♟️ PLS Winning Tactics: The Product Campaigns

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Imagine a world where your product sells itself... sounds like magic?

Welcome to the era of Product-Led Sales, where channel-based and product campaigns are changing the game.

In this blog, we’ll unpack product campaigns as the primary PLS strategy.

By leveraging the inherent strengths of your product, this strategy zeroes in on users who are most likely to convert.

This is achieved by identifying high-intent leads and escalating those users from free tiers to paid plans as they realize the value of your product (the aha moment) and build a habit.

This approach substantially decreases the dependence on traditional sales techniques, enabling sales teams to concentrate their efforts on leads with the highest intent and potential ROI, rather than engaging with a broad spectrum of prospects.

There are 2 types of PLS campaigns:

• channel-based campaigns (email, in-product, etc)

• product campaigns

Throughout this blog, we'll cover the second type of PLS campaigns: product campaigns, identifying what they are, the four main types of product campaigns, and how you can build your own.

What’s a Product Campaign?

Product campaigns are one of the most effective strategies within PLS.

It allows you to identify and cherry-pick the users that are most likely to monetize.

The ability to monetize users is based on key indicators:

• how they use your product

• their interest in premium features (paywall engagement or pricing page visits)

• collaboration signals (sharing links, inviting users)

• a realization that there’s more value to unlock (monetization awareness).

When you identify the highest-intent leads, your sales team will focus on closing them.

You're probably wondering, 'Sounds good in theory, but how do you figure out the best signals to look for and create product campaigns out of it?’

Hang tight! We'll dive into the practical steps for launching a product campaign in just a bit.

But before we get into the how-tos, it’s important to understand that there are 4 types of product campaigns you can roll out.

Knowing this will give you a clear picture of the options available and how they can fit into your overall strategy.

The 4 Types of Product Campaigns

There are 4 types of product campaigns:

👋 Sign-up campaigns
🙋‍♀️Hand raiser campaigns
🪫 Overage campaigns
👀 PQAs or usage campaigns

👋 Sign up Campaigns

This is your lowest intent and highest volume type of product campaign.

It allows you to bucket users based on where they came from (e.x demo sign-ups, inviting a new user to an org, landing page, etc).

There are three key reasons why sign-up campaigns are valuable:

• Identifying Effective Acquisition Channels: Figure out which user acquisition sources are the most effective and eventually lead to monetization.

• Tailoring Messaging: Knowing where users came from will help you tailor your monetization awareness & sales copy.

• Early Relationship Building: Account Executives (AEs) can start building relationships with these organizations earlier in the user journey, setting the stage for more successful conversions down the line.

🙋‍♀️ Hand Raiser Campaigns

This is your highest-intent, but medium-volume type of campaign.

Since this campaign type has the warmest leads, teams must jump on those ASAP.

This group of users might have clicked on ‘Contact Us’ on one of the product’s paywall or pricing page CTAs to have a higher usage limit, more outcomes, or feature differentiation.

This is an example of Airtable's pricing page CTA, which is most certainly their hand-raiser and would live under hand-raiser product campaigns.

🪫 Overage Campaigns

Just as hand-raiser campaigns, this type of product campaign is high intent, but with even lower volume.

Orgs who overaged in usage or hit a usage limit of a certain feature might end up in this type of campaign.

For example, exceeding your monthly tracked usage (MTU) limit in Amplitude counts as an overage.

What does that mean? It may mean that an org grew out of the current plan and needs assistance moving up to a higher usage limit and more advanced platform capabilities.

Some may qualify users who overaged and clicked on ‘Contact Us’ to make even higher intent, while others may just cover everyone who overaged, but not necessarily raised their hand.

However, there is also a higher churn potential, as these users are being pushed to the limit, so they’ll either upgrade or leave.

👀 Usage or PQA Campaigns

This campaign type is a mix of art and science. It's not as straightforward as others.

Those users didn't raise their hands to talk to sales (TTS).

Instead, you think they're ready to be monetized based on some user attributes, properties, and actions they’ve taken in your product.

Those accounts are called Product-Qualified Accounts (PQAs), and the leads within those accounts are called Product-Qualified Leads (PQLs).

🏗️ Building Your PQA Model

To build your PQA model, you need to answer the question, ‘Which account-level properties or behaviors indicate that an account is ready to buy?’

There are at least 2 ways to build a PQA model:

• Using 3rd party tools: you can use PLS tools like Madkudu, Pocus, Breadcrumbs, or others.

• In-house: do your own analysis, and build it from scratch.

Here are the 9 high-level steps on how you can build your own PQA model:

• Step 1: Conduct a closed won analysis on a few selected orgs, answering these questions:

  • What did your users do 6 months prior to an upgrade?

  • Who were these orgs? (account attributes, properties)

  • How many users on average were active in each org in the last 3 months / 6 months?

  • What was their usage in the last 6 months?

  • Did they encounter any paywalls? How many times did they visit the pricing page on average weekly in the last 6 months?

  • Did they collaborate with others in their org? (how many users per org, sharing links)

• Step 2: Did they reach your main usage value metric? (for example: It’s Monthly Tracked Users (MTUs) for Amplitude)

• Step 3: Derive your PQA signals from the analysis.

• Step 4: Create your Amplitude cohort.

• Step 5: Create a new Salesforce campaign

  • Name your campaign

  • Give the sales teams clear instructions on how to handle these leads and write a sequence for them on how to respond.

• Step 6: Sync your Salesforce campaign and your Amplitude cohort.

• Step 7: Launch it 🎉

• Step 8: Keep a close feedback loop with sales.

• Step 9: Track volume and performance daily or weekly and iterate as needed.

Wrapping Up

During my growth journey at Amplitude, I quickly realized that the future of PLS is moving towards product campaigns as an additional layer to channel-based campaigns.

In the blog, we’ve identified the 4 key types of product campaigns: Sign Up, Hand Raiser, Overage, and PQA or Usage Campaigns, as well as the steps for creating a Product-Qualified Accounts (PQA) model in-house.

This shift in PLS represents a new era in growth and sales strategy, leveraging product value for organic user conversion based on the user’s maturity and actions, moving beyond traditional sales methods.

Which product campaign type is the most powerful lever for your use case?

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