Empower Your Customer Service Team with Product Qualified Leads for Customer Service

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david my first question is for you um i'm curious i love learning about your role and it's um super unique because you run this self-serve motion like a growth team um do you think that we'll see more of this in plg um have you seen other companies run their self-service business like grafana or is this very unique to you um and maybe at digitalocean as well yes it's kind of different so digital ocean like just going on that one first geo is like a pure product like company like i don't think it's like uh understood enough like even in the public markets and that like trying to figure out a sales motion is something an evolution there um and then when we talked about plg and like aaron can talk you know for days on this that it really is this uh success motion it's like how are we adding value as a human being to help them like solve their infrastructure challenges whatever it might be it looks a little bit like support looks a little bit like success and sure the sales component is like you know how do we get you into this new car and start spending more money right but it's like in that order i think is the important part um it's interesting because we're open source just like as aaron mentioned where there's already this motion like it's already plg right like where there's this wide distribution because graphon is for free and available across the internet for you know millions of developers so we've got that motion going massive adoption over the years and like most open source companies we've monetized early on the enterprise end right we have a lot of success on that motion the more sales driven side um but i think because we've had those two motions that existed figuring how do we put a disproportionate amount of effort into the sas in my mind plg means like put a credit card and spend some money or experience something for free that didn't totally exist um in a major way going back a few years so i think it's there's probably roles that look a lot like mine and other companies that are adopting this process but i don't suspect it's companies who've started it right out there like most companies nowadays right out of with some sort of plg motion i think so i think for folks that have been around a company's existed for some time um and there's already an enterprise motion i think you probably see more folks that look like like this small self-serve business unit you might might be how we talk about it that makes sense thank you for sharing um i want to dive really quickly into pqls which is let's just get into it because that's the topic of the discussion i think it's a very hot topic right now but a lot of companies thinking about it differently um and what i've seen at focus and with customers that we're working with and others in the community there seems to be three different categories of pqls there's the product engagement piece there's the customer fit piece and then there's buying intent and then you're able to segment those pqls based on what are the goals of your organization what customer segments do you have um what roles need access to pqls so i'd love to hear from you all how you define pqls at your respective companies and what frameworks you use to define those and maybe we can go in the same order i went before from jen to david to aaron sure and and just so everyone knows timeline why it's where we are in our journey versus my fellow panelists here because i think we're a little bit earlier we launched our free product at the beginning of november and so we didn't have to define a pql until november and so for us there's basically two criteria did they take the action that allows them to use the product and share their product um what they you know get in there and sign up and are they in our icp and that's a pql we toss it over the fence to sales and hope that they do magic at that point awesome david and erin i'd love to hear from both your time together digitalocean and now at your two other companies you got this aaron oh man so yeah digital ocean um in right so um you know we define pql's in a number of different ways and dave i can't remember how many times we went back and forth we probably had 40 over the couple of years that we built and scrapped and reiterated on um true free plan right because um you might get a small credit but what we looked for is identifying trends amongst customers right um i was the first rep uh true rep at digitalocean and i joined at a very late stage right and so it was really interesting to start talking to folks that have been on the platform for years and so we developed pqls to identify who we should talk to and once we start noticing trends that you know folks that are adding multi-products or scaling in certain ways and they became large expansion customers and ones that we wanted to lash onto and some of them ended up being our top customers at the end of the day we really started to define that motion and so we really looked for folks that are coming in doing exciting things and that took lots of iteration especially when um you know the funnel looks to be about like a thousand new signups a day really healthy place to be at cypress having a free plan and a self-serve product we started to look at both sides of the funnel to say what are our free users doing that's interesting how do we target them how do we speak with them what do we learn from that and then on the paid side what are the other exciting things right are they going into consumption building are they adding multiple tests are they actually not using the product the way they should be and then we identify them as triggers send him over to mdrs on the free side sales on the uh paid side and sort of watch the magic happen from there nice yeah and just kind of build on some things aaron mentioned at our time at digital ocean yeah we were trying to go after this like years ago we were fortunate to both like either work directly forward closely with this woman emmanuel who feeds success over at toast now kind of like brought this concept to us of like hey we don't do traditional selling at digilotion because it's a pure consumption product that people come on let's let's scrap mqls that's like not the right terminology number one right because there's no marketing relations these are paying customers of ours