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:
And so, how can every team use PQLs? This is one of the most important parts to think about because a product qualified lead, in my opinion, I'd argue a product quality lead is a unifying metric because every team can look at it and take away something new. So, your marketing team could just look at product qualified lead metrics and say, "Hey, wait a minute. The events we're sponsoring, they're not actually driving product qualified leads." Whereas you might find that, "Hey, organic traffic is driving a lot of users to our site, but those users have a high likelihood that they are turning into happy paying customers because we're monitoring them and they are using the product, getting value from the products.
Wes Bush:
And they're turning into these product qualified leads." So that's super important for marketing teams to monitor. And your sales team can really look at your product qualified leads and say to themselves, "Hey, this person has experienced the value of the product. They're a good fit because well, once people have experienced about other products, the majority of the selling has already taken place." The user at that point has convinced themselves hopefully that this product can solve their needs. And the next step is really just how can we continue to service of this product? And so when it comes to your product team, what they can use the product for the metric for is really just looking at how quickly are users able to experience the value of the product? Are they actually using parts of the products?
Wes Bush:
That's one of the most common problems, I refer to it as feature [inaudible 00:01:35] and that's when product teams create a bunch of products and features little widgets that just don't get used. And so for the products team, it's very important that we understand what this product qualified lead is and how people are adopting our products. And here's the tricky piece. You might have more than one product qualified lead. If you're a multi-product company, you might want to have a product qualified lead for every single product. So you can monitor how's the adoption of this product and person going through our product. Okay. So your support team, they can really go through this and say, "Hey. People are dropping off at this one rate before they become a product qualified lead. So how can we proactively help them?"
Wes Bush:
I've seen a bunch of other companies do this, where if there's a difficult integration to set up, there's a pop-up on that page, and it says, "Hey, do you need any help? This is a free one hour call with our product expert. And we'll actually walk you through how to set up this integration." How helpful is that. Pop-ups don't have to be terrible. You can actually make them helpful. And so, your sport team can be very critical in helping users throughout that whole process, but they wouldn't know unless you had defined a product qualified lead.
