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#40: The End of The Content Series - Forgetting the Funnel with Gia Laudi
Gia from Forget the Funnel joins us to unpack her transformative journey from traditional digital marketing to pioneering customer-led growth in the SaaS world.
Struggling with customer research? This episode breaks down common challenges and misconceptions, emphasizing the understanding of ideal customers before diving into feedback and win-loss analysis. Gia advocates for the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) framework to uncover deep customer insights efficiently. We explore why companies often hit roadblocks despite knowing the value of customer research, offering practical solutions like bringing in third-party experts to overcome initial biases and kickstart impactful research efforts.
Forget The Funnel - Amazon
Gia on LI
Welcome to the GTM Pro Podcast, your essential audio resource for mastering go-to-market discussions in the boardroom. Here we share insights for revenue leaders at B2B software and services companies, especially those with less than $50 million in revenue. Why? Because the challenges faced by companies of this size are unique. They are too big to be small and too small to be big. This dynamic pushes revenue leaders into executive leadership without a lot of help or support. We are here to provide that support. Your journey to boardroom excellence starts now now.
Gary:All right, let's get started. So we already we almost got ahead of ourselves here and started recording, or started recording the podcast before hitting record. So, yeah, very, very excited to end this content series, which spilled into September because we had so much to talk about with Gia and her partner in crime, who's here in spirit, claire from Forget the Funnel. And a big reason is around. They literally wrote the book on customer-led growth and customer research voice of customer. So they've been working in that space for a long time and so we're really excited to dig in there and put some meat on this topic.
Gary:But, gia, before we dive in, you're going to do a way better job giving your background introduction than I ever would. So would you mind just taking a few minutes like how did you get to Forget the Funnel, the convergence of your paths? And I guess what I personally found interesting was I came across Claire a few years ago, actually with an old podcast that she'd done with Bob Muesta that was on jobs to be done, and that's kind of how that came together. And my understanding is that she started in that space earlier and you came in from a completely different path and almost like two sides of the same coin, so I'd love to hear that origin story, if you would.
Gia:Yeah, firstly, thank you so much for having me. I'm super happy to be here and love this topic and, yeah, I could talk about this stuff all day long, as I'm sure the three of you also can. Amen, yeah, so, backing up, I mean I had, you know, previous sort of careers. I had been in marketing for about 10 years when I found myself in-house at a SaaS company. But what sort of led me to SaaS to begin with was that I had been in marketing, you know, digital marketing helping more brick and mortar, more traditional businesses in digital marketing. And I realized at a I think it was a startup fest in 20, it might've been 2011.
Gia:I saw Dave McClure talking about pirate metrics One of the first times he was talking about pirate metrics and I was like Eureka, everybody understands that marketing has a role to play post acquisition, like immediately. I was like, oh, I'll, you know, all these things that I've been touting are solved. Everybody gets it now. Um, and I really, really wanted to play in that space of marketing playing, being seen as a revenue driver and having a seat at the table, so to speak, and so I was like, yes, saas is my like. I got to be in tech. I got to be in SaaS, so I really switched from this like focus on digital marketing with more traditional businesses to being really focused on recurring revenue SaaS businesses because of that, because of you know, wanting to play a really important role in driving revenue. Of course, that was 2011, 2012-ish, and we're still talking about these same things today, so all was not solved with that one talk.
Gia:But that's how I got into SaaS. I was freelance for a number of years focusing on a lot of brands, sort of running wild a little bit, cutting my teeth in SaaS with tech companies, and I became quickly sort of overwhelmed and I thought how lovely would it be to go in-house and focus on one brand. So I did go in-house and I was in-house for five years leading marketing at Unbounce, a largely marketing-led SaaS, mostly bootstrapped, really looking to marketing for majority of growth. So it was a very you know it was a period of high growth, was a lot of pressure, ime over, you know, under promise, over deliver type. It was a very stressful environment to be in and my sort of my marketing sort of world sort of shifted again for the second time when I was in San Francisco I was at the Airbnb headquarters.
Gia:Lenny Brzezinski a friend at the time that is very, very well known today, his startup had been acquired by Airbnb and we were at the office in San Francisco you know stars in my eyes the whole bit and we go down to where the product team works and there was these pieces of papers or scotch tape to the wall 10 of them or so in a row and I realized that it was a customer journey map. But it was not pirate metrics, it wasn't MQL SQL, it wasn't these like lifestyle, like I'm sorry these like life cycle transactional moments. It was really through the lens of the customer and I had that light bulb moment that you know I had been, you know I'd like I say sort of like running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to, like you know, help grow this startup that I was at. And I had this moment when I saw this that I knew we had to sort of take it home with us. And our head of CS was with me at the time and we were like oh yes.
