Breezy Beaumont on this episode
Breezy Beaumont is Head of Growth Marketing at Correlated, a product-led revenue platform that helps companies identify Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) and act on product usage signals. She brings direct experience both in building a PLG company and observing the strategy across dozens of customer implementations. In this episode, she and host Eddie Reynolds dig into how product-led growth fundamentally reshapes go-to-market strategy and internal organizational alignment.
Product-led growth is not a feature set but a philosophy about buyer control and accessibility. Breezy defines PLG as any company where users can easily get started with the product within a few clicks, but the real complexity lies in how you structure the free tier, free trial, onboarding, and conversion moments throughout the customer journey. Freemium and free trials are tactics within PLG, not synonyms for it. The key differentiator from sales-led motions is that customers interact with the actual product before signing a contract, forcing companies to rethink marketing, sales, and customer success alignment.
The episode reframes why this shift is inevitable. As buyer expectations evolve and younger cohorts join software teams, they demand the same frictionless self-service experiences they encounter in consumer products. Gartner and other analyst firms project that within five to ten years, SaaS will become nearly synonymous with PLG. Companies that ignore this signal—like some legacy enterprise vendors who still gate products behind discovery calls—are ripe for disruption from more accessible competitors. Even Salesforce, despite a free trial, remains sales-led in design and go-to-market intent, which contrasts sharply with Zoom, Calendly, Slack, and Atlassian.
The conversation also covers the operational shift required for PLG success. Unlike the linear handoff of sales-led companies (Marketing → SDR/Sales → Customer Success), PLG demands overlapping ownership where customer success, sales, and marketing all participate simultaneously across the buyer journey. This requires a unified data warehouse as the source of truth and careful design of Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) to avoid the mistakes made with Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). The episode closes with practical guidance on PQL scoring, volume calibration, and avoiding the perverse incentive of marking every product signup as a PQL.
What we cover in this episode
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2:45
What Correlated does Correlated surfaces product usage signals to revenue teams, automating the flow of insights into CRM, sales, and CS tools to enable action on PQLs.
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6:30
Buy vs. build for internal tools Companies waste engineering resources building internal dashboards and data pipelines that exist as mature products in the market, diverting focus from core product.
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10:00
Defining product-led growth PLG means users can access and use the product with minimal friction; freemium and free trials are tactics within PLG, not definitions of it.
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15:45
PLG vs. sales-led go-to-market Sales-led companies like Salesforce gate product access and require discovery calls; PLG companies like Zoom and Slack make self-service discovery and use the default path.
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22:30
Buyer expectations and generational shift Younger buyers and software decision-makers demand self-serve access, demos, and hands-on product trials before committing time to sales conversations.
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28:15
Revenue org alignment in PLG PLG requires simultaneous collaboration between sales, CS, and marketing rather than linear handoffs; multiple teams act on the same customer at once based on shared data.
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35:00
MQLs vs. PQLs and scoring PQLs are based on actual product usage and key actions, not marketing downloads; they avoid MQL pitfalls by tying lead qualification to real value demonstration.
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42:00
Calibrating PQL volume and avoiding perverse incentives Use the Goldilocks principle to tune PQL scoring based on volume and conversion outcomes; marking every signup as a PQL defeats the purpose and wastes resources.
The lines worth sharing
Product-led growth is any way a company where you can easily get started using the product. You go to their website and within a few clicks, you can start using that product.
Breezy Beaumont · 10:05
A lot of companies in their early days basically refer to anyone who signs up to use their product as a PQL. That is not a PQL. That is a person who is using your product.
Breezy Beaumont · 42:30
Within five or ten years, SaaS will really just become synonymous with product-led growth. This will sort of be the way forward for most companies.
Breezy Beaumont · 24:00
If they have given us access to their tool, we end up selling it to one of our customers. Let's get it set up quickly and show it to key stakeholders.
Eddie Reynolds · 18:30
Common questions from this episode
What is product-led growth and how is it different from freemium?
PLG is an umbrella term for any go-to-market motion where users can easily access and use a product with minimal friction—typically with a few clicks from the website. Freemium is one tactic within PLG; free trials, open source, and others are options too. The key difference from sales-led is that customers use the actual product before signing.
What are Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) and why do they matter?
PQLs are users who have taken specific actions within your product that signal purchase intent or expansion opportunity—unlike MQLs, which track marketing activities. PQLs combine product usage data with account fit to identify the right moment to reach out, making conversations more contextual and valuable.
How should companies avoid making the same mistakes with PQLs as they did with MQLs?
Do not mark every product signup as a PQL. Use volume and conversion outcomes to tune scoring—the Goldilocks principle. Ownership of PQLs should be distributed across sales, CS, and marketing rather than concentrated in one team, reducing perverse incentives to inflate numbers.
Why is PLG adoption inevitable in B2B SaaS?
Younger cohorts demand self-serve access and frictionless experiences. Analyst reports from Gartner and others project PLG will dominate within five to ten years. Companies ignoring this signal face disruption from more accessible competitors, even in traditionally sales-led markets.
How does revenue team alignment change in PLG vs. sales-led companies?
Sales-led uses linear handoffs: Marketing → Sales → CS. PLG requires simultaneous collaboration, with CS, sales, and marketing acting on the same customer at different moments. This demands a unified data warehouse as a single source of truth for all teams.
What does Correlated do?
Correlated is a product-led revenue platform that surfaces product usage signals to revenue teams, identifies PQLs, and automatically pushes insights into CRM, sales tools, Slack, and other applications so teams can act on them without manual data work.
