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.”
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Wes Bush:
So does a PQL just consist of product data? In each of those three examples the answer was yes but that doesn't mean that's entirely encompassing. Because not all product corporate leads were created equal. It really depends on what they do and who they are. And so one of the first elements you should look at that contributes to your PQL metric is the demographic data. So this could be limited to just the job title. You could also expand it out to their company and who they are working for to really get a better picture of, "Okay, if we are dedicating sales resources to this reach out process, is it worth our time or not?" If it's a big company, there might be a big opportunity. If not, well that's okay. Maybe the smaller companies can do the completely self-serve routes. Whereas the bigger companies we're going to help them a bit more build out internal business case for our software.
Wes Bush:
So there's also firmographic data, didn't mention that, but like revenue, that's a good indicator of how big the businesses and number of employees. All right. So the last piece of a PQL is really just about product data. So we are looking for, "Okay, how many folks have actually completed that aha moment within the product where they understand the value of it?" And you can definitely pull data around number of logins, number of users, because those do tell you a full story of what is that account doing. And one of the most important things here too, to be mentioned is terms of seriousness of this product lead is just the velocity of adoption. So if we look at that example of Slack and getting 10,000 messages, if a company is hitting that in two days, you probably either know that they're a spammer or they got their entire team on board with Slack and they're using it religiously already. And if that's the case, that might be an opportune moment to reach out. So it's very important to track velocity of this.