Gia:And we went back to the office in Vancouver at the time and really, with the head of product head of CS and myself, we built a customer journey map that was really very focused on customers' milestones and customers' moments of success and we used that as our blueprint for how we thought about not only the marketing programs that we were running but any CS, all of our, one to many. You know the KPIs that we were using. You know, thinking about our relationship and our influence on the customer's experience. We. It really became part of the DNA of the business and just helped grease the wheels for I mean pretty incredible growth in the next couple of years. So, and not only growth but also my relationship with our CTO and head of product and you know, all of us sort of having that centralized.
Gary:Speaking the same language. Yeah.
Gia:That's right. So that was I. You know, I left that in-house role really with this, like Speaking the same language, yeah. And that's when the sort of like worlds collided of actually how do you build this thing. There's no better way to build this thing than to actually understand, and deeply understand, what motivates your customers, what triggers them to, you know, seek out a solution like yours. How do they make those decisions? Who's involved? You know what is the, you know what are their deal breakers and anxieties, what's that desired outcome?
Gia:All those incredible pieces of like context and nuance that really jobs to be, the jobs to be done approach is really well suited to pull out of conversations with customers or just like learning from customers. So that was when we sort of got business married, so to speak, and paired these two ways of operating together and we formed this, what we now call customer-led growth, and it's really about operationalizing that customer insight so that not only do you learn from your customers but your team can actually operationalize it, act on it and grow based on the KPIs and the learnings, but also the KPIs that come out of it.
Gary:This is going to be fun. All right, so oneIs that come out of it. This is going to be fun, All right. So one thing that stuck out jumped out to me that I'd love to and we'll get into this when we start unpacking this a little bit more is, if you think about back to that origin story with Airbnb and even Unbounce, where that customer journey mapping lends itself very well to more of a product-led motion, where people are bumping around inside of your product to try to get to some moment of value.
Gary:And they're they're all over the place in terms of what their goals are and what they're trying to accomplish and things like that. At what point did you see the ability to take that to something that may be more sales led, where a lot of that exploration and problem definition and all those things happen before they ever sign the contract and actually get in? And then there's the next phase of onboarding and the like.
Gia:Yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty agnostic, truthfully, because at the end of the day, our job is to provide the most resonant, most applicable, you know, experience that's the most appropriate for this customer. And if that means a sales-led approach, then we take a sales-led approach. If it's a product-led approach, then we take a product-led approach. Does it, you know? Does it matter? If the founders of the company want to build, you know, and base on the product-led, you know, growth model, of course, and you know, we can look for opportunities to do that.
Gia:But at the end of the day, our job is identifying what is going to actually work and resonate and help these customers get from one milestone to the next. And in some situations that's a one to one, you know, or a higher touch sort of model, and in others it doesn't necessarily have to be. Obviously, if we're talking about unit economics and trying to make sure that these companies are successful and able to acquire customers in a way that you know brings in both high LTV customers for as low a cost to acquire as possible, we're always looking for ways to sort of optimize. Optimize, you know, those one to many experiences, however we can, but that's not always going to be the case. So, at the end of the day, we don't care. It's what is going to work, what is going to resonate, what's going to help this business hit their revenue goals. Doesn't matter which growth model we leverage to do that.
Gary:Yep, Yep, Absolutely Okay. So let's, since you and Claire literally wrote the book on this, let's unpack that a little bit. So, um, and you've in in. Both of you have written posts about the talk to customers, fallacy and how you know well-intentioned, but how little help that is. Um, so from your perspective, I think people would really appreciate. Let's talk about the building blocks to what it takes to get to real, usable customer insights. Then we'll talk about how we can make that ongoing, if that's okay.
Gia:Yeah, I mean it's an interesting relationship between the two right Ongoing or continuous gathering, continuous customer feedback, versus doing this sort of foundational research that we talk a little bit more about. We often get asked when we talk about this topic. One of the first questions inevitably is like what about the customers that we didn't get? Shouldn't we be learning from the customers that we didn't get? And the answer to that is absolutely after you have clarity on the customers you should be acquiring, because otherwise the context in which you're taking either continuous feedback or win-loss analysis sort of insight is not grounded in anything. So the type of research that we advocate for really is and that's again why we lean on the jobs to be done approach is that foundational understanding of who are these ideal customers and what is it they're trying to accomplish and what is the context that surrounds that decision-making process and really getting a solid understanding of that. Once you've done that, taken that sort of job to be done approach, then you can retrofit it with all kinds of other insight, like personas or titles or ICP data or you know all of those other things. Or, again, like I mentioned, like win-loss analysis or continuous feedback that you're gathering, you know how to sort of take that. So we, you know, talk to customers.
