15 In-App GTM Levers for PLG SaaS

Today’s SaaS PLG companies can’t afford to cling to familiar tools out of nostalgia. HubSpot may have been the backbone of B2B marketing for 15 years, but is it the right choice in a product-led world?

It’s great at email automation, yet it wasn’t built for the real-time, in-app engagement that PLG demands. Customer.io, by contrast, is purpose-built for rich lifecycle messaging... think in-app nudges, behavioural emails, push notifications.

But it’s not about choosing HubSpot or Customer.io. The real question is how to orchestrate a powerful toolkit across your GTM strategy so the product itself drives growth.

In a PLG model, your product must do the heavy lifting: onboarding users, upselling upgrades, and nudging expansion, all inside the app. Below, we break down 15 in-app GTM levers (grouped into five themes) that turn your product into a self-serve revenue engine. Let’s dive in.

Tier Expansion & Monetisation Levers

For CROs and CFOs, expansion revenue is gold. These in-app levers make it seamless for users to become paying customers or upgrade to higher tiers without friction.

Usage-based upgrade nudges:

Don’t wait for users to hit a wall. When a free or lower-tier user reaches a limit (be it projects, storage, seats, or API calls), trigger a gentle in-app prompt to upgrade rather than a hard stop.

For example, if a team on your free plan hits their project limit, show an in-app banner or modal offering a higher tier at the moment of need. This turns a moment of friction into a conversion opportunity; the user is already sold on the value and wants more.

The key is to make the upgrade path one-click and contextual. A sudden paywall or “contact sales” message will only frustrate (friction kills PLG). Instead, a well-timed nudge with a clear value proposition (e.g. “Need more projects? Unlock unlimited projects with Pro”) lets the product sell the upgrade naturally.

Auto-trial expansion:

If a user tries to access a feature that’s above their current plan, don’t just show a lock icon... activate a trial. Spin up a 7-day free trial of the next tier on the spot, with in-app guidance to showcase that feature’s value. The user instantly experiences the premium functionality without scheduling a demo or talking to sales.

For example, if a user on a “Basic” plan clicks a “Analytics Dashboard” feature that’s premium-only, the app can say “Starting your 7-day Pro trial now!” and guide them through using it.

By the end of the week, they’ve seen the value firsthand, increasing the likelihood they’ll convert. Automatic, on-demand trials for specific features are a powerful upsell lever because they remove all delay between interest and experience.

Seamless in-app billing:

Make upgrading a frictionless part of the product experience. Too often, users who click “Upgrade” face a clunky process:

• re-enter credit card info,
• talk to an account rep,
• or wait for an email.

Instead, bake native billing hooks into your product from day one (using tools like Stripe or Chargebee). If a user accepts an upsell prompt, the app should simply pro-rate their plan, charge the card on file (or enable instant ACH/Direct Debit), and unlock the new features immediately.

No redirects, no “we’ll contact you”, the upgrade should feel like a natural extension of using the product. By making payment seamless, you prevent any drop-off in the upgrade moment. The user goes from bumping into a limit to enjoying a higher tier in seconds.

This lever directly impacts your MRR and NRR; every additional seat or extra usage that a customer needs can translate into revenue without a single sales call.

Onboarding & Activation Levers

Product-led growth lives or dies by activation. These levers ensure new users reach that “aha!” moment quickly and without getting lost, a win for CMOs, product leaders, and customer success teams who care about adoption.

Guided checklists tied to “aha” moments:

Don’t bombard new users with every possible action; instead, lead them to the 2–3 key actions that drive retention. Implement an in-app onboarding checklist or wizard that highlights the core steps to success.

For example, if data shows that a user who invites a teammate and creates their first project is likely to stick, make those steps front and centre. A friendly checklist (“✅ Invite your team, ✅ Create your first project, ✅ Complete your dashboard”) gives users a clear path to reach value.

Each item can be interactive, clicking it either takes the user to that screen or triggers a guided tour. Celebrate completion with progress indicators or small rewards (confetti, badges).

This focused approach ensures users hit their value milestones faster instead of wandering aimlessly. It’s not about overwhelming them with features; it’s about activating them on the features that matter.

Contextual tooltips & modals:

Ditch generic product tours that dump a tutorial on the user regardless of context. Instead, use in-app tooltips and pop-ups at the exact moment a user might need help or could benefit from a nudge.

For instance, if users often hesitate at a blank dashboard, a tooltip can appear saying “👋 Need data here? Connect your first data source.”

