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jump right in i just heard my puppy in the background start to do some puppy dreaming so if you hear her nothing to be concerned about um but yeah let's let's uh let's kick this off um i will start by just introducing myself and then i will pass it over to utem and we'll go from there so my name is breezy um i am the head of growth and marketing over here at correlated and i'm joined by tim who's also on the team and i'll let him into it thanks breezy yeah tim uh ceo and uh and co-founder here at correlated and um crazy and i are gonna be tag teaming this one today each of us kind of going through a couple key pieces uh but just to kind of set the stage um we're here today to talk about uh product qualified leads and i'll be going into this a little bit uh into the presentation but just quick context for why we're talking about this this is a topic that comes up a ton with the companies that we talk to and work with here at correlated i actually recently wrote a blog post about it as well and um you know one of the the things that i wrote the blog post which we'll be covering is that i felt like a lot of people are doing pql or product qualify leads incorrectly um that you know we thought there was like a better way to do it and so i think as far as a discussion point like areas where i certainly love to dig in with with folks on the call um you know and we'll have a couple of these these points throughout the presentation or basically you know are you doing pqls today is that something that's a part of your process right now you know what's the level of satisfaction with what exists today if you're doing it um and i certainly would love to hear from folks who are practitioners it's okay if you're not it's okay if this is you know a conversation that you're joining because you don't have any kind of formal pql process in place uh that's totally fine this conversation is for you as well uh we definitely want to kind of cover the bases of you know what does it mean to put in pqls like what are some of the prerequisites there how are you know companies both large and small doing it so we'll be uh we'll be doing you know those are the kind of core topics we'll be covering so if you've never done it before that's fine if you're kind of an expert we want to hear from you please chime in um and and uh and tell us kind of how you're doing it so i think maybe the best place to start and breezy you're going to kick us off is kind of defining what a pql is and then we'll go into a little bit more on kind of our our unique point of view on uh on pqos perfect yeah so what are product qualified leads i think the you know starting with a definition is always the most boring way to kick it off but if we don't have the foundation we can't build a house so a product qualified lead um i i think everyone probably pretty much knows what an mql is right so it's it's activities that someone's done whether it's on our website and attending an event whatever it may be combined with things like what is their title and what size company are they from how many employees does it does the company have or what territory is it located in so similar to that a product qualified lead is taking that information that you have on the mql side about the the title and the company size but instead of adding in that marketing information we're adding information about things that they've done inside of our product and so i think just kind of looking at it that way and breaking it down really simplifies it so a pql is going to be adding in things like okay they invited two users or they logged in more than usual in the last week or month they hit certain usage limits inside of the product they tried out a different feature that they haven't tried before things like that um then one of the other core differences and we'll dig into this more but just to sort of intro the idea is that we generally only have one definition for an mql at a company um and so one of the big differences between mqls and pqls is that for pqls you have multiple pql definitions at a company especially as you scale and grow that company um because there's there's all these different points in a life cycle where it's going to make sense to talk to someone who's a product user so maybe it's that first initial time when they sign up to use your product and and and they've taken a couple key actions but then once they hit the next usage limit because in in a product like growth company it's all about these different expansion opportunities um and so you want to have kind of multiple definitions across that customer life cycle awesome yeah thanks breezy for the intro i mean i think so so this is the like uh header for the blog post um and so i wanted to like maybe talk through really quickly and there's more reading here which we linked to at the end of the presentation we'll send this deck around as well um there's more kind of in the blog post but there's a couple key reasons why we feel you know a lot of companies at least are making a mistake when they are kind of rolling out pql's so like the first mistake is kind of what breezy alluded to before which is in many companies mqls are like that single score so you have like this threshold where okay and now all of a sudden it's a marketing qualified lead and that gets passed to sales and so in a traditional kind of enterprise sales motion where it's someone comes to your website or you meet with a traded show or you know all the different steps that might get to that mql threshold it makes sense then to pass the sales who qualifies that has a demo you know does the sort of normal sales process before then hopefully closing the deal and then passing the customer to customer success that's a very linear process in plg when you have a customer maybe from day one that swipes a credit card and is just using your product that kind of linear process isn't the same it doesn't exist really and so if you're just using one score to say okay all of a sudden this is a product qualified lead you're missing that whole kind of life cycle that could define when a customer actually you know should be engaged by sales or engaged by customer success or engaged maybe by an str team or a solutions engineering team but all these different kind of touch points and so we feel that just using one score really misses a lot of that complexity and and sort of um nuance that exists in product like growth businesses i think one of the other challenges that we see is that because of