 All right. Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's session that is all about product led growth, but more specifically about driving conversion with product qualified leads or, as we like to call them, PQLs. I'm Matthew Wasley, Director of Product Marketing at Gainsight, and personally, I'm really excited to be back with Product School for another webinar, but even more excited this time, because I'm joined by Tori Jeffcoat, who is one of our Senior Product Marketers at Gainsight. Hi, everyone. Great to meet you. And both Tori and I focus on Gainsight PX, which is our project experience solution offering product analytics, user engagements, and user feedback. Now, over the next 25 minutes or so, we're going to be talking about PQLs a lot, but first Tori's going to talk about what they are and why they're important, then she's going to pass it back to me and I'll get into the details of three things you must absolutely do if you want to be successful with them, and then we'll wrap it up with a few key takeaways. So to kick things off, though, in typical Gainsight fashion, we do have a quick icebreaker. So given that we have Halloween right around the corner, you know, our icebreaker today is Tori. What is your favorite candy? You know what? Before I pass it over to you, you know, if I'm thinking about this, if I want something chocolatey, I definitely am a fan of a thousand grand bars. But I also like peanut M&Ms. So over to you, Tori. Thanks, Matthew. My favorite candy, hands down, is Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Any candy with peanut butter always qualifies as good, but Reese's are definitely the best. Speaking of qualifying, I'm really excited to help kick off today and talk a little bit about PLG and product qualified leads or PQLs, what they even are, and why are they so important to product driven strategies, and especially free trial or premium experiences. First, just to level set, I want to make sure we're all aligned on the definition of product live growth, which we define as using your product as the primary vehicle to drive customer acquisition, retention, and expansion. It's a common misconception that product like growth just means free trials or is all about customer acquisition. When in reality, product like growth should influence the entire customer journey, including acquisition, as well as adoption, retention, and expansion. If you're curious to learn more about PLG, we've actually written a lot about this topic and highly recommend checking out our content destination push to production for more. So when we talk about product like growth strategies, we're typically looking at how we can use the product to improve scale, efficiency and cost as we move from sales like growth, typically slower time intensive and really resource heavy to product like growth. Today we'll be diving specifically into how we use product qualified leads or PQLs and how they can help save time and scale customer acquisition or expansion and either product assisted or product led scenarios. Before we go any further, we've defined PLG, but what actually is a PQL? So we define product qualified leads or PQLs as leads that demonstrate buying intent, meaning they've taken actions that express their interest in potentially purchasing your product, determined based either on product interest usage or behavioral data. This definition is actually one that our CTO Mickey along created when he wrote one of the first articles about PQLs with open view several years ago. And it's a definition that's still widely used today. And that blog is actually still seeing tons of traffic. So where does the product fit in the PQLs? When you look at the customer journey flywheel, which is central to product led motions, since the product is used at each stage of the customer journey, PQLs can either be acquisition based or expansion based. Acquisition based PQLs come into play when we talk about PQLs during free trials, where we give users early access to the product, showcase product value and really help solidify why your product is the right fit. Expansion based PQLs on the other hand are already customers who've adopted your product. And instead, we're identifying when customers are ready to expand based on user behavior or health. Expansion based PQLs should also align with customer success and sales team criteria, not just the product team. So why use PQLs and what value do they bring to your product? Our recent PLG index report surveying large and small businesses across verticals about their PLG strategies found that free trial or premium experiences using PQLs resulted in a 2.8 times higher conversion rate than those without PQLs in place. In other words, using PQLs can improve the number of free users that become customers almost three times your current numbers. The downside, the report revealed that only 24% of businesses leverage PQLs and are therefore not seeing the success that PQLs can bring. You may be asking yourself, if PQLs make such an impact, why are less than a quarter of businesses using them? The reality is that it's hard to succeed with PQLs, especially when you don't know where to start. So to help demystify how to implement PQLs effectively, I'm thrilled to hand it back over to Matthew who will help us understand the must do's of using PQLs in your business. All right, awesome. Thank you so much, Tori. And I absolutely love those gifts on the previous slide. Schitt's Creek was definitely one of my binge watches over the past few years and still makes me laugh whenever I watch the reruns. But anyway, hello again, everyone. Now that Tori has set