As a product-led business, you have an unfair advantage over competitors as you have unlimited access to a dominant growth engine and significantly lower CACs. But, it takes an entire team to make the strategy work.
This week, we’ll go over:
Wes Bush:
I encourage you, if you haven't already set up product qualified leads. And we actually have an entire mini lesson on how to identify your own product qualified leads so feel free to dig into that if you want to pause this and go into that section. Or if you want me to just go through a high level view here and give you some examples I'll do that right now but I really do encourage you to go through that mini lesson around product qualified leads since getting this right is so important for your business.
Wes Bush:
So what are some examples of a good PQL? When we think of Drift, a live chat software solution, if someone puts Drift on their website and they have 100 conversations with potential prospects or people just on their site they've identified that that's a really good indicator that this person is going to become a customer because they've experienced the value of the product, they want more. And so, they start measuring that internally. Once someone has that, someone from sales if they're a bigger count will reach out at that point and help them out, help them make that business case internally and add some value. So, that's been super successful.
Wes Bush:
Slack has something similar. Whenever they have 10,000 messages they really look at this and say, "Hey, this person is actually using the product. They're getting a ton of value. Let's make sure that we're able to help them to identify the right person to go out to if we need to help make a sale." Or if it's a smaller account, they might just be looking at that to say, "Hey okay, that took them about a month to get to 10,000 messages and if they want they can upgrade on their own, if not no harm done," if it's a smaller account. If it's a bigger account yes you can definitely have different levels of your product qualified lead because obviously your sales rep's time is valuable so you don't want to go after everyone.
Wes Bush:
So how do we really define PQL for your business? That's once again, please check out that mini lesson as it goes through how to do this for your particular business. But I want you to start thinking about how every team can use PQLs. So let's use that Drift example, getting to 100 live chat conversations on your website. So, your marketing team can use that to measure what campaigns drive active users. If we're sponsoring a lot of events and we realize, "Oh my goodness, sponsoring those parties at the end of the conference that drove zero PQLs." That should show you some red flags that hey maybe that whole strategy wasn't the most effective, maybe it was fun but it wasn't effective.
Wes Bush:
And then we look at your sales team. So they need to identify users who have experienced the value of the product. So when they look at these PQLs they're able to have a very high degree or a very high close rate whenever they're reaching out to these. In fact, that's a really good indicator that you have picked a good PQL metric. So, when I'm thinking of Drift, that same example, they were having a 20 to 30% close rate on their product qualified lead metric. Whenever their sales reps are following up with PQLs, 20 to 30% close rate. It was fantastic.
Wes Bush:
And so, your product team needs to use this metric to really understand how quickly are people able to experience the value of the product. Are they getting stuck in the product experience? Are they even becoming a product qualified lead? If not, that's very concerning and we need to change up the way we are getting people to adopt our product. And then your support team can proactively identify accounts that need help. If they're stuck halfway through they're not quite a PQL. What could they do to offer them more help? Maybe it's offering them a quick call to set up their account or maybe it's automatically if you have a ton of free users sending them self-serve guides where they can just go through this and self-serve and figure out the problem on their own. And so, how do we take this a step further? The one section I really want you to start thinking about is now that we understood what are the main differences for every single team and we have a very common way that we can measure success across all teams...
