posthog-pls-big-fish

What this skill does

# PostHog Big Fish Lead Qualification & Outreach

Research, qualify, and recommend the right play for big fish product-led leads. These are large companies (500+ employees) that have signed up for PostHog and are using it on the free tier without a payment method.

## What Makes Big Fish Leads Different

- **They didn't ask for help** — you're reaching out proactively
- **They're already using PostHog** — they have an account, possibly active usage
- **The goal is supporting their evaluation — and identifying real opportunities along the way.** The TAE's job is to help these accounts get value from PostHog quickly. If PostHog is the right fit, the commercial conversation ($20K+ annual) will happen naturally once they're dependent on the product. Other teams handle free-to-paid conversion and churn prevention.
- **You need a specific reason to reach out** — generic emails get ignored. Every outreach needs a hook grounded in what you actually know about their usage.

## Core Workflow

1. **Parse the lead** — Read Salesforce fields. Watch for the subject concatenation bug: `[Product-led] [email protected]` often smashes the company name and email together. Split at the `@` pattern to get the real email address.
2. **Research the company** — Web search for firmographics, product, industry
3. **Check Vitally** — Account activity, users, products, conversations, notes
4. **Identify the use case** — Map to PostHog's six use cases based on company type and product usage
5. **Qualify and recommend a play** — Outreach / Skip / Nurture
6. **Draft outreach** — If outreach is recommended, write a support-first email with a specific hook
7. **Validate all URLs** — Fetch every link in the draft to confirm it resolves correctly

## Step 1: Parse the Lead

Salesforce has a known bug where the subject line concatenates the company name and the person's email without a space. For example:

- `[Product-led] [email protected]` → Company: **AcmeCorp**, Email: **[email protected]**
- `[Product-led] Go [email protected]` → Company: **Go Team**, Email: **[email protected]**

**Always parse the subject by finding the email address pattern** (look for where `@` appears and work backwards to the start of the local part). The company name is everything between `[Product-led]` and the start of the email.

## Step 2: Research the Company

Use web search to gather:

- What the company does (one-sentence summary)
- Industry / vertical — is this ICP or not?
- Company size (employees, engineering headcount if available)
- Funding stage and recency
- **Does the company build software products with end-user UIs?** This is table stakes for PostHog relevance. A company can have 5,000 employees but if they don't build software, PostHog isn't relevant.

**Search queries to run:**
```
[company name] what does it do
[company name] crunchbase funding
[company name] engineering team
```

**Cross-check Salesforce enrichment data against your research.** The "500+ employees" matching criteria comes from Clearbit/Harmonic data in Salesforce, which frequently maps to the wrong entity — especially for companies with common names. A 10-person startup can get enriched with data from a completely different company with a similar name, showing 45,000 employees and $10B+ revenue. If your web research contradicts the Salesforce employee count, revenue, or founding year, trust your research and flag the discrepancy.

## Step 3: Check Vitally

**This is the most important step.** The Vitally data determines whether this is a real evaluation or one person poking around.

### 3a: Find the Account

Search for the account in Vitally. The most reliable lookup method is **user email** via `get_user_details`. Account name search is unreliable. If the email lookup returns the user with their account, you have everything you need.

If the lead email returns nothing, try the posthog_org_id from Salesforce as a last resort — but note the `search_accounts` externalId filter is unreliable and may return unrelated results.

### 3b: Check Users in the Account

Use `get_account_users` on the account ID. This is the single most important qualifying signal:

- **1 user** — One person exploring. Lower priority. Light touch outreach at best.
- **2+ users** — Real evaluation underway. Multiple people means someone shared PostHog internally — organizational interest, not just curiosity. Treat with urgency.
- **3+ users with diverse roles/activity** — Very strong. Active cross-functional evaluation. Prioritize.

For each user, note:
- **Email and name** — who are these people?
- **Vitally segments** — "Analytics Creator", "Replay User", "Feature Flag Creator", "Experiment Creator" etc. tell you exactly what they're doing
- **Last seen date** — how recent is the activity?
- **Who's the org Owner?** — this is usually the champion who initiated the evaluation

**Signup velocity matters.** If all users joined within a 1-2 week window, it's a coordinated evaluation. If they trickled in over months with gaps, it may have stalled.

### 3b-ii: Research Each User's Persona and Role

**Mandatory.** For every user in the account, research their actual job title and role. This changes the outreach strategy significantly — an Engineering Manager building a software product is a completely different conversation than a Marketing Ops person tracking a website.

**How to research:**
1. Check Vitally user traits first — `roleAtOrganization`, `sfdc.Role__c`, and `vitally.custom.calculatedTitle` sometimes have useful data
2. Check their LinkedIn profile URL if available in Vitally traits (`sfdc.Linkedin_Profile__c`)
3. Web search: `"[first name] [last name]" "[company name]" LinkedIn`
4. If the company has divisions or sub-brands, note which division the person works in — this can completely change the ICP assessment (e.g., an engineer on a SaaS product team within a services company is very different from a project manager in the services delivery business)

**What to look for:**
- **Exact job title** — "Senior Software Engineer" vs. "AV Project Manager" tells you everything about ICP fit
- **Department / team** — Engineering, Product, Data, Marketing, IT, Operations?
- **Which product or division they work on** — especially important at large companies with multiple business units. The division they're in determines whether PostHog is relevant.
- **Seniority level** — IC engineer, engineering manager, director, VP? This affects who you address the email to and how you frame the ask.

**Report what you find for each user** in the output. If you can't find someone's title, note that as an unknown.

**Why this matters:** Knowing that both users are engineers on a software platform team (strong ICP) vs. marketing analysts tracking a corporate website (weak ICP) is the difference between a Slack channel + outreach email and a skip. The persona research often overrides the company-level ICP assessment — a non-tech company can still have a strong PostHog use case if the right team is evaluating it.

### 3c: Check for Other Accounts on the Same Email Domain

**Mandatory.** Large companies often have multiple PostHog accounts on the same email domain. Search Vitally for other accounts that share the same domain using `search_accounts` or `find_account_by_name` with the company name, and check whether any other accounts have admin emails on the same domain.

**Why this matters:** Sometimes a user signs up and creates a new PostHog org when they actually meant to join an existing one that their colleagues already set up. This is especially common at large companies where one team is already using PostHog and a new person from a different team signs up independently.

**What to look for:**

- **Another account on the same domain that's more established** (more users, more usage, already paying, has a TAE assigned) — If this exists, the new account may be a duplicate. The lead contact may have accidentally created a new org inst