Gia:Everybody says that it's very easy. It's very easy to say talk to customers. It's difficult to actually do it and do it well. And it's even more difficult to actually learn something and then apply it. And you know, we recognize that it is research. I think there was a, I think there was a podcast episode of yours that I saw recently. It was like research without a capital R, with a lowercase r.
Gia:So that it feels more approachable and that is 100% the approach that we also tend to advocate for, especially for these.
Gia:We're not talking about massive enterprise-level companies here.
Gia:You know we're not talking about, you know, massive enterprise level companies here.
Gia:We're talking about reasonably sized teams and you know margins, and so taking a sort of an iterative approach to research is absolutely doable and I think a lot of people just assume that you know, when you say talk to customers, you're talking about a multi-month, long in some cases longer project where you've got to talk to hundreds of customers and need expert interviewers and all kinds of you know tools or skill sets that may not exist in your existing team. So we, definitely we, we. That's another reason why again, bob Mesta, like huge shout out to the jobs to be done approach is it's really you can get a, you can learn a ton with only you know a few interviews. If you run really well, well executed jobs to be done interviews, you only need 10 to 12 of them to actually start seeing some meaningful patterns so that you can actually take that insight back and then bring it out into the market and validate that it's going to work. So this is not a massive research project that we advocate for.
Gary:Right, and how? With that in mind, how often do you run into companies that are nodding their head in agreement that we need to do this, but then inevitably say, well, why can't we just do this, which is a fair question. Right, it's a little bit of a loaded question because we've been on the receiving end of that as well and I think there's from our experience. There is almost a freedom that the customer feels when they're speaking to a third party and there's no curse of knowledge from our perspective, and so I think it's more of a the way I describe it is. It's more of a.
Gary:You're seeking to uncover the story, as if you're writing a documentary and you just want to get to the story and the script and the story under the story, versus almost listening for things that you want to be true, but from your perspective if somebody was talk about the benefits of a third party doing it, if for no other reason than to kickstart that process and actually teach the organization how to do those interviews well, but in the case where maybe they do want to run it in-house, what are the core requirements to get there to do that?
Tiana:I was just going to ask that or something similar at least, because it seems like a lot of the people that we have interviewed in the past month have agreed in the same thing and it seems like everybody knows this it's common knowledge that this is the most important part First know your customers and then actually get to know like the jobs to be done, like why they would buy from you, but nobody seems to get it exactly right. So that's like my doubt, like how, why is this common knowledge? But at the same time it's so hard for people to actually implement it.
Gia:Yeah, Um, I mean, there's a lot of reasons. I would say that buy-in is probably the number one reason why teams can't execute on this, but buy-in just means a lack of understanding, or I should say, a lack of buy-in just means a lack of understanding. I recently actually I'm writing a talk right now, and one of the slides is you don't have time for shortcuts, which is ironic, right? Because research is a shortcut at the end of the day, and so whenever there's a lack of buy-in for this type of research, it's typically because it's not seen as a shortcut, it is seen as the long way, when actually it can absolutely be a shortcut. So there's a lot of reasons why research is hard to do, Um, and there's a lot of reasons why leadership may be against it. And there I mean we could probably have episodes dedicated to each of those two topics and not have a lack of things to talk about at all, Um. So I'm I'm trying to think now like which one which one's worthwhile to dig into first.
Gia:Maybe it's the buy-in piece, Because generally, by the time we are talking to folks, they're bought in, they get it, they understand. Like we don't know enough about our customers and we have to get to the bottom of this, because our business is not going to survive if we don't. Because they've seen the writing on the wall and they recognize that their team is potentially flailing, or they've seen stalled growth and they've tried everything and they don't know what else to do. We've seen those situations. So we're in the privileged seats of we get the people who show up that are like tell us what we don't know, You've got to help us.
Gary:We're drinking the Kool-Aid help us.
