vault backup: 2026-01-05 13:03:55

03_Resources/Marketing/Beginners Guide to Product Qualified Leads (PQL).md

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+https://productled.com/product-qualified-leads/
+
+A product qualified lead (PQL) is a lead who has experienced meaningful value using your product through a free trial or freemium model.
+
+When you reach out to a PQL, they should have already experienced meaningful value in your product. This makes the sale easier because there's no need to sell the user on the value of the product.
+
+Before we dive into how to identify a PQL, I wanted to take a second to list out what PQLs are NOT: PQLs are not people who upgrade their free plan; PQLs are not marketing qualified leads; Someone who signs up for a free trial does NOT qualify as a PQL;
+
+To choose a successful PQL definition, it has to involve helping the user become successful in your product. I\'ll share a few great examples with you in a second.
+
+What matters, however, is that you try to find behaviors that correlate with people upgrading.
+
+To really nail down the ideal definition of a PQL, you need to know your value metrics. According to Patrick Campbell (the CEO and co-founder of Price Intelligently), the perfect value metric should align with your customers' needs, grow with them and be easy to wrap one's mind around.
+
+No business should have the same product qualified lead definition.
+
+Every business should be constantly refining what their PQL definition is and make sure it helps users experience meaningful value in the product. Here are just a few examples of PQL definitions from well-known brands: For Slack, a PQL is when an account reaches its 2,000 message limit; For Facebook, a PQL is once someone adds 7 friends; For Drift, a PQL is once someone has 100 conversations on their website;
+
+As a result, PQLs close at significantly higher rates than MQLs because users understand the value of your product. It's not uncommon for PQLs to convert upwards of 20-30% in my experience working with B2B SaaS businesses.
+
+As prospects utilize your application, they demonstrate buying intent based on product behaviors which can include: Product interest Number of users Features used Spending patterns Usage patterns Velocity - How fast a user or team is adopting your product
+
+Once you have that in place, I recommend brainstorming a few PQL definitions as a start. Even if it's just a hypothesis at this point, it will come in handy when you test it in your business
+
+I find that usage patterns are one of the easiest ways to define a PQL if you're short for time. At first, your PQL could be as simple as a user that logs in 10 times. This at least shows that the user is
+actively using the product and is coming back for a reason.
+
+Now, the next step is to find out what they're coming back to do. Like I mentioned before, your PQL is meant to be a moving target. You can start with usage patterns but eventually, you want to get closer to pinning what the leading behaviors of someone who becomes a paying customer are
+
+Once you have your PQL definition, you need to put the systems in place so that all teams can play an active role in generating more PQLs. This is not a solo sport. In this section, I break down some of the key metrics each team can be responsible for.
+
+When setting up metrics for teams, I always recommend having both a quantity and a quality metric to ensure that each team isn't sacrificing quality in order to attain the quantity metric
+
+important that it reflects that we're upgrading users that become and stay as successful customers.
+
+One of the best parts about PQLs is that it aligns teams to focus on helping the user become successful in the product.
+
+Updated Nov 16, 2019:
+
+A product qualified lead (PQL) is a lead who has experienced meaningful value using your product through a free trial or freemium model.
+
+When you reach out to a PQL, they should have already experienced meaningful value in your product. This makes the sale easier because  there's no need to sell the user on the value of the product.
+
+Before we dive into how to identify a PQL, I wanted to take a second to list out what PQLs are NOT: PQLs are not people who upgrade their free plan; PQLs are not marketing qualified leads; Someone who signs up for a free trial does NOT qualify as a PQL;
+
+To choose a successful PQL definition, it has to involve helping the user become successful in your product. I\'ll share a few great examples with you in a second.
+
+What matters, however, is that you try to find behaviors that correlate with people upgrading.
+
+To really nail down the ideal definition of a PQL, you need to know your value metrics. According to Patrick Campbell (the CEO and co-founder of Price Intelligently), the perfect value metric should align with your customers' needs, grow with them and be easy to wrap one's mind around.
+
+No business should have the same product qualified lead definition.
+
+Every business should be constantly refining what their PQL definition is and make sure it helps users experience meaningful value in the product. Here are just a few examples of PQL definitions from well-known brands: For Slack, a PQL is when an account reaches its 2,000 message limit; For Facebook, a PQL is once someone adds 7 friends; For Drift, a PQL is once someone has 100 conversations on their website;
+
+As a result, PQLs close at significantly higher rates than MQLs because users understand the value of your product. It's not uncommon for PQLs to convert upwards of 20-30% in my experience working with B2B SaaS businesses.
+
+As prospects utilize your application, they demonstrate buying intent based on product behaviors which can include: Product interest Number of users Features used Spending patterns Usage patterns Velocity - How fast a user or team is adopting your product
+
+Once you have that in place, I recommend brainstorming a few PQL definitions as a start. Even if it's just a hypothesis at this point, it will come in handy when you test it in your business
+
+I find that usage patterns are one of the easiest ways to define a PQL if you're short for time. At first, your PQL could be as simple as a user that logs in 10 times. This at least shows that the user is
+actively using the product and is coming back for a reason.
+
+Now, the next step is to find out what they're coming back to do. Like Imentioned before, your PQL is meant to be a moving target. You can start with usage patterns but eventually, you want to get closer to pinning what the leading behaviors of someone who becomes a paying customer are
+
+Once you have your PQL definition, you need to put the systems in place so that all teams can play an active role in generating more PQLs. This is not a solo sport. In this section, I break down some of the key metrics each team can be responsible for.
+
+When setting up metrics for teams, I always recommend having both a quantity and a quality metric to ensure that each team isn't sacrificing quality in order to attain the quantity metric
+
+important that it reflects that we're upgrading users that become and stay as successful customers.
+
+One of the best parts about PQLs is that it aligns teams to focus on helping the user become successful in the product.