so like how do we know the right signals or triggers to reach out to so for years we kind of referred them as triggers and then there was some good branding some folks started doing around equals we adopted that terminology so we were both just fortunate to work with someone who's like very like forward thinking uh on this and sort of got us on the right path a little while ago on it um but it's kind of where it all starts like and i'll talk a little more about experience at grafana but a do um it was like just triggers there's like all right the following person does x amount of things within y amount of time right um things we were writing in sql to like figure out like what does this look like and then then figure out how to work with someone to automate it right so that would be one example in my experience now at grafana just kind of contrast that or show how similar it is to some extent with digital we think about the world like well someone just because someone's a qualified lead in our mind doesn't mean like they have any interest in chatting with us so like the hardest part i found and there's maybe like a different tangent to go on here is like we try to use some sort of qualification of like might they have any interest in chatting with us and is it not just us wanting to talk to them because i'd argue we sort of struggle with the same problem that like you deal with in sales in other places of just because you have thousands or hundreds or tens of thousands of people using your product and you think they're interesting doesn't mean they want to talk to you at all and i think that is like what i found is one of the unique challenges so it's like all these triggers of product usage or their demographics and all the leap scoring style stuff i don't i don't have a good answer for this right just like an important uh like phil thing we care about is like let's also only reach out to the people who probably could find value from talking to us i love it something that um has been sticking with me since the beginning of what you all both said is we heard from jen you know we keep it simple we have one pql we just launched our free product let's do it and then i heard from aaron at digitalocean we must have had 40. what how many pql should you have it's a great question um you think it also depends on the complexity of your product right if you think about digitalocean right they have many different features functionalities products different icps different types of customers and so it just got complex in the sense that we wanted to explore different things and i i'm pretty sure last time i checked they're like down to 10 again so they've really you know cooled it off they're probably laughing at dave and i know um but you know we were interested in just like hey it was early days we have the uh ability to test multiple things so let's go and see what it looks like right if a customer is using droplets and spaces when you're pairing servers and storage together you're most likely building in production so why are you doing that let's talk to you and understand why um here at cypress we've probably got around six today and that grows and shrinks depending on the month alexa you and i have talked to depth about this and in our time together um and so i think it really depends on a couple of things like what you're looking for um we do something unique and dave and i experimented a little bit with this at do is we bring demographic data into because i'm equally as interested in who the person is um i see a lot of times some folks are just looking at product data and so i think our our scope expands a bit because we're looking at more of the demographic side as well especially here at cyprus so it sounds to me that the line of our definition is a little different so here's how i think about it um what is the thing there and we have one action right now effectively i mean yes it takes some time to get there but we effectively have one path when you sign up for first starter as we call it you are going to make what we call a replay when you publish it suddenly you must be at least somewhat qualified or at least you you've gotten to the point that you can share it if we had 12 products we would probably have 12 different definitions of what that final trigger was right what's the final trigger to get over the fence then um it gets qualified by icp and then it gets segmented and so we don't define a different pql by segment because to me that that point that's like a sales a lead routing issue more than it is like a definition issue interesting yeah it makes sense and for my when we're at d.o or a little bit of what we're seeing at grafana there's a couple different buckets so yeah it goes up from like you know two or three all the way up to tens and like what i've seen from like an organizational pressure standpoint is well you want to like figure out what the hell is going to work right like we start early we have like a million things and then you like open up this funnel or have too many people that are considered pql and like there's not enough noise and then you like swing the pendulum to be like all right like let's just pick one or two things and then there's like zero volume and you like figure how to go back and forth so like in my experience that's a real thing of like super tight constraints like opening up um that's one this other bit that's a little nuanced is like in deal we saw this where we're looking for people who are like showing real signs they might scale or like because they scale they have more complexity so they might value from speaking to us but i think the other one that's interesting and we spend some more time doing this here is like something that looks like proactive support at the end of the day like can we add value with the human being we couldn't give you via email right like we couldn't trigger an email to do this well see you're like visiting certain types of support pages or whatever it might be or you generated an api key and didn't do the following thing like you're maybe you're stuck and other than just triggering your email to like speaking of the human might help you so that's another pit part of my mind so like demographics all obviously the product behavior but then there's the like trying to do something but like not knowing how to i think is also part of this equation so what i'm hearing is it could be based on kind of what the goal