the difficulty in um sort of getting product data into a format even to like use successfully a lot of times the pko score is almost completely owned by the data team and maybe growth marketing as well and so that's fine that's good obviously we love our colleagues on the data side they you know make the world go around and it's essential to have you know those folks uh helping us every day but i think when it's completely owned just by the data team and you're not able to uh as a maybe sdr manager or a cs lead or someone on a vp sales if you're unable to sort of test and manipulate maybe the scoring or the thresholds that you want to have your team kind of go after if that's kind of all held on the data side that can lead to the business team not really being able to iterate and see what's working and what's not working as they try to layer sales on top of kind of that plg self-service motion and i think the last thing i alluded to this in the top bullet but basically there's no way to customize that single score really for kind of the complex customer life cycle we'll get into that a lot more um in subsequent sites right i'll i'll say more on that in a moment i think um kind of go into the the next slide we want to just have a quick opportunity for people uh to chime in here and you know the discussion point that i'd like to lead with if anyone's willing i won't actually call on you don't worry but if anyone's willing to chime in um we'd love to hear from folks in the audience on whether or not they have a pql methodology today and also whether or not any of the mistakes that i mentioned resonate or or not if it's going really well and you feel like what you're doing today um is working really well we'd love to hear kind of both those things so if anyone wants to share please chime in if not uh we will continue uh but we'd love to hear from the group if anyone has any thoughts and if you are eating that sandwich i'll continue to stop for time while people think about replying if you are in fact eating that sandwich and off camera if you want to just type in a question or response into the chat that's also totally fine and you can type that in at any point whether or not i'm on a side like this or not you can you can just type it in toss questions our way no problem all right well with that we'll kind of go into a little bit more on why we think a single pql uh won't cut it if you want to go back to this and talk a little bit about how you're doing pcos your company chime in the chat totally fine yeah i tossed it in there i'm looking at a couple faces okay simple pql here all right so andy's using pqls um is anyone else looking at that that product usage data today okay simple pql what is that just anyone who signs up to use the product is that kind of like v1 yep okay not really calculated no problem just curious nice we i mean we it's like super common um this is like what we're talking about is like the vision right like that's where you want to get to so that's part of the discussion today all right cool well feel free to chime in in the chat awesome thank you cool well let's talk a little bit more about why we think you know a single pql score kind of this overarching score is you know kind of an oversimplification you know i i think from our perspective what we hear talking to you know leading companies um you know public companies like mongodb or twilio slack down to like massive private companies like callumly and others all the way down to startup series a series b you know startups that are starting on this journey if you have a plg kind of a self-service type part of your business and then you're also layering on sales success other kind of go to market teams that have a human component there's a sort of customer life cycle factor to consider when considering how you do scoring and how you think about your process internally and so again i alluded to before that traditional enterprise sales cycle in that world it's so clean it's so easy you know marketing responsibility is kind of here there's always some nuance you have life cycle marketing and the old b2b but you know you kind of have the top of the funnel they own that sales is responsible for closing a new business and then they hand off customers the cs is responsible for retention and expansion and upsell a lot of those same lines are still drawn in plg but the challenge really becomes um you know the ante is kind of brought up a bit when you have this self-service component in a way for people to seamlessly start using the product and so you will often see you know pql is used at the top of the funnel for acquisition uh which makes a ton of sense like are people in like a free usage a free trial starting to actually start to use the product so you get into activation a bit more and then you often see that's when kind of traditionally that pql score is used by sales and or the ser team to say okay now they're starting to activate we'll hit them you know they're in this 14 day after sign up free trial maybe but we'll start to hit them with a bit more concerted messaging the challenge though is and we see a lot of companies not spending a ton of time where we think they should is what happens once that customer converts or if you have a pure self-service motion what if they convert as a self-service customer they swipe a credit card but there's all these maybe enterprise tiers that they could be upsold into by sales when should sales you know after conversion get involved when should they talk about expansion or a lot of the companies that we talk to and work with have a multi-product portfolio so when should sales or customer success or even the lifecycle marketing team get involved to cross-sell what should those thresholds look like uh what should the scoring or the pql type factors be uh if you want to do expansion or cross-sell and so this is core to plg companies and a really big challenge and where we think a lot of the companies that are doing pqos today aren't really considering kind of some of these nuances ramifications and so before i go further i have been noticing on the corner of my eye a couple of comments in this in the chat so i want to just quickly go back to that um and just look so it looks like leilani said that there's um loads of valuable points but not systematize or use across the board okay um andy added in there's some transactional stuff uh going on and then as you said that there's uh technically a pql but you're not naming it yet okay um well you offer now because you offered thank you