs, but there’s also a technology angle. If you’re already using a Customer Platform to manage your portfolio, there’s a good chance you have everything you need to create—and close—expansion opportunities.
In this article, we’re going to explore the different types of whitespaces that typically exist in a relationship with a current customer, how to use technology to identify expansion opportunities, and how to use that same technology to foster Executive Sponsorship to close those deals.
These learnings come from a session at Planhat Open 2025, with special thanks going to Terri James, VP of Product & CS, and Co-founder at Continu, who shared the majority of the methods included here.
What is whitespacing?
Whitespacing is the identification of areas of ‘white space’ where your product or service could be further adopted to deliver value within a customer account.
Types of whitespacing opportunities:
Product expansion
Identify areas where current customers are using some, but not all of the tools or features you offer. Define the minimum product adoption and feature set that leads to greatest retention, and if customers are falling short of the definition, encourage them to adopt the tool or feature set that will deliver greatest value for both them and you.
Department expansion
A typical ‘land and expand’ motion where you identify another department within the same company that could utilize your product or service. For example, if you provide process optimization for Accounts Payable, and know you can deliver value in Accounts Receivable too.
Familial expansion
When selling into a large enterprise, it is often the case that there are multiple companies all housed within one company. This means there is opportunity to serve the same function with the solution many times over by tapping into the counterparts to the function you already serve at parent or sister companies. These can be independent companies, or global subsidiaries.
How to identify expansion opportunities
For product expansion, use your Customer Platform to identify the tool set and usage patterns that lead to greatest long term retention in customers that share characteristics (size, ACV, industry, etc.) with the customer you are looking to expand.
Then compare the adoption to see where there is convergence and divergence in their product adoption. For the points of divergence, identify the value that customers are achieving with those tools or features, and bring them back to your customer.
For department and familial expansion, use your Customer Platform to identify enthusiastic users outside your current network of connections, then reach out to them to see if there’s an expansion opportunity in their department or company.
The example Terri shared at Open was around video creation. Continu is a Learning Management System that enables internal and external education. She discovered that one user at a customer with an internal use case was creating hundreds of hours of videos a month. Upon reaching out, she discovered an expansion opportunity for an external use case that was larger than the initial internal one.
In Planhat, you would do this by segmenting users with high engagement, then use Calculated Metrics to refine the user pool, based on maturity stage, lifecycle, and use cases. You end up with a shortlist of people to reach out to, each a potential opportunity.
Driving deals with executive sponsors
Because expansions often mean including more—and more senior—people in the buying decision, having an executive sponsor helps to close deals. But getting executives involved in deals is a major commitment and requires more due diligence upfront.
In order to reduce the burden, use your Customer Platform to create a simple summary of the customer for executives so they can get up to speed quickly before joining a call. Include information about current use cases, value achieved so far, objectives for expansion, and potential hesitations.
This will allow the executive sponsor to join the call ready to have an informed conversation, and will make the customer feel heard and seen.
Taking control of expansions
Senior Copywriter
Planhat
Andrew is a seasoned creative with over 10 years of experience creating content for industry-leading SaaS companies. As Senior Copywriter at Planhat, he blends strategic clarity with a strong editorial voice to craft content across every channel. He’s held senior content roles in-house at Celonis and Hotjar, as well as The Drum's B2B agency of the year winner Velocity Partners—and brings a distinctive approach to tone and rhythm shaped by his early career as an actor, including the West End production of War Horse.
