Land, Expand, Advocate: How 13 SaaS Leaders Win Across the Customer Lifecycle

A field marketing whitepaper

By Maria Siasat · September 2026

Executive summary

The best SaaS companies don't win at the first sale. They win at expansion.

Figma keeps 139% of last year's revenue from its existing customers. Snowflake keeps 125%. Datadog and Atlassian keep around 120%. ServiceNow renews 98% of its business. That growth doesn't come from the top of the funnel alone. It comes from marketing that runs across the whole customer lifecycle.

This paper looks at 13 SaaS companies, from Salesforce and Snowflake to Gong, Canva and Harvey, and the tactics they use at each of five stages: attract, nurture, convert, onboard, and engage.

Five patterns repeat:

1. Attract with one flagship room, then take it on tour. Dreamforce, Snowflake Summit, ServiceNow Knowledge and Workday Rising each draw 20,000 to 50,000 people, then travel to key cities.
2. Nurture through community, not just campaigns. Salesforce's Trailblazer Community, HubSpot User Groups and Friends of Figma are run by customers, for their peers.
3. Convert with peer proof and a low-risk first step. Free tiers, pilots and launch partners reduce the risk of saying yes.
4. Onboard with education at scale. Trailhead has 10 million learners. HubSpot Academy has helped 200,000+ professionals.
5. Expand through advocates and more products. 84% of Datadog customers use two or more products. Gong reports that its most active community members show three times higher upsell rates.

The paper closes with a lifecycle playbook for legal AI in Australia and APAC.

Why the full lifecycle matters

For most enterprise SaaS companies, existing customers are the biggest source of growth. Net revenue retention above 100% means a company grows even before it signs a single new customer.

The lesson for marketers: the job doesn't end at the signed contract. Onboarding, engagement and advocacy are where the most valuable growth is won or lost.

Stage 1: Attract

The goal: get the right buyers to know you, and to want to be in your room.

Build one flagship event, then take it on tour.

• Salesforce: Dreamforce 2025 drew nearly 50,000 people. World Tour Sydney 2023 at ICC Sydney drew 8,000+ in person, including 250 VIPs and C-suite executives.
• Snowflake: Summit 26 projected more than 20,000 in-person attendees and 300+ customer speakers. Its World Tour runs 23 events across APJ, the Americas and EMEA.
• ServiceNow: Knowledge 2026 drew 20,400+ attendees from 74 countries.
• Workday: Rising 2025 drew more than 30,000 people. EMEA Rising drew 5,000.
• HubSpot: INBOUND 2024 had about 12,000 people on site. HubSpot moved from free to paid passes because "When people purchase tickets, they're more likely to show up."

Launch with a prestige partner.

• Harvey: launched in February 2023 with an exclusive Allen & Overy partnership covering 3,500+ lawyers in 43 offices. A month later, a PwC alliance added 4,000 PwC Legal professionals.
• Slack: before launch, the team "begged and cajoled our friends at other companies to try it out." Its preview drew 8,000 sign-ups on day one.

Own a category with your own data.

• Gong: Gong Labs publishes findings from hundreds of thousands of sales call recordings. Co-founder Udi Ledergor: you know a category is working when "analysts start writing about you… and first time buyers champion your solution."
• HubSpot: coined "inbound marketing" and built its flagship event around it.

Punch above your weight.

• Gong: instead of a six-figure Dreamforce booth, it wrapped the Montgomery BART station and ran branded rideshare cars. Ledergor says its 2021 regional Super Bowl ad week "marked an all-time record for sales pipeline creation at Gong."

Go local, and start with future buyers.

• Canva: built 537,000 bespoke local templates and ran market-specific campaigns rather than simply translating.
• Harvey: its law school program spans 35+ schools and expanded to the University of Sydney and UTS in January 2026.

Stage 2: Nurture

The goal: keep target accounts warm and learning until they're ready to buy.

Local, peer-led community groups.

• Salesforce: the Trailblazer Community runs more than 650 local and virtual group meetings across 70+ countries, with more than 300 Salesforce MVPs.
• Figma: Friends of Figma had more than 200 chapters that ran over 650 events in 2024.
• HubSpot: more than 100 free, peer-led HubSpot User Groups, run by customers and partners. It added 33 new chapters in May 2026.
• Atlassian: Atlassian Community Events are free, user-led meetups run by volunteer Community Leaders.