so much for doing that i'd love to hear what you uh what your process looks like um and maybe we can you know use that as a jumping off point for a little bit about what we see with other companies absolutely uh hey everyone my name is oz i work at the predictive index um talent optimization platform and we do have um our um you know our legacy platform and we are now gradually switching into a product that growth um with you know offering um some uh free value exchange in the in the process and right now we uh we're doing it with um with a release candidates process right now our general availability will be sometime around may and what we're doing is we're basically inviting these users which we think could be a good fit based on the lead grading system that we released so what happens is people go into that link we send them they fill out a form and they get for free they get access to our our platform which has never happened before technically these are product qualified leads but how we got them is um through um through lead grading which is you know basically took some thermographic data graded those leads um basically how we did in business as usual motion now we're very careful with um you know naming conventions how we kind kind of um label these users and um the second process that we're still working on is obviously getting the product data in our marketing instance and kind of like merging them because before we've never had anyone who is not paying us using our product it was always a demo or something like that so we're now seeing some product engagement by those pqls and we now have to bring those into our lead system and merge them and say hey these three people like companyx are you know engaging more with your product um you know maybe a customized playbook a discount or something like that could be um could be offered to them so this is where we are now still pretty um you know in in the introductory phase but um cool thank you for that overview and what one quick follow-up question and i i always love you know i could probably have a million questions so i'll keep it at just one do you intend to go to a full kind of free tier or freemium type version of the product is that the plan over you know over time or what what is your intention with uh with kind of the product side for sure we will have right now we have four products um hire inspired design and diagnose and we will be offering ideally sometime in 2023 we'll be offering um you know a freemium motion for all four but we will be continuing the business as usual process in the in the meantime because we have a huge partner network as well uh we have about like 500 partners uh we want to make sure they're taken care of as well during this process so um it's a delicate balance well it sounds like a big undertaking and certainly one that i'm sure poses some fun fun challenges and fun opportunities thanks so much for sharing that absolutely um one other question came up from chris uh into the chat so i wanted to address that quickly the top question chris um we're going to go into uh how uh our clients integrate pcos in the lifecycle i'll show you some examples of that um and then your second question around could someone be both a pqo and an mql it's actually an interesting question and if anyone has thoughts on that from kind of their best practices you know what we see often is that like true i guess what i could call sort of true plg type companies they will basically just use mqls but they'll have a fire sorry pqos but they'll have like a firma graphic and demographic component to it as well as like maybe some like website browsing like some of the traditional factors that might go into an mql they'll kind of layer that in so they'll say you know i want to know do they fit our icp you know are they kind of the title or whatever um have they maybe done enough website hits or gone to certain content that we think is important and then have they are they also a user and or are they in an org that has usage and what are the different components that usage so they'll kind of combine all those things into one score i haven't heard too many companies have like a separate mql plus pql but but maybe breezy you have and i would love if you have to share there and if anyone else is doing both at the same time i would love to hear i love your thoughts from the group as well yeah i i have heard from a few companies who basically tried to keep these as almost like two separate funnels and i will say that it didn't go incredibly well um and the reason for that is because there's gonna end up being inherently there's gonna be sort of a mixing of the two funnels if you try to keep them in that separate format like that um so for instance someone might sign up to have a demo but then they may sign up to use your product um and so then which which one of these do we want to keep them in so i think um what's proving to be sort of the best practice as if um some of these marketing activities are also important like tim mentioned including that sort of in those different scores throughout the customer life cycle we use both but we have multiple go to market strategies based on company size currently yeah i think that can make sense i mean if you have some part of your motion that is i don't think you should just throw the mql out the window um i think there's there is still a place for it um especially if you do have a strong outbound motion and things there but just know that it won't be like some sort of clean perfect cut between the the two different paths um the the path previously um was very linear right someone became a lead to an mql to an sql opportunity whatever kind of your path was um and in product led it's it's not quite so linear it's sort of like a jagged line or a circle however you want to think about it so it will um have some messy pieces to it but um i think it's it is still a good way to track some of the people in your pipeline so the last thing i'll say to andy's point which is it is a good one we talked to a lot of companies that have that characteristic where they'll have a self-serve business and then they'll have sales going after maybe strategic enterprise in market a ton of tiers and maybe the self-serve piece or plg piece is a bit more smb but what often happens i won't name the company but we hear that sales at mid-market enterprise strategic will just go dive right into the self-serve users and customers uh if they fit the sort of that whatever the sort of stratification is there so they'll kind