Tyler Bench is king of the wide funnel.
With over 700,000 new Lucidchart registrations a month, Tyler has a big task as Director of Demand Generation. However, with great user numbers, comes great responsibility. Lucidchart’s PQL approach strategically aligns marketing and sales, essentially changing the customer experience within SaaS while taking competitive advantage of the landscape.
Listen to this episode of Hey Salespeople to learn more about Tyler’s strategy when it comes to PQLs and his three-part axis of qualification.
Listen here, and keep reading for some of the highlights from this episode below.
Combing for Leads
Jeremey: How do you go about combing through 700,000 leads per month and figure out which ones are the ones to engage?
Tyler: Yeah, so I think there’s sort of a three-part access to that and how we think about it. One access is a person fit. So this is sort of your traditional buyer persona. To use an example that is relevant to the sale space, we’re building out a solution for sales that we call the LucidChart sale solution.
It sounds like you’re keying in on that use case yourself with your personal use where were trying to help reps and sales organizations visualize their relationship with an account and do account planning in LucidChart.
So we have a pretty good idea of who we want to talk to there to get that conversation going. And, it’s not just one type of person, but in that case, right? We want to talk to sales leaders. We also want to talk to sales ops. And we also want to talk to especially enterprise sales reps, because they get very strong value out of the product as an end-user.
They also tend to be fairly well networked within their sales organizations. So we know who we want to talk to. That’s one access. The next axis is the company, right?
So in the case of our sales solution, where we have the strongest fit is with sales organizations that are trying to sell into the enterprise. Because doing that type of account planning and really deeply knowing an account, having really strong collaboration internally around the account can move the needle there. So we’re looking for the right people at the right companies.
Then the last piece is, how qualified are they are how interested are they behavior early in the product? So that’s things like, how far have they made it into our onboarding? How are they using the product today on the tool that they’re on? And so what we’re looking for is for all three of those factors to come together, right?
The right person who matches our buyer personas, the right company that matches an organization that can get a lot of value out of Lucidchart at scale. And then how qualified are they in terms of their level of interest in the product?
Getting the Most out of Freemium
Jeremey: You have this opportunity when you have freemium that people are going to give you a bit more information in order to get access to the tool. It gives you the opportunity to ask a few more qualifying questions just as they register.
Tyler: Exactly and it’s not just that we’re doing that to try to be able to give them to a sales rep, right? We are also making a promise which we deliver on that, by telling us who they are we’re going to surface the right things to them in the product, as they move through.
But yeah, we don’t just, when we talked about creating a product-qualified lead, even once you’ve qualified people on those three dimensions I mentioned, so right person, the right company, the right level of interest in the product…there’s still a ton of volume.
The base we’re starting with is 700,000 new people a month. And so, we are usually taking an almost another step of qualification where marketing will actually initiate the first contact in a way that is automated but highly targeted where we use a stack that is basically our product database, Marketo sales productivity platforms to initiate that contact. And we’re sending them an email that is highly relevant to what they did in the product.
Then like waiting for them to respond to the rep. And that’s usually where we will have the first active sales engagement. And the content of the email that we’re sending is designed to qualify to find that right person as well. So that’s the extra layer of qualification that we’re putting in there?
Jeremey: You mentioned what the content of that engagement is. Can you expand on that a little bit?
Tyler: So we might say something like:
“Hey, we want to make sure that you’re getting the most value out of Lucidchart, as a sales rep. We want to make sure you’re having success visualizing your account. Also, we want to make sure that you’re aware of all the different features that you have available to you and your sales organization. Do you have five to 10 minutes to jump on a call?”
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