PLG Signals and Playbooks for Every Stage of the Customer Journey

Whether you’re just starting to make the leap into a product-led growth strategy, or you’ve been doing it for years and already have a definition for your first PQL (product qualified lead), this post will help you determine what other signals and playbooks leading PLG companies are using across their customer’s lifecycle.

At this point, you’re probably considering:

• What stages in the customer lifecycle are most important to target?

• What specific data points do I need to track?

• Where will this data even come from?

• And what actions should my team be taking once we do surface this data?

While every company has unique products, features, pricing, and other attributes, there are a few common PQL signals and playbooks that we see time and time again at Correlated that will help you hit the ground running.

First, let’s quickly list out the main stages your customers might be going through. 

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Customer Journey: Conversion, Adoption, Expansion, Churn

To keep it standardized, we’ll look at Conversion, Adoption, Expansion, and Churn (pro tip: you can keep your PLG Signals organized at each stage with the use of “Categories” in Correlated).

Next, at a high-level, let’s map out the main goal for each of these stages: 

For conversion, sales and growth teams want to identify who is ready to buy, or convert from free to paid.

For adoption, CS teams will need to determine who is using their product effectively, when it’s becoming valuable, and what makes their product “sticky.” 

For expansion, this may be relevant to sales and CS (or really any revenue teams) to discover when customers at all levels are ready to upgrade plans or access new/more paid products. 

For churn, CS would largely lead the charge here, but it’s powerful for all teams to know when a customer is not using the product, not getting value from it, or simply at risk of leaving. 

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Finally, let’s take these goals and tie them to real PLG Signals that you can create in Correlated using a combination of CRM data (from sources like Salesforce or HubSpot) and product-usage data (from tools like Segment, Hightouch, or directly from a data warehouse like BigQuery or Snowflake)!

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Conversion PQL Signal:

Key persona signs up and is using a core feature. 

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• Example: User with “executive” title signed up and added > 2 new integrations → Automatically add to Outreach sequence to get a meeting scheduled

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• Example: Company market segment is Enterprise and they have used > 90% of available credits during free trial → Send Slack DM to account owner to reach out and convert to paid

• Pro tip: You can include “Trigger Details” in the Slack notification to give the account owner important context like number of seats sold, plan type, days until renewal, and trial end date.

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Adoption PQL Signal

Customer is active in product and invites new team members to join.

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• Example: Company activity score is better than “very good” and invited > 1 user in the last day → Create Salesforce task to welcome new teammate and offer support

• Pro tip: You can use the “Activity Scores” that Correlated generates for you based on your unique product usage data to target active (or inactive) customers.

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• Example: User has logged in 3 consecutive days and invited > 3 users total → Automatically add to Outreach sequence for nurture

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Expansion PQL Signal

Customer is showing interest in new features or ready to renew.

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• Example: Company’s contract renewal is < 60 days away and they viewed a product/feature detail page in the last month → Send Slack DM to account owner so they can prepare for conversation to cross-sell 

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• Example: Company’s contract renewal is < 90 days away and using > 80% of purchased seats → Create task for account owner in SFDC to discuss upgrading plan for more seats

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Churn PQL Signal

Customer has not completed a key milestone in desired time frame.

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• Example: Company has not connected any integrations > 5 days of signing up → Send Slack DM to CSM owner as a warning to reach out send help documentation on connecting integrations

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• Example: Company’s overall license utilization is < 20% after 14 days of converting to paid plan → Alert CSM owner and Sales owner to engage for meeting and confirm value is realized

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Now that you’ve had a chance to familiarize yourself with a few great Signal examples at each customer stage, I think it’s time to bring in the master playbook library.

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Here at Correlated, we’re constantly discovering new ways of how top companies are being successful in our PLG enablement platform, and we want to share those with you! Check out our playbook library for endless inspiration of sample Signals that can be used across, Sales, CS, and Marketing at every key stage. Simply plug in your own criteria where it makes sense, and put it to the test. Or get started for free here.

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Happy Signal making!