Track and rate how people use your product
You can’t qualify an account based on how much a product is used if you don’t track how much a product is used. In other phrases, if you aren’t keeping track of the most important events (i.e., actions) that happen when people use your product, you should do that now. You can’t move forward unless you do this. But this is just the beginning. You should also score and rank your users based on how often they use the parts of your product that are important.
By scoring product engagement, you give each user a score that shows how much they use the product. It’s product engagement data that your sales team can understand and act on, so this is the kind of data you should have. Please don’t give your sales team a ton of event data and expect them to make sense of it. Failed.
Track and score product use at the account level
That is so easy that it’s easy to forget. You sell to teams, to businesses, and that’s how you make money to the books. It would help see how many people use your products at the account level. If you don’t use account-based scoring, your sales team will likely give up on your PQL process.
Find out which users are the most active on each account
They always look for the best “entry points” into a customer’s account when making a sale. They need to find people who will be their internal champions. It’s because your sales team needs to know how each person on an account is using the service. Users who are most enthusiastic about the product will be used as “case studies” to persuade other business leaders that the product is a good idea. This is very important for your sales team.
Track how many people sign up during the trial period
When people and accounts are in a “trial,” the goal is to get them and their reports to “Activation.” When a person opens a tab for the first time, they do three, four, or five things that allow them to experience “first value.” It might have a checklist called “Activation” that looks something like this:
- A file was made.
- The teammate signed up.
- The document was shared.
- A comment was made.
Activation progress will be shown in a proper PQL process. It’s vital that your sales team has the answers to these questions, and your PQL process needs to be the one that gives them the answers.
All of this critical data is easy to get to
Having data about how people use your products is one thing, but getting it into the hands of your sales team is a different thing. If your sales team doesn’t have access right away, they won’t use it as a business owner. That’s why you need to put all this data together in a way that makes it straightforward to understand and easy to transfer with the tools your sales team uses every day, like your CRM or CRM-like tool (i.e., Intercom).
How to use Sherlock to help you run your PQL process better
There’s a tool called Sherlock that can help you figure out how much your users and accounts are interested in your service from the moment they sign up to when they leave (and after). There’s nothing you can’t do with it.
- Rank and score your users and accounts based on how much they use your product.
- All users on each trial account can see how engaged they are.
- When you set “Activation” criteria for your trial users and accounts, you can keep an eye on them and see how close they are to “first value.”
- Connect these engagement scores and activation rates to Salesforce, Intercom, Slack, and other platforms so your sales team can quickly see the data. This way, they can quickly see the data.
Here it is for those who want a step-by-step guide on setting this up in Sherlock
Step 1: Connect your product data to Sherlock. This is the first step
If you use Segment.com to store your product data, you can flip a switch and have your product data sent to Sherlock right away. If you want to start using Sherlock, you can use our custom tracking script to get started.
Step 2: you’ll make your first score profile
This is part of how Sherlock works. This is where you will figure out how many people came to your product events and make your first Sherlock scoring model. Users and accounts will automatically be ranked based on how they use your product after you do this, so you don’t have to do it yourself.
Step 3: Establish trial account activation requirements
To track how many of your trial accounts are activated, you need to figure out what it means for an account to be “activated.” To show activation rates, you’ll see how many of the activation criteria a user or account has met at any given time. The percentage will be between 0% and 100%.
Step 4: Connect Sherlock to your other tools. This is the last step
To get these insights to your sales team where they can act, you can connect Sherlock with other tools, like Intercom, Salesforce, Hubspot, and so on, so they can get them. You will send the engagement and activation rates for all of your accounts and users to these other tools as well. Your users and reports will also get tagged with any Sherlock segments that match their names and where they live.
Step 5 (Optional): Configure Sherlock Alerts
Your sales team needs to know when important things happen to leads in “real-time.” Whenever something important happens, they need to act quickly. You should set up Sherlock Alerts to ensure your team knows when an account has been set up.
Stop reading and start working on your PQLs
Everything you need to build a process to help your sales team find and convert the best leads should be there now. You have all the attributes you require about how your account and users use it, how they get activated, and how they use it. You also have ways to make this data easy for your sales team to get their hands on.
You have to add how to use this data inside your own company. One thing is for sure: this will depend on your current team and process. But you can’t wait any longer on this. When it comes to SaaS, if you don’t have a PQL process in place at this point, or if it’s terrible, you’re already out of the game. Your competitors are already using PQL processes. They are also making their sales teams more efficient. Join them, will you?