Guides
Share community-qualified leads (CQL) with sales
Looking to define and implement a process for driving leads through community activities? This playbook will help you to work with your internal teams to create a definition of what that lead looks like, how to find suitable candidates using Orbit and how to make sure you and your team get the credit for any resulting deals, whilst ensuring you’re maintaining trust between your team and the community.
What is a Community Qualified Lead?
Just so we’re all on the same page, a Community Qualified Lead is an individual that has been discovered through certain activities they perform within a community that point to potential additional value for the company. This is not simply from a sales perspective either. CQLs bring value to many aspects of modern technology companies, from marketing case studies, to providing product feedback, to helping fill your talent pipeline. All of this can stem from a community member.
In this playbook we’re going to focus on the relationship between a community team and a sales team, using real-world approaches to defining, identifying, and engaging with CQLs.
Part 1: Planning
Step 1) Build a relationship with your Sales team
It’s safe to say that good sales operators want to be in the most informed position possible. As a community team member, you’re in a strong position to enable them when engaging with CQLs, and they’ll be appreciative of the chance to share in that knowledge.
Here are some steps to get started.
- Identify one or two Account Execs who are interested in, or responsible for, ‘slower burn’ deals (depending on the size of your company and the size of the sales team)
- Take time to understand their process, and the sales processes of your company.
- One idea: Join your Account Exec colleagues on Sales calls.
This will help you present the right information at the right time.
This is a great way to learn, help unclog deals, gather feedback and maintain a dialogue between them and the other teams at the company. (We do this at Orbit every week)
An alternative path: Identify anyone from the team who has expressed interest in working more with Community. They’re prepared for what comes next.
Step 2) Define the criteria for your CQLs
What makes a good CQL from a sales perspective? It’s a tough question, and one single set of criteria likely won’t work for every company so that is something you’ll need to define for yourself. Take the following steps to create your definition.
Step 2a) Build a list of recent customers
Ask your favorite sales team friend if you can sit with them (in person or virtually) to go over recent deals that have closed (this can be self-serve signups as well as AE supported deals, it’s all customers at the end of the day!).
Gather the following pieces of information:
- The name of the company
- The date they became a customer
- (Optional) The date they first entered the sales pipeline
Step 2b) Identify customers in Orbit that were active in the community before becoming a customer
Use the info you gathered above to help you identify customers who were active in your community before they decided to sign up and pay you something.
If you set up the HubSpot integration,
- Go to the Members tab
- Filter for Organizations that are customers (use the Organization Status filter type).
If you did not set up the Hubspot integration,
- Go to the Organizations tab.
- Use the Search by name and website bar and enter a name of one of the customers you have identified.
Next, do the following,
- Click on an organization to view its profile.
- Note when they recently became a customer.
- Look at the Active since field and the date at the top of their Member Activities. This will tell you when the organization first entered the community and whether they are still active.
- Using the date that the organization became a customer, look for all of the activities that took place up to the point they signed up.
You can get this info either from your previous sales meeting or from the org’s profile (if you have the Hubspot integration set up) Here we can see that Stefanini Group recently became a customer in November 2022.
Stefanini Group was first active in December of 2021, which means they’ve been a part of the community for 8 months (that’s great!).
Repeat this process with 5-10 other customers that were active in the community before they signed up/signed on the dotted line with you.
Step 2c) Identify common criteria
Through your research, extract commonalities that might be true for all those customers. Examples could be:
- They signed up for your newsletter
- They are active in your Discord, asking questions that have been answered promptly by the community team
- They regularly visit your product documentation
- They have submitted issues or pull requests on your open source SDKs, indicating that they’re using them
- They are at companies of similar sizes and estimated annual revenue
You can also pay attention to how long the members of that Organization were in the community before becoming your customer. Is there any commonality there? If so you can always add a ‘Time in Community’ element to your definition to further qualify your CQLs.
Step 2d) Create your definition and socialize it
Now that you have the bones of your CQL definition for sales,
- Write it down and socialize it to get feedback from the sales team.
- See if your sales colleagues agree with your definition. What, if any, additional criteria do they want to include?
You could present it as a sentence: “Our definition of a Sales-Community Qualified Lead is an organization that has typically signed up for our newsletter, been active in product specific channels on Discord, used our documentation reference and implemented a POC (proof of concept) using our SDKs”
The important outcome here is that you are all on the same page about why these CQLs are being created in the first place.
Part 2: Building
Step 1) Identify your CQLs using Orbit - on the Members Level
If you want to view your CQLs on an individual member level, do the following:
Step 2a) Create a list
- Go to the Lists tab in your workspace and click Create new list.
- Add a name and a description for your list.
e.g. Name: CQL Handoffs
Description: Contains members that are CQLs. Use this list to track who has been shared to Sales.
Step 2b) Set up a workflow to populate your list
Workflows will allow us to automatically add members who are CQLs to your list. To set up this workflow,
- Go to the Workflows tab and select Add Member to List
- For workflow step 1, use the filters that define a CQL for your team.
- For workflow step 2, select the list you created above from the dropdown
- Click Run Workflow. If you then go back to your list, you will see that it has already been populated with members that match your CQL criteria. Moving forward, only members that have not matched before will be added to your list each day.
Tip 1: Add a filter to exclude customers by doing Add filter → Organization Status → Customer and change the operator to is not.
Tip 2: Add a filter to exclude members already in Hubspot/Salesforce by doing Add filter → Linked Profiles → Hubspot/Salesforce and change operator to is not.
Learn more about filters here.
