Part 3 — Trial, demo, or both: choosing your conversion event
Let ACV pick the funnel, use friction deliberately, and optimize to the event that predicts revenue — not the cheapest one.
Your conversion event is the contract between marketing and the bidding algorithm: whatever you define as success, the machine will buy more of. Choose a shallow event and the machine drowns sales in noise; choose a deep one and campaigns starve for signal. The trial-vs-demo decision is really the choice of where on that spectrum your economics can afford to sit.
ACV decides, mostly
- Sub-$5k ACV: self-serve trial or freemium. Sales-touch per deal is unaffordable; the product must sell itself and campaigns optimize to activation-predictive events.
- $5k-$25k ACV: the contested middle. Product-qualified trials with sales assist usually beat pure demo walls; test both and let payback per funnel decide.
- $25k+ ACV: demo/sales funnel. The buyer expects a conversation; the trial would under-serve the evaluation anyway. Campaigns optimize to qualified meetings, and lead quality dominates lead cost.
Friction is a bidding instrument
Form length, work-email requirements, and qualifying questions are not UX debates — they are signal filters that change what the algorithm learns. Every field you add raises cost per lead and raises lead quality; the correct amount of friction is whatever makes your optimization event predict revenue. High-ACV funnels should qualify hard and pass only sales-accepted signals back; the mechanics of bidding when not every lead is equal transfer to SaaS wholesale.
Optimize to the deepest event with sufficient volume
The working rule: pick the deepest funnel event that still clears roughly 30 conversions a month, and value it honestly. Raw signups clear volume but predict nothing; closed-won predicts everything but arrives at a trickle months later. The practical middle — activation milestones, PQLs, sales-accepted demos — usually wins. Import offline outcomes so the platform eventually learns from revenue itself (part 5 covers the plumbing), and size what each event is worth with the free lead value calculator. You are always buying pipeline, not leads.
Audit question for your current setup: does a 20% improvement in your optimization event reliably produce more revenue a quarter later? If you cannot answer, part 5 is where the answer gets built.