There's an expansion play that the biggest enterprise software companies use that almost nobody in the mid-market SaaS world talks about.
Forward deployed engineers.
The idea is simple. Instead of — or in addition to — selling more software, you sell your people. Engineers from your company who go and work inside the customer's operation. They build integrations, solve specific technical problems, and help the customer get more out of the platform. They're paid by the customer, deployed by you.
The economics look unusual at first. You're billing at rates that are often 2x or 3x the customer's subscription — a $1,000/mo SaaS customer might be paying $3,000/mo for a forward deployed engineer. The margin profile is different from pure software. There's real labor involved.
But the LTV math is extraordinary.
First, it's a completely different revenue line with no ceiling imposed by the original contract. You're not limited to what the customer was willing to pay for software — you're pricing based on engineering rates and business value delivered.
Second, and more importantly, it makes the customer structurally unable to leave.
When your engineers are embedded in the customer's operation, they start building things. Integrations that connect your platform to the customer's other systems. Custom workflows that are specific to the customer's business processes. Institutional knowledge about how the customer's environment works that lives in your people's heads. The customer's operation starts to run on your people as much as your platform.
The switching cost at that point isn't "migrate our data and retrain our team." It's "replace the people who built and maintain the custom infrastructure our business runs on." That's a completely different conversation.
This is the extreme version of a principle that applies at every level of expansion: the more deeply you embed yourself in the customer's operation — through services, through relationships, through custom work — the more durable the revenue becomes.
You don't have to offer forward deployed engineers to apply this principle. You can apply it with a dedicated CSM who becomes irreplaceable to the customer's team. With implementation services that create a custom environment only you fully understand. With training that builds your platform into how the customer's team thinks about their work.
The question to ask for any expansion opportunity: does this make us easier to buy more from, or does it make us harder to leave? The best ones do both. Forward deployed engineers do both at an extreme level.
Most SaaS companies will never offer forward deployed engineers. But every SaaS company can build expansion motions that embed them more deeply in their customers' operations. The principle scales down. The LTV impact doesn't.
Lincoln Murphy formally named and popularized Customer Success starting in 2010 and has spent 15 years connecting it to expansion revenue and commercial outcomes. Read The Premise.