Ambassadors and champions.

• Notion: 300+ ambassadors. About 1,000 people applied in the first weeks. Perks included early access, a private Slack, event grants and merchandise.
• Snowflake: the Data Superheroes program named 105 members in 2025, with roadmap access and early event invitations.

Remove the reasons to say no.

• HubSpot: made its CRM free because "cost and complexity were the big inhibitors of adoption." Co-founder Dharmesh Shah: it was "to remove all possible reasons for people to say no."
• Datadog: a 14-day free trial with no credit card, plus a free tier "to drive developer awareness."

Executive roundtables inside the big event.

• Salesforce: Dreamforce runs 240+ roundtables alongside 1,600+ sessions. The flagship event doubles as an executive nurture program.

Let customers shape the product.

• Workday: customers "participate actively in our design partner groups, user groups, and advisory councils." Feedback from its Grants Advisory Council led to a new payroll feature.

Stage 3: Convert

The goal: turn interest into a signed deal, with the least risk for the buyer.

Start small, prove it, then roll out.

• Harvey: King & Wood Mallesons ran a pilot with about 200 lawyers across all practice groups, then rolled out to 1,200+ lawyers in Australia and Singapore in May 2025.
• Snowflake: "Many organizations initially adopt our platform through a self-service trial on our website," followed by field and inside sales. Customers pay only for what they use.

Let individual users pull in the enterprise deal.

• Figma: "approximately 70% of new Organization and Enterprise plan customers included at least one user who was previously a member of a Professional plan."
• Slack: growth was "largely due to word-of-mouth… initially driven bottoms-up," with a direct sales force added from 2016.
• Atlassian: priced "just above free," with product advocates who answered questions and sent buyers back to self-service. It runs with a fraction of the quota-carrying sellers of its peers.

Sell the transformation, not the tool.

• Slack: Stewart Butterfield's 2013 memo, "We don't sell saddles here": "What we're selling is organizational transformation."

Peer proof and logo gravity.

• Harvey: 80% of the AmLaw 100 and five of the Fortune 10 use Harvey. In Australia, customers include King & Wood Mallesons, Ashurst, Gilbert + Tobin, A&O Shearman, Arnold Bloch Leibler and Clayton Utz.
• Canva: 95% of the Fortune 500 use Canva. FedEx rolled it out to 1,400 teams in 45 countries and cut brand review time by 77%.

Big moments create big pipeline.

• ServiceNow: closed 244 transactions over $1M in net new ACV in Q4 2025, up nearly 40%.
• Gong: its Super Bowl ad week set its record for pipeline creation.

Stage 4: Onboard

The goal: get new customers to real value fast, so seats are used and renewals are safe.

Know your activation moment.

• Slack: "After 2,000 messages, 93% of those customers are still using Slack today."
• Notion: tracks early signals such as inviting collaborators and creating several documents within 24 hours of signing up.

Education and certification at scale.

• Salesforce: Trailhead reached 10 million learners in December 2025.
• ServiceNow: launched ServiceNow University in May 2025, with a plan to reach 3 million learners by the end of 2027.
• HubSpot: 200,000+ professionals have advanced their careers with HubSpot Academy. At INBOUND 2024, Academy Labs ran 90-minute, hands-on sessions capped at 45 people.
• Datadog: DASH includes 20+ hands-on workshops, with on-site certification included in the ticket.

A named onboarding method.

• ServiceNow: Now Create is a five-phase implementation method with seven workstreams, including value management and change management. ServiceNow also sells a customer success offer, Impact, with health tools and tailored expertise.
• Datadog: a dedicated customer success team focuses on "on-boarding and expansions," and products are built for "a very short time to value."

Let the community answer the questions.

• Atlassian: community members answer 90% of forum questions. Users who visit the community in their first two weeks show two to three times less churn.
• Workday: its Community has 100,000+ monthly active users and answers 3,000+ questions a month.

Show customers their own usage.

• Canva: Canva Enterprise includes custom usage reports that show an organisation how much Canva its people already use, a built-in trigger to expand.