Gia:Right, exactly. So thankfully we're not seeing that quite as much these days, but we definitely talk to lots of folks who are in-house that believe in this. They understand that we shouldn't be guessing, we shouldn't be throwing spaghetti at the wall. We're throwing money literally down the toilet by spending more money on performance marketing and paid campaigns without really understanding who it is that we should be targeting, know should be targeting with this, without really knowing what kind of language to be leaning into, really understand if they're in a saturated market right, trying to come up with really powerful, you know language around, their differentiated value and things like that, and they're struggling. So a lot of in-house practitioners, I think, recognize that this is needed. A lot of stakeholders and sort of leadership teams see it as the long way, unfortunately, because they believe or maybe they have experienced a customer research that has taken a long time and also has led to more questions at the end of it. Poorly executed research is a very real thing that many of us have been, have experienced and so we have. You know, often these like negative connotations associated with research, so it's hard to get buy-in. But if, if the research can be positioned as like very targeted laser focused on identifying this one thing and can be applied in these ways and can really be communicated to the leadership. We find that it, you know, we can get past that hurdle.
Gia:One of the additional reasons why leadership or senior teams may have not want to go through with research is because they know that there's nobody on the team that's going to do a good enough job and they're worried that the skill set just doesn't exist on their team. Um, or they don't know if the skill set exists on their team and they don't want to pay the price of finding that out, um, so that's a reason why bringing in a third party can also help. That you know, um, there's the mainstay we don't want to bother our customers or our existing customer base. That isn't representative of where we want to go. There's a lot of those sort of mainstay, I'll say, like misunderstandings of research or objections to research, that are relatively easy to hit in the bud, but being able to execute, having the team to execute on internally, is often what's missing.
Gia:I can speak a little bit to like the research methods that teams could employ, depending on, though, their customer bases, because the types of research that you would lean to will be different if you are in a. You know a lower ACV or more prosumer space versus you know fewer, you know bigger customers. You're going to need to use different research methods and so the skill set, again on the team, would need to sort of be there. Are you going to have, are you do you have a team that could execute well on a on a survey? Or do you have a team that could execute well on a survey, or do you have a team that can actually run a 30-minute customer interview that's actually going to pull what you need out of those conversations? Those are two very different skill sets. So, yeah, sorry, I'm sort of running around this, because there's like a billion angles.
Gia:I could answer this from.
Gary:No, that's great. I mean, you're highlighting the complexity of it honestly, and so I think a related objection that we sometimes hear and you can see is well, we're already doing research on our customers, right? Our product team is talking to our customers, Our customer success team is talking to our customers. Even our marketing team will run surveys and what have you?
Gia:Yeah, what about the? We are our customers objection. Yeah.
Gary:Like we're very customer focused, yeah, but I think to your point you referenced this with the jobs to be done framework is that every one of those comes in with a particular point of view, that the research is focused on what they need versus seeking to understand what's really going on with the buyer and why they did what they did, and that it's that level of like the dynamics at play.
Gary:And so that one of the things that was that I'd love to have you touch on a little bit is so the jobs to be done approach is that the jobs are fairly durable, right, once you kind of uncover what's going on there, they don't really change that much. We may use a wildly different set of approaches to actually that we hire to complete the job, but the job itself is not. That doesn't change so that much, but like the motivations and the catalysts and the pressures and all of that can change a lot. So how do you when you're, when you're going in and you're researching the two of those, how do you parse those two apart? Like like this is kind of the durable aspect of the finding, and then these are the things that are more transient that would require us to to go back more frequently to see if they're still valid.
Gia:That's a really interesting question.
Gia:To be honest, we don't parse for those two.
Gia:We think about it more in terms of the opportunities that present themselves at a given point in time. So one of the things that's really critically important about this type of research that we run is that we're speaking to customers that haven't been around so long that they don't remember what life was like before or they don't remember what led them to seek out your solution. So when you're in this situation where you are wondering, do we have enough clarity on who our target customer is? Do we have internal alignment on who our ideal customer is? Do we have deep enough understanding on who our target customer is to really stop guessing at the approaches that we're going to take to our growth, Generally, what we do is we say like, okay, you know, pick this moment in time. We're going to go back three to six months and any of your customers who have signed up in the last three to six months who have reached recurring value and are experiencing recurring value in your solution, we're going to learn from them what was going on in their world.
Gia:How did they make this solution? What watering holes did they go to? Who was on their short list? Who else was involved in that process? How did they discover that we existed? What was it about our offering that convinced them to try us over all the all of the others? Once they tried it, what was it that convinced them to keep going with those desired outcomes? What can they do?
Gia:All of those, all of that nuance and context is this can be taken and applied immediately in the business, and that's because those customers made that decision in this market today.
Gia:And we can then, with that insight and once we've mapped the customer experience, what we do is we do the kind of the secret shopper thing and we go through the current customer experience as a customer, with that prioritized job to be done and prioritized is really important and really take a look at all of the ways the current customer experience is out of alignment with that insight and that job.