SEO meta description
Breezy Beaumont, Head of Growth at Correlated, explains product-led growth strategy, PQL scoring, and why PLG is becoming the default go-to-market motion for B2B SaaS.
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product-led growth
PLG strategy
Product Qualified Leads
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Breezy Beaumont
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Read the full transcript · 50 KB · Breezy Beaumont
EDDIE REYNOLDSWelcome to RevOps Corner, where we talk about how B2B SaaS companies scale through revenue operations by interviewing amazing guests and sharing what we see in the trenches every day here at Union Square Consulting. Okay, today I'm here with Breezy Beaumont,
EDDIE REYNOLDShead of growth and marketing at Correlated. Correlated is a product-led revenue platform, and they're also an early stage product-led growth startup themselves. Today, we're going to dive
EDDIE REYNOLDSinto all things product-led growth or PLG and how the go-to-market strategy is different for PLG companies or a PLG motion. Breezy, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks, Eddie. This should
SPEAKER_03be fun. Yeah, I'm excited. I want to start off by just like layering in some background. If you could
EDDIE REYNOLDSshare a little bit about what Correlated does and what you do at Correlated as head of growth and marketing, then I can fill in questions later. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the big problems
BREEZY BEAUMONTor opportunities that arise in product-led growth is that it's hard for revenue teams to get access to product usage data and understand how their users are using their product when they're kind of taking these key actions in the product. And the reason they need access to that data is because these are key opportunities for people to be able to reach out. So at Correlated, we're really focused on not only surfacing these key moments in the customer journey for the revenue team to reach out to your users, but then also plugging into some of those downstream applications that you have. So things like outreach and sales loft and adding people to one of those sequences, HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack notifications, all the different places where the revenue team is working. So we're really focused on not only servicing these insights to the team, but making them as actionable as possible. And so my role at Correlated is I run both growth and marketing. So a lot of my thinking is about, you know, our product-led growth strategy and sort of what we're doing there and how we're enabling our users to be as successful as possible. But also running all of our different marketing activities, including the SDR team, which rolls up to marketing in our company. So it's a fun adventure. There's a lot to solve. And it's
BREEZY BEAUMONTbeen fun so far and much more to come.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat's awesome. It's going to give us a lot to talk about. And, you know, we're consistently running into this problem with our own customers as we do revenue operations as a service. Customers are coming to
EDDIE REYNOLDSus and saying, we want to set up Salesforce. We want to set up outreach. We want to set up sales loft and all of these other tools. And we are a product-led growth company, or we have a product-led growth motion. How do we get the right, you know, PQLs or product qualified leads into these systems so that our sales people can reach out and we can take other actions to try to drive growth in those accounts. And inevitably, it comes down to some kind of a data science exercise. And my understanding of your product is that you help solve that problem by analyzing some of those signals and helping to push that into these systems so that the right leads can go in so that salespeople, and I'm interested to see what you see in marketing as well, can take action on that data.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, definitely. I mean, up until today, a lot of the ways that people are solving this are they might be building, you know, custom BI dashboards and reports. So maybe you have a data
BREEZY BEAUMONTteam who's kind of putting together this report for you. You send that over to sales or customer success or marketing, and they take action on it. Then you pull another one. It's a very manual process, both for the data team pulling those insights and also for the team trying to act on them. Another thing we see is people who are piping some of that product usage data into their CRM, which is it can be effective actually at some of the earlier stages, maybe when there's not as much for you to sort of look into. But you run into problems when you're trying to look at change over time in that data. So if they're logging in or inviting X amount of users or their sheer usage is X amount, has that gone up or gone down? So you need sort of some of that context. And then you also kind of want to know, all right, that's interesting. That data and those insights are interesting, but what do I do with it? So trying to inform the revenue team so you can, with correlated or something like that, you can basically, you know, give context. So if you send a Slack notification, the Slack notification could come to a rep and say, you know, here's the context of what happened, like here's the action that they took or the usage that they hit or the increase in their decrease in their usage. And therefore, you know, there's an expansion opportunity or there's a churn risk or there's an opportunity to convert them from a free user to a paid user. And then gives them some context for how to reach out. Or you can kind of automate some pieces of it, add that person to an outreach or sales loft campaign and kick off a series of emails or HubSpot campaign and kick off a series of emails to help better onboard that user or teach them about a feature that they might have tried inside of the product. So the way that companies are solving it today or have solved it up until today has been incredibly manual. And I think a lot of, not only is the revenue team sort of happier to be able to be better enabled and understand what to do with that context, but the data teams and operations teams that we're working with are also very happy to not be spending so much of their time building out these reports and trying to move data from one place to the other with correlated basically after it's all set up and you kind of, we plug into your data warehouse or segment or wherever you're kind of pulling that product usage and also into your CRM. So once we have that set up, it's actually really easy for a business user to use correlated and create those various PQLs throughout that customer journey. And that's a key piece of the puzzle because if what you're trying to do, when this is how it's been solved up until today is, is say, hey, I'd like to know when, you know, someone signs in more than three times and the, they're during their trial and they click on this
BREEZY BEAUMONTfeature and they're one of our ICP accounts. Then you send that over to your data team and they're trying their very best to try to pull this data together. And now when you can kind of move them off of that task, the data team can actually focus on other initiatives that are really important to your business. So it's a, it's a happy experience for both sides to be able to, you know, have, have this kind of tool sitting in the middle and to help enable these different parts.