the stage on what PQLs are and how they fit into product-led growth, we're going to talk about three things you can do to really set yourself up for success with PQLs as you begin to think about using your product to drive growth. And here we're looking at exactly what those three things are. And if you do these three things, you'll be well on your way to ensuring that you don't underestimate what it takes to be successful. And that's actually an important thing to call out. On the slide where Tori talked about how conversion rates are nearly three times higher when PQLs are used, that doesn't just happen by luck. Those conversion rates are higher because the businesses that are leveraging PQLs put emphasis on the things that you see here on this slide. The first thing you must do is to set goals and define your funnel stages. Your goals set your direction and your funnel stages begin to outline how that conversion happens. The second thing you must do is to document your entry and exit criteria for each of those stages. This does two things. First, it narrows the scope of the key user behavior that you want to drive. And secondly, it will naturally lead to questions about technical requirements, which brings us to our third thing that you must do, which is understand what your requirements are. And there are a few types of requirements that we're going to talk about in a couple of slides. So let's dive deeper first into setting goals and defining your funnel stages. Now, I don't want to say that setting goals is self explanatory, but I think we all know what setting goals are and why it's important. That being said, if you don't set goals and you happen to move forward without setting them, then you will have trouble focusing your time and resources, especially as things in the future inevitably force you to iterate throughout your PQL process, your trial, your freemium models, whatever it may be, right? So the two questions you absolutely need to ask yourself are, why are we doing this? And what does success look like? And if you have answers to those questions that everyone agrees upon to be true, then and only then can you begin to think about how you're actually going to get there. Now, when it comes to defining your funnel stages, right, this is where you start to outline how that 2.8 times higher conversion rate actually happens. And the reason stages are important are because they create cohorts of users that all have behaved in similar fashions. And once a threshold of behavior and other qualifications have been met, that's what can give you confidence in the quality of the product qualified lead that you generated. So let's take a look at a specific sample here. So here we're looking at a simple example of how a PQL funnel can coexist and work right alongside a traditional marketing funnel. So let's break this down a little bit. And using this legend here on the bottom left, we can see that the gray blocks represent shared stages of both the marketing and PQL funnel. And the white blocks represent for distinct marketing funnel stages. But for for the session, we're all talking about PQL. So let's focus on the pink blocks, which are the distinct stages of the PQL funnel. And here in this example, there are four stages. A prospect enters the funnel when he or she signs up for the trial. They advance to become a confirmed user from there. They advance to become an active user. And then they finally PQL. And what makes this example unique is that once a prospect in the trial becomes a product qualified lead, they then re enter the traditional marketing funnel where the sales team gains visibility and then they have the ability to either accept or decline that PQL. And what we're seeing here really aligns to the product assisted strategy that you saw earlier. And it's a good example of how product can contribute to creating actual pipeline. But once you have this mapped out, the question now becomes how does it prospect or a user advance through the stages of this funnel? And that brings us to our next must do, which is to document your exit criteria for each stage of your PQL funnel. And documenting your exit criteria is extremely important because otherwise your stages mean nothing, right? Without describing them and setting the parameters of entry and exit. They're just meaningless buckets of users. But what makes this part of the process really powerful is that when you lay out your exit criteria, you are essentially documenting what specific user behavior you need to drive and influence within your product. The challenge is, however, that if you make your criteria criteria too strict, then you're limiting the volume and velocity potential of your PQLs. But if you make them to lacks, then they will lack any meaningful qualification, right? Just finding the balance between those two things is key. And that's something that marketing has organizations and teams have had to do with MQLs for for decades. Now, on the screen here, right now, we're taking a look at an example of an expansion PQL framework, but we'll advance slides and we'll use those same funnel stages from the previous slide. And those stages are trial sign up confirmed user, active user and PQL. And if we look a little bit closer at the framework here, you can see the best practices to really describe the stage and outline how a user that exits that stage would then in which progress to the next stage. So we won't go through every single detail here, but let's pick out one row. So we have a really good idea of how documenting how the documenting of exit criteria informs us on the type of behavior that we want