Step 2) Identify your CQLs using Orbit - on the Organizations Level
If you want to maintain an ongoing view of Organizations that are performing the activities you have outlined in your CQL definition is to create a report in Orbit.
- Go to Reports Tab
- Click Create new → Chart
- Edit the chart to have the following settings:
- Use the filters to apply the activities that you outlined as part of your CQL definition.
- Click Filters. Select Activity Types from the list.
- Select all of the activity types that you want to include (eg. Discord messages, GitHub Pull Requests, Newsletter Subscriptions etc.).
- If you want to get super specific on things like Discord Messages only from certain channels, go to Filters → Activity Properties to select channels. Many of Orbit’s integrations have additional Activity Properties alongside their Activity Types that allow for this fine tuning of your Filters.
- Check the date range. In the image below, it is set to a year (12 months), but you might only want to have activity from a specific time period. Use the
Custom
button to set your start and end dates to suit your needs.
This will create a tabular view of activities performed by all members but it will group them by Organization, effectively creating a list of companies for you.
Now your table will update with only the Organizations who have members in the community that match all your criteria.
Part 3: Create CQLs in your CRM
You’ve defined your criteria, worked with your Sales team to agree on it, and you’ve found some Organizations and Members that match it. Now it’s time to hand them over.
Step 1) Ask your Account Execs how they want to work with CQLs
Every company has a different way of doing this.
Some questions you can ask your account exec:
- Would you like these leads to be created in our CRM?
- What contextual data do you need along with the contact information?
- What should the Lead Source be? (this one is important)
Possible actions you can take are:
- create the CQL in Hubspot or Saleforce using Orbit’s built-in integration
- export a list of CQLs and give it to your sales team
- send CQLs to another CRM via a webhook
Step 2) Check your list for new matching members
- Go to your list
- Scan your list for new members. The best way to find these members is by looking at the Status column in the list. New members will always have a status of No Status.
- Go through the list and update the status of each new member.
- If there is a member that you think should not be added to your CRM, update their status to Skipped
- If you’re ready to act on a member, update their status to In Progress. This helps others on your team know that this member is being addressed.
Step 3) Perform your action
For each member that you’ve marked as In Progress, you can now perform whatever action you need with this member. We’ll walk through some examples below.
Manually Create Contacts in HubSpot or Salesforce
- From your list, select all members that are marked as In Progress.
- Click Actions → Create contact in HubSpot or Create lead in Salesforce.
To learn more about how Contact/Lead creation works, check out these docs:
Manually export your CQLs as a CSV
If Salesforce or HubSpot aren’t your jam, you don’t have access to them for a direct integration, or you’re using some other CRM that we don’t have an integration for, don’t sweat it. We’ve got you. Providing the team with a CSV of fresh lead information is just as acceptable, and you can create this from your member list.
- Go to your list
- Select the members you’d like to download
- Click Export CSV.
The output will be a nicely formatted CSV of pertinent information you can upload into your CRM of choice.
You’re now off and running discovering and sharing leads, but the most important step is still to come. It’s the next one if that wasn’t obvious. Do not skip this one!
Step 3) Mark member as complete
Once you’ve completed your action (either through Orbit or outside), update that member’s status to Completed. This will help your team know who has been celebrated so you can all keep track.
We’ll walk you through how to create CQLs in your CRM using Orbit.
Using Orbit’s built in integrations, we’ve made it easy for you to create CQLs in both HubSpot and Salesforce (two very common tools used by lots of companies to manage customers and sales processes). You can do it either manually or automatically. However, if you’re not using either of those tools, don’t worry, you can still get data from Orbit that you can use in any other CRM.
Part 4: Automate Your Assignments in your CRM
You’ve created leads in the company CRM. That’s awesome, but there’s still some work to do.
Creating a lead or a contact in a CRM just does that, nothing else. You now need to make sure that your CRM is set up to properly handle these leads/contacts once they get created.
Grab your friendly CRM admin and your bestest Sales friend and decide on the following things:
- When a lead/contact is created in the CRM with the Lead/Origin Source of Orbit, what should happen?
- What automation should be put in place to handle these leads/contacts once they come in?
- Are there specific Account Execs/SDRs that are going to work with these leads/contacts? How should they be notified?
Ensuring that a process is in place to make sure these leads/contacts don’t just disappear into the ether and become orphaned leads is key to making sure that they are acted upon, but also that your team maintains the credit for sourcing the lead. This is key for later reporting on revenue driven by community and is super valuable for team budget discussions. Again, don’t skip this step!
If you’d like ideas on how to do this, don’t hesitate to reach out at [email protected] or find us on Discord.
FAQ
What if I want to automatically add CQLs to HubSpot or Salesforce?
We only suggest doing this if you feel confident that the CQLs you are adding are high value and doesn’t create too much noise for your sales team.
If this is true, then you actually do not need to make a List. Instead, you just need to make a workflow that automatically adds members to HubSpot/Salesforce. Follow the guides below for the step-by-step:
- Share community-qualified leads (CQL) with sales
- What is a Community Qualified Lead?
- Part 1: Planning
- Step 1) Build a relationship with your Sales team
- Step 2) Define the criteria for your CQLs
- Part 2: Building
- Step 1) Identify your CQLs using Orbit - on the Members Level
- Step 2) Identify your CQLs using Orbit - on the Organizations Level
- Part 3: Create CQLs in your CRM
- Step 1) Ask your Account Execs how they want to work with CQLs
- Step 2) Check your list for new matching members
- Step 3) Perform your action
- Step 3) Mark member as complete
- Part 4: Automate Your Assignments in your CRM
- FAQ