is of a team or the end user so maybe one of your goals is i want to make sure i'm proactively reaching out to folks that are on the self-serve product that are stuck so we'll have a pql there but then there's also a pql for folks that maybe are already paying on a lower tier plan and you think that they have upsell potential so your pqls are defined based on what those kind of motions or goals are is that fair yeah that's very well said cool um and it sounds like gens is based on product it's like this thing happened we have one product we have one premium product we are in the early days so we are confident about the pql motion for this one thing um and then is putting it a little high here so we don't have enough data to be confident yet fair fair it's been four months then aaron at cypress you have it based on it almost sounds like different segments of the business and then similar to what david has at grafana yeah i'll give an example right if a large company in our icp signs up and um you know i saw somebody from rainforest here so you probably understand this if they're running a low amount of tests they have a really big front end right we can assume that they're either just poking around or not fully onboarded or need to work on adoption right and so we pair like hey large company right fits our icp and also low usage together and say hey there's a lot more we could be doing with these folks let's reach out it becomes much more of like the idea of solution selling rather than like your old i grew up as a cold caller right so i remember those days of like really trying to force the marketing message down um and you know i think we've really adapted this uh adapted this idea of solution selling of much more how can we help right we want you to do more with us of course that leads to more dollars but it's a much more healthier conversation than like trying to show value and go right to decision makers and uh for lack of a better term like force a solution on somebody versus like naturally letting them on board in the right way i love it there's a really good question in the chat uh by eddie how often do you change your pql qualifications was that cycle different from when you first started your plg motion i'm like we don't know yet hey my gut is like let's evaluate every quarter and see what we get i think the other two probably have better answers here yeah like oh maybe not better just different right so aaron and i talked a lot a bunch about a digilotion this the story um it was fairly often what daily not quarterly after a while we'd introduce new ones but we'd be like hesitant to kill things on the cadence of more than more often than every quarter mostly because and i know this is a segway so we don't have to go into if we could i'm like well how do we know if these things are working right like how do we test it's like a good use of the time interesting topic so like how we did a digilotion is the example was we just like held hold up hold our grip so we said here's a pql they did the following thing this trigger we're going to like put them in front of aaron's team and we're going to hold out the other 50 we're going to measure what happens and again it's a pure there's no commit here right this is usage-based pricing we're going to look what happens on that audience over the course of one two quarters it's like see what the impact is um and that's how we were able so we always said like we want to make sure not remove pqls maybe we needed to give it three or six months just to be totally honest because we felt we had to have it this type of view and it was the nuance of our product all products are different ours was a long game um and that's how we were able to do it uh that sounds really cool when we sound like intelligent about like how we set it up it doesn't mean that we ever get crystal clarity i'm like this was a factor with this one right like we were constantly looking at ourselves and debating with executives i'm like well like these results look interesting but what if you dig under the hood and would this have happened anyway and you know just because they spoke to you what are they gonna have done it right they're it's like very very nuanced that was maybe more more than we were looking for that that was basically how we thought about our cadence i want to hear from aaron but i also quickly want to learn how did you you say we were measuring success every three to six months to see how effective the pql was compared to just remaining in self-serve what data were you looking at were you seeing how much quicker they converted the quicker time to value the increase of ar like what were those metrics aaron you want to take that one sure um no this this is such a alexa you and i have talked about this in depth right um one of the biggest things we had to prove at dio was like are we doing better than self-serve because then you're deploying a bunch of sales resources at something that's going to happen anyway and that was always the big question and right away i think our first pqrl day was the 48 hour spike right it's still around today it's still very high performance digital ocean right when someone comes in and their usage dramatically spikes up let's talk to them understand why and the the questions we started asking or you know for the data team started asking was do we convert them faster to larger customers do does their asp increase and does churn over time decrease and what we found was when those things started to become true we were on to something right and then small tweaks would sort of come from there but as long as we were beating uh we always a b tested right we've also talked a lot about this right we would do something around 60 40 to sales or 75 25 because we want to understand what's that control group look like because if we weren't like i said we're probably focusing on the wrong things and then we're giving sales credit for uh you know motions with a segment that would happen anyway and so i think those metrics really stand out um here at cypress we sort of take a similar route to understand what does the asp look like um would they have upgraded and spent more with us and as we continue to prove that wrong or right we tweak and adjust based on those metrics that we're pulling basically on a weekly basis at this point that's interesting to me just because we don't have an upgrade a self-serve upgrade path between you know