BREEZY BEAUMONTYeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think one of my first exposures to this kind of use case
EDDIE REYNOLDSwas in a company I worked at before starting this company about six years ago. And it was a fintech product. So it's a little different, but effectively we had this exact problem in trying to figure out which users we can drive to grow on our platform. And since we charged transaction fees, that meant everything for us. And what inevitably happened was, is that we were going to our data team saying, can you help us analyze this data so we can figure out what to do with this from a sales standpoint? And our data team was central, critical to the actual product build. So we're literally pulling them away from building the product to solve a sales and marketing question. And inevitably we went down this path where sort of pulling data into BI tools and trying to analyze it. And then they carried that forward after I left the organization, but it's a very similar problem. And what I saw is just like some incredible resource constraints, where is the data team going to be working on solving this problem, or are they going to be working on actually doing more critical tasks in this case, which was actually building our product and all the analytics that went into the product that actually provided the value for the customers that were using that product. Yeah. Yeah. And that's actually a really
BREEZY BEAUMONTgood point too, because one other piece that I hadn't mentioned is that we've talked to some companies who have also built something like a correlated internally. And so what that looked like is touching on the same idea that you just mentioned that they're taking, you know, six of their engineers away from core product to build another tool to use internally and then moving them back to core products. So not only is their product sort of missing out on being able to be improved in that time, but also that context switching for the engineers means that there's, it takes longer actually for them to work on these sort of internal project tools because they might not have been the one who even originally built it a year or two years ago when it was there. So yeah, exactly. Same thing. We've, we've also definitely run into that a few times. Yeah. This makes a lot of sense, but I want to be
EDDIE REYNOLDScareful not to turn this into a product pitch for correlated because it's never a good thing for a podcast. No, no, no. Very fair. Very fair. It's just the more, it's less like, oh, come by correlated from
BREEZY BEAUMONTmy point of view. And more so I just, it's interesting to see the way people solve a problem before you have, you know, a different type of solution to it. And also, you know, we're making a bet on it that we think this is sort of the best way to solve it. And we're working with the market to do that. But you know, there's, there's obviously more than one way to approach any problem. So.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, that's not on you. I think I'm a big believer in, you know, when you look at buy versus build, you need to think about like, what is the benefit of building something, right? If you're building your
EDDIE REYNOLDSown proprietary technology that you're selling to the market, then I think nine times out of 10,
EDDIE REYNOLDSit makes more sense to like invest all of your energies into building that really great mousetrap. But when you're just trying to build a tool to solve a problem internally,
EDDIE REYNOLDSso oftentimes, and when we see this all the way across the revenue tech stack, you know, how often companies are bringing in developers and they're saying, hey, let's build our own proprietary CRM, let's build our own marketing tools, build our own BI tools, let's build this, that, and the other. And it's like, there are companies that have literally invested billions of dollars trying to perfect this product to solve the problem that you have. And you're going to pull away some of the most valuable resources you have in your company, pull away from building the product that you think is the world's best mousetrap to solve XYZ, to scratch your own itch in something that's not related to your product.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIf it is related, sure. But if it's not, it just doesn't make sense.
BREEZY BEAUMONTYeah, I totally agree. It doesn't make any sense to me, but we do see it. You know, we've all seen it at various companies. It's sort of a strange practice. But the more I talk to some of the more, you know, forward thinking folks, I think we're all starting to get on the same page that, you know, that's just really not worth our time. Let's focus on what
BREEZY BEAUMONTwe're great at and make that even better. And, and yeah, definitely agree there.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, and I see it because I'm usually brought in to clean up the mess. You know, I'm usually coming in at the point where they're like, well, we did this and we spent three years doing this and it's an absolute disaster. And now we need to move to, to Salesforce or outreach or whatever tool that
EDDIE REYNOLDSthey're trying to use because we tried to reverse engineer this and it's awful. And we really need to get our developers working on our product. And I'm like, yeah, you should have done that three years ago, but sure. Let's go clean this mess up now, now that it's really like too late. But anyway,
EDDIE REYNOLDSgetting us back on track here, I want to, I think we, I skipped ahead a little bit. And for anybody
EDDIE REYNOLDSlistening to this, you know, let's, let's define a few things. Like how would you define PLG and how is it different from premium? Yeah. So in my opinion, product-led growth is
SPEAKER_31any way, any company where you can easily get started using the product. So you go to their
BREEZY BEAUMONTwebsite and within a few clicks, you can start using that product. And so that's sort of how I would loosely define a product-led growth company. Of course, there's a lot more complexity to that. So what happens when you start to use that product? Is that a freemium version of the product? Is it a free trial? Is it a combination of the two? We've seen some companies like Asana combine both a free trial period of the higher level of their product, like the business tier with, and then after 30 days, they kind of knock you down to that freemium tier. So there's a lot of different strategies that you could have once someone starts using a product. We've also seen product tours start to take off a little bit. And then also it changes a lot of internal parts of the company as well. So the way that your company operates will also need to change with this new shift of people being able to get access to your products. So as you'd probably imagine, the way that we market the product would be different and the way that we do marketing for the company would be different. Um, the sales process looks different. Previously, you know, at a, at a sales-led company, the, the prospect might see the product in a demo format a couple of times. Uh, and then that's probably about it. Every once in a while, there was a POC, but, uh, otherwise, you know, you, you really didn't have full access to the product until you'd already signed some long contract and PLG sort of flips that on its head. Um, so yeah, so there's a lot of complexity that happens, uh, after someone starts to use the product, but all in all, I think the simplest version is to think of anytime you can go to a website, start using a product, that's very likely a product-led growth company. And how is that different from freemium?
