What’s a Product Qualified Account (PQA) and Why Should I Care

We’ve already covered the ins and outs of a product qualified lead, so now let’s talk Product Qualified Account (PQA).

PQAs are commonly used in B2B product-led growth (PLG) companies to understand buying readiness of an account. After all, companies buy, not people.

Like PQLs, PQAs are an aggregation of metrics collected about the company compared to threshold criteria. If the score is high, then the account can be handed off sales for converting into revenue (initial purchase, expansion, etc).

PQA models typically include a combination of product activity, firmographic/TAM, and consideration for where the account is in the sales process. There are two ways to generate a score.

The first method is manually generating a model by setting a point score for a certain activity, for example, 3+ users = 10 points, and when it gets to 100 then it’s a PQA. The second method is using machine learning to do it.  

You can use PQAs mainly in two ways: onboarding and expansion.

Using PQAs in Onboarding

We often talk about user-level onboarding, but it’s really important to also think about company onboarding. The overall account. Did they add their teammates? is a simple yet great question.

PQAs can be effective in onboarding when an account has hit the PQA score and is ready to be handled more directly by Sales or CSM for more personalized onboarding by a human. A key component of this can be firmographic information, such as the size of the company. The bigger the company, the bigger the opportunity, and it may be worth it then to give them a custom experience.

Using PQAs in Expansion

If a customer has reached a certain threshold but has only 5 employees, is it worth having an AE engage? Maybe, maybe not.

The model for PQAs in expansion is similar with different variables in the scoring. For example, if PQA for onboarding considers the time taken by the team to complete onboarding, the scoring for an expansion PQA would consider the frequency of adding new users to the team.

Your upselling and cross-selling campaigns can be based on PQAs for accurate targeting.

In Summary

Setting the PQA scoring model in place and optimizing it for efficiency is necessary to land and expand revenue for product-led growth companies. PQAs help decide the best ways to approach the right account at the right time and with the right context.

Inflection.io can help you mine PQAs and automate growth campaigns so you don’t miss an important revenue opportunity. See a demo.