the lower tier starter plus as we call it and the full platform like there so that would be an impossible way for us to measure so for us it's like pure play conversion rate at first and then obviously subjective feedback because sales will whine at me sorry i've got a sales rep or two here on the call i probably shouldn't whine about them and then yeah obviously time to close is probably the next thing we'd look at i love it so there's a consistent theme of you know we want to test this and make sure that our sales motion or using pqls to power sales teams um that is beating the self-serving otherwise leave it to self-serve um and when i say beating it sounds like you're both doing a b testing with take maybe a cohort of users cut them in half for three months and say we're going to try sales reps in these pqls leave the others to self-serve and then make sure that it beats it and then we can program that as a longer term pql did i explain that correctly yeah yeah that's right and i think one of the the nuances because that you know we talk about numbers and like pqls so it's like you know it's not like a score at least for my experience i haven't like implemented as a score like the old-fashioned way that like yeah they are sort of like these discrete things it's like the action x action y whatever might be and i think we did see in our time at do you had to look at the results like the hypothesis different for each right so as i already mentioned there was like immediate you start spiking up that's like one behavioral trigger there might be another one and like in one of those scenarios the success metric might be that we were like convert them to a contract right and one might be that we actually reduce churn over some period of time which was made a little bit more helpful and again again pure usage-based pricing is a little different about how about the world but that's another thing worth considering that like hey not all these things are created equal they like have these slightly different intent very interesting and when you experimented with those different triggers as you called it at do and now pqls did you give it to every sales rep like run free tell me like if these pqls work like how did you do that it's a great question uh we actually kept it really small um especially in the early days because we had one rep um he's actually now here with me inside so you know i have a tendency to do that but you know he understood what we were trying to do and i think when you um when the team became five six seven eight reps right to deploy a pql across that um consistency you're gonna get different messages you're gonna have different phone calls and so we really wanted to you know get that small control group with new pqls give it to one or two people that really understood our sort of mission sometimes we would split different groups of peak routes between different groups of people and work with them on that initiative but it really helped to keep it smaller rather than disperse across the whole team and sort of have to work across a number of people rather than you know a small control group um once we confirmed that things were sort of working the way they were intended and there was no hiccups then we'd start to release to the bigger team work on enablement on boarding sort of let them run from there i love it anyone else have a different perspective on that um well there's a question in chat like so we have a very large sales org you know like first off we're like new to like we're framing it as pql's here right so we're actually very early in the journey here and how we talk about that what what might be taking away from my experience at digilation uh which again was like pure product length trying to figure out the sales motion on top of that where here was the opposite right like we understood sales motion going up um was like how do we actually service these customers that come through self-service and i think for me what working with aaron for all that amount of time and then you look at like the hyperscalers like the amazons of the world as an example and we really found was like you were supplying and we were very technical business focused focused on software developers and uh devops and so on where actually the unique value we ever offer to customers in a self-serve setting is actually around like technical support solutions engineering sales engineering and that's the approach we take for the most it's one of the things we do here we do a bunch of different things but where i spend a lot of my time specifically on this is actually the people we're having reach out to a lot of these people that are referring to as pqls are people that we refer to as like success engineers um before we pass anyone to sales so that happens to be a very very small group on my team so sort of keeps that as a instead of being widespread it's just you know a handful of people today um so we have a slightly different um market of just like we just want to educate customers on a very technical product first and foremost and then you know we figure how we interact with sales that's interesting because it's persona based then because we sell the sales of marketing people and so that's a very different sales promotion than i had when i was at aws and we were doing the developer route right which was far more similar to exactly what you described and as such right now we're tql is the same as mqls and basically putting them into the round robin or the whatever whatever my sales office is set up for lead assignment but i also know that we're talking to maybe a sales engineer or a product marketer or it could be a vp of sales or it could be somebody in marketing right like i know we know our personas and they're more likely to not get pissed off at us by taking a phone call yeah that's a really great point yeah totally i have a spicy question for you all that i'm hoping sparks in the debate so we have a salesperson a self-service person and a marketer who owns pql's jed owns all of the pqls i have extreme ownership fundamentally so there's who has owned the product who has owned the go to market and who has owned pqls and we've gone on a bit of a journey once upon a time before i started it reprise because i started last summer the product owned it because they were literally building it so it made sense for them to own it and then we had to launch it and i negotiated out of pqos with