Or if they try to use a complex feature for the first time, an on-the-spot modal can give a quick how-to or a video clip.

The idea is to provide just-in-time guidance where friction occurs.

Modern PLG companies integrate tools like Pendo, Appcues, or Chameleon to deploy these reactive helpers without writing code. By addressing confusion in the moment, you prevent drop-offs and guide users smoothly toward activation. It feels like the product is a helpful coach, not static software.

Progress gamification:

Humans love a sense of completion. Incorporate progress bars, set up percentages, or even levelling up concepts to motivate users through onboarding.

For example, show a setup meter that goes from 0% to 100% as the user completes key actions (with perhaps a milestone at 80% like “Just one more step to unlock your first report!”).

You can also unlock small perks at milestones. Maybe a special avatar frame when they finish onboarding, or just a celebratory message: “You’re all set – enjoy 100% of Product’s benefits!” This gamified approach turns onboarding into a challenge to beat rather than a chore.

It gives users visual momentum and positive reinforcement, pushing them to complete the journey. The result: more users stick around to reach that all-important “aha” moment where they truly grasp your product’s value.

Real-world proof that these activation levers work: A recent case study showed that simplifying and guiding the onboarding process can dramatically boost conversions.

In one B2B SaaS, a daunting 27-step signup was cut to 6 essential steps by deferring setup tasks until later and letting new users choose their first goal. They asked, “What do you want to do first?”, options like “Send an invoice” or “Scan a receipt”, and only collected company details at a logical point later in the flow.

The impact was huge: users reached their desired outcome faster, and trial drop-offs plummeted.

In fact, an anonymised DataDab study found that 60% of trial users were dropping off during a complicated onboarding, but refocusing on one core task with interactive checklists cut drop-off to under 25% and lifted trial conversion by 15%.

The takeaway: streamline onboarding to deliver value quickly, and you’ll convert more users into happy customers.

Expansion & Sales-Assist Levers

Initial activation is just the beginning; next comes driving expansion. These levers fuel viral growth and upsells from within the product, while smartly involving sales or RevOps when a human touch can accelerate big deals.

Built-in viral invites:

Every workflow in your product should subtly encourage users to bring others on board. Viral expansion is a hallmark of PLG winners. If your tool has collaborative elements, prompt users to invite teammates or share content at natural points.

Examples: a project management app can suggest “Invite your team to assign tasks” after a project is created, or a communication tool might offer “Get a free month for each colleague who joins.”

Make the invite frictionless (one-click to send an email or link) and highlight the benefit (“It’s better with your team!”). By baking viral loops in-app, each new user can lead to multiple others.

This not only lowers your customer acquisition cost but also embeds your product deeper into each organisation. The goal is to turn one engaged user into a conduit for organic growth.

Self-serve upgrade path + sales overlay:

Empower users to self-upgrade at any time, but also have a sales-assist safety net for high-value opportunities. In practice, this means your app has a clear upgrade menu or pricing page accessible in-app where a user can swipe a credit card and get more, whether it’s a bigger plan or add-on features.

At the same time, instrument your product to flag “Product-Qualified Leads” (PQLs), users or accounts showing signs that they could be big customers (e.g. heavy usage, multiple team members, hitting limits frequently).

Those PQLs can trigger alerts to your sales team via CRM integration (e.g. send a lead to HubSpot or Salesforce when a trial account hits the usage threshold that correlates with enterprise plans).

That’s where a sales overlay comes in: a salesperson might reach out to offer a tailored plan or assist the account through procurement. The key is to let smaller deals go through self-serve untouched (efficient growth), while catching whales in a net of human help.

Many PLG companies achieve this by connecting product analytics with their CRM and having RevOps define the rules. This hybrid approach ensures you don’t leave big money on the table. (Remember, product is only responsible for upsells ~10% of the time today, – there’s still 90% of upsell revenue often requiring a human touch, so let the product do its thing and loop in sales when it makes sense.)

In-app messaging & product tours:

One of the most underused GTM levers in SaaS is in-app messaging; surprisingly, many companies still rely only on email or external marketing to engage users.

A recent industry index found that nearly half of companies haven’t adopted in-product engagement tools, meaning a majority are not leveraging their product as a direct communication channel.

This is a huge missed opportunity.

By using in-app messages (via slideouts, chat widgets, notifications), you can drive product adoption and expansion at exactly the right moments.

For example, when user activity drops, a subtle in-app message can offer help or highlight a feature they haven’t tried. When a user achieves a milestone (e.g. 10 tasks completed), an in-app modal can suggest “Time to upgrade for [some benefit]?” within the celebratory message.

