PQL Milestones

Product Qualified Leads are one of the most under-leveraged data points used by marketers, especially in low-touch sales models.
If we can identify 4-5 key milestones, we can then track if marketing is bringing in people who take those actions.

Identifying the right milestones is critical. For example, by analyzing product metrics, Shopify may know that people who connect their Stripe account are 200% more likely to become a paid customer (this is just a guess). Some other examples:

Freshbooks: Sending your first invoice
Wix: Setting up a custom domain
Mailchimp: Sending your first email
Hootsuite: Scheduling 3 posts
Hubspot: Uploading your customer list

It could be that one milestone supersedes all. It could also be that a combination of milestones cause a prospect to cross the PQL threshold.

But these milestones highlight marketing’s role beyond just interacting with sales.

In such models, marketing needs to be connected with product teams to gather these metrics and connect them to top of funnel activities.

In blended models where the customer is in the product and there is a sales team as well, marketing can be a huge asset to the sales team by adding product qualification to the sales pipeline stages.