Case Study: Online Software as a Service (SaaS) Company achieves 25% trial-to-paid conversion and stops trial abuse with Splunk

How Splunk Software Helps to Effectively Convert Sales Leads Into Paying Customers

A cloud-based SaaS company that provides hosted virtual training environments faced a flood of free-trial signups but had no way to tell which users were genuinely interested, which marketing campaigns produced the best leads, or which accounts were abusing the trial system. Sales teams were overwhelmed—receiving hundreds of undifferentiated leads daily—while conversion rates remained around 2% and infrastructure costs rose due to fraudulent or excessive trial usage.

By deploying Splunk Enterprise to ingest and analyze web and application logs, the company created an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) scoring system, built real-time dashboards, and integrated ranked leads into its CRM. Sales focused on top-scoring trials while lower-scoring users received automated outreach, and alerts enabled immediate action on abuse. Results: leads-to-sales conversion rose from 2% to 25% for prioritized prospects, an MQL=1 user had about a 50% buy probability, roughly 50% of fraudulent users were converted to paying customers, and compute costs and marketing ROI improved.