Product tours can periodically introduce new features or deeper use cases to existing users (“New Feature just released, take a 2-minute tour!”). The beauty of in-app comms is that they reach users when they’re in the product mindset, which means higher relevance and engagement.

Modern PLG tech stacks use tools like Intercom, Customer.io, or Userpilot to automate these contextual nudges. The result: higher feature adoption, more upsells, and a user base that feels taken care of.

Bottom line: if you’re not talking to your users inside the product, you’re leaving growth on the table. Start triggering those in-app messages for onboarding, upselling, and re-engagement, and watch your expansion metrics climb.

Note: When layering in a sales-assist motion, ensure your RevOps team is in the loop. Revenue Operations will need to connect the dots between product signals and sales actions, defining which usage metrics qualify a lead, setting up routing in your CRM, etc.

With a solid RevOps foundation, this product-led + sales-assisted hybrid can accelerate deals without chaos. For truly PLG-oriented companies, RevOps isn’t optional; it emerges as a crucial function to orchestrate data and ensure no PQL slips through the cracks.

Intelligence & Feedback Loops

Data is the lifeblood of PLG. These levers equip your product and team with continuous insights, so you know what users are doing, where they get stuck, and how they feel. Armed with this, product and marketing teams (and CFOs) can make smarter decisions to boost conversion and retention.

Instrument events from day zero:

Don’t bolt analytics on later; build it into the MVP. From the moment a user signs up, your product should track key actions and usage patterns (without violating privacy, of course).

Whether you use tools like Amplitude, Mixpanel, PostHog, or a homegrown solution, ensure that every “aha” moment, every drop-off point, and every upgrade click is logged.

Why is this so critical?

Because you can’t improve what you don’t measure, if you don’t know that 40% of users never get past step 3 of onboarding, you can’t fix it. Shockingly, most companies are still flying blind on these metrics; only ~26% track their activation rate or similar PLG metrics.

By instrumenting your product early, you create a feedback loop: the data will tell you what features drive conversion, which segments retain better, and where users struggle.

This intelligence allows your growth team to iterate fast. In short, your product should come with its own “analytics DNA” and treat event tracking as a first-class feature of the product.

In-app micro-surveys & NPS:

Quantitative data is great, but pair it with qualitative signals from users. Embed tiny surveys or feedback prompts at strategic points in the user journey to capture sentiment and intentions.

One popular approach is the in-app NPS (Net Promoter Score) prompt – e.g. after a user has been active for 30 days, ask “How likely are you to recommend us?” with a 0–10 scale, plus an optional comment.

This gives you a pulse on customer satisfaction and loyalty in-product (often more accurate than emailed surveys). Beyond NPS, use one-question micro-surveys: “Did you accomplish what you came to do today? [Yes/No]”, or a quick emoji-based feedback after using a new feature (“How was this experience? 😃 😐 😢”).

These take seconds for the user, but the insights are gold for your product and customer success teams. You might discover, for instance, that users are unhappy with a workflow (low scores or angry comments come in), prompting a redesign before churn creeps up.

Also, by making feedback easy to give in-app, you show users you care,  and you often catch issues that wouldn’t trigger a support ticket.

Segmentation hooks for personalisation:

Not all users are alike, so your product should dynamically adapt where possible. Build (or integrate) a segmentation engine that tags users by attributes and behaviours, then use those segments to personalise GTM efforts.

For example, automatically tag an account’s industry, size, or the role of the user (you can ask at signup or infer from usage). Also segment by behaviour: who has logged in last week vs. dormant, who has used Feature X, who is on the free plan vs. paid, etc.

With these segments in place, you can do magic: marketing can send targeted in-app messages or emails that speak directly to that user’s context (a “We noticed you love Feature X – here’s a guide to advanced usage” to power users, vs. a “Here’s how to get started with Feature X” to those who haven’t tried it).

Likewise, product can release new features to a beta segment first, or show different dashboard content by role. If you have a Customer Data Platform (CDP) like Segment feeding data in, all the better – it can sync these segments across tools.

The result is a more personalised product experience that feels tailor-made, which drives deeper engagement. Plus, segmentation helps identify expansion opportunities: e.g. if an account’s usage is spiking (flag as “growing account”), your CS or sales team can proactively reach out with an upgrade offer at just the right time.

In summary, bake segmentation into your GTM strategy so every user gets the right touch at the right time, automatically.

