We have recently added a free account tier to our offering. As our users sign up, I am having trouble deciding how best to categorize them in order to be able to extract meaningful data on conversions to paid accounts. I'm wondering if others who have free accounts could share how they categorize these users? Are they "leads", "opportunities" or "customers". I know there isn't really a wrong answer, I'm just looking to find out what has worked for others with a setup similar to ours.
I think you're right that there isn't a single right or wrong answer, here. Consistency is the most important thing.
That said, I think we can do some process of elimination here:
I would rule out Opportunity right away. Opportunity typically refers to people your sales team is actively working with, and my guess is that you don't need (or want) your sales team to actively reach out to every single free user on an ongoing basis. To avoid adding noise to your sales team's views and pipelines, I'd wait until a freemium user indicates that they want to buy before you make them an Opportunity.
(As an aside, when I say "indicates that they want to buy," that can happen explicitly or implicitly. An explicit indication would be clicking a link that says "Talk to Sales" or "Buy Now." An implicity indication would be bumping up against whatever limits you put on your free users.)
The other two options you mentioned are Lead and Customer. I think one of those will be right. To figure out which one, you'll need to think about what you do with the Customers in your CRM.
Internally at HubSpot, we define Customers as people who are actually paying us money. This is useful for us organizationally because Customers get an assigned Customer Success Manager, Renewal Managers, etc., but free users don't get any of these things. If you have a similar practice, then you'll want to distinguish Customers from free users so that you can make sure all of your Customers are getting assigned account reps etc.
In that case, you would designate your free users as Leads. That makes sense to me because then the progression to Opportunity will be pretty natural.
On the other hand, if aren't assigning speicific employees to individual accounts, it might make a lot of sense to label your free users as Customers. This way, you can send out communications to all users--free and paid--at the same time.
Those are my thoughts on the topic. I hope that helps you come to a decision.
I think you're right that there isn't a single right or wrong answer, here. Consistency is the most important thing.
That said, I think we can do some process of elimination here:
I would rule out Opportunity right away. Opportunity typically refers to people your sales team is actively working with, and my guess is that you don't need (or want) your sales team to actively reach out to every single free user on an ongoing basis. To avoid adding noise to your sales team's views and pipelines, I'd wait until a freemium user indicates that they want to buy before you make them an Opportunity.
(As an aside, when I say "indicates that they want to buy," that can happen explicitly or implicitly. An explicit indication would be clicking a link that says "Talk to Sales" or "Buy Now." An implicity indication would be bumping up against whatever limits you put on your free users.)
The other two options you mentioned are Lead and Customer. I think one of those will be right. To figure out which one, you'll need to think about what you do with the Customers in your CRM.
Internally at HubSpot, we define Customers as people who are actually paying us money. This is useful for us organizationally because Customers get an assigned Customer Success Manager, Renewal Managers, etc., but free users don't get any of these things. If you have a similar practice, then you'll want to distinguish Customers from free users so that you can make sure all of your Customers are getting assigned account reps etc.
In that case, you would designate your free users as Leads. That makes sense to me because then the progression to Opportunity will be pretty natural.
On the other hand, if aren't assigning speicific employees to individual accounts, it might make a lot of sense to label your free users as Customers. This way, you can send out communications to all users--free and paid--at the same time.
Those are my thoughts on the topic. I hope that helps you come to a decision.
Thanks so much for this thorough answer! You have given me a lot to think about. We have only just recently opened public access to our platform so we're still figuring a lot of things out. Your suggestions for free customers being leads, who then transition to opportunities based on their actions (and then ultimately customers when they pay) makes the most sense for us, I think. Now I need to bug our developers to see if we can track usage in HubSpot a bit better to trigger the lead -> opportunity transition.
