Elena Verna: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay, so this is a really important topic. There's this concept you just described, product qualified account. It might be a good time to define a couple other acronyms and kind of compare them. THere's PQA, there's PQL, product-qualified lead. There's marketing-qualified lead. Can you just maybe describe the suite of acronyms? Then, I want to follow up on the PQA because that seems really important. I'll start with PQA just because we just breezed over it. PQA is product-qualified account. It's on account level, it's aggregation of multiple users that are using the account. It might be on the overall logo level, so let's say you've attracted a company, so you qualify PQA across the entire company usage, or it might be on a specific team or workspace level depending on what is the better predictor for you and who the sales team is going to be engaging with. Product qualification is very much product metrics. It's the volume of use, it's the velocity change. For example, yesterday I've been adding one user per day and then today I've added 15 users to account. That's a velocity change that you need to pay attention to. Or there is a feature usage that can be highly correlative to enterprise interest. That product should be driving towards every single account reaching in order to qualify them for sales conversation. Now, within the PQA, there may or may not be PQL, so PQL is a product-qualified lead. Lead assumes there is a person in the account that I can go and sell to. Now, leads are those buyers. They're those decision-makers in the account, and if you have a smaller segment, so for example you had more in small businesses or lower end of mid-market segment, you may very have PQLs in there because user is maybe equals buyer. User can make those buyer decisions. However, the more you move up the market, the more end user is many steps separated from the buyer, so you might have very healthy usage and you might have a PQA that is off the charts, but you don't have a PQL in it. If you just stick your sales against that account, you're going to have a very terrible situation and very terrible user journey where users are like, "Why is sales talking to me? I have no decision-making power in my organization. I love the product, but please leave me alone." This is where you get a bunch of cold outbound, and I put big quotations on outbound emails that are just not getting returned. You need to very clearly understand who's your buying persona and, are they in your user base? If they are, you have a PQL. Pass them, go for it, but if they're not, go find it out there. This is where MQL concept really comes into play because then marketing has to still qualify a lead to bring it and connect it to PQA. PQA can have a PQL as a user already in the user base, or you might need an MQL with marketing or sales, bringing their lead over and connecting them with the usage. Amazing, so we're going to share a link. You have this awesome visual that shows kind of like the funnel of PQAs and PQLs funneling into sales along with marketing qualified leads. Basically there's a kind of instead of one path to sales, knowing who to talk to, now there's two. Product is funneling you people that are qualified, and then marketing following you people that are qualified.…

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