Five PLG tactics every sales-led company should do
The smartest sales-led companies are borrowing PLG tactics to make their sales motion faster, smoother, higher-converting, and more scalable.
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Let’s be real - going full Product-Led Growth (PLG) isn’t for everyone. Some products need high-touch sales, complex onboarding, or enterprise buy-in to close deals. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore PLG entirely.
The smartest sales-led companies are borrowing PLG tactics to make their sales motion faster, smoother, higher-converting, and more scalable.
And if you’re not? Well, you’re leaving efficiency (and money) on the table.
When your product plays a bigger role in closing deals, setting expectations, and onboarding users, you accelerate pipeline conversion and cut down on post-sale disappointments and churn.
So if you want a tighter, more efficient sales funnel with higher retention, steal these five PLG tactics:
1. Create interactive demos
If you are not enabling your sales team to use (and create) product demos, you are majorly missing out. Sales-led products typically aren’t self-serve ready, which makes interactive demos the perfect way to showcase the product while layering in educational overlays to smooth out any complexity.
And let’s be real, prospects don’t want yet another sales deck. They want to see the product in action. Instead of forcing them to sit through a full demo call just to get a glimpse, set yourself apart by offering an interactive product tour:
Equip sales teams with interactive demos to personalize their outreach.
Embed them on your website so prospects can explore at their own pace.
Use them to qualify and pre-sell before your reps even hop on a call.
Checkout how Atlassian uses it. Or Carta.
Data point: When I was at Amplitude, interactive demos made up as much as 30% of the overall pipeline. To this day, they remain a secondary CTA on the homepage - meaning they still work.
And creating demos has never been easier. Now, it’s just a browser extension install away - click around the product while AI writes the copy and prompts for you. (Seriously, check out this demo I created about how easy it is to create a pricing page with Lovable using Arcade. Mind-boggling.)
Which teams should use this tactic?
Marketing for pipeline creation
Sales for sales enablement
Success for customer education
Product for sales training
Which companies benefit from this?
Honestly, all - but especially those whose products are not self-serve ready at all.
2. Use time-based trials to accelerate the sales cycle
Ever had a deal drag on forever because the buyer just wasn’t sure? Time-based trials create urgency while letting prospects experience the product’s value firsthand.
This also makes for a killer LinkedIn outreach tactic - instead of asking for a 15-minute call, which usually ends up in this reaction:
Send them a trial link instead. Trials are notorious for creating urgency (only 30 days to try it out! gotta get a move on it), so lean into that psychology. Even better - don’t wait for them to ‘activate’ the trial. Tell them: “Your trial starts NOW! Enjoy the best of our product FREE for the next 30 days.” And don’t be afraid to go straight to enterprise buyers - you’d be surprised how many more opportunities this opens up. One big bonus of a trial? You don’t need to worry about monetization - trial timing handles that by cutting off access.
Of course, don’t just set and forget it: offer live chat, schedule walkthroughs, interactive demos, and be there to guide users throughout the trial and beyond.
Which teams should use this tactic?
Marketing for pipeline creation and ABM
Sales for sales outbound & expansion opportunities (giving trials to higher end plan)
Which companies benefit from this?
Companies whose products can deliver a “self-serve-ish” activation experience without a lot of costly set-up. If that’s not the case, go back to interactive demo links.
3. Invest into self-serve activation
Before you say - woah woah woah, we are a sales-led company and have an amazing success team that does that… I have no doubt in your team's abilities. However, let’s say you close the logo - your success team runs an onboarding call and maybe you even schedule quarterly business reviews and offer professional services. Great - but is that *really* enough?
I think not. For starters, many users end up missing their success-led onboarding call. Or maybe they didn’t need access at that time, but now something has changed. Even more so, new employees are constantly joining the company - and guess what? They’re not getting a personal onboarding session from your success team (nor should they). What do all these users have in common? They’ll end up fumbling through the product on their own, getting frustrated…
And - GASP - possibly looking for a more user-friendly, self-serve solution. Here you go being disrupted by some PLG incumbent.
So even if you don’t have a self-serve sign-up flow, nailing self-serve activation for *additional users joining* is a game-changer for customer health and retention. Unfortunately, many sales-led product teams ignore this.
Here’s where to start:
Define your activation journey - Identify the setup moment, aha moment, and first habit loop that turn new users into engaged ones. Check out my post on activation here.
Measure activation within existing logos - See how new users are progressing through these milestones. I bet it is shockingly bad.