the head of sales in fact i did it um on camera in front of everybody that we put out as a reality show so that one's a fun one and you can probably even find it and see how just crazy we were um then sales owned the whole project for a while while we tried not to scare the crap out of our sales folks by bringing in a product led motion on top of their enterprise sales motion then ops had to own it for a while because we needed to put in the credit card and we needed to make sure all the data flows were working and but as of tuesday literally two days ago um marketing now owns the entire thing including and which gives us full autonomy over what a pql is we actually have now orchestrated it completely in hubspot and then we're passing it over to salesforce appropriately to get it into the sales team and with the routing that we have through lean data and and it's all mine which means that i can i could go completely cowboy here and define a ql is whatever the heck i want now i'm not a complete idiot all of the time and so i plan to actually watch it and make sure that i can get the right signal from product if i want a signal that sales actually knows what the heck just happened with this lead that just fell into their lap because otherwise they can't nurture it correctly but that's that's long story longer that was our journey uh to marketing owning basically the whole shebang and you combine mqls and pqls into one score it sounds like no we we toss them both over the fence into the same bucket kind of um but they're two different orchid funnels we also have and i i was really happy to hear david say this like we have simple definitions of mqls and pqls marketers over over engineer mqls all the time well if they did this white paper and then they did that and then they saw these three web pages they're suddenly magically ready to be sold to is usually a bunch of crap yeah and i think we can easily do the exact same thing with pq as well if they clicked here in the product and they did this and they did that and so we're working with product to set up what are the milestones um if we need to do something other than the one we have currently set up yeah last point you brought up i think it's like so spot on um it's like so easy to overcomplicate it good for decent reasons under the hood is like there's some element but when interacting with sales oh i think the most common is like okay why like why are they this like why are they triggered or whatever it might be they're usually looking for like a moment or a milestone to be like well they did the following right they did x the product so i yeah i agree with you oh it's not as spicy as we wanted i guess well i want to know david who owns it yeah so i think we're fine maybe i'll give some perspective i think so does marketing right um because there wasn't the whole business was a self-serve business wasn't product right so i think in that regard it wasn't product it was marketing like our marketing growth team however we want to frame it like was responsible for it right then we partnered with with sales and you also like i think in with mqls as an example aaron whoever would be like oh dave this sucks right stop sending me this right uh the loop is there um here graffon it's a little nuanced it's like i don't know if it would apply for everyone because my team looks a little more like a product like a growth product team um in that regard i think it just sort of matters it depends like our marketing team is there to help get a lot of demand for sales um and because we don't totally we don't pass anyone about our handwriting there's like we can talk about hand raisers as a separate bucket our marketing teams are covering that like how do we drive people to raise their hand and talk to sale and so on and so forth but this like proactive you know we are initiating the conversation sort of lives in this growth org but that's uh a journey right i imagine we'll change our mind if this sticks um over time yeah i like i like how you said partnered um i'm glad you put it that way so we don't have to argue too much but um you know interesting here at cypress i was sort of like first in seat amongst the rev-ops group the marketing group and i did a panel with openview a few months back and i think we decided that revops now owns qls because they seem to sit in the middle and can be a liaison to helping create these things across the product team the data team data team is a really important piece to pqls in my past um we'll talk about break fix hopefully in a minute because we have pointing fingers across and that was always fun but i think there's a lot of influence from other groups and um i i think it's less important who owns it but that person does need to take responsibility for because until the plg tools like focus and others came along this is a pretty crazy process to manage depending on how you're pulling the data right um and so you know nowadays we we sort of pin this on on rev ops to own the process and there's a lot of influence coming from internal teams such as marketing product data and sales so um sort of a combined effort to partner on building these and maintaining them yeah i mean i one interesting child like whether where it sits now is another i don't know that's most important one the question is like who's being held accountable for what i think it really matters the other day and like that i think with plg does it go to market it's i've seen it look really different across like there's different do's very different here even from the uh everyone's on the call i think probably structures their team differently what they hold their head of marketing accountable for is different than others when we were at digilation just for contests they were going through this question like who owns revenue in a pure plg business where there's no sales people like it's a really by the way strange question i have to address and i think that's why we need to look at marketing but global marketing is going to hold some attribution toward some aspect of revenue so i think it's like as a the executive team getting good alignment i'm like like who do you hold accountable for like generating getting people over to sales i think often looks like marketing right or devops is like the um at a minimum the piping for that that's the reason you might take i think devops at least from what i said is like a piping often a piping function