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Build an expansion assistant in your CRM that tells reps green, yellow or red
Picked and checked by Olga Pearson, SalesUpLevel
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Reported by Personio's CRO: expansion SDRs' account research went from about 2 hours a day to 15 minutes, and pipeline per FTE roughly doubled.
Philip Lacor's team mapped what reps do by hand (a GTM engineer shadowed account managers for 2 weeks), then a GTM engineer built an assistant inside Salesforce for expansion SDRs. A rep types an account name and it pulls data from 10 to 20 systems (usage, contracts, product analytics, Gong calls) and returns a cross-sell recommendation: green, yellow or red.
By Philip Lacor, CRO at Personio, at SaaStr AI London (written up by Jason Lemkin) · SaaStr (saastr.com) ↗ · Jan 8, 2026
If you sell: run the green, yellow, red check by hand on your top 10 accounts
- Have a GTM engineer shadow your account team for about 2 weeks and list the jobs they do by hand. Personio found AMs working across 7 to 8 systems.
- Clean the data first. Personio found about a third of its Salesforce records were duplicates.
- Connect usage, contract and product data (they used Snowflake and Amplitude) plus Gong calls.
- Add your ICP, decks and product context so the assistant knows what you sell.
- Let reps type an account name and get a green, yellow or red cross-sell call with the reasons.
You help an expansion rep decide whether to pitch an add-on to [account]. Data: product usage [paste], contract and renewal date [paste], recent call notes [paste], our add-ons and who they fit [paste]. Return: GREEN (pitch now), YELLOW (wait or fix something first) or RED (do not pitch), the 3 facts that drove it, and the one add-on to lead with. If key data is missing, say which and default to YELLOW.
If you lead a team: roll it out
- Start with 2 weeks of shadowing and a data cleanup before any build.
- Measure research time per rep and expansion pipeline per rep before and after.
Watch out for
- The last paragraph of the SaaStr write-up misspells the CRO's name. Personio's own press release confirms Philip Lacor.
- The 2x pipeline per FTE is his reported figure for the expansion SDRs using the tool; the write-up gives no baseline.
- Bad CRM data will give confident wrong answers. Clean duplicates first.
Source: Philip Lacor, SaaStr (saastr.com), Jan 8, 2026. Results are as reported by the source; we did not measure them.
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