Product Qualified Lead (PQL)
Product Qualified Lead is a lead qualified through your product.
What are Product Qualified Leads?
PQL, or Product Qualified Leads, is a lead qualified through your product. PQLs are defined as users who have performed certain meaningful behaviors or events while using your product. These users are highly interested in your product and can be nurtured in the sales process as prospects with a high likelihood of conversion.
Typically, PQLs are users who have experienced the product through a free Trial or Freemium plan. These users are considered PQLs if they use the product’s main features and exhibit high activity levels.
Additionally, if a user signed up using a large enterprise email address such as @ibm.com, @facebook.com, etc., they have the potential for enterprise sales opportunities and can be used as a basis for PQLs.
PQLs are distinct from traditional Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). MQLs are defined as leads generated from marketing campaigns, while SQLs are defined as leads more likely to be contacted directly by the sales team. PQLs, on the other hand, are leads generated through your product and have a higher potential of becoming customers.
Like MQLs, PQLs need to be further validated by SDR/BDR or AE.
Set a Baseline for PQLs
PQLs are especially important in low-touch models like SMB/startup sales with free trials or product-led growth (PLG) with freemium tiers.
- Slack: Invite 3+ coworkers and send 1,000+ messages
- Notion: 1,000+ blocks shared with 3 or more team members
- Figma: Collaborate with others by creating projects and sharing links
- Mailchimp: Send 1,000+ emails per month
To get the most out of PQL, you need to understand what your users’ “meaningful actions” are, which is why close collaboration between GTM teams (marketing/sales/CSM) and product teams is very important.
Leveraging PQLs in Sales
Once you have a rough baseline of PQLs, the next step is to decide how to build them and how to utilize them. Since you need to monitor product usage data to know if a user is a PQL or not, you need to connect your sales CRM with an analytics tool like Mixpanel, Amplitude, or a customer data platform (CDP) like Segment or Snowflake that has product data.
SDRs or AEs (= sales reps) qualify PQLs and manage sales processes using sales CRM.