Your sales team chases users who aren't ready to buy
Track which free users are most active and reaching feature limits. These are your best upgrade candidates.
When to use
You have enough free users to segment by usage. Works best with 200+ free users.
Hypothesis template
If we score users by [usage signals] and reach out to high-scorers, upgrade conversion will increase by [target]% because we're contacting users who've already proven value.
Method
The problem: You email every free user about upgrading. Most ignore it because they haven't used the product enough to care.
What Slack did: Tracked which free teams were most active: messages sent, integrations added, daily active users. When teams hit usage thresholds, they became "product-qualified leads" and got targeted outreach.
The result: Product-qualified leads convert 5-10x higher than marketing-qualified leads because they've already experienced the value.
How to do it:
- Define 3-5 usage signals that predict upgrade readiness: feature usage, frequency, team size, hitting limits
- Score each user 0-100 based on these signals
- Set a threshold (e.g., score > 70 = product-qualified)
- For PQLs: send a personalized email referencing their specific usage
- "You've run 8 experiments this month — unlimited experiments is $15/month"
- Track: PQL conversion rate vs generic outreach conversion
Key insight: The best sales pitch is the user's own data. "You've used [feature] 47 times this month" is more convincing than any benefit statement.
Success metrics
- •PQL identification rate
- •PQL-to-paid conversion rate
- •Revenue from PQL outreach
- •Conversion rate vs generic outreach
Prerequisites
- Per-user usage analytics
- A scoring model or simple threshold rules
- Personalized email capability
Common pitfalls
- •Scoring on vanity metrics (logins) instead of value metrics (feature usage)
- •Reaching out too early before real value is proven
- •Using generic outreach instead of personalized messages
- •Not including the user's own data in the outreach
Source: Slack, Dropbox. Product-qualified leads convert 5-10x higher than marketing-qualified leads.
Suggested ICE scores
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