Top 10 mistakes in creating Product-Qualified Leads (PQLs)
Product-led growth is revolutionizing the way businesses operate. Companies like Slack, Dropbox, Canva, Calendly and many developer tools such as Segment, and DataDog have helped to popularize its use with their widespread success in providing customers with free trials or freemium products that garner immediate value - not only driving customer acquisition but creating loyal users for life. Despite this breakthrough, these companies must carefully manage their Go To Market strategies in order to capitalize on product-led growth's many benefits. Continue reading to find out What are top 10 mistakes in creating Product-Qualified Leads (PQLs)
What is a PQL?
To make the most of customer conversions, product-qualified leads (PQLs) are a must. By assessing their interactions with your offering through trials and freemium models, PQLs can identify when potential customers are in an ideal state for investing – allowing you to capitalize on the momentum of that engagement.
So, let's dive into all the issues that we have seen at Humanic with our customers.
1. Creating PQL's before you have enough Signs ups
Generating user interest in your product is no easy feat - it requires a comprehensive approach to problem-solving. By providing an effective solution that lots of users need and are willing to pay for, backed by a well-thought-out inbound marketing plan, you'll ensure consistent sign-ups over time.
Learn How to measure lead quality? For a detailed understanding of many sign-ups, you need to check out
#2. Ignoring your Never Converted users
PLG companies must remain vigilant of the never converted users they amass as their product fit matures. To ensure resources are not wasted, these users must be accounted for and carefully managed - a task that could see your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) reduced significantly if executed correctly.
#3. Setting up rule-based metrics
Early-stage PLG businesses must utilize clever tactics to remain competitive. Managing users with customized rules can be a challenge; however, distribution-based user personas are an effective way of categorizing those who engage more deeply than the average customer - namely power users within your product's current state.
#4. Not looking for trends
To get the most out of user personas and associated marketing automation, it is essential to look beyond looking at absolute numbers. Trends over time are key in determining how successful our persona definition has been. Monitoring these trends will help ensure we're on track for success!
#5. Ignoring Customer Success and Support Team
Many early-stage PLG companies have unresolved edge cases that a user might find very frustrating. It's easy to understand loops in user activity and route that to the customer success qualified leads team. This is an essential PQL metric for customer delight and adoption.
#6. Creating PQL metrics without attaching them to an action
Crafting a persona with the correct PQL metrics is essential, but without an actionable outcome, it can be useless. To avoid confusion and disorganization among teams, always ensure that before publishing your persona you have set a definitive goal for success.
#7. Using all Signup as a lead list
The moment someone signs up for your product, you should classify that user as a PQL. However, just because someone has met the most basic PQL criteria does not mean you should start targeting them from a sales perspective. There's a big difference between a new user and someone actively leveraging your product.
By targeting everyone that signed up you end up diminishing the brand of your company. The ultimate goal of your PQL definition should be to drive product adoption and feature usage.
#8. Creating personas on accounts as well as users
PLG companies come in four different flavours - the B2C, B2B2C, B2C2B and Marketplaces. Sometimes your product could have more than one flavor. Personas can be created for users which might be across accounts and accounts themselves who fit certain criteria.
#9. Not merging user activity with payment data
By leveraging payment data, it is possible to identify users who have been contentedly paying for the product but not engaging with it. This can provide valuable insight into customer needs and trends, enabling targeted support solutions that increase user satisfaction and activate dormant customers.
#10. Not learning and iterating your persona criteria
To keep your product's growth trajectory on track, it is important to constantly identify and pursue new users. As the early adopters have already embraced your offering in its current form, expanding further requires evolving the product experience - enticing unexplored segments of potential customers with what you have to offer.
