What is a Product Qualified Lead?

A Product Qualified Lead is a lead who has already used the product and has experienced meaningful value through a free trial or freemium model. A PQL has a higher possibility of converting into a customer than other leads. Unlike Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), which base buying intent on arbitrary factors like email opens, whitepaper downloads, and webpage visits, PQLs are tied to a meaningful value.

Since a PQL has already experienced meaningful value, it makes the job of a salesperson easier because there’s no need to sell the user on the value of the product. It is also important to define who will be a product qualified lead. For example, if your PQL definition is someone signing up for a free trial or freemium service, then there will be a chunk of users who just activated their free trial and not experienced a valuable outcome. Do all of them should be considered as product qualified leads?

How to identify Product Qualified Leads?

Understanding what a PQL is for your business is challenging. There might be many users who signed up for the free trial or freemium service, but how all the users interact and use the product would be very different. What matters, however, is to find behaviors that correlate with people upgrading.

A SaaS business has a huge advantage over other business types. You can get a vast amount of data about your leads. To nail down the ideal definition of a PQL, you need to know your value metrics. Value metrics is important because the more products and features you have, the harder it is to pinpoint exactly what behaviors lead people to upgrade. The perfect value metric should align with your customers’ needs, grow with them, and be easy to wrap one’s mind around.