Gia:So we may identify things that are fantastic and like keep going, this is really good, this is solid. Obviously, we also identify a lot of opportunity to improve positioning and messaging, product onboarding, that early sort of experience that companies are providing to their customers expansion opportunity, right Post-acquisition opportunities, so it really gives us an opportunity to sort of like kickstart and identify and unlock those growth levers that are available to that team to leverage right then and there, so we don't actually pull those two things apart. What we sometimes do, though and what's happened a number of times is we've actually worked with the team again about a year later, depending on product, you know, product updates and what happens, what's happening in the market, like around COVID, like everybody needed to do this again because everybody was making decisions in a completely different environment, but also how a product evolves or how a market evolves can change the answers to some of these questions, and so we would always recommend doing it again.
Gia:If you have this slight shift in market or slight shift in your offering, you're going to want to do this type of sort of heuristic analysis again at that point in time. But you're going to want to do this type of sort of heuristic analysis again at that point in time. But there's always going to be opportunity there. Hopefully that answered your question.
Gary:That's a really, really great point because you're right, I think now more than ever to the velocity with which the market, and therefore the buyer, is changing. Is, I mean, the number of solutions that become AI, right? I mean, 18 months ago that wasn't even in the lexicon. And now, well, almost two years ago now, but you know, now it's. Even if it's not a direct competitor, somebody's, some board member somewhere, is asking well, can't we just do this with ChatGPT? So you know you have no choice but to go explore it, because you know it came from the board. So what are you?
Gia:going to do, want me to tell you how many times. Ai has come up as a competitive alternative in a customer interview, never, zero times.
Gary:But to your point, and I think that's actually a great segue. Then to the next case of this where, okay, so we get in and we do this work. There's a lot of benefit in having a third party do this, just for all the reasons that we discussed. But, honestly, if that's not on the table, if you're in product, if you're in marketing, even if you're in sales, find a way to go get this done. Find a way even if it's yourself. Like you know, you guys have a fantastic book. Go read the book and then go deploy it yourself, because the insights are you know now more than ever.
Gary:So you come in and you do this first research. Now what are the training wheels that you've seen Like? Okay, now the organization wants to start to take this over, and I say that a little bit also with an aside. We were talking about this earlier.
Gary:So Bill Macias was a podcast guest about six weeks ago, maybe eight weeks ago, and one of the things that he advocated that you know he comes from that original business to consumer slash media world and he then came over to the SaaS world and he brought many of those learnings with him, one of which was around like you got to understand how your brand is actually resonating and being recalled by your audience, and so he brought some of those consumer oriented marketing metrics over that you know for a long time are passe and now they're cool again, like unaided recall and things like that, and actually, as a marketing team, investing in those insights periodically, so you can, that's not so much the absolute. But are you in which direction are you trending? I think of this in a very similar manner. Where this is such a powerful, important thing, why wouldn't you make this just a normal part of your marketing planning for the year or company planning for the year, to course correct. Understand what's changing To your point. I mean, your product is constantly changing, the competitors are constantly changing.
Tiana:The team also.
Gary:Constantly changing. Yeah, so maybe the answer is just plan on doing this every year, but maybe in the interim stages. What are the training wheels that can feed that mindset where you get the whole team thinking from a jobs to be done perspective?
Gia:Yeah, I mean it definitely takes, I'm going to say, just like the executive buy-in it has to. We've never worked with a team where the team at the team level, there was like resistance to this, ever. Because for the people on the ground actually producing these types of assets, being responsible for these campaigns, their performance is being measured on this stuff. None of them will ever complain ever, ever, ever about these insights coming in right, because it makes their jobs so much easier. They don't need to guess anymore. It provides them, especially when you've actually operationalized it to the point where you've got a customer journey map with KPIs. It really facilitates handoff points between teams. It helps the individual, like practitioners, see their role in the customer experience and helps create the sort of guard rails in which they've got a ton of freedom to be really, really strategic and, like said, really intentionally in that way right, like guardrails, help people be really strategic and really, really effective.
Gia:So there's at the team level, there's never a sort of resistance to this that that we have found Um. One of the things that we do, uh to sort of secure this type of work is when we uh, when we're working with a company at the end. So our uh basically our growth sprints are six weeks long. We have a couple of weeks at the front end where we're asking questions around goals. We're getting some benchmark data. We want to understand who are the qualified customers to learn from. We spend about a week or so getting clarity on that and then we effectively kick off our research period. We run interviews for typically about two weeks. Just takes about two weeks to run those 10 to 12 interviews.