SPEAKER_32I would say that freemium is a subset of product-led growth. So freemium is one of the
BREEZY BEAUMONToptions that you could choose. If you're, if you're taking a PLG strategy, you could also choose a free trial. You could do open source. There's a lot of different ways that you could, um, run a PLG strategy, but I think PLG is almost like the umbrella term for all those different, um, ways to, to do it.
BREEZY BEAUMONTThat's interesting. But like, you know, let's take Salesforce for, for example,
EDDIE REYNOLDSwhich everybody knows, you know, they don't really sell this way, but you can just go to the website and sign up for a 30 day free trial anytime you want it. But I would think of them as being the
EDDIE REYNOLDSpolar opposite of a, of a product-led growth company. Yeah. I think that one thing would be,
BREEZY BEAUMONTI'm not sure if you can really self-serve through Salesforce. So you might have a free trial, but I, and I'm not, I'm not totally sure. So I don't want to put false information here. Um, but I think that there's a setup that it might not be actually like the, the full product in that free trial. Um, but I'm not totally sure. Uh, but yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, it, it is for the most part,
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think you can't like send out emails without like a tag that says sent from Salesforce, little limitations like that, but for the most part, you can use it. I think a lot of it, and maybe this will be a good thing for us to, you know, dig into is that I don't think that from a go to market strategy, Salesforce is thinking about it in this way at all. I think they think about it in the very opposite way and they just don't make it easy. So someone like myself that knows Salesforce, I'm a Salesforce consultant. I know what, like what webpage to go to, to find the free trial. Sometimes even that's difficult. I know how to sign up for it. Uh, I know how to go in and like sign a contract and like buy the licenses without talking to a sales rep. I know how to set it up,
EDDIE REYNOLDSbut that comes from years and years of experience. It's not intuitive. If you were to go to their website and just try to go through it on your own, which tell me if I'm wrong, I would think is central
EDDIE REYNOLDSto a PLG strategy. Yeah. I mean, there are, there are definitely tiers to it. And just like you can
BREEZY BEAUMONTdo any strategy in an effective or less effective way. I think that that definitely stands for product web growth as well. So we see really great examples of PLG companies who not only make it easy to get started with the product and kind of, uh, uh, self-serve your way through and understand what those aha and value moments are going to be. Um, and so we, we see those types of companies like Zoom and Calendly and Slack and Atlassian and a ton of companies that would fall into that category. And then I'd say even especially today and going forward, we will probably start to see many, many more examples of companies who are not very good at this strategy, um, who hopefully will continue to improve it over time. Um, the reason I say, I think that there will be more sort of today and going forward is there seems to be a really large push from the market for people, for companies to make their product more readily accessible. Um, which will mean when you do that, you're going to run into some bumps in the road, you're going to make the process better than you're going to run into more bumps. And even at correlated, like we've been doing the same thing, right? So we are a product-led company. Um, but is that process perfect? Absolutely not. Um, there's a, there's a lot that we could improve into the onboarding and process for the, for our users, uh, to be able to fully self-serve that said, we, there's things you can do along the way to just try to make it, uh, you know, put the, put the band-aids in where you can today and hopefully improve that, uh, those pieces in the product later. So what we do today is just make sure that people know, Hey, we're readily accessible. If you do want to get on a call, if you want a strategy call, if you want an onboarding call, if you just want to talk about what the potential use cases are, we can insert a human if you'd like that. Otherwise we have a bunch of docs and resources here. Um, but that said, I mean, there's, there's still a lot of different ways that even we could be improving. And, and, uh, I think the same applies for a lot of companies for Salesforce specifically. Um, I think that my guess would be that they started to sweat a little bit when they, uh, got some more competition from HubSpot who made it a little bit easier to self-serve and, and added some, um, components in there, uh, for users to understand what the different value props would be, how to set things up. Um, and so to, to probably stay competitive, they, they, you know, released this piece and they still are very much a sales led
BREEZY BEAUMONTcompany, but they do technically have a product led offering.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I mean, I think that having worked at Salesforce for three years and worked for a Salesforce partner before that, where they had a product on the platform. So it was basically selling Salesforce. You know, those were the really, the only two SaaS companies that I worked for directly. And the training that I got as a sales rep was never demo anything without discovery,
EDDIE REYNOLDSlike really hold the demo back. And you got massive resistance from customers. And so when I transitioned
EDDIE REYNOLDSfrom where I worked in financial services before that private equity, venture capital, and came over into, um, into tech, I had been in sales for a long time, but the first time I had to like face that
EDDIE REYNOLDSchallenge of trying to explain to a customer why they can't just see a demo that they want to see. And this is something that you see in other industries as well. Um, I sold cars in college
EDDIE REYNOLDSand it's the same concept. Everybody just wants to drive the thing around the block. And you're like, hold on a second. Like this is time consuming for the sales rep. Like this is actually something you're interested in buying. Um, but that's also not necessarily an industry with all the respect that like, we should probably be modeling the customer experience after. Right. And I think that like what I have seen over the years and continuing to work with Salesforce and work with Salesforce reps that are selling to their customers is that you get so much pushback from customers that like, I just want to understand how this thing works. I just want to see it. And even in our own business, what we have done is we've built some like five minute YouTube videos with a short demos
EDDIE REYNOLDSon particular use cases. And we're seeing that the Salesforce reps are reaching out to us and sharing these videos with their customers because their customers are saying like, sure, I'll do a demo in the discovery and I'll bring in my key stakeholders, decision makers and all that. But can I just get something, something before I invest all that time and energy to see if this is even like a remote possibility for us. And I think that that comes down to aligning your go to market strategy with the way your customer wants to buy. And we are so used to, especially in 2020 with all of the things that we have at our disposal, especially on like in our personal lives of just being able to jump into something, being able to like read the blog post or watch the YouTube video or read the tweet or jump into the demo and set it up. And then where Salesforce, I think is really challenged, especially for, you know, smaller companies is so many competitors that have, you know, chat bots right on the website, like, Hey, I don't understand how I like upload my contacts to this. And they're just like, here you go. Here's the article. It's right here. And I think that regardless of whether you're doing a traditional sales and marketing motion or PLG, there's a really strong need to start to think about how we break down this friction in the buyer journey and how we can get things to folks that they want faster and earlier with less friction.