but i've seen companies who looked at it as a very strategic like goal-setting function i i love all of the points and what i'm hearing and actually is very consistent to what i've seen amongst several plg companies is it's a team sport there's going to be someone who's accountable but there's many people who have input and need to be either defining the pqls which comes from uh input from product and growth and rev-ups and data and sales leadership and then acting on the pqls is the sales team and then actually piping it as rev-ups um so yes i agree with george it's a cross-function task force but it's really important that someone's accountable because if no one's accountable then nothing will happen but there always is that feedback loop going from and i like how you talked about that at d.o david and aaron where you would create a pql feed it to aaron aaron would say like what is this crap and then you'd have to rebuild the model and like that's kind of how it like gets more robust over time yeah yeah i love jill's question um for david and aaron how does the open source offering factor into your pql program if at all you want to go i think there's still an internal debate on whether we call these things pqls i tend to just group everything under repeat mainly because i love them um but i do think they they make sense right and so one of the things we've started doing is we're using a series of tools to understand who our open source users are one of them i'll call it out because i love it is clay.run actually thank you dave for that introduction and they've got a great tool where i can scrape my github users into clay and i can push that to a system where i'm understanding who they are and so then what i do is i group pairings of open source users together and compare it to uh free users and so from seeing a correlation of multiple signups on the open source side we're getting the stars from our github users and then they're also signed up for a free plan then they're also using the product we're signaling as a pql and so we absolutely consider the open source data you need to be careful i was very against and so was you know our leadership team in the early days of just messaging the open source users without them having you know signed up for the product because then you're like the line of like getting a little creepy and being a little too aggressive and so when we see some trends we we like to think like hey if they're they're signing up for the product they've been all over the open source side that's a really good sign let's reach out now versus like somebody starts your github and you're cold calling them so we generally take like a a paired approach where we're combining a bunch of data to get uh you know a pql from that yeah and on my end it's probably a little probably a little different in that our marketing team might be leveraging some of this information and some of their outreach um i think we think about the word a little idealistically like yeah we just want to get as many people to raise their hand right and then we don't have to feel like we're annoying anyone like i know that sounds stupid but like wouldn't that be great for all of us anyone who's a marketer or a growth or sales person we just have more people raising their hand to talk to us um i think we do what we can to figure out how we can drive more of that um from where i sit um i typically stay away out of like thinking about not thinking about open source but um incorporating that data into sort of like qualification uh because we're mostly just looking at our sas product so that's like a driver and distribution mechanism um and you know we have a ton of adoption there but we for the most part keep that out of our uh out of my universe at least cool love it switching gears a little are any other teams the sales teams using pqls yes um this is leading question yes uh this is new so recently we've uh partnered up with uh the customer success team um to also have um you know we've sort of rebranded internally so don't get confused but we're calling them like csqls which are essentially pqls for cs and so how that works is sales continues to own all revenue we really didn't want to create that blurred line like i've seen in the past it gets a little like hey this is my deal versus yours and we wanted to stray away from that and so in this case cs owns the top book of business here at cyprus and we have ql's pql set up where if there's a you know whatever trigger may be they'd get alerted they'd reach out have a conversation understand you know what may be going on if there's an expansion play they'll bring back in sales um we launched this two months ago and it's been working really really well and also helps sales focus on the smaller uh customers the the pqls that are more geared at like the folks that just signed up versus customers who have been here for four or five years and so we've we've really leaned on the cs team to drive expansion revenue over to sales and happy to report it's working quite well uh thus far so i have a question sorry to interrupt there but um and that is that is that is that different from what they were doing before because most cs teams i've worked with the way that they learn to land and expand is they look at product signals right in fact they were the first people to look at product signals before marketing ever even thought about it right and so are you simply using the term now expansion pql or whatever that is for something that they were already doing yeah i think a little bit right i think the the caveat there is like um a lot of times all of our product data is buried right we use a number of tools where sometimes it's a little more difficult to navigate what you may be looking for you might have to log into cypress itself or use something like appendo to go out and get that data and so i think our attempt here was to bubble it up in a way that it's more uh deliberate to say hey these folks have done this and it's really exciting i'll give you an example if somebody has 30 users right or their test usage spikes up 150 we're going to want to talk to them and um the way to find that in the past would be a lot more difficult to like navigate a book of 100 accounts versus like hey prioritize these folks first because they're doing these interesting things and so it just helps us get what we're looking for immediately versus like digging into the data itself