Gia:And then we go in and identify the jobs to be done, prioritize one of those jobs to be done based on those business goals, and then we would bring back we do what's called like an insights review call with the team multiple people on the team, right so the practitioners and the senior leadership. We bring it back and we basically tell them everything that we learned about these ideal customers, ask them if they have any questions. Is anything out of alignment? Did anything surprise you? Did anything not surprise you. A lot of times it's very validating. It's very much an alignment conversation. For some folks it's very validating, for some other folks it Um, but it's very centering around that, that job to be done. And then what we do is we take about two weeks and we do that heuristic analysis on their customer experience, we identify opportunities. And then what we do is we identify the milestones and the customer experience and we assign KPIs to those milestones. And the KPIs, very importantly, are centered on how, on how we'll know customers have reached their goals.
Gia:So on the front end of a customer journey. It's very straightforward, right? It's, like you know, new, unique website visitors to the website, the conversion rate on the website itself, a trial start, a free sign up, a demo, booked. But then when we actually get into product usage, we're looking more to like what is the product usage that's going to tell us that customers reach that value based on their job to be done? And we figure out what is. How do we measure continued value? And we sort of work kind of reverse engineer to product activation and product engagement and to get to that value. So once we've done all of that, then we sit down with, typically, ceo, cto, cpo, cmo, all the as many of the C-suite as we can call it, you know having all the go-to-market sort of functions there in the room, and we sit down and we share it again same group of people where we say, okay, look, this is what we know about your customer experience, these are the opportunities that we identified, these are the milestones in your customers experience with you, these are the KPIs.
Gia:We basically go back and forth. We workshop those KPIs, we workshop the milestones. Generally it's, you know, everybody's pretty well in agreement. We workshop the opportunities and the important part of what I just said is everybody's in the room. So the CEO is there, their direct report is there. Anybody in a product marketing role better be in that room.
Gia:So it's really those key go-to-market functions being in that room all together and they all know that. Everybody else knows that we're all here and they all know that everybody else heard this and they all know that everybody else heard this. So that does a ton for alignment and helping the team sort of center what they do after that on this customer experience and on this job to be done. So that is the best way to sort of secure it moving forward. Another thing that we do with the companies that we work with is we pull together like a KPI dashboard, basically a tracker of these leading indicators of success. So we refer to these KPIs as our leading indicators of success. So we refer to these KPIs as our leading indicators of success that will impact your lagging indicators of success, like revenue growth, and we provide them with this tool so that we can think about ways that we will improve the customer's experience with onboarding campaigns or who knows?
Gia:there's a lot of things that we can do and we can basically estimate or try to factor how that will influence some of the downstream KPIs and see like, will it pay to add to send more traffic to this website or would it pay to improve the trial to pay conversion rate and the onboarding experience? Typically, the answers become really really obvious when we're looking at it in that way. So that's what we do to try to continue this conversation even after we're not in the room anymore, so to speak.
Gary:Yeah, yeah, not surprising, but when you state it and you unpack it, what really has to happen to make this successful, ongoing, is, by virtue of bringing everybody into the room, you're effectively changing the mindset of the tactics and motions that everybody's deploying to be in service to the buyer be for in service to the buyer, and so it's like this complete mindset shift, probably without them even knowing, there's a mindset shift going on which is, as you start measuring, are we serving the buyer, are we giving them that which takes a systems approach, because if everybody goes back in the room and takes over their marketing KPIs and their sales KPIs, sometimes they can be mutually exclusive, right when we're showing positives. We see this all the time. Wonderful success in marketing Marketing is meeting all its goals, but meanwhile sales isn't closing and we're not getting our pipeline. Well then, is that actually success Versus? Maybe we actually show lower, either throughput or visitors or conversion or whatever, but the net output is better because we did a better job of weeding out people who weren't a great fit right.
Gary:They shouldn't be going to sales.
Gia:Yep, that's exactly right. I mean that was one of the follow-on conversations I had recently with the team actually, where after the workshop, we give them a little bit of breathing room and then we meet up with them a couple of days later. And I was like, okay, so what are the? What are the questions that you have? And they're like how do we test this? And great question. And my answer was I mean, we can apply this learnings about your ideal customer and this better fit customer for you and apply those learnings, you know, with messaging on a website or on a closed loop, you know, a landing page campaign if that makes you feel you or you're less up for taking risk. But at the end of the day, what I really cautioned to the team was the measure of success is not the conversion rate on your website.
Gia:The measure of success is did those customers actually activate into customers and high paying customers? Typically we would look for an activation rate right which is an early sort of KPI in the customer experience. Otherwise you're waiting, potentially depending on the complexity of your product. You could be waiting months. So typically a first value KPI, an activation KPI, is what we would really advocate for them to measure success of. If you're changing your messaging and positioning, it's not the conversion rate on your website that is the measure of success around on your website.