03_Resources/Marketing/Clusters.md

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+Tags: [[Email]] [[Marketing]] - [[Audience]] [[Customer]] [[Local]]
+Author: [[Seth Godin]]
+## Highlights:
+
+With few exceptions, that’s being replaced by a return to clusters.
+
+The cluster might be geographic (they eat different potato chips in Tucscon than they do in Milwaukee) but they’re much more likely to be psychographic instead. What a group of people believe, who they connect with, what they hope for…
+
+The minimal viable audience concept requires that you find your cluster and overwhelm them with delight. Choose the right cluster, show up with the right permission and sufficient magic and generosity and the idea will spread.

03_Resources/Marketing/Consumers Are Hungry For An Experience-Based Connection With Your Brand.md

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+https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2019/11/21/consumers-are-hungry-for-an-experience-based-connection-with-your-brand/
+
+According to one study, 83% of consumers admit paying as much attention to how brands treat them as on the product they sell. The same study states that 73% say they are willing to pay more for a product if they love the brand. These statistics call attention to the fact that customer experience is critical.
+
+re-imagine every touchpoint a consumer has with their brand, delivering an experience-based, emotional connection. These organizations are looking past traditional ways to attract and retain customers and designing compelling, personalized experiences – via advanced technologies – around products and services to better engage.
+
+The term “Experience Economy” was coined a few decades ago by James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II. The two, who co-authored a book of the same name, describe that consumers seek experiences above and beyond products and services. In the book, they explain that services must be mass-customized for each individual need and that offerings must be charged for time (i.e., subscriptions). They also urge more organizations to pay attention not just to what workers should do, but how they do it.
+
+The customer experience is not merely about your mobile app, your website or your call center agents – it runs deep inside the four walls of your company. All of the internal processes, people and systems that contribute to your brand’s overall customer experience – those operations that take place behind the scenes – are just as much a part of that customer experience.
+
+First and foremost, brand interactions must be easy for consumers. They must co-exist in the natural rhythm of consumers’ daily lives.
+
+From a consumer’s perspective, what matters most is that their brand interaction simply works and provides value
+
+Part of this strategy involves leveraging technology and data to decode the nuances of consumer behaviors and sensibilities that drive their unique brand interactions and decision-making processes
+
+Don’t generalize your customers and prospects.
+
+These lenses are too narrowly focused and don’t expose the more valuable behavioral criteria that inspire long-term, emotional connections. Intead, utilize technology to develop a more robust, data-driven picture of your audience.
+
+consumers ourselves, perhaps many of us are used to accessing anything we want, at any given time, through all of our connected networks. Similarly, customers expect their brand experiences to be on the ready, whether it’s via a smartphone, tablet or any other device
+
+no longer to dictate an exchange but to facilitate one.
+
+Develop a strategy that accounts for business needs, market demands and technology
+
+the Experience Economy must be backed by your data
+
+Utilize your back-office to generate the right amount of data about individual consumers.

03_Resources/Marketing/Marketing.md

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+### Notes
+```dataview
+table file.ctime as Date from "300-resources/Marketing"
+sort file.name
+```

03_Resources/Marketing/Validation is backwards.md

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+Tags: [[Article]] [[Marketing]] - [[Entrepreneurship]] [[Validation]]
+Author: [[Alex Hillman]] 
+From: https://stackingthebricks.com/validation-is-backwards/
+ 
+## Highlights:
+
+On one hand, it’s possible that Lean methods could protect you from making a huge mistake, by making many smaller mistakes instead. You could avoid wasting a whole lot of time and money on a shitty, half-cocked business idea. And hey, that’s not all bad!
+
+Validation claims to be a data-driven process, but the results are neither predictably nor repeatably successful.
+
+“Before you launch, you’ll interview people who may be potential customers, but have not yet given you money, and are ergo not customers. They’ve got no skin in the game, no frame of reference to build on. But even after you launch - and you begin to interview your customers - the technique is flawed.
+
+You rely on your interviewees being experts at research & development — you trust them to identify their own pains with unflinching honesty and accuracy. To remember, in essence, exactly what they do, all day, every day. And to be willing to tell you about it. And to be able to imagine a world unlike the world they inhabit, with a different workflow, different tools, different outlook, different life. You rely on them to accurately identify the causes of the pains they do identify. You rely on them to be wholly rational. They must not care about your feelings at all
+
+You need them to be people who always do exactly what they say they will.”
+
+The process that we created and teach in 30x500 is based on an observational research technique called Ethnography
+
+answers you need for repeatable business success: understanding peoples’ behaviors, specifically why they do (or don’t do) things, and why they buy (or don’t buy) things.