BREEZY BEAUMONTYeah. I think that what you're referring to, that you were already getting pushed back from buyers a few years ago, working on this, has not only amplified to where we are today, where people are even more so they want to be able to get access to a product and see a demo immediately and watch a video or even just actually play around with it themselves. So we're seeing even more of that today. But there's also study after study from Gartner and at least one other, maybe McKinsey or Forrester talking about that buyer journey coming basically like what's to come over the next few years. And so as more and more of the workforce, especially in the software space gets younger and younger, you see that they're even more capable and wanting and pushing for this ability to start using a product as early as possible and to get their hands on it to understand it. They don't want to just hear about the benefits. They want to see it and understand the mechanics of it and and see how it might work for their specific use case. And so we're already seeing so much pressure from the market to do this today. But as you continue to look down those generations, I think it's inevitable that, in my opinion, within, you know, five or ten years, SaaS will really just become synonymous with product-led growth. And this will sort of be the way forward for most companies, even in some of those existing industries that seem to be thriving and doing very well. And some of these companies that we think of as some of the best companies out there are ripe for disruption from product-led growth. And we're already seeing companies enter those, enter into the same market as them and start to take away some of that market share because these other products are readily accessible for people to start using immediately, get value and maybe even pay right through the website or end up talking to a rep down the line and paying for it that way. But we're already seeing this disruption happening. And I think it would be a mistake for companies to ignore that this is a major change that's happening in the market and
BREEZY BEAUMONTsomething that they should be adapting to.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think it's really exciting to see how this evolves. I mean, I think one thing that we see because we're now, I'm still out, you know, selling every day. But at the
EDDIE REYNOLDSsame time, we're buying every day, you know, we're working with our customers to try to help them evaluate so many different software solutions across the revenue tech stack. And one of the things that I've done in this company is to reach out to a lot of these vendors and say, Hey, like, is there any chance that you'd give us some, some level of free access to your products, we can use it for ourselves and get to know it? And some of them will say, Sure, no problem. And others will say, No, no, no, like, we've got to set you up. And there's all this time and effort, you need to pay money. And I'm like, look, like, we don't really, we're not a really strong use case for your company, we just want to use your tool so we can know it and represent it to our customers. And what I've seen inevitably with every single one of these vendors is that if they have given us access to their tool, we end up and we don't like really get commission off of it. That's not why we're doing it. But we end up selling it to one of our customers. So we start using it. We're like, Wow, this is great. We understand it. And then it's even easier if we can get our customers into some kind of a free trial or free usage. And all of a sudden say, Hey, like you have this problem, we think this might work to solve it. Let's get it set up quickly. Let's show it to the key stakeholders. And when they're able to just like visualize and say, wow, like, this is great. Especially like, I think the part of the training that I got at Salesforce kind of presupposes that the customer doesn't know what they're doing. And I'd like to think that we know what we're doing. And I think there's a lot of folks in rev ops and sales ops and marketing ops that know what they're doing. And that's not to say we know how to set up every single tool from scratch with zero effort or zero help. But we kind of know enough to like start poking around and figure out what's going on with things. And when we're just like able to just get free reign to do that, even for a short period of time, sometimes it's pretty obvious to be able to see the value, especially when that company has really thought about, well, what is it going to take to get this tool up and running? Where are these users going to find that information? What are they going to do when they have a question? This is why I mentioned the chat bot. It's like so powerful. All of these different things and tell me if I'm wrong, but like, I have to imagine that what's top of mind for you is thinking about what is that buyer journey and like,
SPEAKER_18literally what is their click path as they start to try to use our tool and figure out how to use it and how to get value out of it. Yeah. I mean, I think at the end of the day,
BREEZY BEAUMONTlike everything that we're talking about here and just in general is, is what does the customer want to be able to do? What is the, what is the best choice for the buyer and how can we enable them to be able to do what's best for them throughout that whole journey? So if that's immediately getting started with the product, great. But now time to value is, is a crucially important metric in, in product-led. So how quickly do they start using your product? And then they have that aha moment, like, oh, I get it. Like you you're, even you talking about like, oh, I use this product. Like, oh, now I understand how this could help one of our, one of our customers and, or one of our clients. And then the same thing with your client, they get in there and they're like, yeah, okay, we get it. It kind of clicks right there. So what is that, that aha moment? How can we get there as quickly as possible? Ideally you can build things like that into the product. So over time, as much as possible, you want to build these sort of onboarding capabilities and ease of use into the product. But along that journey, you also want to still be able to say to people, hey, you know, if, if you want to get on a call, then we're available for that. And so what you'll see in, in PLG is that on most of the websites, there's sort of like two CTAs, which is hard because as, as growth people, we know that, uh, two CTAs is a tricky, tricky play. You want to focus people's attention in, in as few areas as possible. Um, but it's giving them the choice. Do they want to have a demo and have someone walk them through it? Also, it drives me crazy that companies still like, if they, if someone wants a demo, just let them book on a calendar. Jeez Louise, like having this process of waiting a few days is, is insane to me that that still even happens. Uh, let alone if some, if the company is still working on that, there's no way they're, they're product led. Um, but so we have that. And then, uh, or do they want to start using the product? And if they start using the product that they would then want to talk to someone or after they have that first demo, do they then want to start using the product? So it's not linear. It's not this linear journey that we, you know, know, wish that it was, or we've tried to force fit into existing CRMs that there's this, some sort of linearity to it. They become a lead to an MQL, to an SQL, to an SAL opportunity. Um, but it's really sort of this back and forth about what the customer wants in their journey and what fits best for them,
