How to Find Hidden Expansion Revenue in Your Existing SaaS Accounts

Most SaaS companies are sitting on 20–40% more expansion revenue than they realise. The opportunities are there — accounts hitting usage limits, teams growing, features being adopted beyond the original use case — but the signals are scattered across tools that don’t talk to each other. Your billing system knows one thing, your product analytics knows another, and your CRM knows a third. Nobody sees the full picture.

This guide covers the specific expansion signals to look for, where they hide, and how to surface them without building a data team.

Why Expansion Revenue Matters More Than New Logos at Scale

For SaaS companies between $3M and $10M ARR, expansion revenue is typically the fastest, cheapest way to grow. Selling more to an existing customer costs a fraction of acquiring a new one. The sales cycle is shorter, the close rate is higher, and the customer already trusts you.

The best SaaS companies generate 30–50% of their new ARR from expansion. But most scale-ups underperform on expansion — not because the opportunities don’t exist, but because nobody can see them.

The reason is structural. Expansion signals live across multiple systems, and at most scale-ups, those systems aren’t connected.

The 6 Expansion Signals Hiding in Your Data

1. Accounts Hitting Usage Limits

A customer on your Pro plan is using 92% of their API calls, seats, or storage. They’re getting value. They’re bumping against the ceiling. That’s a natural upgrade conversation waiting to happen.

But this signal lives in your product analytics or application database — not in your CRM, where your CS or sales team works. Unless someone manually checks usage data for every account, these opportunities slip through.

What to look for: Accounts at 80%+ of any plan limit — API calls, seats, storage, events, or whatever your product meters. Prioritise by MRR — a $20K account at 90% utilisation is a better expansion target than a $2K one.

2. Feature Adoption Beyond the Original Use Case

A customer bought your product to solve problem A. But their usage data shows they’ve started heavily using features for problem B — a use case they didn’t originally buy for. They’re discovering more value than they expected.

This is a signal that the account has expanded its internal footprint. More teams or departments are using the product. That’s an organic expansion signal — and often the best time to have an upgrade conversation, because the customer is already experiencing the value.

What to look for: Accounts using features outside their original onboarding flow or use case, especially if new user roles or departments are appearing in login data.

3. Growing Team Size

The customer’s company is hiring. Their headcount grew 30% in the last quarter. More employees often means more seats, more usage, and a bigger budget for tools. But this signal lives on LinkedIn or in external data sources — not in your CRM or billing system.

Even without external data, you can spot this internally: new users appearing in your product, invitations being sent to new team members, or an increase in the number of active users on the account.

What to look for: Accounts where active user count has grown 20%+ in the last 90 days, or where new users are being added regularly.

4. Support Conversations Mentioning Upgrades

Your support team fields questions every day. Some of those conversations contain explicit expansion signals: “Does the Enterprise plan include SSO?” “Can we add more seats?” “What’s the pricing for the analytics add-on?”

These signals live in Intercom, Zendesk, or HubSpot — not in your CRM pipeline. Unless your support team manually flags them (and they’re busy, so they usually don’t), these buying signals die in a ticket queue.

What to look for: Support tickets containing keywords like “upgrade,” “enterprise,” “pricing,” “add-on,” “more seats,” “SSO,” “advanced,” or “team plan.”

5. High NPS or Satisfaction Scores Paired With Low Plan Tier

A customer gives you a 9 or 10 NPS score. They love your product. But they’re on your lowest paid plan. That’s a mismatch — they’re getting significant value but paying very little for it.

Happy customers on low tiers are your lowest-risk expansion targets. They already trust you. The conversation isn’t “do you like our product?” — it’s “here’s what you’d get with more.”

What to look for: Accounts with NPS 9–10 (or high CSAT) that are on Starter or basic plans, especially if their usage is also high relative to the tier.

6. Contract Renewal Timing + Positive Signals

An account’s contract renews in 60 days. Their usage is strong, support tickets are low, NPS is high. This is the ideal moment for an expansion conversation — before they auto-renew at the same level.

But contract renewal dates live in your billing system. Usage data lives in product analytics. NPS lives in your survey tool. Combining these three signals for each account at the right moment requires cross-system visibility that most scale-ups don’t have.

What to look for: Accounts renewing within 60–90 days where usage is strong and satisfaction is high. These should be automatically flagged and assigned to a CS rep for an expansion conversation.

Why These Signals Are So Hard to Spot

Each signal above requires data from at least two different systems. That’s the fundamental problem. Your billing system doesn’t know about product usage. Your product analytics doesn’t know about support conversations. Your CRM doesn’t know about NPS scores.

At most scale-ups, these tools exist in silos. The data is there, but nobody can see it all at once. The result is missed revenue — expansion opportunities that existed, were not spotted, and expired.

The typical fix is to hire a data analyst or RevOps engineer to manually connect these systems, build dashboards, and create reports. That works, but it takes months, costs $150K–$220K per year, and the dashboards require constant maintenance.

How to Surface Expansion Opportunities Systematically

Option 1: Build It Manually

Set up a data warehouse. Build ETL pipelines from each tool. Write SQL to identify the signals above. Create dashboards. Assign someone to monitor them. Maintain everything when schemas change or new tools get added. Timeline: 3–6 months. Requires a data engineer.

Option 2: Cobble It Together With Spreadsheets

Export data from each tool monthly. Merge spreadsheets manually. Look for patterns. This works at very small scale but breaks quickly — it’s error-prone, time-consuming, and always out of date by the time you finish.

Option 3: Use an AI Revenue Intelligence Platform

Connect your tools and let AI correlate signals across systems automatically. This is the approach Eru takes.

Eru connects to your billing, CRM, support, product analytics, and databases in 5 minutes each (read-only). The AI agent maps your data across systems and automatically generates expansion opportunity watchlists — accounts hitting plan limits, growing usage, positive support signals, upcoming renewals with strong health scores — ranked by revenue potential.

Your CS and sales teams see expansion opportunities in real time, prioritised by impact, without waiting for a data pull or a dashboard build.

What an Expansion Watchlist Actually Looks Like

Once your data is connected, an expansion watchlist surfaces entries like:

Acme Corp — $18K ARR, Growth plan, renews in 45 days. Usage at 94% of plan limit. 3 new users added this month. NPS: 9. Support ticket last week asked about Enterprise SSO. Recommended action: Schedule expansion conversation before renewal.

Globex Inc — $8K ARR, Starter plan, month-to-month. API calls grew 60% over 90 days. Active users doubled. No support issues. Recommended action: Proactive upgrade outreach — account is outgrowing current plan.

This is the level of insight that was previously locked behind a data team and months of pipeline work. Now it surfaces automatically.

The Revenue Impact

Consider the maths. If you have 200 accounts and your expansion rate improves from 5% to 12% (a conservative improvement when you’re actually spotting the signals), and your average expansion deal is $6K ARR, that’s an additional $84K in annual expansion revenue — from your existing customer base, with no new acquisition cost.

For most scale-ups, improved expansion visibility pays for itself within weeks — not months, not quarters.

How to Get Started

Connect your tools to Eru — Stripe, Salesforce, HubSpot, Intercom, Segment, your database, or any system with an API. Read-only access, 5-minute setup, no data team required.