of constantly be dipping into the self-serve bucket for good leads obviously um you know so so even if it's like not aligning with like the mql approach like it's it's almost ad hoc happening so um you know every company does it differently and it's i think part of why we're helping here and and talking about this topic and and uh and building correlated is to help build coherent and consistent playbooks uh to help solve this problem to maybe avoid uh misalignment across uh across organizations and across across teams so okay well let's dive into um a couple of the key pieces here so you know i mentioned before like what we thought some of the common you know mistakes were well okay how how do we recommend that correlated that you actually do uh pqls across the customer life cycle so first things first instead of like a single score we recommend using these concepts uh which we'll go into in a moment called signals and playbooks and basically you can think of signals as comprised of different characteristics whether firmographic or demographic and then product based that you know indicate uh where a customer might be in their lifecycle are they ready to go from that activation to maybe a sales conversation and convert are they maybe more mature and they're already spending a lot uh but they're ready to be cross sold are they ready to expand what are some of those different signals and different characteristics that go into that and then what are the playbooks that align with those signals that your teams should should utilize should it go to the customer success team because it's more of an expand or cross-sell playbook and they're going to run a certain way to try and get expansion to occur or is there an sdr uh play here where it's more of a type of funnel kind of conversion out of that self-serve piece so we think that's the right way to do it we'll be going into some some tangible examples in a moment um piggyback you know what i just said a second bullet here we'll talk about this a little bit more um you should segment who responds to pico so obviously in that more traditional enterprise sales motion you kind of have a really well-defined playbook of you know passing off that lead maybe an inbound you know scr bdr resource is going to do some qualification or if it's going directly to sales they'll do some qualification before then getting into the um you know the sales process in motion that's all top of funnel and kind of linear path uh with pqls especially if you're going to do kind of this more you know segmentation type strategy using signals and playbooks you kind of have to think through you know who's going to respond to it so we'll talk a little bit about that uh and then i you know we couldn't help but but put number three in here you know we fundamentally believe this this would really help and we've seen it help a lot of our customers but you know using a tool it could be ours and there's other tools we will mention not to be uh to be very uh transparent there's other ways like you can do this it's not just using correlated but there are ways you can obviously enable the business team uh with customer data uh we'll talk a little bit about what some of those tools look like so going into signals and playbooks so this is going to be you know a lot more detail is going to go in gonna go into this um when i go to some examples in a moment um and we've talked a little bit about this uh you know so i'll skip like the first bullet but you know essentially what we recommend is you know breaking down by both accounts and users so really trying to understand you know not just on a like a user or traditional like lead level you know what this person is but also on account level you know who should you be targeting on the sales side one of the reasons why account level targeting matters so much is that in um in a lot of plg type businesses uh there's a huge type of funnel it's so big that you don't even know which accounts you should be targeting and so i just got off the phone earlier today with someone that got a hundred thousand leads a month um so you know when you have that i mean everyone would love to have that problem of course that's a great situation to be in but it also presents a challenge where you know a lot of those are maybe you can throw them out but even so after you've kind of done some just really simple filtering and qualification um it's still a huge no matter how big your team is you can't really handle that so doing both a user level kind of segmentation and account level uh segmentation based on activation is really important um and then we think that um there could be multiple different playbooks that you take based on sort of the signals that are being uh triggered and so that could be maybe a marketing automation play maybe uh triggering sales or sdr to do direct outreach maybe it could be the customer success team focused on existing champions or existing buyers uh and in more of an upsell basis maybe it could be some mix of all three in fact um and so how do you orchestrate that how do you decide you know what the playbook should look like uh well we're going to tell you some of our thoughts at least in a moment on the last bullet so tooling obviously uh oop i think we went backwards crazy oh i think we're on run number we on number three sorry thanks i appreciate it a pesky pinky finger so so you know obviously correlated you know i put that as a last point like we could help and we'll explain especially if anyone wants to pop after this to learn more about us we can tell a little bit more about how we help i think what exists today uh what many companies that we talk to are using right this moment are some combination of bi tools like looker or tableau and then their existing crm to basically arm their teams with at very least like the uh information they need about what's going on um with these pqls with with sort of the users or accounts um and it's it's often you know possible to kind of get some of the playbooks in order using this set of tools so uh the first bucket is bi tools as i mentioned there's a newer category of product which some of you may have heard of called reverse etl they could help you send some of this data into existing platforms like salesforce and hubspot i think the challenge is um you know with just doing this there's still a lot of manual effort involved and existing tools like salesforce and hubspot are great we have integrations with them with correlated to help enable teams to use those but both those platforms