Overview

When conducting a PLG (Product-Led Growth) motion, a frequently sought-after playbook involves taking specific actions on qualified leads (PQLs) from qualified accounts (PQAs) that are currently in the trial stage.

Preliminary assumptions

The concept revolves around initially identifying qualified accounts. In journy.io, the following steps should be taken:

• Stages should be set: See Stages

• Account signals should be defined for the 'Trial' stage, and conversion scores to be calculated for accounts: See From Smart Signals to Conversion, Churn & Health Scores

• In a similar way, user signals should be defined for those users in 'Trial' stage, and health scores to be calculated for each individual user.

In general, we recommend you to check out general information about playbooks. See Anatomy of a Playbook

Anatomy of the PQA/PQL playbook

We will be constructing a playbook designed to engage with promising trial accounts, addressing both converting and non-converting accounts. The final playbook will take on the following structure:

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Entry Condition

The entry condition for this playbook, checking if an account is a product qualified account (PQA), comes down to:

• Checking if the account is in stage 'Trial'.

• Checking if the account has a conversion score that is higher than a certain threshold. e.g. 75%

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Main actions: Notification and User actions

Once PQAs are established, there are a few things we could contemplate to do:

Send a Slack notification that we have a promising trial account

Press the add action icon (+) and choose Slack action 'Send a message'.

A Slack popup will appear where you will be entering Slack channel, personalized message and a message color.

Establish qualified users within the qualified account, and add them to a HubSpot static list

We are going to reach out to product qualified users/leads (PQLs) that have the power to make decisions in the account. This comes down to creating user actions that holds following user conditions:

• Checking if user has a health score that is higher than a certain threshold. e.g. 50%

• Checking if the relationship between the PQL and the PQA is of enough importance. Typically you could state that the user's relationship property 'Role' would equal to 'Admin' or 'Owner'.

To do this, start with adding action icon (+) and choose system action 'Send a message'.

You will now see all user-based actions related to your connected apps. For this example, choose HubSpot action 'Add to list'.

You will now have the option to select user conditions, and select the HubSpot list you want those PQL users from selected PQA account to be added to.

HubSpot will now do the necessary to start sending drip campaign emails for as long as those users are in that list.

Goal Condition

The goal of this playbook is that the product qualified account would become a customer within a certain timeframe. E.g. 21 days.

• Checking if the account is in stage 'Customer'. More elaborately, this could be one of the stages representing a paying tier such as 'Standard', 'Pro', 'Enterprise'...

• Setting the time-out for this playbook to 21 days.

The goal conditions should look like:

Upon entering goal settings, you playbook framework should now look like this:

You now can start defining actions when goal is reached (Trial PQA converted to paying customer) or when not reached (Drip campaign did not work, Trial PQA is still a trial of churned)

Goal-reached actions: Remove PQLs from HubSpot list and Notification

The moment your PQA account becomes a customer, Goal-reached actions are executed. At this point, you mainly want to clean up and notify your peers about a new customer.

Clean up list in HubSpot

As part of the engagement workflow, we had certain qualified users (PQLs) being added to a static list in HubSpot, so HubSpot could start a drip campaign, trying to convince the account to become a customer. Now that has actually happened, it's now time to quickly stop this drip campaign, so users won't be asked anymore to become a customer, while they already are. This is the action you should define:

Make sure to select a user action again.

Chose user HubSpot action 'remove from list'.

Make sure you select same user condition and list as was added as main action.

Notify Team on Slack

This is practically the same sequence as the previous Slack notification:

Goal-not-reached actions: Add manual follow up task for Sales

Unfortunately, at this point, promising trial did not convert and Goal-not-reached actions are executed.

Add a manual Sales follow up task in HubSpot

When after a time-out, a once-promising trial account did not convert, you may want to ask the Sales team to manually follow up on the account. This is how it's done.

Add a HubSpot action 'Create a task'

Ands set up the task details.

Tip: Need help with your Playbooks?

Reach out to our support team

or book time to make it together