Pricing & Experimentation Levers

Last but not least, a PLG product needs the flexibility to evolve. These levers ensure you can adapt pricing, packaging, and user experience on the fly to maximise growth, a priority for product managers and even CFOs seeking optimal monetisation.

Entitlements & feature flags built-in:

Design your product architecture to handle tiered access and on/off switches for features from the start. This “entitlement engine” means the product knows which features or limits apply to which plan, and you can change those settings without code changes.

Why is this a growth lever? Because it lets you run pricing and packaging experiments with agility.

Want to move a certain feature from the Premium tier down to the Free tier for a month to see if it boosts conversion? Flip a setting.

Need to create a new intermediate plan with limits in between existing plans? Just configure it.

By having feature gating baked in, your team can respond to market feedback or test new offers in days, not development cycles. Many SaaS startups delay this and end up with hard-coded “if(plan==gold)” spaghetti, which makes iteration slow.

Instead, treat your pricing model as part of the product: a flexible system you can tweak at will. In essence, code your pricing logic into the product in a modular way. This enables rapid monetisation experiments and tier changes that could significantly lift ARR without waiting for the next major release.

A/B testing in-app:

We all A/B test our landing pages and email subject lines, so why not apply the same rigour inside the product? Embrace experimentation for your in-app flows and GTM triggers.

For example, you might test two different upgrade prompt designs: one that’s a subtle banner vs. one that’s a modal dialogue – which yields more conversions?

Or experiment with trial lengths and see which maximises paid conversions (some research found a 7-day free trial outperformed a 30-day trial, boosting subscriptions by ~5.6%).

With a culture of experimentation, you make decisions based on data, not assumptions. Implement a framework (homegrown or using tools like Optimizely or LaunchDarkly) to roll out tests to a subset of users.

This could be as simple as testing a new onboarding flow on 50% of signups to measure activation lift, or as advanced as multivariate tests on pricing page language.

The point is, treat the in-app experience as a living, optimisable funnel. Continuous testing can lead to surprising wins.  Perhaps a different call-to-action text could yield significantly more upgrades, or a redesigned feature tutorial could double adoption. Without testing, you’d never know.

So empower your team to try bold ideas on a small scale, measure outcomes, and then roll out winners to everyone. This lever keeps your product’s growth engine constantly tuned and improving, much like an e-commerce site optimises its checkout.

Freemium “ceiling” transparency:

If you have a free plan or free trial, be very clear about what else is available just beyond their current usage, tease the next step. Too many companies hide premium features or don’t communicate the value of upgrading until the user hits a hard stop. Instead, use the product interface to continuously and subtly market the paid offering.

Examples: show locked features in the UI with a lock icon that, when clicked, explains the benefit (“Available on Pro: Custom Reports, unlock deeper insights”).

Or in a free user’s dashboard, have a section like “Imagine what you could do with [Premium Feature] – Upgrade to try it.”

The idea is not to annoy free users, but to inspire them by demonstrating what’s possible if they invest. Freemium works best when users clearly see the ceiling of the free experience and the richer world beyond.

Give them tastefully-timed reminders of the extra value they’d get by upgrading. Perhaps even allow temporary access to premium features as a teaser (overlaps with the auto-trial lever).

The goal: convert latent desire into action by ensuring the upgrade path is never out of sight. As a rule, tease value, don’t completely hide it in a black box.

Users should constantly feel, “I love what I can do so far… and I can unlock even more if I upgrade.” When done right, this creates FOMO for your paid features and nudges users to ascend naturally when they’re ready.

Bottom line: A true PLG-ready product isn’t just a bundle of features; it’s a revenue engine in code. The levers above help your SaaS product onboard itself, monetise itself, expand itself, and even tell you how to improve it.

If you’re launching a product-led business, bake these capabilities into your app from the outset rather than tacking them on later. That includes choosing the right tools (e.g. adopting a customer engagement platform like Customer.io for in-app messaging over a traditional email-only tool) and planning the user journey with growth loops in mind.

The reward is huge: you can confidently drive top-of-funnel acquisition (even pour on the ads) knowing your product will convert, retain, and expand those users efficiently on its own.

In a world where 58% of companies are trying some form of PLG, simply having a good product isn’t enough; you need these in-app GTM levers to truly unlock scalable, efficient growth.

Ready to accelerate your PLG strategy and ascend to new growth heights? Talk to our team, hit the button in the menu or the form in the footer.

FAQs: PLG In-App GTM Levers

Q1: What are “in-app GTM levers” in product-led growth?