don't really uh deal with product data that well so if there's any kind of like change over time in terms of usage of a product kind of trends that indicate an account's ready to expand because they just saw a huge boost in some sort of key product metric that's not really well reflected at all in a sales force's hub perhaps they're not designed to handle that so there are tools that exist today that can help we think we can you know really help and obviously we'll talk a little bit more about that in the next section and obviously if someone wants to go deeper on that let us know so let's go into some examples um so what we have here in a moment basically kind of three examples of some signals for kind of three lifestyle stages conversion expansion and cross-sell and what the signals mean um and like what you should be thinking about as you're building you know what we call signals and then some of the playbooks that kind of go from there and so let's start with this one um the company name is a sort of dev tools product that allows you to track issues as an engineering team and maybe track tickets it's called tickets r us great great company um and so you know what we're sort of imagining here as like a conversion signal you know based on some you know live experience talking to companies like that might have products similar to this um it's basically you want to have some mix of thermographic information that kind of fits the icp as well as some kind of activation signal um because if you have a ton of signups you might have a huge type of funnel for self-serve of people just kicking the tires trying you out and so you might get a ton of signups even from great companies that fit the title like vp engineering which would be someone that's obviously going to be putting in maybe a ticketing platform and maybe at the sort of photographic level like oh employee count as high this is a sort of in our wheelhouse it's a growth stage or higher company or whatever the stratification might be but if you're not also layering in some level of momentum around maybe inviting their team in the last week or the last day it might just be someone kind of clicking around by themselves they're not really ready to talk to sales yet but as soon as they start inviting their team in that means it's going into active use and sales getting involved right at that moment is really important and so in this particular instance this signal would be then sent right to the right sales person that got to sign this account and given them sort of a task in salesforce in this example uh to talk to them and then what you could also do and what we see a lot of companies do is they'll pair this kind of segmentation with their marketing automation platform say opswat for example and they'll say this is maybe an example of a you know a great you know segment of users that have they're the org admin they have the right title they're in the right kind of photographic fit and they just invited a bunch of teammates in the last week let's add them to a specific onboarding sequence that's actually tailored to you know that persona and have them you know get a personalized onboarding email that talks about you know their kind of uh like level of business like 50 employees and up their kind of title so it's personalized maybe the vp of engineering that sort of thing so these are the kind of strategies that we see really work well for a conversion that have a better chance of sales kind of responding quickly to the right lead at the right time because they're seeing it based on this like kind of activation moment and they're also added to market automation in case you know sales gets ignored which you know we all know sometimes can happen then they're kind of added to this like more personalized onboarding trip which is a higher level of getting uh sort of a response and actually getting them to reply and maybe dig in a bit more um i have i want to go to the two others but before i dive in uh to expansion and crossover want to talk uh see if there any questions on this kind of conversion playbook i see one from uh chris here um and if you want chris you're welcome to ask it live um but otherwise i can read the question for you so i i i um oh yeah chris feel free to ask a little more or i think everyone that's a public so you can read in the chat but i will give you my kind of answer to it um and if anyone else has any thoughts on this would love to hear it so there's kind of two ways to think about it um what's very common in plg is there's this workspace concept so in traditional enterprise software there's the account and there's a contact if you think about like salesforce you know you have your accounts you have your contacts in salesforce there's two two things in plg there's often this third thing which is can be confusing but it really matters and so that third thing would be a workspace so for example in chris's example here for google you would actually care a little bit more about like how many workspaces and then people in those different workspaces are are joining is there velocity and workspace creation it almost doesn't matter that google is this massive company you would want to see that there's actually like a lot of kind of ground swell around that usage across different workspaces different users in there because it could be different teams or using it and you would then try as a salesperson maybe to use that as an example to go to central i.t or to try and like find out who the champions are within those different workspaces to then try and cross-sell into other or expand into other teams that are adjacent teams so i think the like total employee count can matter um for segmentation but it also matters a little bit on like the velocity or or addition of um of these workspaces and that concept and we see that time and time again in plg especially when those plg products are being adopted by bigger companies so like the total company size matters less than sort of adoption within the company all right i see a question from elizabeth and so i'm reading it now so give me a moment and then i'll give my thoughts if anyone while i'm reading this if anyone has any thoughts on chris's question let me know yeah so i think that's a really good point in what we see a lot of plg companies do so to summarize elizabeth's question obviously everyone can read it um you know essentially uh many plg companies view the free tier where they're self-served here as kind of this you know kick the tires try before you buy type of um