Watch the reach across the ceiling

The sharpest feature signal is not adoption of what they have, it is repeated reach for what they do not. Five or more attempts to use a premium, gated feature inside thirty days is a customer telling you, in their own clicks, exactly what they want to buy (Saber). An upgrade-gate click is the highest-intent signal in the entire taxonomy because the customer initiated it; there is no guesswork about fit, no inference about intent, just a person trying to do a thing your plan does not let them do yet.

The numbers behind this are the most persuasive in the whole field. A customer reaching for a gated feature is, in effect, a product-qualified lead, and a free trial that surfaces PQLs converts at 2.8x the rate of one that does not, because a PQL has actually used the product rather than downloaded an ebook (UserGuiding). The contrast with marketing-sourced leads is brutal: only about thirteen percent of MQLs become sales-qualified, and only six percent of those convert to paying, whereas one well-run PQL programme defined its trigger as trial users who finished onboarding, used the product on five-plus days, and had three-plus team members active, and closed those at 35 percent versus 4 percent on marketing leads (Gainsight). Intent expressed against the ceiling is simply worth more.

So instrument the gate itself. Every time a user hits a tier boundary, that is a logged event with a name, a count, and a timestamp, the same way a saturation alert is. Treat reached for an enterprise-only feature as a first-class signal alongside seats at ninety percent, and weight it heavily. Premium-feature pursuit and seat saturation are the two signals you instrument first; everything else is supporting evidence. For how this reach shapes the rest of the funnel, see lead activation and the automation of trigger detection in upsell and cross-sell triggers run by AI agents.