A1: In-app go-to-market levers are the built-in product features and tactics that drive your user acquisition, conversion, and expansion from within the product itself (rather than via external sales or marketing alone). Essentially, they’re the mechanisms that let your product “sell itself.”

Examples include usage-based upgrade prompts, in-app onboarding guides, feature trials, and automated messaging. Each lever serves as a touchpoint to either enhance the user experience or encourage a next step (like upgrading or inviting others).

In a PLG strategy, these levers replace or augment traditional GTM efforts,  so instead of a sales rep convincing the user to convert, an in-app nudge or seamless upgrade flow does the job. The result is a more scalable growth model: the product becomes the primary vehicle for reaching and converting customers.

Q2: How do in-app levers drive revenue growth without a heavy sales team?

A2: They enable a self-serve sales motion by guiding users to value and prompting monetisation opportunities contextually. For instance, rather than relying on a salesperson to upsell a customer, an in-app lever like a usage cap prompt can offer an upgrade at the perfect moment (when the user actually needs more). This often leads to faster conversions; users can upgrade in one click when they hit limits or want a locked feature, translating to immediate revenue.

In-app levers also improve retention and expansion: a well-crafted onboarding (lever) means more users activate (more will eventually pay), and built-in viral invites mean users bring you new customers for free. All of this drives growth without needing a proportional increase in sales headcount.

Importantly, these levers handle the timing and targeting that a sales team traditionally would; the product knows when a user is ready to convert or expand and intervenes right then. The outcome is growth that’s faster and often more cost-efficient.

Many PLG companies find they reach a healthy >100% net revenue retention largely through product-driven expansions and upsells, with sales only involved for the largest deals or complex use cases.

Q3: What tools or tech stack do we need to implement these in-app GTM levers?

A3: The good news is you don’t have to build everything from scratch; a rich PLG tech ecosystem exists. To implement analytics and event tracking (the foundation of many levers), products like Mixpanel, Amplitude, or PostHog are popular for capturing user actions and conversion funnels.

For in-app onboarding tours, tooltips, and guides, you can use Appcues, Userpilot, Pendo, or Chameleon. These allow you to create walkthroughs and prompts without coding. In-app messaging can be powered by customer communication platforms like Intercom or Customer.io, which trigger messages based on user behaviour (far more real-time than traditional marketing automation).

Feature gating, trials, and entitlements often leverage your billing system. Integrating Stripe or Chargebee early on helps for seamless upgrades and trials (many startups also build a simple internal feature flag system or use LaunchDarkly for controlling access).

Additionally, a Customer Data Platform (CDP) like Segment can be invaluable for piping user data to all these tools and keeping things in sync. And don’t forget integration with CRM if you have sales, connecting product usage data into HubSpot or Salesforce ensures PQLs get followed up.

In summary, a typical PLG stack might include: product analytics, an in-app engagement platform, a billing/subscription management tool, and possibly a CDP and CRM. Each company’s needs differ, but the goal is the same: a well-orchestrated system where product usage triggers the right experiences and where you have visibility into the user journey.

Q4: When should we start building these levers into our SaaS product?

A4: As early as possible. Ideally, you consider in-app GTM levers during the product design and initial development phase, baking growth loops into the product’s DNA. That means during MVP planning, you’d already think about onboarding flows, instrumentation for key events, and how upgrades will happen in-app.

If your product is already live without these levers, don’t worry, but start integrating them now rather than later. It’s easier to lay the groundwork when your user base and codebase are smaller than to retrofit a complex product with tracking and new flows down the line.

Early-stage SaaS teams that plan for PLG levers from the outset often find they can accelerate much faster once they hit the market, because the product itself is ready to capture demand and convert users efficiently.

That said, implementation can be iterative, you might first introduce a basic onboarding guide, then add usage-triggered emails, then later more sophisticated in-app prompts as you see where users struggle.

The key is to not treat these as “nice-to-have” add-ons for some future roadmap; they are core to your go-to-market success. Every new feature you add should consider: how will the user learn this, how might this feature upsell or invite others, and how will we measure its use?

If you adopt that mindset from day one, you’ll build a far more growth-aligned product.

Q5: Does embracing PLG and in-app levers mean we don’t need a sales or marketing team?

A5: Not exactly. It changes their focus rather than eliminating them. In-app levers automate a lot of the traditional sales and marketing tasks for the low end of your market and for initial user onboarding.

That means your marketing team can shift from just pumping out ads and email drips to focusing on product-driven growth (like optimising the in-app experience, creating content that educates users inside the app, etc.).