uh you know tier and you're gonna have maybe some value there but there's going to be future gate and there's going to be limits that you impose to that you know that part of your product that free product that you know it's either users are limited usage is limited there's some cap or some gating that occurs and so i think the you know this is not an easy thing to solve for by any means and so i think it's really hard to crack and it's a combination of a product and go to market problem but what some of the best companies will do is they'll find a way to like organically and nicely get people to transition from that free product to the paid product and that could be on a credit card so you still might not talk to sales but there'll be some you know very you know uh interesting hook to a free user that says hey i'm ready to uh go from free to page so i it was a long time ago when i converted to paid but i'm now remembering calendly which we're customers of and i believe calendly has you know you can get like 10 meetings or something for free there's some a number i believe they do in meetings getting if i'm getting this wrong forgive me but you know once you're starting to use it you're like oh like i'm gonna probably do more meetings than this and it's like a pretty you know convenient product like i'm going to convert i'm going to convert myself up so you know some people might just be fine in that you know limited tier and yeah use it for nurture send them content they're on your newsletter they're seeing your product updates um and some of them might self-select to convert up or be a hand raiser to sales i think that that's fine um i think where we see companies like calendly engage sales is often when those people have gone from free to self-serve credit card deals and then and then they're they're trying to look at some of these signals around are they inviting a bunch of people are they creating new workspaces are there some trigger events once they're even paid that then says okay sales should parachute in and talk to them so hopefully um hopefully that helps answer your question elizabeth if you have any follow-ups type them in or let me know yeah yeah so if it's if it's just free and then sort of more of an enterprise lift and this is this is a product problem too right it's like where is there that gradual happy path to go from free to you know a sales motion and it's often not just a good market problem it's also or not problems wrong word but it's not just a go to market you know task to figure out it's also a product task to figure out like is there a middle a middle area that you can invest in so uh but very we see a lot very good points and and a lot of companies are navigating that transition for sure all right well let's move over to expansion example yeah good questions keep them coming so expansion is is you know a bit of a catch-all bucket um but what we often see in product like growth is because of that dynamic i just mentioned a second ago of like calendly where you know you can you know really start spend spending a lot on the product without talking to a human being the the name of the game for the sales people for the teams that are actually trying to get um conversions that are maybe on an invoice that are driven by a sales process they're often coming from already paying customers already you know existing customers and so the question then becomes what are some of the signals that might indicate an account that is otherwise maybe somewhat happy as a self-serve customer or maybe they were on an invoice and they're just kind of humming along um what indicates when a salesperson should come back in and say we think it's actually time for you to talk to us about you know xyz higher tier or this you know more seats or whatever it might be and so what we often see i mean it sounds intuitive and it is but what we often see is you know whatever your pricing model as soon as your customers are hitting some of those upward bounds of whatever plan they're on whether if you price on seats if they've exhausted all most of the seats if you price on some usage basis like credits or api calls or you know whatever it is there's so many permutations but if you're getting closer to you know that maximum percentage of usage it's a really natural point for sales to get involved i think another example for expansion is the one i just gave before when chris asked about google which is when we see multiple workspaces created and so this is often a sign for those enterprise or strategic reps to say okay we're seeing at the tesla account that you know there's three new workspaces that were just created this month with 40 or 50 users you know in each of those workspaces we need to map out what those teams are you know who how are they starting to adopt us and are there other teams that we can expand into and so one example there it's a simple i didn't even include it on this um this illustration but one of our customers has a very simple bottle they use but basically they'll pull in enrich total employees for a company and they have a product where they can sell licenses to 100 of all employees at their customers so they look to get 100 penetration but they'll often start with you know smaller than 100 penetration so they'll basically look at how many seats or licenses have they adopted self-serve or sales led and what is the total employees is there a big delta there well then sales should be focusing on the ones with a high activity score where there's like a big delta between the total employee account and the total licenses they've purchased where there's a big room to upsell um and then maybe where renewal and it's not renewal date's not like right you know coming up right away but it's maybe a little bit around the corner um so if there's like some positive signals around usage and adoption uh but they still haven't adopted all the way then that's a good uh a good signal for sales to focus on that account maybe versus other accounts that are a bit more penetrated or not showing quite the same level of action or activity um what we often see from a playbook standpoint are a couple things one especially for enterprises strategic you know sales just telling them about the account is enough right like they're spending a lot of time on those accounts they're mapping them out so just a slack message or adding to salesforce and saying hey this is like a you know you're this is it it's a nice threshold it's time to focus on this one like that's enough for enterprise or strategic if