Okay, so you want to do Product-Led Sales?

PQL or product-qualified lead is all the rage in the #PLG space these days. But have you tried to build one for your product?

Whoever has tried doing this knows how difficult it is to build a PQL.

First up, what is a PQL?
A product-qualified lead is a customer showing a higher propensity to buy your product based on their engagement with it. It is demonstrated as a lead score often used by Sales teams to target the right customers.
(Note: this definition assumes the product has a free trial or free plan to derive engagement for the lead scoring)

Let’s look at what makes it so challenging to develop a PQL:

1. Lack of unified data between Sales, Marketing, and Product
• Sales uses Salesforce or Hubspot, Marketing uses Google Analytics, and Product more often fires events in Amplitude / Pendo/Mixpanel.
• For these tools to talk to each other, data architecture has to be very well thought out from the beginning. Even if data architecture is consistent across these tools, none of these tools show a unified view of the customer.
• Product data has to be piped into custom Salesforce fields to make it usable by the Sales teams. That requires adequate training of Sales teams, ongoing maintenance by engineers and results in higher CRM costs.

2. Defining a PQL
• Just like defining activation (I wrote about defining activation in an earlier post - find the link in the comments below), defining a PQL has to be an experimental approach. You need to start with a definition, use it to target customers, and see how it performs in terms of Sales conversion.
• Companies use Tableau charts or other BI dashboards or lead-scoring ML models that need to be updated continually based on the Sales feedback for the definition to be valuable.
• The process is highly resource-intensive for the data team, and these tools generally see very low adoption from Sales teams.

3. Operationalizing a PQL:
• Even if you’ve successfully addressed 1 and 2 above, the challenges don’t end there. In a product-led world, everyone needs to embrace the idea of efficient customer acquisition.
• Thus, to successfully operationalize a PQL, you need strong buy-in from the Sales and RevOps teams. A successful PQL Sales motion requires deep and continual collaboration between the Product and the Sales teams.
• Sub-optimal tools and data will not see enough adoption from the Sales teams breaking the feedback loop for the Product teams, which will ultimately lead to a PQL that’s not valuable at all.

Thus, building a PQL is hard because there is no one correct way of doing it. Companies need to experiment and iterate on what approach works best for them.

Are you using PQLs in your org? I want to learn more. Please share your thoughts below.