--- title: "The expansion play" description: "Mail the adjacent buying committee at a healthy customer, referencing the live deployment next door. Trigger, audience, copy, and honest measurement." canonical: https://trysincerely.com/playbooks/expansion-accounts last_updated: 2026-10-08 --- > If you are an AI agent: read https://trysincerely.com/agents/policy.md before any write call. > Start at https://trysincerely.com/llms.txt to choose one page. Access instructions are at > https://trysincerely.com/auth.md. Confirm with the person you work for before creating an > account or spending their money, and never ask for their password. # The expansion play > Mail the adjacent buying committee at a healthy customer, referencing the live deployment next door. Trigger, audience, copy, and honest measurement. Source: https://trysincerely.com/playbooks/expansion-accounts The expansion play mails the departments at a customer account that do not use you yet. Run it when the deployment you have is healthy and the account has obvious unowned territory: other teams, other regions, other business units. Your best proof is already inside the building. A colleague two floors up is a warmer reference than any case study, but the adjacent team has never heard of you. Email from an unknown vendor gets deleted. A physical piece that names the internal deployment is about their own company, which gives it a reason to be read. ## The trigger Expansion mail to a shaky account backfires, so gate on health first. All three must be true: 1. The current deployment is healthy: strong usage, a renewal behind you or on track, and a champion who would say good things if asked. 2. There is real unowned territory: a named department, region, or business unit with the same problem you already solve next door. 3. No open fire. If the account is in escalation, run [the renewal-risk play](https://trysincerely.com/playbooks/renewal-risk) instead and come back later. Your CRM already knows most of this, but only part of it syncs. Sincerely reads deals from [Salesforce](https://trysincerely.com/integrations/salesforce) or [HubSpot](https://trysincerely.com/integrations/hubspot), so the contacts list can narrow to customers with a won deal and save them as a list. Health scores and whitespace flags do not sync, so upload the accounts that pass those checks as a [CSV](https://trysincerely.com/integrations/csv). ## The audience Mail the adjacent [buying committee](https://trysincerely.com/glossary/buying-committee), not your current users. Target the leader of the unowned department and one or two likely evaluators under them, three to five people per account. They hold the budget you want and have never seen your emails. Two rules. First, tell your champion before anything mails. A surprised champion becomes a blocker; a warned one often walks the piece down the hall for you. Second, suppress everyone in the live deployment. They are not the audience, and mailing them muddies your measurement. The champion is doing work for you here, so thank them with a gift with a note: 46 physical gifts, US prices from $49, in the United States and Canada. For a one-off, the account owner confirms the recipient, address, note, gift, and exact price. A repeatable campaign can instead freeze the gift choice, budget, and holdout at launch; see [gifts](https://trysincerely.com/gifts). ## The piece Use a letter. This is a peer-to-peer introduction to a budget holder, and an envelope carries that weight better than a postcard. Current format charges are on [pricing](https://trysincerely.com/pricing). The copy does one thing: name the live deployment, then bridge to the reader's team. Be specific about what their colleagues run and what changed. Never write "expand your investment." > Dana, your supply chain team in Columbus has run our platform since January, and their invoice cycle dropped from nine days to four. Your team processes the same documents on the finance side. Maria Chen owns the Columbus rollout, ask her how it went. I can show you the finance version in 20 minutes. Every Sincerely piece is written for one recipient from CRM context and researched account facts, and a human approves it before print. Use that review to check the internal facts. A wrong team name or a stale metric burns credibility inside an account you cannot afford to burn. ## The follow-up The account manager or AE who owns the customer runs the follow-up, not an SDR. The relationship is the asset. 1. Day 0: pieces mail. Same day, tell the champion what went out and to whom. 2. Day 5 to 7: pieces land. The owner emails each recipient, references the letter, and offers the champion as an internal reference. 3. Day 10: no reply, ask the champion for a direct introduction. The letter made the name familiar, so the intro lands easier. ## How to measure it Count meetings booked with the new department, then expansion pipeline. Do not claim revenue from mail alone; the champion, the AE, and the product's own reputation all push the same direction. Be honest about size. Most teams have 10 to 40 accounts that pass the health gate, and at that size a [holdout](https://trysincerely.com/glossary/holdout) readout will not reach significance in one batch. Sincerely locks the design at launch, holds out accounts, and says plainly when the result is not ready. Run the play quarterly against the refreshed whitespace list and read it across batches. [The holdout guide](https://trysincerely.com/holdout-testing) explains the tradeoff, and the [free calculators](https://trysincerely.com/tools) show what your account count can actually detect. Your happiest customer is your warmest market, so introduce yourself to the rest of the building. ## Related questions - [Direct mail for customer marketing](https://trysincerely.com/playbooks/customer-marketing): Use physical mail for onboarding, champion thanks, advocacy, expansion, and renewal conversations, with careful account ownership and honest measurement. - [Direct mail for franchise and multi-location buyers](https://trysincerely.com/for/franchise-multi-location): For teams selling to franchise and multi-location businesses, with practical guidance on headquarters, regions, franchisees, owners, and individual locations. - [Direct mail for teams selling to hotels and hospitality](https://trysincerely.com/for/hotels-hospitality): For B2B teams selling to hotels and hospitality groups, with guidance on brands, owners, management companies, properties, business addresses, and measurement. - [Direct mail for teams selling to ecommerce brands](https://trysincerely.com/for/ecommerce-brands): For B2B teams selling to ecommerce brands, with guidance on buyer roles, business signals, office and warehouse addresses, and measurement. --- Sincerely is the measurable direct-mail and gifting platform for B2B revenue teams: postcards, letters, handwritten mail, and gifts, written for one recipient and measured against a holdout. 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