it's a bit more of like a commercial or high velocity bucket like an smb or mid-market type bucket then we often see outreach used so you'll or sales off those kind of email automation platforms where you can start to automatically add kind of users that are within these accounts based on different rules you might set whether or not they're the org owner or if they're a decision maker is flagged in in salesforce you'll see them added into sequences you can start to have sales at least assisted in um in how they're doing that outreach uh if it's on more of like a long tail or a larger set of accounts so those are some uh examples of kind of signals and playbooks for expansion um i see uh chris's question which which alludes a little bit to the last last one but i'm happy to cover here though too um which is a good one which is how to identify the most important signals and free tools usage that indicates a customer is likely to convert so this is a question we get almost every conversation we have which is great great tim sounds cool poorly it sounds really cool um what signal should i use and you know the the shorter answer is what we don't know because everyone everyone's business is different but there are some common themes and i think we can certainly help point people in the right direction and so my typical answer to this is you know what are even if you you know have just like a beginning starting to begin to look at your product data and understand sort of the core metrics there usually you'll start to have one or two or three core metrics that indicate there's an activation occurring and you know we've given a couple examples of different products like i'm a customer of like calendly is a good one so for the free product of calendly you know a core metric for them is how many meetings are being set with calendar like that's ultimately what the tools the job of that tool is is to like help you set meetings and so a core metric for them is are you setting meetings and so you know for a free tool like let's say calendar for example you know the more meetings that are being set maybe the velocity of that uh happening either on an individual user basis or across you know a team's workspace you know that's going up you know a bunch week over week month over month whatever it might be that is a pretty good indication that a free tool um a customer there is like they convert because they're just using it more and they're using the way the product in the way that it's that that's the highest value the the best sort of activation metric and so that's going to be the reason why i say i don't know is because every company has like a different one of those activation metrics so i can't without like knowing what that is i can't i can't tell you but it's usually um one or two or three of those kind of core metrics of like where's the kind of value in that free tool where is it what does it look like for that specific product that's how you identify kind of the most important signals so that hopefully that helps chris that would be my kind of high level answer that question anything else on expansion before we dive into crossout and we're just a couple slides away from from wrapping up we can do a little q a at the end all right so let's go into crosso and talk a little bit about that so for cross-sell you know basically it's a little similar to expansion i think the kind of main differences here are you want to look at you know some level of product usage and firmographic usage and then you might have to have a slightly to chris's last question a slightly better understanding of some of the tip over points where other customers have converted to new products you know so it might help to have a little bit more of like past history there and understanding but you know essentially if you have an understanding of like we know in our customer base that when companies so this example is a business credit card company called slope and they sell virtual credit cards for small businesses um and so you know in this example slope offers obviously a credit card they have other services now they have banking and expense management anything you might need as a small business you know on the on the financial side they're starting to offer upsell opportunities there and so obviously you can self-serve your way into that but when should sales start focusing um on it on specific accounts uh what is what is like a cross-sell signal for for something like a slope and so for them you know it might be something like okay is there a certain amount of cards deployed a certain amount of spend already happening so they're a good customer already they're kind of already kind of active they're hitting some level of maturity or we may be seeing some growth in their spend so they're they're kind of going up in their spend and they have a certain amount of employees so maybe they hit a firmographic level that kind of matters we know the level of complexity here well in that case because of these different criteria both product attainment uh as well as kind of some firm graphics we know that that's a good fit for our expense management product so we're going to anytime an account kind of crosses those thresholds we'll send a slack to the sales person that owns that account and say hey this account you know whatever account that you own here uh within slope they just hit these thresholds you should try and ping them about expense management and i think again for kind of more that long tail in particular um you can add them to sequences whether it's in market automation or a tool like outreach saying you know hey we saw you're hitting these increases typically when companies hit you know this threshold of spend on slope credit cards you know expense management becomes much more of a focus so you know we have a we have functionality there whatever the sales pitch is um you know you can imagine the content being paired there but those kind of playbooks really help um drive cross-sell instead of waiting what we see often a lot of companies before they talk to us is oftentimes they're waiting to get a hand raise saying hey i want to learn more about expense management whereas this like feeds kind of the right companies right to the sales person um it gets them kind of being more proactive on on doing the cross sell than they might otherwise be so let me pause for a second here i want to say questions on cross-sell of course but i also want to go back to the check i did see another question here i want to take a chance to