Worked example: the readiness score in action

Three accounts, one Tuesday, to make the bands concrete.

Account A, the obvious yes. A 6-seat team is at 92% seat utilisation, has completed its onboarding milestone, week-over-week active-user growth is running 18% above its own baseline, and a second department went live last week. Capacity pressure high, value realised, momentum hot, breadth expanding: every dimension lights up. The score lands firmly in the hot band. The agent assembles a brief for the human account owner with the account's own numbers and the exact seat-tier path that relieves the ceiling. This is the deal a quarterly cadence would have caught three months late, at renewal, framed as an upsell tax. The agent catches it the week the pain is real.

Account B, the trap. A 40-seat account jumps from 30 to 39 active seats overnight. On a naive single-threshold rule, that 97% utilisation screams fire now. But the readiness score reads the rest of the picture: no milestone completed, the spike traces to a one-off bulk import, and a support escalation is open on the account. Capacity pressure high, but value realisation zero and a live suppressor present. The score holds it in watch, the agent stays silent, and you avoid pitching money to a frustrated, unactivated account, which is exactly the move that contracts a renewal.

Account C, the self-serve nudge. A 3-seat team is at 85% utilisation with steady but unremarkable momentum and one milestone hit. Real pressure, modest conviction. The score lands warm, so the agent does not route a human brief; it surfaces an in-product nudge showing the limit and the one-click upgrade path, then emails the account owner the upgrade option as a soft follow-up. The product closes the ones that do not need a relationship, which is the whole economic point of the band split and the heart of the product-led sales motion.

The lesson the example carries: the same 90%-plus utilisation number meant send now, say nothing, and let them self-serve across three accounts. A single threshold could never tell them apart. The composite score is what turns a noisy signal into a decision you would defend out loud.