Expansion Is Decided Before Go-Live: Graphite Connect's Approach to Implementation-Led Growth

Graphite Connect once quoted a Bay Area enterprise customer $10,000–$20,000 for a complex ERP integration. 

Their new head of implementation scoped it properly and proposed $500,000. The customer barely blinked. They negotiated a little—it's their procurement team, after all—and paid somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000. That same pattern has repeated a dozen times since.

Kasey Smith, who runs operations at Graphite Connect—overseeing implementation, support, and customer success—took the stage at Propel 26 to explain how a company gets to that moment. 

The short version: it starts in implementation, long before any expansion conversation is had.

Read on for the key takeaways from the session.

Why the Way You Implement Determines Whether You'll Ever Expand

Graphite Connect sells supplier onboarding and data management software to enterprises with over $2 billion in revenue. Implementations range from 60 days to two years. The product is not self-serve. And for years, Kasey's team treated implementation the way most do: get customers live, minimize time, move on.

"Implementation is not a handoff, it is not a cost center," Smith said. "The way you implement determines whether you have the opportunity to expand in the future."

When Graphite implemented Rocketlane to track project hours and delivery against budget, Smith got her first real look at what was actually happening inside their implementations. 

The team started rewarding speed—on-time or ahead-of-schedule project completions. It worked, but it revealed a hidden cost: moving fast didn't always mean going deep. And going deep, it turned out, was everything.

Smith used Rocketlane's MCP server and an internal AI agent to pull a clean dataset across all customer accounts and identify what was unique about customers who expanded early—sometimes during implementation itself. 

Some accounts doubled or tripled their recurring revenue before a project even closed. The finding wasn't subtle.

"Nearly every single customer that expanded early was a customer that was happy during implementation," Smith said. "If they were unhappy during implementation, it was basically never that they were expanding."

The Three Stages of Implementation Maturity

Smith described three stages she sees across PS teams—and was honest that Graphite itself had operated in the lower stages until recently.

Surface-level implementation. The team executes the SOW. The project closes on time. The customer is reasonably satisfied. This isn't a failure—it's table stakes. But it creates no foundation for expansion because the implementation team never went beyond what was asked.

Functional understanding. The team executes the SOW and starts suggesting improvements. They understand the product deeply enough to identify gaps and opportunities that the customer hasn't surfaced. Early expansion starts happening here, but inconsistently.

Deep business understanding. The team genuinely understands the customer's business goals—not just their project requirements. They know the customer's procurement org, their internal politics, and their strategic priorities. They recognize expansion opportunities because they're inside the business, not just executing a project. And critically: the customer trusts them.

"They trust us as experts," Smith said, describing accounts where Graphite implementation managers became so embedded that customers asked to keep them on as their CSM after go-live. "They view that person as a net add to their business."

Why Industry Expertise Is the Moat in an AI World

Smith spent significant time on a theme she described as one of her most important takeaways from preparing the session: in an AI-first market, the moat is human expertise, not software features.

Graphite is a procurement technology built by procurement experts. Their CEO was the Chief Procurement Officer at Adobe and Intel. That expertise runs through the organization—and Smith is deliberately extending it to every layer, from implementation managers to CSMs.

The reason is direct: enterprise customers are actively having internal conversations about whether to build or buy. "I believe these conversations are happening," Smith said, "and I do believe that can happen if you are not an expert within their business."

The teams that survive those conversations are the ones where someone in the customer's room raises their hand and says, "We cannot replace the expertise they bring." Not because the software is irreplaceable, but because the people are.

This is what made the $500K integration proposal work. The customer wasn't paying for the integration. They were paying for the judgment, the scoping, and the trust built across years of embedded implementation work. A vendor who had never gone deeper than the SOW couldn't have had that conversation.

Smith contrasted this with the internal tools Graphite uses, where there's no human connection to the software vendor at all. "It's much easier to replace those tools," she said. "As opposed to those where we say, when we run into a problem, we consult with them about how to solve it."

4 Key Takeaways from Kasey Smith on Implementation-Led Expansion

Expansion is decided before go-live—and the data backs it. Pulling Graphite's project history from Rocketlane showed a near-perfect correlation: happy CSAT during implementation predicted early expansion; unhappy implementation predicted no expansion. 

This isn't soft insight—it's a measurable leading indicator that should drive how implementation success is defined and rewarded.

Stop optimizing only for speed. On-time implementation is a good goal. But Graphite found that rewarding speed above all else pushed teams to stay surface-level. 

A slightly longer implementation where the team builds genuine business understanding is more valuable than a fast one that leaves no foundation for growth. "We're less concerned when an implementation may run a little long," Smith said, "depending on why that is."

Get high and wide within the customer org early. The project team assigned to an implementation often has a narrow mandate: go live on time. 

Getting to the executive level and across departments early—finance, operations, procurement, leadership—uncovers expansion opportunities the project team would never surface. Executive sponsors on every account, starting in implementation, is how Graphite creates those connections.

Hire and develop industry experts, not just implementation managers. The trust that enables a customer to accept a $500K proposal comes from years of demonstrated expertise—not from a smooth delivery. 

Customers who see their implementation manager as a genuine domain expert don't view replacing the software as a neutral option. They view losing access to that person as a risk. That's the moat, and it compounds over time.

Conclusion

Kasey Smith's session at Propel 26 reframed a question most PS leaders think they've already answered: what is implementation actually for? The conventional answer is go-live. Graphite's answer is expansion.

The data Smith pulled from Rocketlane made the case cleanly: almost no unhappy implementation customers ever expanded, and almost every early expansion came from a customer who was happy during implementation. 

The teams that build deep business understanding—not just functional competence, and not just on-time delivery—are the ones that create the kind of trust where a $500K integration proposal lands without flinching.

In a market where AI is giving customers more reasons to question whether they need any specific software vendor, the implementation team is the last line of defense against churn—and the first line of offense for growth. Graphite is built from the same motion.

Based on live session data from Propel 26 (May 2026) and aggregate outcomes from 750+ Rocketlane customers.

Check out the rest of our Propel 26 recaps here for more insights from the industry's best.