BREEZY BEAUMONTwhat's going to help them find value. Um, and, and hopefully eventually either buy your product or recommend it to someone who will. Yeah. I saw somebody post something just yesterday where,
EDDIE REYNOLDSyou know, it was, um, you know, a person passing a baton, literally like a track runner saying,
EDDIE REYNOLDSyou know, the old model of sales and marketing and then the new model. And they showed a soccer team and it's like passing from sales to marketing to customer success, to product back and forth.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd I think more and more, that's the way we all want to buy both as, uh, both as business people and as, you know, and in our personal lives. Um, I don't know at what point in time, any of that gets turned off. I mean, I want to be educated, uh, in the way that I want to be educated by marketing throughout the entire journey from the time that I first heard your company until well after I am no longer a customer. Um, if you have a great podcast, I'm going to listen to that podcast. If you have great social media, if you have great white papers, um, you know, for example, I've never been a customer of HubSpot, but I love the content that they put out in the world.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI've learned a lot from it. Um, I used to like read all that stuff when I worked at Salesforce, which is hilarious because I think they produce better content than, you know, maybe some places, some other places. Um, and you know, the same is said for customer success. The moment that there's a signature, like you're, you're in it and sales, like sales should not be giving up the moment that
EDDIE REYNOLDSthey sign a contract. How are you going to grow and retain that account? And you have to have all of those folks working together. And I think PLG is just an evolution of that. Um, in that buyers are demanding, they're saying, look, we want quicker access. We don't want to jump through all of these hoops. How can we get our needs met quickly? Uh, and now all of a sudden you have companies that are saying, okay, like there's a better way to approach this. Tell me if I'm wrong.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, no, that's definitely the case. And I'd almost even, I was trying to figure out how to push the, that imagery of the soccer game even one step further, because there's actually even some
BREEZY BEAUMONTcrossover there. So the, the, I totally agree that it's not this linear thing. So I like the, the idea that it's no longer a baton, but sort of like the soccer game, but it would almost be like if the soccer game had two, two balls in the game or something, um, because, you know, you might have someone start to use their, your product and maybe they need a little bit of assistance across, uh, some onboarding touch points. So maybe customer success comes in early before there's even a sales conversation at all. Maybe customer success is coming in and making sure that that person is successful. Then let's say say they hit, you know, a key milestone, uh, within the product or try a feature that's maybe not part of their current tier that they're paying for. So sales enters in there for a conversation to say, Hey, uh, I said, I noticed you tried this feature. Can I help you with, you know, understanding what, what might be beneficial with using that? Uh, let's have sort of what would be like a sales conversation. Um, but based on the idea of it being a value add conversation. Um, and then again, making sure that they're successful and that there's strong adoption within that feature base that they've, that they're using now, or within whatever tier additional users that they might've brought into the products. So customer success is involved again. So it's very, there's a lot more crossover in product-led growth and same with marketing being involved at all those various touch points too, to educate and nurture the customer throughout these various stages that they're in. So where it used to be, okay, marketing has it. Now we throw it over the line to sales. Sales has this person. Now we throw them over to customer success. It's not only just a back and forth and, and, and, you know, kind of continuous journey, uh, with the entire revenue org. Um, but it's also might have multiple people involved, multiple stakeholders involved at sort of at the same time. So there's there's definitely a lot of like stepping on each other's toes, which means you need to be crucially. It's crucial that you're not only just aligned in sort of what actions each person is taking, but, um, the, the data set that you're working off of also. So that's why we see a lot of product-led companies, um, moving towards using a data warehouse as sort of their central source of truth. So that all of the different teams are sort of working off of the same data set. It's so interesting because what you're describing is exactly the way that Salesforce does renewals.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo when I was an account executive, I covered new and existing accounts, you know, the mandate is land and expand. Right. And we had customer success. We had customer service, of course, of course we have market marketing, um, and they have, um, renewals dedicated renewals managers. And so when you think
EDDIE REYNOLDSabout how they approach a renewal, it's very similar to what you're describing in that, you know, if the sales rep already has an opportunity for growth, like they're talking to a key stakeholder and
EDDIE REYNOLDSthey're thinking about doubling their spend, then the sales rep is just going to run with it. But what if the customer is unhealthy? Like they have product data being piped into Salesforce so they can see usage on a very granular level. Customer success is looking for signals to reach out and try to get that customer healthy. They may be so unhealthy that there's no meaningful conversation that sales can have when a customer is not using the product when they're upset. Like the last thing