which has always been a problem dave you know our systems at digital ocean were always difficult to navigate so this has made it a bit easier to do and conduct that outreach that makes sense it's just that usually when people come up to me marketers come up to me and they're like how do i define the pql i'm like go talk to cs because they already know what pieces of the product are sticky right like they already know what the aha moments are probably in a way beyond sales right because they know they know what actually tends to work and yes that's assuming you have something like appendo and you have the data data to actually look at right so i was bemused to hear it go the other like in my brain the other direction i agree and i think especially cyprus right we've got you know a much smaller base of paid customers than a digital ocean that had you know two million you know customers in the database and so you know when when there's a larger pool it becomes a lot trickier which is uh why we we use so many triggers over there and here you know we can be a little bit more deliberate with how we set things up i think the the point around like cs people already doing this is such a great point i think maybe what's different now versus in the past is it's pay as you go like or at least like our time at digital ocean was like there's not a contractor so there's like how do we go and learn what they're doing so we can make sure they stick around we can renew them for another year where it's like yeah they're paying us this month but they might not paying us next month and i think it's like kind of the and that candidly and we have this debate here all the time at digital ocean we have this of like this is pre-sales this is post sales what the hell is this um that like notion doesn't totally exist if it's paid as you go in my mind um and that's where it's like who reaches out success like digital is like sort of a success motion here it's probably even more of a technical success motion at least today i don't know there's uh there's something in that like circle between four pre-sales and post sales that is i think the the problem we're trying to all figure out for sure and it's not um unique to product like growth um in that when i worked at madison logic we weren't sas right people did things with ios so when i said who are our customers they said you mean this month right because it was who was paying us this month and and you know cs was a sales word because of that like they were all rolled together it's not a new problem we just almost have new definitions and it's a little more technical now yeah that's well said and david i i love the point around pre versus post sale because i think the lines get blurred in plg uh with maybe c before was owning just account health and churn prevention and maybe expansion and upsell was the ae or maybe it's sales assist like who owns going from free to paid and then paid to the bigger paid um and so we all need to figure out like should should that be a csql or a pql and i think it's differ by organization uh we probably have one more time one more question aaron how are you alerting your cs team of csqls uh using salesforce right now to push a notification to the cs team it bubbles up to them as a task um they'll reach out and then if there's a an opportunity they'll create an opportunity pass it back over to sales tag themselves as the csm and then we have a mechanism where it gets flagged as a csqo cs qualified opportunity a lot of terms flying around i'll have to get like a definition sheet at some point i'd love it all right in the last three minutes if for all of you i'd love to hear from each of you what is one thing you want to leave with the group for folks that are defining pqls operationalizing them or experimenting with them what is your number one golden rule or recommendation piece of advice start simple you don't need to go with 8 billion triggers i like it patience um you probably won't see results right away you need to tweak your messaging right um you know one thing we've recently done is work with marketing we're seeing an increased supply rate right and so sometimes the reps will have a different tone than how the business perceives reaching out to these folks and of course um folks in marketing always have a much nicer way of talking to folks rather than sales people i'll i'll admit to that as a salesperson so um patience is is definitely one yeah and like those are all good price like on the pragmatic theme i think it's like really aligning with whoever with the head of sales marketing product and like what are we trying to achieve with this like what is it that we actually want to do are we just like trying to put more people from the sales that's a different problem to solve then you know are we a pay-as-you-go business we're trying to convert people into a commitment like i think really get clear on like what is it that we're trying to do like what does the end result look like in vsco as well um because it's easy to get lost in like product data and modeling this data and figure out how the hell they're getting themselves like they're becoming solid problems right um but like the pragmatic questions are particularly hard i love it all right so keep it simple be patient and experiment over him um and make sure it's cross-functional effort and you have everyone's buy-in and you're building something that the whole team finds valuable um thank you all so much this was incredible i feel like we just did like speed round of pql's but we got through so many amazing topics you all are incredible and i appreciate the unique insights from each of your different businesses so really appreciate you being here for anyone else on this call if you want to continue to have these conversations you can request an invite to our community at focus.com community and jen david and aaron anything else you want to share before we sign off thank you so much thank you yeah and i know there's a lot of great resources that um on the focus site so go check them out um i've worked with livestock itself there so yeah i will say in our recent product led sales playbook which you can find on our website aaron wrote an entire piece on pqls how they defined it at cypress as well as an actual document that you can download as a template for different pqls um so thank you all everyone have an incredible rest of your day and good luck with your pqls