

The product qualified lead - ttunguz
http://tomtunguz.com/the-new-sales-hotness-the-product-qualified-lead-pql

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jtheory
I'm a bit put off to notice that the default action they discuss for PQLs is
"call the customer" to convert them.

If I'm interacting with your business in some way, and I hit a threshold that
causes a salesperson to ring my phone number, I'm going to think really hard
about whether I can drop your service completely.

My reactions are probably stronger than the average, but who out there feels
that a phone call from a salesperson is a _pleasant_ event?

I don't care how polite the person is; they're interrupting my life, asking
that I stop whatever I was doing -- they can't know, of course -- and pay
attention to them while they try to convince me I'm _wrong_ about something
(that is, not yet converting to a paying customer of their service).

Trigger an email from a real person, if you like, that I can read at my
leisure (or simply delete, without feeling impolite like I would hanging up on
someone).

But think carefully before you start triggering unsolicited sales calls to the
people you want most to think favorably of you.

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jtchang
I read somewhere that for a certain product (salesforce maybe?) that they
discovered if a user uploads their own data they were 2x to 3x more likely to
convert.

The first step is always identifying the actually qualification event. The
problem is they are not always obvious. I see in a few years big data
companies helping to find these patterns in data and identify a few high
correlation metrics with ease.

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caseysoftware
I'd wager that's why tools like Mailchimp try to get you to send out that
first newsletter - even a test - as soon as possible.

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dkroy
It would be hard to not "buzz" about PQLs, but they are by no means "free"
even if you didn't pay for lists of PQL's, and gathered the data for yourself.
They take time and effort to develop.

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notahacker
They're "free" at the margin if you have enough budget/customers to justify
writing the code to collect the write metrics in the first place. You might
well be able to use metrics from your existing analytics package

Salespersons' time, of course isn't free, but it might be more efficiently
convert to revenue by up/cross-selling to existing customers than trying to
find new ones.