EDDIE REYNOLDSthey want to do is be sold to. So the only thing that the sales rep can do, although this can be a very valuable thing is to basically kick the door open and say, Hey, you know, Mr. Ms. CXO, you guys are spending a lot of money on this product and not getting value from it. Um, can we please bring customer success and to address this? Will you please take a meeting with them? I think salespeople are pretty good at opening doors, but beyond that, like it's not their skillset. It's not the best use of their time. So they have to tag team it with customer success. Then of course, renewals is, is, you know, an event that can drive action. Marketing is obviously continuing to market to those folks. Now you're able to see like, well, wait, hold on a second. Like this person over here is downloading all these white papers. Maybe they have an interest in something that can help us in our initiative. And as you connect all of those dots, you see a strategy come, you know, or you see a strategy surface that you might be able to leverage to grow that account. And it's just interesting that what you're describing is just
SPEAKER_28doing that before they've signed anything. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's why I, I'm there's this
BREEZY BEAUMONTuse of these product qualified leads. So, um, in the way that we would think of an MQL, right? So we would
BREEZY BEAUMONTthink of, okay, it's actions as they've taken, uh, with our marketing material. Did they download white papers, attend events, this and that. And then you combine that marketing information with information about that user. So what account are they from? How many employees does the account have, or what's the revenue? Uh, what's that person's title, things like that. And so you're, you're combining these subsets of information. The PQL is very similar to that, but, uh, instead of that marketing information, you're looking at product usage data. Um, and so the, the way we think of an MQL is okay. Someone becomes an MQL and then they move away from being an MQL, but for PQLs, uh, there's an S at the end because there's multiple PQLs. So you might have a PQL when someone is using, you know, a free tier or free trial version of your product and you want to, it's there, they take some sort of key action and it might make sense to reach out to convert them to paid now. So there are PQL there, and then we kind of move them over. Uh, then they're using this tier, they're successful with it or not successful. Uh, that's another opportunity. So maybe there are PQL again. So PQLs, uh, or signals or whatever the different triggers, uh, people talk about it sort of in different formats, but one of the core differences is that, um, it's including that product usage data and then also that they're across the customer journey. Um, one other thing that I'm really, uh, enjoying starting to see is a combination of, you know, these different PQLs combining in marketing information into that same score. So it's almost just like, uh, you know, uh, we get notified about a user. Okay. They're a PQL because they did certain marketing activities and activities inside of our product. So there's, there's sometimes like this additional layering in of, um, you know, marketing on top of product usage. And I mean, just thinking about it from a high level, that probably makes the most sense. That is the most clear way to see as a user getting value. What actions are they taking in our product and, and what are they looking at to try to educate themselves? Maybe that would be an indicator for, you know, sort of other features or the next year that they might move towards. This is really interesting, but I also see a
EDDIE REYNOLDSpotential trap here. So I think that we, MQLs have become a very controversial topic, right? I think the first time I ever heard about the concept of an MQL, I thought, oh, this is great.
EDDIE REYNOLDSLike I'm a sales rep. I can go cold call somebody that has no idea who I am, who my company is, or I can call somebody that took the time and effort to download a white paper and read about something that we have to share. And I'm going to call and I'm going to reach out and say, oh, wow, you read this white paper. You wanted to hear all about this topic. Let me tell you all about it. And they're going to be very receptive. And then you find out that that's not the case at all. They don't want to talk to you. The connection rate, the response rate is like almost zero. And inevitably on top of that, a lot of these folks are not the right companies. They're not the right people. And you may be just better off making cold calls. I think that's often the case. And so a lot of that can just come down to how a company defines an MQL. I think there's a very simple solution to this. It also comes down to incentive behavior. If you're telling marketing, your job is to get the maximum number of MQLs possible, then your quality is going to drop to the floor. What's that scenario like with PQLs? Do you see people falling into a similar trap? And if so,
EDDIE REYNOLDShow do they get out of it? Yeah. So one of the big differences with PQLs too is going to be that
BREEZY BEAUMONTpeople are, there's going to be different people responsible for acting on a PQL. So anytime there's an MQL, you're either tossing that to your SDR team or straight to the sales team. Whereas for PQLs, it might be about different stages in the onboarding process. So it might be notifying CS about something, or it might be about an expansion opportunity. So you're notifying sales, things like that. So there's sort of various people who are on the responsibility end of it there. And then I'm forgetting what your second question was. Well, let me recap the question in a different way.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI would argue that the number one problem with MQLs is incentives. When marketing is told your job is to produce the maximum number of MQLs and this is how you're going to be measured, promoted, compensated, potentially fired. You're going to get a lot of MQLs that have very low value. Do you see companies
EDDIE REYNOLDSdoing the same thing with PQLs? Telling somebody that their job is to get the maximum number of PQLs
EDDIE REYNOLDSand then seeing very low quality where sales reps are reaching out with very little response? Yeah. So a couple of things here. First of all, the ownership of PQLs can land in a couple of
BREEZY BEAUMONTdifferent places in the organization based on who's responsible for acting on them. So I don't think that you run into the same sheer marketing as responsible for MQLs and thus, you know, we have sort of a risky scoring there. I think the other like sheer sort of downfall of MQLs is that, and this is sort of how marketing is already changing. It was about downloading an ebook or attending a webinar or different things. And, you know, I've worked in marketing for a long time and I've worked with MQLs for a long time, but it just really doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense for a few reasons. It doesn't make sense to gate all of this content from your prospects to be able to educate themselves. So if you have to have them sign up for an event because you need to add their email to a calendar, that's different. But gating ebooks and all of different content pieces doesn't make any sense. And so the reason, the only reason why we gate them is because you needed to create an MQL number. And so even that piece of the incentive doesn't make sense. For PQLs, you're talking about things that actions people are actually taking inside of the product. So it's really night and