Gia:That is the measure of success. It's actually driving customers that converted, or new users that converted into customers and high value customers.
Gary:Amen. For that reason we evangelize, looking at the business through cohorts. For that very reason, right Because what you want to see is this progression through the engine, and if we're seeing that positive momentum, we may find okay, they made it through gate Gate's a bad term. They made it through phase one or stage one or whatever their buying process. Stage two looks like things are holding up. Stage three all of a sudden, ah, they hit a wall at stage four.
Tiana:All right.
Gary:well, why is that Versus to your point just making a bunch of changes and then hoping it turns out in revenue or you know earlier metrics?
Andy:Well, the implications on always be testing. A lot of that converges on that, because you mentioned performance marketing, where you know senior management's like well, we're doing that, we're testing everything, but the person on the ground who's running that stuff doesn't have those guardrails that you mentioned right. They don't have the foundation with which to say, first of all, am I in the right ballpark testing what I'm testing? They don't have that foundation. Then, when it comes to the entire life cycle of that customer, they have no visibility on that either. And it's not a trivial amount of money too. In a lot of cases, the testing budget allocated toward performance marketing can be a big number.
Gia:Yeah, absolutely. It is wild. The amount of money that the teams that come to us, the amount of money they are spending a month on basically guesswork, is heartbreaking.
Gia:And I use that word deliberately, like it literally breaks my heart when I see how much they are spending on performance marketing, where they're literally just guessing at the messaging and positioning that they're leveraging on their you know some of their marketing assets, let alone the onboarding experience that they're providing to customers. That is just a leaky bucket. Like what is the point? What are you doing? This is like. This is not a make work project. You know the. The goal is actual customers at the end of the day, and your, your team's going to feel a lot better about what they're doing too If they know that, ultimately, who they're bringing through the front door is going to get a ton of value.
Gia:And I, when I was in house I mean, I, I used to it was like this running joke Like I can hit our profile, I can get our trial start goal, no problem. Like nobody wants me to do it that way, but unfortunately there are a lot of bad actors out in the world right now spending a lot of money, a lot of company's money, on ads and performance marketing that is not converting into actual revenue. Right, yeah.
Gia:And a lot of time. Their answer is well, we need to turn up the dial. We need more, more leads, more leads, more leads. Thankfully, more leads is not the thing that we hear show up at our front door as much anymore, because I think people are starting to wisen up to this. Profitability is finally on people's minds and language that we're using. It's not about growth at all costs anymore. Profitability is wildly important, especially the last two years, and I think a lot of people are wisening up to this fact that like no, it's not. This isn't about traffic or leads. It's about actually leveraging the you know attention that we've already garnered, doing more with what we already have. I think I just read a stat too today. I think ChartMogul sent an email today where there was the the companies that have a 100% net revenue retention. So those that actually do expansion, do onboarding and expansion well grow at twice the rate that those that don't.
Andy:And what?
Gia:that tells me is that like being focused not only on this, like acquisition, number, people coming through the front door but actually thinking about what do customers need from us next? How can we help them more, how can we reduce the amount of people leaving that were actually a fit and really help them see value more quickly, better, more deeply and just doing a better job with the customers that we already have, versus always going to the shiny object out in the market.
Gary:Yeah, yeah, I think I mean you're preaching to the choir there, because we're all about the it's almost hard to describe.
Gary:But it is this economic model where go-to-market and product and problem buyer needs, all that comes together and you're literally designing this perfect structure where you have very little fraction on the front end. You get to a quick moment of value. You have all these levers for expansion. As they realize more value, you can capture that economic control. It's like the pursuit of the perfect economic engine because it serves the buyer so well. Right, that's right, that's right. And how do you Easier said than done.
Gia:Totally. But I mean, it's a matter of survival, right, because how do you do that more in a more economically viable way over time, right? How do you do that more efficiently over time, as the business matures and as the product matures, than to more deeply understand your customers, right? So how do you get the answers to those questions? We've worked with a lot of teams that are, you know, running in in a constant, like a, a constant experimentation and testing mode, um, and they're thinking and making decisions based on data alone, when the data can often be misleading and a lot of times when these teams pause and actually go to like qualitative data, they they find it's like adding fuel to the fire for quant and actually running those experiments.
Gia:You'll run so much more effective experiments and tests if you're powered with this why your customers are doing, versus just the why.