Track number of active users within logo - Many companies evaluate contract value by dividing total contract volume by the number of active employees using the product. If you’re not keeping an eye on this metric, you might suddenly find yourself in a churn conversation.
Have product and marketing teams take activation metric as a goal - If activation is broken, retention will be too.
Fix this, and you’re not just reducing churn - you’re making your product stickier across the entire customer lifecycle.
Which teams should use this tactic?
Success for automation and scalability of their team
Product for improving retention
Marketing for lifecycle management
Which companies benefit from this?
Any multiplayer product with multiple users within a single logo. This is especially relevant for companies whose clients evaluate cost based on active employees (i.e., users).
BONUS: If you nail self-serve activation, you’re laying the groundwork for self-serve revenue in the future - if you ever decide to go that route.
4. Use product signals to drive expansion
In B2B, expansion isn’t just a nice-to-have - it’s the difference between thriving and watching your revenue graph do the sad trombone slide. Companies live and die by Net Dollar Retention (NDR) or Net Revenue Retention (NRR), and let’s be real - if you’re not expanding accounts, someone else is poaching them. Check out the best way to visualize retention & expansion in my post here.
And if you’re waiting until a QBR or contract renewal window to bring up expansion? You’re already too late.
That’s like showing up to the airport after your flight took off and wondering why you’re stuck at the gate. Instead of relying on scheduled check-ins, use product signals to time your expansion plays perfectly. Because let’s be real: expansion isn’t a happy accident - it’s a hustle.
Here’s how to stop hoping for expansion and start engineering it with PLG tactics:
Track usage data: Feature adoption, new users joining, errors hit, and/or usage volume are powerful predictors to expansion - set up the tracking so you are not missing these important signals.
Expose data to sales: Your sales team shouldn’t be guessing when to reach out - give them real-time visibility into feature adoption and usage patterns so they can act before the customer even realizes they need an upgrade.
Expose upgrade paths within the product: Most products only show users what they already have access to. Big mistake. Every product interaction should subtly tease what’s possible if they upgrade.
Which teams should use this tactic?
Sales for landing those expansion quotas
Product to assist sales in expansion process
Marketing for lifecycle management
Which companies benefit from this?
Any product.
5. Begin creating User-Generated Content (UGC)
Sales-led companies shouldn't overlook scalable growth levers like UGC. I strongly believe that UGC will the future of Marketing. So tapping into what your customers create can help spark organic advocacy and diversify your marketing and sales channels.
PLG companies utilize UGC all the time, just look at Miroverse, Notion Template Marketplace, or infamous Canva’s infamous template library.
But UGC is not limited to just ‘templates’. Communities and forums are the examples of UGC as well and some of the biggest sales-led companies are already doing it:
Salesforce: The Trailblazer Community isn’t just a forum - it’s an ecosystem (and extremely impressive one). Customers share success stories, tips, and case studies, turning UGC into powerful social proof. While Salesforce leans on a consultative sales process, this community-driven content builds trust, drives engagement, and helps close deals.
ServiceNow: Their developer forums and customer communities work the same magic. Users contribute workflows, integrations, and best practices, enriching the product experience and boosting adoption. Even without a self-serve model, this content becomes a scalable asset for the sales team, proving the platform’s real-world value.
For sales-led companies, UGC is a scalable tactic that drives awareness, builds trust, and ultimately fuels customer success. By empowering users to share their experiences and insights, you create a feedback loop that reinforces the product’s value, making your sales efforts more effective without requiring every customer to go through a traditional, high-touch onboarding process.
Integrating UGC into your growth strategy means you’re not just relying on direct sales outreach; you’re also harnessing the voices of your customers to tell your brand’s story and highlight its real-world benefits. This dual approach can significantly boost your credibility and help drive both adoption and expansion.
Which teams should use this tactic?
Product for improving retention
Marketing for assisting with pipeline creation and quality
Sales for improving conversion
Which companies benefit from this?
Honestly, any. Validation coming from your own users is *everything*, in the age where people want authentic perspectives.
P.S. Sites like G2 are NOT the way to scale your UGC. And traffic trends shows that fewer and fewer customers use them. It needs to be authentic and you should own it.
Gotcha
The biggest gotcha here? The product team needs to go beyond just delivering on sales deck promises - they must also create a product experience that can be showcased within the sales process and help drive conversions. This can be a tough pill to swallow, with excuses like “the product is too complex” or “the ROI isn’t there.” But I’ve seen it repeatedly - when sales & marketing carry the entire load without the product pulling its weight, deals drag on, and disappointment follows, letting PLG-incubants thrive. So the choice is yours.
Preach 🙌