PLG Tactics

Business software was sold one way for a long time. The website showed a "contact us" button instead of a price. Clicking it produced a form asking for a company name and a phone number. Two days later a rep called to ask how many seats were needed, a thirty-minute conversation ended with a demo booked for the following week, quotes went back and forth, and the account opened only after a contract was signed. Three weeks if things moved; two months if they didn't.

The place this broke was the very first step. Whoever clicks "contact us" is usually not the person who signs contracts — it's someone with work to finish today. What they wanted was to edit one document with three colleagues this afternoon, and what they got was a scheduled phone call. Booking a call about a tool you haven't touched is a lot to ask, so most people closed the tab and found something they could start using immediately. The company never learned it had lost them, because nothing in the funnel records a person who declined to fill in a form.

The selling side had a matching problem. One rep can work maybe forty companies a month. If a deal is worth 300,000 dollars a year, that headcount pays for itself. Sell a 3,000-dollar team plan the same way and the labor behind each closed deal costs more than the deal. Serving small teams meant taking people out of the sales motion, because there was no arithmetic in which the old motion worked.

One more thing had shifted underneath all of this: who picks the tool. Companies used to standardize on one product and roll it out to everyone. Now an individual tries something, brings it into their team, and only after that team has grown does anyone discuss a company-wide contract. The decision runs upward instead of downward.

PLG tactics move the selling into the product to match that direction. The first screen does the explaining, hands-on use does the convincing, an invite feature does the spreading, and a usage limit does the asking for money. The approach as a whole is called product-led growth (PLG); the terms collected here are how that approach gets built into actual screens. Sales doesn't disappear, it arrives later.

Six tactics sit under this heading. There's no need to memorize them as a list — each one is a device placed along the path a user walks: arriving alone, feeling the value, spreading sideways, hitting a limit and paying, then pulling new people in from outside.

Picking which one to work on follows the same path.

1. Break the numbers into stages and find the biggest leak. If 1,000 signups produce 340 first documents and only 40 of those teams ever invite a colleague, the problem isn't the signup screen — it's the gap between first document and invite.
2. Choose exactly one tactic for that stage. Attach all six in a quarter and you can't tell which one did anything.
3. Build the device into the product. It has to live on a screen people hit while working, not in an onboarding email or a blog post. Guidance that leaves the product gets opened by about two people in ten.
4. Two or three weeks later, look only at the pass rate for that stage. Total revenue moves for other reasons — a holiday week, a pricing change, one large account — and can't settle the question.

Self-serve signup opens the front door without a human behind it. An email address creates the account, no card and no approval step, and the user lands directly in an empty workspace. The fields worth cutting are the ones asking for company size and job title. That data is useful to a sales team but it's a gate to someone who came to write a document, and every added line costs you people at the door. The same facts accumulate later anyway: which company domain someone signed up with, and how many people edit the same file, answer the question more accurately than a form does.

Time to wow measures the gap between signing up and the moment someone thinks this is actually good. For a collaborative document tool, that moment is watching a colleague's cursor move through the same paragraph. Measuring it matters because opening a free tier isn't enough on its own. Four minutes alone in front of an empty page and most people close the tab for good. So the empty page gets replaced with a sample document, the first paragraph gets drafted for them, or the invite box moves to the first screen — all of it to shorten that gap.

Bottom-up adoption is the pattern where one practitioner starts using something, their team follows, and the organization follows the team. Where the first two are devices, this is closer to the outcome those devices produce. A product built for it looks different from the first screen: admin settings and permission models stay out of the way, and the thing is useful to one person working alone. Administration becomes necessary around the time ten people in one company are using it, and by then switching tools is painful. When a decision-maker finally starts a review, the organization already holds hundreds of documents, so the question has quietly changed from whether to use this to whether to consolidate it onto a company account.

Team invite stops leaving that spread to chance. Sharing a document requires the other person's address, and the person who receives it makes an account to open the file. Invites that work are almost always attached to something people do anyway. An invite item buried in settings goes untouched; the identical feature placed in the share control of a document gets used daily.

Usage-based upgrade moves the payment conversation to the edge of a limit. If the free plan stops at three documents, the upgrade prompt appears as someone tries to create a fourth. What separates it from the same message in a marketing email is that the thing the person needs right now is what's blocked. Where to place the limit is the whole tactic. Set it too generously and everyone stays free; set it too tightly and people hit the wall before they've felt any value. The usual answer is a line that feels roomy to one person and tight to a team, which is also the point where the account is worth more to the company than the free storage it consumes.

Viral surface is any place where the output of the product is visible to someone outside it — the product name in the corner of a shared link, the formatting left behind in an exported meeting note. If invites spread sideways inside a company, this leaks outward, and it becomes an entrance for new users that costs nothing in ad spend. The constraint is taste: branding that clutters the output reduces sharing itself, so it has to stay light enough that the sender isn't embarrassed by it.

The six are chained. A tactic further down the path does nothing while an earlier stage leaks. Polish the invite flow all you like — if half your signups leave on the first screen, there's nobody left to invite. So rather than attaching all six at once, teams plug the leaking stage first and move on.

"If everything works for free, there's no reason to pay. Let's decide where the limit goes first."

Opening the free plan wide isn't the goal; the design question is where the crossing into paid happens.

"Signup to first document takes four minutes. Getting that to 90 seconds is the target this quarter."

People are leaving before they feel any value, so that stretch is where the effort goes.

"This account is already at 18 seats. Time for Sofia to reach out."

The product grew this account on its own and it's now large enough for a human to get involved, which is the only point in this model where a rep's time pays for itself.

At Pagedeck, Ravi split the numbers by stage and found one spot worth working on. Free accounts where three or more people edited the same document converted to paid at six times the rate two months later — but only one in eight free accounts ever reached that state.

Noa moved the invite control. What had been an item inside settings went up to the share button at the top right of a document, and any account still working alone ten minutes after creating a file got a single prompt asking whether they wanted someone to edit with. Theo wired both up in four days.

Three weeks later the share of teams with three or more editors had gone from one in eight to one in five. Mia called it there and moved to the next stage, because accounts that had grown seats were hitting the free limit without reaching the checkout screen. Meanwhile Sofia took a list of accounts past 15 seats and started calling, and none of those companies had ever come from an ad. Her opening line had changed too: instead of introducing the product, she was asking whether eighteen existing users should be consolidated onto a company account.

The most common misreading is that this approach removes sales. The name suggests the humans are gone, and it's true that early conversions happen without anyone. But there's a ceiling on what a checkout screen can carry. A 300-seat contract drags security review and legal review behind it, and the person filling in those documents is a rep, not a product. What actually changed is not whether sales exists but the list sales works from: instead of calling companies that have never touched the product, they call an account with fifteen active seats and daily usage. Cut the sales team before understanding that difference and accounts that grew on their own sit stalled at the contract stage for six months.

The other frequent assumption is that opening a free plan handles the rest by itself. A free tier is the visible face of this approach, so it looks like the cause. But free access only does work up to the front door. The moment someone feels the value, the place they invite a colleague, and the boundary where payment begins are each designed and built. Skip those three and open the free tier anyway, and user count and server bills grow while revenue sits still for a year or more. A company with 30,000 free users and forty paying teams is usually standing exactly here, and the fix is never a wider free tier — it's the three designed moments nobody built.