Worksheet
The emergence of the Product-Led Growth model has forever changed how we build, sell, and deliver software products to our target market. This try-before-you-buy model has also demanded that we change the way we operate a software business. One of these ways - and the focus of this post - is the way in which we qualify our “leads.”
In this course, you’ll learn:
Wes Bush:
The big question here is, while this might sound all great and everything, but how do you really identify what a PQL is for your business? Now, I've helped lots of companies identify what their product qualified lead is, but what I often find is that most companies try and over-complicate it. We want to run all the data, we want to run all these tests to really pick and identify what your product qualified lead is.
Wes Bush:
Although that might be helpful to some degree, a lot of times it comes down to analysis paralysis. In my experience, you can get actually pretty darn close to what your PQL will be by just thinking through it, and thinking through your user's lens, and actually asking your users. I'll give you an example here.
Wes Bush:
This is what we refer to as the straight-line onboarding experience. Essentially, it is the minimum number of steps someone needs to go through in order to use your product. Most products follow some sort of journey like this. Someone visits your website. Then the next step is they'll sign up. Then in the onboarding experience, they have a quick win. Maybe that is uploading a script to their websites. Then eventually, they can start having those live chat conversations on their website after using a product like Drift or Intercom or something like that. At that point, they get to that 100 conversations that really fully activated using the products. We eventually help them get to end-user success, which if it's a live chat software solution, that might be more deals closed or something else, but that's the straight-line onboarding experience.
Wes Bush:
How this relates to your product by lead, is because when we think of in between the quick win and full activation, what does someone have to do? Your PQL is going to be that activation moment. Maybe in this case, to go back to my example around uploading the script. That is one step around the way on getting there, but that's not a product qualified lead. It's really about the activation.
Wes Bush:
If it's 100 conversations someone has on their team, at that point they understand, "Okay," that is when they experience the value the product, or if it's Slack, that's the 10,000 message limit. If it's Facebook, it's the seven friends. Think about what does someone need to do and experience in our product for them to get a really good handle on the value of the product? That is the activation moment. That is more or less what you can define, or at least start to define what your product qualified lead looks like.
Wes Bush:
Then how you prioritize them internally is really up to you. If you look at your product qualified lead and just the product data lens, that's helpful, but it's also really intuitive to bring in not just the product data, but also the demographic, firmographic data is you define your product qualified leads so that your sales team, if you have one, you can really start prioritizing. Okay, the bigger accounts who do you activate? We're going to give them a little bit of a different experience than maybe the small team that just has two people. We're not going to prioritize them just as much through this experience. Does that mean we don't offer them support? No. If they reach out, we do support them and we do help them, but it's just in terms of how we allocate resources internally to help these users succeed. Obviously, we can do a lot more if there's a bigger deal at the end of the day that we can help these folks with.
Wes Bush:
I hope this helps you identify what a product qualified lead is as well as what this could look like for your business, because the big thing that you need to take away is that that activation moment, that point when someone understands the value of your product, that should be your product qualified lead metric. That's what you should track internally because every team can look at that metric, takeaway something and have some value. When you start tracking this, here's what's going to happen. Because you're tracking end user success, your team, your entire organization actually, is going to get much more focused on how can we accelerate this? How can we help more of our users become successful with [inaudible 00:04:26] our products? That's the challenge for you after this video. Define what your product qualified lead metric is, and to start tracking it, start sharing this metric with other teams because you will start seeing other people think differently about your users.
Wes Bush:
They're not just these faceless people. No. At the end of the day, it's about how can we change them? How can we help them experience these outcomes in our products? Because that's why we're around. Our whole product, our whole team, our whole organization is here to serve, not just to sell and sure if we get very crystal clear and identifying the product qualified lead, sales will come, but it will only come in a product led model when we start leading with value. I hope that's helpful, and do let me know if you have any questions around how to identify your product qualified lead metric.
