PLG ≠ Self-Serve, Door Philosophy & User Activation | BTW - Edition 5

Welcome to the fifth edition of Buy The Way - your weekly dose of SaaS sales and marketing stories from around the world! ??

This week we cover some pretty interesting topics like:

• How PLG and Self Serve are not the same things ??
• A door ???philosophy can speeds up your org’s movement exponentially ??
• The Seven Hells of User Activation

and much more….So let’s jump right in ??

What’s the buzz? ??

Alexa Grabell straightens it out that “PLG ≠ Self-Serve”. She also takes examples of Superhuman & Carta to show the reverse paradigm. She says “PLG is all about giving value & frictionless experience” while “Self-serve is a customer acquisition channel”.

Adding to the discussion, Geffen Posner ( CEO @ OpenSepc ) sets out a no-fluff definition of both. ??

Read the full post and discussion here.

Are you a “Two-way-door” person or a “One-way-door” person? Avery Yip recommends this segmentation strategy to every founder if they want to enable the whole org to catch speed.

Basically, Two-Way-Door means you can break things around and still come back, while One-Way-Door involves decision-making for harder things which are irreversible. ??

So if you want to get unstuck and move fast, you should definitely read this framework here.

Kyle Poyar drops some real talk on 7 activation mistakes you might be making during self-sign-up. And guess what? Improving new user activation leads to a whole chain reaction of delightful outcomes like better conversion to paid, retention, NDR, and CAC payback!

Don't miss out on this activation party, read more about it here.

Podcasts to tune into ??

B2B Growth Show hosted by Benji Block & James Carbary is a Forbes Featured, “Top Podcast for B2B entrepreneurs and ironically they have the simplest description:

“Throwing in our 2 cents on what B2B marketers are talking about on the internet.”

They talk about current market sentiments, best practices and also take a stab at Popular/Un-Popular Opinions. ??

In a recent episode, they picked up the viral post of Jessica Gilmartin (Chief Marketing Officer at Calendly) and asked themselves: “To pitch or NOT to pitch a CMO?”.

What came out of that convo, hear for yourself here

Confessions of a B2B Marketeer, hosted by Tom Hunt , he brings on interesting guests to discover what top dogs are doing to acquire customers and generate revenue which others have turned a blind eye to.

In a recent episode, he brought on Aurther Castillo ( Head of Dark Social and Evangelism at Chili Piper ) to share his field marketing secrets & learn about dark social, peer-to-peer events, content capture, revenue tracking, employee retention and product expansion. ??

Hop on to the full episode here

That's all for our fifth edition folks, we hope you enjoy reading it.

Any feedbacks and comments are most welcome ??

Stay tuned for the Sixth Edition of?Buy The Way -?Your weekly dose of SaaS Sales & Marketing Stories ??

Featured Demo of the week: Sumo Logic ??

Sumo Logic’s Continuous Intelligence Platform helps developers deliver reliable and secure cloud-native applications.

And to deliver a hands-on experience of their platform to their prospects, they rely on?Storylane???

Check out the product tour Hashlist built using Storylane - here & If you’re looking to learn more about how Sumo Logic can help you, reach out to?Aditya Gaur.