40% of Slack's revenue last year came from the sales teams closing high-valued accounts and expanding current customers.
That's the power of tracking and engaging Product Qualified Accounts (PQAs).
We wrote this piece so you know how to define your PQAs, how to track them and how to turn tracking into new revenue for your business.
Let's dive in!
1.What are Product Qualified Account (PQAs)?
3.A 3-step way to track PQAs in your workflow
Product qualified accounts (PQAs) are potential customers who have signed up for a product, whether through a single user or multiple users and have taken actions signifying a strong likelihood of becoming paying customers.
PQAs are defined by a mix of Firmographic info and milestones in the product.
The best PLG sales team focuses on less than 50% of their user base as high-revenue prospects.
The most common firmographics include:
Pro note: Firmographic criteria are influenced by the price structure of your solution.
Per-user pricing or low ARPU —> More dependant on firmographics.
Usage-based pricing or high ARPU —> More dependant on product milestones.
For example, Notion's sales teams need to focus on really big accounts since their enterprise pricing point is around 20$/user/month.
On the other hand, a company like Userpilot can be more flexible with firmographics because their pricing is higher (minimum of $249/month) and they charge per usage.
Which account in all of our sign-ups have reached the "aha moment"?
That's the main product milestone to identify.
Once users have understood the value of your solution through using it, they're very likely to buy. If they have the required, firmographics criteria, your sales team must engage.
A few "aha" milestones from your favourite PLG companies:
Those PQA types can all be identified by different trends in the product's usage.
Sales reps need to adjust their outreach depending on product buying signals sent by the accounts.
Now that there are a bunch of new accounts to outreach to, PLG sales teams need to learn to prioritize which accounts to focus on to maximize the effort-to-revenue ratio.
The easy one is by focusing on accounts showing direct buying intent in the product.
For example, if an AE sees that qualified users are clicking on the "Export PDF" feature in Pitch without upgrading, she should reach out!
Second is to prioritize by using the existing marketing qualified lead (MQL) model already in place.
Meaning you can prioritize PQAs to engage based on who has users that:
The basis of engaging PQAs is very timely.
Grabbing prospects' attention is hard and sales reps need to react closely after accounts reach specific milestones.
What we've heard from the best-performing PLG sales teams is that having data is not enough.
Getting actionable insights in real-time is key.
Because as we all know, sales reps are lazy ;)
Make it easier for them to do what they do best.
Same as they would with identifying PQAs, PLG sales teams use demographics and product actions to identify key users to reach out to.
🏆 Champions: Aka power-users. Users who are taking key product actions or constantly engaging with the product.
Those users have reached milestones and understand the product's value.
🧑💻 Influencers: Users that can influence the upgrade.
For example, an ops person if your paid offering requires developer input.
👩💼 Decision-makers: Users who have titles like "VP, Head of..., Director of...".
That's it!
Love those tips?
Have a wonderful day 🤩
Fred
