--- title: "Upgrade Readiness Score — Expansion Growth Tactic" description: "Maintains a continuous expansion-intent score for every subscriber, feeding downstream growth tactics and a watchlist of who to pitch, who to talk to, and who to leave alone." canonical: "https://churnkey.co/growth/library/upgrade-readiness-score" category: "growth" related: - /growth/library/index.html.md - /growth/library/methodology.html.md - /feature/customer-health.html.md - /tools/dollar-retention-rate-calculator.html.md last_updated: "2026-06-09" --- # Upgrade Readiness Score Maintains a continuous expansion-intent score for every subscriber, feeding downstream growth tactics and a watchlist of who to pitch, who to talk to, and who to leave alone. - **Stage:** Expansion - **Evidence grade:** validated (replicated across many companies) - **Evidence:** 62 percent of expansion events caught, with a 1.7× conversion gain from the combined score - **Trigger type:** Scheduled - **Channels:** webhook ## What is it? Most expansion programs run on anecdote: the account a CSM happens to know, the subscriber who happens to write in. This tactic replaces the anecdote with a continuous per-subscriber expansion-intent score that combines integrations adoption, billing-page visits, settings activity, and feature breadth, recomputed on a schedule for every subscriber. It is infrastructure as much as a play. The score feeds downstream growth tactics that need a readiness signal to fire well, and it maintains an operator watchlist that sorts the base into three honest buckets: who to pitch, who to talk to, and who to leave alone. ## When it fires The tactic runs on a schedule rather than an event. Every subscriber gets rescored as usage data accumulates, and score changes propagate through a webhook feed to whatever consumes them: downstream tactics, the CRM, the operator dashboard. The watchlist is the human half. High-and-rising scores belong in front of an operator while the intent is fresh. Flat scores justify leaving the subscriber in peace. The leave-alone bucket is a feature, not a gap. Unprompted subscribers who were never going to expand cost nothing, while mistimed pitches to them cost goodwill. ## What the evidence shows The combined score catches 62 percent of expansion events and converts at 1.7 times the rate of untargeted outreach. That is measured performance across product usage data and a 110M+-subscription dataset, not a backtest on one product. The components have their own evidence. Billing-page visits run 477 percent above baseline ahead of an upgrade, and integrations adoption carries a 376 percent gain among upgraders, the strongest single expansion signal in the dataset. The combined score exists because no single signal is sufficient, and together they are. ## How it runs In production, the tactic recomputes scores daily, emits changes over the webhook feed, and maintains the watchlist with movement flags: who crossed a band, who is rising fast, who went quiet. Downstream tactics read the score as an input. Operators read the watchlist as a queue. Guardrails keep the score trustworthy: subscribers without enough usage data are marked unscored rather than scored badly, score bands are operator-tunable, and the feed carries the contributing signals alongside the number so a consumer can see why a score moved. ## Run it with the Churnkey MCP This tactic runs via the Churnkey MCP. Connect it to your favorite AI agent and it reads your own usage and billing data, then recommends and runs the plays most likely to move your LTV — starting with whether this one fits. **Trigger:** Scheduled recomputation: every subscriber’s expansion-intent score is rebuilt daily from integrations adoption, billing-page visits, settings activity, and feature breadth. **Surface:** Webhook feed of score changes and band crossings, consumed by downstream growth tactics, the CRM, and the operator watchlist. **Guardrails:** - Coverage honesty: subscribers without enough usage data are emitted as unscored, never given a default score that reads as signal. - Explainability: every score change ships with its contributing signals, so consumers can see why a subscriber moved. - Separation of concerns: this tactic scores and feeds. It never contacts a subscriber directly, since outreach belongs to the tactics and operators consuming the feed. - Band discipline: watchlist bands are operator-set, and the leave-alone bucket is respected by downstream consumers rather than treated as a backlog to work through. **Evidence:** The combined readiness score catches 62 percent of expansion events and converts at 1.7 times the rate of untargeted outreach. The component signals hold up on their own: pre-upgrade billing-page visits run 477 percent above baseline, and integrations adoption carries a 376 percent gain among upgraders, the strongest single expansion signal in the dataset. Measured across product usage data and a 110M+-subscription dataset. **How to run it:** 1. Instrument the four component signals per subscriber: integrations adoption, billing-page visits, settings activity, and feature breadth. 2. Build the combined expansion-intent score from historical expansion outcomes. Recompute it for every subscriber daily. 3. Emit score changes and band crossings over a webhook feed, with contributing signals attached to every event. 4. Maintain the operator watchlist from the score bands (pitch, talk to, leave alone), with movement flags for fast risers. 5. Mark subscribers below the usage-data coverage floor as unscored and exclude them from bands until coverage improves. 6. Track catch rate against realized expansion events and the conversion gain of score-targeted outreach versus untargeted. Retune the score weights against those outcomes. Install the MCP server: ```bash npm install -g @churnkey/mcp ``` The full reference is in the [Churnkey MCP docs](https://docs.churnkey.co/data-integrations/mcp). ## Related - [Growth Tactics Library](/growth/library/index.html.md) — The full register of graded growth plays. - [How Tactics Are Graded](/growth/library/methodology.html.md) — The four-grade evidence ladder behind this grade. - [Customer Health](/feature/customer-health.html.md) — The Churnkey feature this tactic maps to in production. - [Dollar retention rate calculator](/tools/dollar-retention-rate-calculator.html.md) — Related calculator.