Tips for building PLG teams, 6-step activation playbook, & proactive objection handling

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Welcome to the PLG Recap 📈 

I spend all week deep diving into the best PLG LinkedIn posts so you don't have to.

Here are my top 5 favorites from last week! 🔥

1️⃣ Mario Araujo

Strategy or Tactic? Strategy

Growth lever = All levers

Recap

• Mario shares some amazing advice on what you should do as a founder/CEO if and when you decide on hiring someone to build a PLG team

• My favorite pieces of advice:

  • Pair your growth leaders with an advisor - Personally, I find it ironic that some founders think that advisors are only for the executive team. However, the majority of executives have executive coaches. The purpose of advisors is to improve your decision-making efficiency and Heads of Growth are responsible for high-stakes decisions. It’s a no-brainer to not only “hedge” your decision-making with an advisor, but also create an acceptable culture for learning.

  • Don’t commit to revenue for at least 6 months - Over and over again I see marketing and growth teams have to commit to pipeline and revenue targets, but more than 50% of the time, growth teams are still trying to figure out how the engine works. Delineate between levers that connect to revenue and big bets that are in discovery.

• It’s imperative to build a strong foundation right from the start.

2️⃣ John Kotowski

Strategy or Tactic? Tactic

Growth lever = Monetization

Recap

• John drives home 4 reverse trial decision-making points to consider when strategizing PLG monetization:

  • Entry point

  • Plan choice

  • Credit card

  • End of trial

• Asking for a credit card upfront will get you fewer people, but drive a higher conversion rate at the end of the trial

• At the end of the trial, should you auto-convert or downgrade your user? In my experience, this one is usually dependent on the pricing model you have whether it’s usage-based, seat-based, feature-based, etc. Or whether there are engineering limitations.

• Understand the why behind each of these. Test them.

3️⃣ Andrew Capland

Strategy or Tactic? Tactics

Growth lever = Retention

Recap

• Andrew’s 6-step playbook for activating your users in PLG:

  1. Define value

  2. Deliver value, quickly

  3. Motivate users to action

  4. Customize the experience

  5. Start in the middle

  6. Build momentum pre-signup

• Starting in the middle is about recognizing that you need to address a large swath of users’ pain points while many users have different pain points. Therefore, building a generalized solution like templates ends up solving more problems than it potentially misses on addressing problems.

• Building momentum pre-signup is very aligned with my favorite topic: PLM (product-led marketing). Distribute your product to the website in the form of interactive demos, templates, and communities. This way you prime your users with the right biases and value expectations.

4️⃣ Yaakov Carno

Strategy or Tactic? Tactic

Growth lever = Retention

Recap

• There are 4 stages to the PLG flywheel:

  1. Activate - experiencing value

  2. Adopt - building habits

  3. Adore - love using the product

  4. Advocate - creating champions

• You must prioritize customer feedback, invest in data and experimentation, and be able to implement a growth framework

• Check out Yaakov’s post to download his beginner guide on activation!

5️⃣ Adam Jarczyn

Strategy or Tactic? Tactic

Growth lever = Monetization

Recap

• Proactive objection handling is a tactical approach to use during a free trial in order to increase the conversion rate, but also provide transparency to the user on how to experience value quicker

• Objection handling is about surfacing problems and areas of friction you know your user will run into and at the same time, providing solutions to these problems.

• I personally see proactive objection handling another form of personalizing the user journey from the lens of pain point journeys vs value journeys. In theory, this approach is something we should all be testing!

6️⃣ My post of the week - What is Product-led Marketing (PLM)?

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See you next time.

-Drew