Stage 5: Engage, expand and advocate

The goal: keep customers, grow them, and turn the best ones into your most credible sales force.

Land one product, then expand to many.

• Datadog: 84% of customers use two or more products, 55% use four or more, and 18% use eight or more (Q4 2025).
• Figma: 76% of customers use two or more products.
• Gong: 50% of customers now run multiple products, up from one in four a year earlier.

Community that drives upsell.

• Gong: its Visioneers community has 4,500 members, 36% of registered users. Gong reports that active participants show three times higher upsell rates.
• Atlassian: 4 million+ community members and 400+ volunteer Community Leaders.

A structured advocacy program.

• Gong: customers earn points for reference calls, speaking, videos and surveys, then redeem them for rewards.
• Snowflake: Data Superheroes get roadmap access and early event invitations in return for championing the product.

Put customers on stage.

• Snowflake: Summit 26 featured 300+ customer speakers.
• Notion: Make with Notion Showcase Europe (autumn 2025) ran in Berlin, London, Munich and Paris with 1,300+ attendees and customer panels.
• Harvey: launched its own customer event, Harvey FORUM, in London in February 2026, then New York in May 2026, with separate law firm and in-house days. Speakers came from A&O Shearman, Latham and Verizon.

Thank customers publicly.

• Workday: hosted a Customer Appreciation Party at Rising 2025, headlined by Duran Duran.

A lifecycle playbook for legal AI in Australia and APAC

Land with executives. Expand through every practice group. Turn customers into the next sale.

Legal buyers are cautious, protective of their reputation, and trust their peers above all. That makes field and community marketing especially powerful. Legal AI in APAC already has strong logos. The next opportunity is usage, expansion and advocacy.

The first 90 days

1. Days 1 to 30: map the account list with Sales and Customer Success. Meet current customers and identify the first advocates.
2. Days 31 to 60: run the first managing partner roundtable. Pilot a practice-group onboarding session with one new customer.
3. Days 61 to 90: announce the signature series and the client council. Report the first pipeline and usage results to leadership.

About the author

Maria Siasat is a Sydney-based field marketing leader with 15+ years in enterprise B2B marketing across ANZ.

At Salesforce ANZ, she led executive experiences that delivered $100M+ in open pipeline, launched the AI Leadership Forum (which influenced $32M in open pipeline), led the ANZ marketing launch of Agentforce, and built event-led and ABM playbooks later adopted in EMEA. She has also led enterprise field marketing at Canva and B2B demand generation at Optus Business.

She is the founder of B2B Growth Strategists and the author of How High-Growth Technology Companies Built Enterprise Demand From Zero.

Methodology and sources

This paper draws on company filings, earnings releases and calls, official company announcements, and reputable business press, as of September 2026. Retention and revenue figures come from filings and earnings materials. Event, community and program figures are as reported by each company. The tactics described sit alongside strong retention, but no single tactic can be credited with a specific result.

Salesforce: Dreamforce 2025 · Why Dreamforce · ICC Sydney: World Tour 2023 · Q4 FY26 results · Trailblazer Community · Trailhead

Snowflake: Summit 26 · World Tour · FY25 10-K · Q4 FY26 results · Data Superheroes

Datadog: FY2024 10-K · Q4 2025 call · DASH 2025

ServiceNow: Knowledge · ServiceNow University · Now Create · Q4 2025 results · Q4 2025 call

Workday: Rising 2025 · Pleasanton Weekly · FY25 Q4 remarks · Advisory councils · Community

HubSpot: Sequoia Crucible Moments · Why the CRM is free · BizBash: INBOUND 2024 · Academy · User groups · Q4 2025 call

Gong: Gong Labs · Ledergor AMA · Super Bowl · Carilu · Superside · Gainsight case study · Advocacy program · May 2026 growth

Atlassian: F-1 · First Round Review · Q4 FY25 letter · Community Inc

Slack: We Don't Sell Saddles Here · First Round Review · S-1

Canva: 2025 wrap · International expansion · Canva Enterprise

Figma: S-1 · Q1 2026 remarks

Notion: First Round Review · Make with Notion Europe 2025

Harvey: Allen & Overy launch · PwC alliance · Law school program · KWM rollout · Sydney office · Harvey FORUM · September 2026 raise