read it so if you're coming up with questions on crosstalk please go for it and i'll be just reading chris's question here yeah so chris you're you're coming up with some of the common common ones here that we see um you're not alone chris i mean if you're willing to come off mute one question i'd have just clarifying are those free users attached to the domain so like they have like they're the same domain so you know they're part of the account um or are they unidentifiable because they're not on the account domain yeah so they'll have uh the domain of the account but like for large enterprise companies if somebody has like an at google domain and you have like you know 15 different workspaces uh for google it's really challenging to figure out uh what workspace if any that this particular user belongs to yeah i mean i think part part of that is especially if it's a large enterprise account and i'd love to hear this this sounds right to you but like typically we'll see that like owned by a strategic rep and so maybe it's a good use for like at salesperson's time because they only own maybe a handful of accounts to say you know what you know this week i'm going on a mission to like round up these free users and i'm going to like individually email all of them and say hey you know thanks for using the product i happen to be the you know relationship point of contact here you would love to just learn how you're using it and see if you can get any of the you know some percentage of those 250 to reply so it's almost more of like uh you're like being a consultant and then then that might help you if you get maybe some percentage of those people to reply you can start to map out oh yeah well i'm part of this team we're just trying to you know so you start to do it so it's a bit more manual i would say a little lower on the automation side of the spectrum um and obviously uh you know a strategic rep might not view that as the best use of their time but i think often we find that that kind of more manual approach makes sense for the strategic side and you might uncover within that sort of free usage pool some interesting people you haven't you know known before and so the best way to filter through at least our recommendation is like just stack rank those 250 in terms of activity within the product and then you can maybe have a top 10 or top 20 of like super users that are like just seem like based on their usage they're they love the product they're in it all the time they're using it all the time and then you can start your focus there as a strategic rep and say hey you know clearly you love the product happy to like i want to know a little bit more about that and you know i'm your point of contact would love to just like hear how we can help and and see if you can get some on the phone to uncover uh uncover across sale um cool well i know we're almost we have like three minutes left um so i want to make sure we kind of get to the end here uh so let's go maybe to the building the business case piece and then we can uh answer any follow-up questions so you know i think the the biggest thing here on like how to start to execute on this is you know basically where can you get access to the data so um that's one of the things that we really help with we have connections um in our product to data warehouses and so most of the time within companies once you get to a certain level of maturity your data team is utilizing a snowflake a bigquery or redshift to consolidate all of your company's data and that includes all your customer data whether it's from the crm product usage whatever it might be billing whatever it might be and so to build the signals that we showed you especially if you're using correlated you just plug in your data warehouse to our product and we allow you to build those segments if you're not using our product and you're using whether it's salesforce directly or crm directly or a bi tool again that'd probably sit on top of the data warehouse and you would have you know that feeding into those different tools and so you know oftentimes we recommend as you're starting out if you're on more of the go-to-market side of marketing sales yes whatever it might be you know the data team is going to be your best friend to help you um get started before i started correlated um one of my co-founders dianna who's our head of product she was you know we didn't have a data team she was the data team at my prior company and we collaborated very closely to basically solve this problem manually at the company i was part of so um that's kind of the process we see especially as startups and you get more to maturity i think also as you get you know further along your operations team is super important they're often liaising with the data team as well and putting kind of everything together um into the crm into other downstream tools into correlated uh whatever it might be um and so making sure they're bought in you know matters a ton and then finally you know i think this was maybe a little it should be hopefully a little easier because at the end of the day you know the goal here is to drive you know tangible business outcomes revenue um you know core metrics and so you know building a case around hey we think this will have a meaningful impact on conversion rates from you know from free from free tier to paid or from you know expansion from sort of a self-serve piece to sales deals that have a higher average contract value you know whatever it might be and we can certainly if anyone wants to talk offline talk to you a little bit more about like the roi case here whether you're using correlated or just trying to build build support internally for that uh this sort of thing so those are kind of the top recommendations that we would have and you know i i think um i have now spoken more than enough so i would love to open it up for any final questions but otherwise um you know we really appreciate all of you logging on and i think the um we'll end with just you know we're going to send this deck around we'll send the presentation link around so you can have the recording as well and um i did write a blog post about this so if you want to kind of go a bit more on the written word you can check that out too so any final thoughts final questions before we wrap up all right well thank you all so much really appreciate your time great seeing you all and uh if you have any questions for us feel free to ping us directly on linkedin email whatever thanks so much hi everyone all right have a good one see ya