Gary:Yeah, absolutely yeah, absolutely Well, and I think to your point about growth levers. Part of what we see in the lower middle market is that sometimes companies get trapped with false positives, and by that I mean they've had success with some customer segment and then maybe they want to go up market or something to that effect, when a much more capital efficient path would be to actually double down on a particular segment. And if you go and you listen, there's additional tangential things that your product team could develop and build that would actually improve retention huge expansion levers, all of those things which may not need a huge growth in new logos, but from a revenue and return on capital perspective, it's by far the best path. But they overlook it because it's like the constant pursuit of more.
Gia:Yeah, absolutely. We've worked with a lot of teams where, well, every company that we've ever worked with actually we discover through that research a couple of different jobs to be done that show up through the front door and often it is drastically like a lot of teams conflate and sort of think of customers as this big sort of homogenous thing, like oh yeah, sometimes some have this problem and some have that problem and they sort of it's like this, you know big homogenous group of customers, when actually there might be this sweet spot of customers that if you focused in your efforts on solving this customer's goals you might actually find. Or even if you just looked at them from a data perspective, after identifying them with qualitative research, you would see that you know they're higher LTV, they're easier to acquire through the front door, they ask less questions, they have a high willingness to pay. You just have to identify that group and it's really hard to do that based on data alone or numbers alone.
Gary:Yeah, absolutely. All right, we are running short on time, but selfishly tell us about the book. So it's been out for a year, year and a half now. Is that accurate? Yeah, it came out in May 2023.
Gia:That's right. So just for a year, year and a half. Now, is that accurate? Yeah, it came out in May 2023. That's right, so just over a year.
Gary:So I know that was a journey to get there. So just a little like peek behind the curtain of what was that like to kind of come together and write this book. And where can people find it? Obviously on Amazon, but tell us a little bit about it.
Gia:Yeah, oh, it was so long. I, yeah, tell us a little bit about it. Yeah, oh, it was so long. I wrote a post at the one year anniversary. Actually in May, I wrote a post on LinkedIn about like the 10 years that it took to actually get to writing that book, which is ironic because it's a pretty short book. It is not a long book. We were very, very deliberate. We wanted to write a short book that a founder or an exec could read on like a flight, let's say right.
Gia:Highly, highly inspired by April Dunford's obviously awesome. She did a bunch of research that we didn't have to do. So we're like hey, short book, got it. Very actionable, got it. Rob Fitzpatrick was a big influence there as well, so the book is very, very practical. It's very much walking through the process from beginning to end. It's designed so that a founder or an executive can understand what the process is without getting too far into the nitty gritty of how to execute on it. For those that are interested in actually executing on it, there is also a workbook which is almost as long as the book itself, that has a bunch of templates and tools and checklists and stuff like that. For the folks who are in-house that actually want to do this themselves and DIY it, there is that workbook, but the book itself is very short and accessible. Yeah, it was a fun process, but again, it was our number one job was like how do we make this not a sentence longer than it needs to be to make the point that we're trying to make? So that took effort.
Gary:Yeah, that is not easy, Because I know I mean just trying to write a blog post and like that took effort. That, yeah, that is not easy because you know, I know I mean just trying to write a blog post and like I can't cut myself off.
Gia:Yeah, exactly. But yeah, of course it's called Forget the Funnel. It's available on Amazon right now. Actually, depending on when this episode goes live, we brought the Kindle down to 99 cents to celebrate the one year and I haven't put it back up yet. So if anybody wants to take advantage of that, they're welcome to it. But, of course, forgetthefunnelcom, our website. You can see more about it there as well.
Gary:Awesome, and Gia. If people want to connect with you, where can they find you?
Gia:Yeah, I guess I'm sort of active on LinkedIn these days.
Andy:RIP.
Gary:Twitter.
Gia:Yeah, I mean, that's really on. As far as like social is concerned, it's really only LinkedIn. Uh, for me these days I used to be pretty active on Twitter but gave up on that um a little while ago. So, yeah, linkedin, um, but if anybody's interested in, you know, asking questions about the process or finding out more, you can just shoot me an email at Gia, at forget the funnelcom.
Gary:Awesome. Well, gia, this was wonderful. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and your experience. Uh, there's a lot we can take away from this and really appreciate this. Uh, we'll go out later this week, on Friday, so, yeah, we, we hit. We hit publish fast.
Gia:So uh appreciate your time, um, but uh hang with us just a minute and uh, we'll, we'll connect real quickly before we go.
Gary:But hang with us just a minute and we'll connect real quickly before we go.
Gary:But for everybody else.
Gary:Thanks again for joining us on GTM Pro and we'll see you next week. Bye.
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