Your sales team, meanwhile, can focus on high-value opportunities where a human touch is truly needed, often called a “sales-assist” model. For example, sales might engage when a large team starts using the free product heavily (a signal they could become an enterprise deal).

The product will handle the thousands of self-serve sign-ups; sales can concentrate on the top 5-10% of accounts that represent big expansion ARR. Importantly, PLG still benefits from marketing and sales alignment.

Marketing might work on generating awareness and driving sign-ups (top-of-funnel is still needed!), but once in the product, those users are nurtured by the product’s levers instead of by a salesperson.

And marketing teams often take on metrics like activation and PQL generation, which traditionally might have been “post-sale” concerns.

In summary, you still need humans in the loop, especially as you move upmarket. PLG levers free those humans to work smarter. They’ll rely on the product usage data (e.g. PQL signals) to know who to call and when, rather than cold-calling everyone. And they’ll coordinate to ensure the in-app experience and external touchpoints are complementary.

Many of the fastest PLG companies actually have larger sales and marketing teams as they scale – but those teams operate very differently, acting on product insights and focusing on scaling what the product can’t do on its own (complex negotiations, procurement, building partnerships, etc.).

Q6: Is a PLG in-app approach suitable for enterprise or complex B2B products?

A6: It can be, but often as part of a hybrid strategy. Even enterprise-focused SaaS firms are increasingly adopting PLG principles in parts of their business. For a very complex product, you might not be able to deliver full “self-serve” onboarding to a Fortune 500 client with lots of custom requirements, and a sales and solutions engineering team will still be involved.

However, you can use in-app levers for smaller teams or pilot users within those enterprises. Many enterprise SaaS offer a free tier or sandbox that individuals or teams can try (PLG motion), which then seeds a bigger deal that the enterprise sales team closes.

The in-app levers in that scenario might drive virality within a department, demonstrate quick value, and create internal champions – making the eventual enterprise sale much easier (essentially the product is doing the pre-sales work).

Additionally, in-app GTM levers can greatly enhance customer success and upsells after an enterprise deal is signed. For instance, once an enterprise is onboarded, in-app prompts can help different user personas discover relevant features, driving deeper adoption (which leads to renewal and expansion).

So, product-led techniques absolutely have a place in complex B2B sales, but often you’ll blend them with traditional high-touch tactics. One more point: implementing PLG levers can actually simplify parts of a complex product.

If you design a smoother self-serve onboarding for smaller customers, that often results in a better UX for your enterprise users too (who says enterprise users enjoy 100-page manuals and training sessions?).

In short, enterprise SaaS can leverage PLG levers to complement their sales efforts; it’s not just for simple or SMB products. Many successful companies run a dual motion: product-led at the top of the funnel and for expansion within accounts, and sales-led for the big contracts.

Q7: How do we measure the success of our in-app GTM levers and PLG strategy?

A7: You’ll want to track a mix of product usage metrics and business outcomes. Key metrics include Activation Rate (what percentage of new users reach the key “aha” action or set of actions in a given time frame). A rising activation rate often indicates your onboarding levers are working.

Time-to-Value (TTV) is another one: how quickly do users hit that productive moment? Shorter TTV tends to mean higher conversion. On the revenue side, look at Conversion Rate from free to paid (or trial to paid). If your in-app upsells and prompts are effective, you should see a healthy portion of users converting without sales intervention.

PQLs (Product-Qualified Leads) count and conversion is a metric if you hand off to sales – how many PQLs does the product generate and how many turn into customers, which measures how well the product and sales assist are working together.

For expansion, Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is king. Are your existing users growing their usage (NRR > 100%) or not? Good PLG levers (like up-sell prompts and excellent engagement) drive NRR up, as more users expand accounts or move to higher tiers over time.

Also track Feature Adoption Rates for major features, if you launch a new in-app guide for Feature X, does usage of Feature X increase among new users?

And don’t forget qualitative measures: your NPS scores or satisfaction surveys over time can reflect if users feel guided and supported by the product.

A practical approach is creating a PLG dashboard that might show, for example: week 1 activation %, 30-day conversion %, PQL volume, upgrade prompt CTR (click-through-rate) and conversion, average revenue per user (ARPU) trend, and retention curve. Improvement in those metrics after implementing new levers is how you know it’s working.

One caution: keep an eye on the user experience too; if you overdo prompts and experiments, you could see engagement metrics dip or feedback turn negative. So it’s a balance. But overall, success will show up as more users converting faster, sticking around longer, and expanding their spend, all observable through the metrics above.