Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel)
Georgiana Laudy (Gia) of Forget the Funnel shares her exact process for SaaS companies to unlock and accelerate growth, often doubling or tripling conversion. She details how to identify key customers, map their journey, set goals, and execute on growth opportunities.
Deep Dive Analysis
16 Topic Outline
Critique of Funnels and Pirate Metrics
Georgiana Laudi's Career Background
Impact of Customer-Led Growth Work
Inspiration from Airbnb's Project Snow White
Forget the Funnel's Customer-Led Growth Process Overview
Identifying and Prioritizing Ideal Customers for Research
Mapping the Customer Journey and Value Milestones
Defining Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Customer Journey Milestones
Example: SparkToro's Customer Journey and KPIs
Developing Messaging and Positioning Guides
Tips for Effective Messaging
SparkToro's Key Customer Job to Be Done
Explanation of the Jobs to Be Done Framework
Addressing Objections to Customer Research
Recommended Books for Marketing and Personal Growth
Strategies for Focus and Productivity
6 Key Concepts
Antiquated Funnel Models
Traditional marketing funnels, pirate metrics (AARRR), MQLs, and SQLs are considered antiquated because they put the business at the center, assume all customers and products are the same, and fail to account for post-acquisition retention and expansion in recurring revenue businesses. They also neglect the customer's 'problem stage' before discovering a product.
Customer-Led Growth Process
This framework involves understanding your best customers, mapping their experience through the lens of value delivery, making that experience measurable, and then evaluating current activities to align with customer needs. It emphasizes deep customer research to uncover what customers are trying to accomplish and how your product helps them achieve a 'better version of themselves'.
Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)
A theory that suggests customers 'hire' products to accomplish specific 'jobs' or desired outcomes in their lives. It focuses on understanding customer motivations, the 'better life' they seek, and the context of their struggle, rather than just demographic data or personas. The product is merely the vehicle to get them to their desired outcome.
Customer Journey Milestones
Key points in a customer's relationship with a product, viewed as 'leaps of faith' or 'value moments'. These typically include a struggle phase (problem, interest), an evaluation phase (first value, value realization), and a growth phase (continued value, value growth). Each milestone should have a measurable KPI.
First Value (Product Activation)
The initial moment a customer experiences significant value from a product, convincing them to continue using it. This is a critical milestone within the evaluation phase of the customer journey, where specific product features or actions are identified as delivering this initial value.
Value Realization
The milestone where a customer fully achieves the desired outcome or 'job to be done' with the product. At this point, they reach a critical threshold of product engagement, confirming that the product effectively solves their core problem.
7 Questions Answered
They are problematic because they are business-centric rather than customer-centric, assume all customers and products are identical, and often neglect crucial post-acquisition phases like retention and expansion, which are vital for recurring revenue businesses. They also fail to consider the customer's initial 'problem stage'.
The most immediate impact is realigning with the ideal customer, leading to better positioning and messaging that resonates more deeply with their context and desired outcomes. This often results in significantly improved website conversion rates and a higher quality of customer acquisition.
Best customers are those who derive significant value from the product, are happy, low-maintenance, and have recently signed up (typically within 3-6 months) so they clearly remember their life before the product. This recency ensures more accurate insights into their problems and motivations.
Prioritization is based on criteria such as high willingness to pay, minimal hand-holding required (if aiming for product-led growth), an urgent problem (painkiller vs. vitamin), high retention/expansion potential, ease of marketing to the customer segment, or an existing unfair advantage in that market.
Each key milestone in the customer journey should have a measurable KPI tied to meaningful product usage or a specific product attribute that delivers value. This allows teams to proactively guide customers to value and reactively re-engage them if they fall off track.
The core idea is that people 'hire' products to help them accomplish a specific task or achieve a desired outcome in their lives, rather than simply buying products for their features. It emphasizes understanding the customer's motivations, context, and the 'better version of themselves' they aspire to be.
Effective messaging comes from deeply understanding and reflecting the language and priorities of your best customers, learned through research. It's crucial to focus on what customers say is most valuable about the product and how it helps them achieve their desired outcomes, rather than what the company perceives as 'cool' features.
21 Actionable Insights
1. Map Customer Journey: Customer-Centric
Create a customer journey map focused entirely on the customer’s emotional journey and external life context, not just business touchpoints, to align teams, improve communication, and clarify goals and KPIs across the company.
2. Conduct Targeted Customer Research
Prioritize customer research (interviews or surveys) focusing on your “best customers” (recent, high-value, low-maintenance) to uncover their pre-product struggles, trigger moments, must-haves, anxieties, and desired outcomes.
3. Prioritize Single Customer Job
From your research, identify and prioritize one “Job to Be Done” for your product, focusing on customers with urgent problems, high willingness to pay, and strong retention potential, to maximize effectiveness and resonance.
4. Define Max 6 Journey Milestones
Map your customer’s journey into 3 phases (Struggle, Evaluation, Growth) with a maximum of 6 key milestones, such as Problem, Interest, First Value, Value Realization, Continued Value, and Value Growth, to simplify and focus your efforts.