to drive from our users within that stage. And I think the best example of or demonstration of this is the example from an active user, a user in that active user stage to finally becoming a product qualified lead. And if we look at the description of active user, it means that essentially a user has a fully completed profile and has logged in within the last 30 days. But how do they become a PQL? And for that answer, we really need to look at the exit criteria for that stage that has been documented. And in this example, we can see that how user behavior and product adoption can be used to qualify prospects. So in the scenario here, the exit criteria to go from an active user to a PQL, the user first must follow within the company's ideal customer profile or ICP. So this could be a mixture of things like company size, geography, vertical revenue, and maybe even that specific user's job title at that company. And once that box is checked, it's then all about that active user adopting the product in a way that demonstrates high intent and that is done by and business can do this by tracking user activity and the actions that they're taking. So in this example, I'm going to use a user must take action A plus action B and then either action C or D. And these actions could be any behavior that your company identifies as high intent. And ideally you have the data that shows that these are high value actions that high intent users take. And a lot of the time they're what we like to call your golden features, which is also why it's extremely important to be using things like product analytics to understand what drives adoption and user attention. That said, whatever those user user actions are, and once you have them agreed upon and documented, you're then able to start mapping out how you actually influence that type of user behavior within your trial experience or within your regular product, right? If it's an expansion PQL final to actually take those actions. And that's what we're going to bring that's going to bring us to our final must do, which is understanding your requirements and operationalizing. And as I mentioned a bit earlier, right? There's a few types of different types of requirements, technical people and process. Technical requirements include things like what is required from your product, such as your signup page and registration page, or maybe even adding paywalls or feature flags to your trial experience. User engagements include things like in app walkthroughs, tutorials, videos, onboarding guides and emails that drive the behavior you want to see based upon your stages and criteria. I think a simple example of this could be launching something like an onboarding bot that takes trial users through the key steps to get the most out of their trial, right? And aligning those key steps to walk them through the actions needed to PQL based upon what you've outlined and defined. Technical requirements also encompass things like understanding integrations needed with other technologies, such as Salesforce. And obviously, you know, data and reporting is an absolute must so you can actually track user behavior for progression between stages and understand where users are getting stuck and also understand things like attribution to revenue from your PQLs. People and process requirements really go hand in hand. Understanding roles and responsibilities will make sure that your PQL funnel has the environment in place to make an impact over time. So for example, if you're not completely product led and maybe are a hybrid model with sales assistance similar to the funnel that we just looked at, when do BDRs get involved? How do AEs get deals and visibility into PQLs? You know, what are the handoffs between different parts of the organization? And that's why we have the image here of Jalen Hertz passing, handing it off to Miles Sanders, the football analogy there. Another good question to ask is what about if a trial wants to transition to a proven concept? What happens? What are the agreements and rules of engagement there? The reason that these questions are important and having answers to these questions are important is because ultimately they will impact the experience that your prospects and customers have. And the ones that are impacted the most are probably the ones that have the highest intent to buy. But I promise if you're thoughtful about these things, you're setting yourself up for successful conversion rates with PQLs. So let's summarize. As Tori presented earlier, PQLs are super efficient and drive higher conversion rates. Clearly defining your funnel stages and criteria is a step that you cannot skip. And finally, don't forget about aligning your people, processes and technology because it will impact your customer experience. Now, if you'd like to get access to our free PQL benchmark report, just pull out your phone, open your camera and this QR code will take you right to it. You'll find a bunch of great stats all on PQLs like the ones we share today, such as the median results from companies that use PQLs versus those who don't. All of the data is based off of the larger PLG index that we ran earlier this year that surveyed something like over 500 respondents. So I'll give you a few seconds to pull out your phone, take a picture of this QR code to get to the report. And with that said, though, you know, that's all we have on behalf of Tori and myself. Thank you so much for joining us. Reach out on LinkedIn just to connect or if you have any questions about PQLs, product leg growth or gain site PX. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, everyone.