day from what an MQL is. You're not saying, oh, they read this ebook. And so therefore they must just want to buy our entire platform solution. You're saying they tried, they've been using our product. They've signed in X amount of times. They have invited two other users. And now they're clicking on this dashboard feature. That's maybe not part of their pricing set. That's a totally different conversation. And also it means you have a basis for something to reach out to. You can say, hey, I saw you've been using our platform and that you've been successful with X and Y and Z. Looks like you already clicked on this feature and it's not part of your current set. So let's have a conversation about how you might be successful there. We have companies like X, Y, and Z using it, or you could talk about something specific to their company and their use cases to how it might be beneficial. Whereas before what we're talking about following up on for an MQL is saying, hi, I saw you downloaded this ebook. Really interesting topic, right? Okay. So do you want to buy our solution? There's not like a really smooth way to transition this. I think the only time for calling on MQL is that it was a smoother transition is if you said, okay, like I saw you were on G2 comparing different solutions. Are there questions I can answer about the comparison between us and this other solution? Or maybe they downloaded something that was about pieces that you should evaluate or how to build the business case internally. So it's just changing the conversation to always be adding value. And so I think you can do that with MQLs or PQLs, but the old, what we think of as for many companies, that MQL model is very broken, has been broken for years. I've personally transitioned the SDR teams away from following up on certain types of marketing activities like that. Because I just think it's a waste of their time, I would. And it's a waste of everyone's time on the prospects end as well. They're trying to do some education. It doesn't make sense to reach out then. And so I couldn't agree with you more. I think there's just sort of a better way forward and PQLs also have a different setup for getting there, right? So that MQL, like we talked about, website visits and downloads, very different than actual usage and key actions taken inside of a product.
BREEZY BEAUMONTYeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. But to be more specific, what do you coach your customers on
EDDIE REYNOLDSin terms of defining how to qualify PQL? For example, I would imagine that if I signed up for Zoom or some other product and logged in one time, and then I got a call the next day, I probably wouldn't be super receptive to that. At this point, I've been using Zoom for like two years across my entire team. If somebody called me, I probably would take the call. How do you define when's the right time?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, a lot of companies in their early days basically refer to anyone who signs up to use
BREEZY BEAUMONTtheir product as a PQL. That is not a PQL. That is a person who is using your product.
BREEZY BEAUMONTSo two different things. Again, just like any system you create, MQLs, PQLs, leads, whatever it is,
BREEZY BEAUMONTpeople will find a way to abuse it. Before it was an MQL, people were responsible for just creating leads and they bought lead lists. Then they were responsible for making sure those leads did key actions. Then they tried to create low key actions to make it an MQL. And then you have PQLs and you say, okay, when they've hit certain usage limits or invited certain amount of users and they have this title or, and they're from this size of account where we know we can add value, then we reach out. That was what a PQL was created for. And we're seeing most companies do that. But of course, like any system, and just like when you set up a compensation structure for your sales team, you know that people are going to exploit that to the best that they can because people are incentivized on things. And so we've seen some companies who will call every, and these are not correlated customers to be honest, because it just wouldn't make any sense. We wouldn't be able to add value to them. But if they're calling every product sign up a PQL, then they're in a different bucket. The thing is we see some companies doing that at earlier stages, which makes sense. They're hungry. They don't necessarily have a lot of top of funnel yet. And so they're just trying to reach out and scrounge for anything that's coming in and inbound product signups to them are like, ooh, like that's definitely reach out immediately. Even if that's to their own demise, that's what's happening in some scenarios. For most companies though, and especially for scaled companies, reaching out to every person who signs up for their product wouldn't even be possible. We are talking to companies who have 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 signups per month. Reaching out one-to-one to each of those signups wouldn't even possibly make sense. And that's definitely the case for Zoom as well. And so usually for that first initial, that initial PQL, because we talked about how there's sort of different ones across that customer journey, but maybe that first PQL opportunity is going to be a combination of different actions that they took in your product, and that's going to align with what your company feels is that time to value, that aha moment. So is it that they have integrated something and that they have invited one other user? And that's going to be that first PQL opportunity, where you know that they've taken some key actions and have gotten value out of the product. So that will be one. And there's kind of like different ones throughout the customer journey. But the way to figure out, is this a good score for us or not, is to just check the volume. So it's sort of like thinking of the Goldilocks example, too hot or too cold. You see, okay, if we're using this as our PQL score for one of our PQLs today and another, and another, and another, is the volume too high or is the volume too low? And let's tweak it a little bit to make it fit there. And then on our next one for expansion opportunity, is that, are we getting too many in there or is it too low? Again, so, and that's just not, that's not just based on the capacity for your team, but that's based on the results of what happens after that person becomes a PQL. Your team reaches out, is it successful or not successful? Maybe we need to change the criteria
BREEZY BEAUMONTand we need to tighten it up, or maybe we need to kind of just scrap it and try out something new.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. That makes a lot of sense. This has been really fun. We're about out of time. So I think
EDDIE REYNOLDSit's time to wrap, even though I have a million follow-up questions, but this has been great.
BREEZY BEAUMONTIt's been fun. I know I could go on forever. I get very passionate about this. It's fun.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, thanks for joining me. Thanks, Eddie. Bye.
SPEAKER_60you