5. Set Measurable Milestone KPIs
Assign a specific, measurable KPI to each customer journey milestone, linking it to meaningful product usage or attributes that deliver value, to track progress and identify where customers might be falling off.
6. Develop Customer-Centric Messaging Guide
Create a comprehensive messaging guide (5-7 pages) based on customer research, outlining value propositions, competitive advantages, and value themes (emotional/functional benefits tied to product attributes), to serve as a baseline for all marketing and product communications.
7. Use Customer’s Own Language
Base your messaging strictly on the language and priorities expressed by your ideal customers in research, reflecting their concerns and desired outcomes, rather than internal assumptions about your product’s coolest features.
8. Implement Proactive/Reactive Customer Experiences
Design proactive in-app or email experiences to guide customers to value moments, and reactive “win-back” experiences to re-engage those who fall off, using your milestone KPIs to trigger timely interventions.
9. Optimize Product Onboarding Messaging
Extend your refined customer-centric messaging and positioning beyond your website into product onboarding (email, in-app) to guide users to the most valuable parts of your product, increasing trial-to-paid conversion and product activation.
10. Prioritize Post-Acquisition Growth
For recurring revenue businesses, recognize that marketing and growth do not end at customer acquisition; actively account for post-acquisition retention and expansion in your growth models to stay in business.
11. Understand Customer’s Pre-Discovery Problem
Incorporate the “problem stage” into your growth strategy by understanding the customer’s world and context before they discover your product, as this provides valuable insights for marketing and product development.
12. Realign with Ideal Customer
Realign your positioning and messaging with your ideal customer by deeply understanding them, as this is the lowest-hanging fruit for growth and can significantly increase website and trial-to-paid conversion rates.
13. Streamline Research for Quick Action
Conduct customer research efficiently, aiming for decisive outcomes within 2-3 weeks (especially with surveys), to avoid analysis paralysis and quickly gain solid insights for actionable steps.
14. Regularly Re-evaluate Customer Understanding
Even as a founder, regularly conduct customer research to learn new insights, as products, markets, and customers evolve, ensuring your understanding remains current and your product continues to meet their needs.
15. Focus on Customer Value
Shift your business perspective from being business-centric to customer-centric, measuring value delivered to the customer rather than just internal business values, to ensure sustainable growth.
16. Match Sales Strategy to Setup
Choose between a product-led or sales-led approach based on your current setup; if not equipped for high-touch sales, opt for product-led, and vice versa if you have a robust sales team.
17. Implement Time Blocking for Focus
Proactively schedule dedicated blocks of time for specific tasks, using methods like “brain emoji” time blocking, to safeguard focus and improve productivity throughout the day.
18. Use Message Priority Codes
Implement a system of priority codes (e.g., “no rush,” “EOD,” “timely,” “alarm emoji” for ASAP) in team communication tools like Slack to help colleagues manage their mental processing load and protect focused work time.
19. Track and Review Time Usage
Consistently track your time usage and review it monthly or quarterly to maintain honesty about how time is actually spent, allowing for adjustments and more effective time blocking in subsequent periods.
20. Read “Obviously Awesome”
Read April Dunford’s “Obviously Awesome” to gain foundational knowledge on product positioning, especially if you are a founder, as it is considered required reading for effective strategy.
21. Read “Hooked” for Design
Read Nir Eyal’s “Hooked” to understand how to build habit-forming products and influence user behavior, providing insights into behavioral design and engagement strategies.
5 Key Quotes
Funnels are gross.
Georgiana Laudi
The problem with funnels and pirate metrics and, you know, the favorites that I love to pick on are like MQLs and SQLs is that like nobody knows what those mean. It puts every customer in like these, the same sort of buckets. It assumes that all customers and all products are the same. It puts businesses or they, I should say, puts businesses at the center of the business versus putting customers at the center, right?
Georgiana Laudi
You want to reflect them back to them. Right. That is what is going to show them that you understand the problem that they have and that your product has exactly what it is that they need.
Georgiana Laudi
It's like this documentary of like being out in the world, finding it, realizing that like, hell, yeah, this might actually solve a problem for us. This might be it, right? Getting that enough value to convince them to keep going to full value realization, to continue value to value growth.
Georgiana Laudi
I've never been in a scenario like this where a founder has not learned something new from their research and been able to leverage it in a way that makes their, their product experience better.
Georgiana Laudi
1 Protocols
Forget the Funnel's Customer-Led Growth Process
Georgiana Laudi- Understand your best customers through research (e.g., surveys, interviews) to uncover their 'jobs to be done', motivations, anxieties, and desired outcomes.
- Prioritize a single ideal customer job based on criteria like willingness to pay, urgency of the problem, retention potential, and market advantages.
- Map the customer's experience into key milestones (struggle, evaluation, growth) through the lens of delivering value to them.
- Define measurable Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each milestone, linking them to meaningful product usage or attributes that deliver value.
- Develop a messaging and positioning guide based on customer language and priorities, outlining value propositions, competitive advantages, and value themes.
- Identify where the current customer experience is most broken by comparing current performance against defined KPIs.
- Roll out targeted programs (e.g., email onboarding, in-app checklists) to guide customers to value and re-engage those who fall off track.