Forget the Funnel - Georgiana Laudi

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Here is a summary of the advance praise for the book “Forget the Funnel” by Claire Suellentrop and Gia Laudi:

• Several people who have worked with Claire and Gia directly say that implementing their customer-led growth framework and methodology led to measurable increases in key metrics like product adoption and usage.

• The praise emphasizes that the book provides a practical, systematic guide to understanding customers through qualitative and quantitative research and then applying those insights effectively in marketing, messaging, and growth strategies.

• The endorsements call out that the book includes real examples and case studies from companies Claire and Gia have worked with.

• Multiple people say the book is a must-read for anyone in product marketing, growth, or leading a product team. It presents an alternative to more “tactical” or hypothesis-driven approaches that are not truly customer-led.

• Several endorsements say the customer insights framework in the book is directly applicable for SaaS products and unpacks how to overcome challenges those teams often face.

• Many emphasize the book will save readers from “guessing” and provide confidence through a clear methodology and process supported by the authors’ extensive experience.

So in summary, the advance praise promotes the book as a very practical and proven guide to building a systematic, customer-led approach to growth based on the authors’ work helping many companies achieve results.

• The author, Gia, struggled in her previous marketing role running experiments and tactics without clear direction or insight into customers. This led to long hours and inconsistent results.

• Many marketing teams operate this way, flinging ideas without understanding why things aren’t working better. Most advice doesn’t consider a company’s unique customers and product.

• The solution is to understand customers deeply - their struggles, motivations for choosing the solution, how they’ve grown as customers. This provides clear guidance for marketing, products, and sales.

• The book outlines a three-phase Customer-Led Growth Framework to 1) learn from customers, 2) map their experience, and 3) identify big growth levers by addressing customer needs. This moves marketing from chaos to predictable growth and happier customers. Understanding the customer’s perspective is key to resolving marketing struggles.

• The passage discusses building a cross-functional team to implement a customer-led growth strategy.

• It provides an example of Tara Robertson at Sprout Social who wanted to launch a new agency referral program to increase customer retention.

• However, instead of just copying what other companies were doing, Tara conducted customer interviews and surveys to understand what agencies really wanted.

• She found agencies were less motivated by revenue sharing and more interested in networking, collaborating with brands, and gaining access to resources to help grow their businesses.

• Tara presented these findings and got approval to pivot the program to focus on what customers actually wanted rather than what the company initially envisioned.

• She recruited agency customers to help beta test and provide input into the new program, ensuring it was truly customer-led from the start.

So in summary, the passage emphasizes the importance of understanding customer needs and wants through research, rather than just assuming the company knows best, when building cross-functional teams and programs focused on customer-led growth.

• The program focused on engaging company leaders and getting their buy-in at each step to ensure success. As agencies participated, their businesses grew and so did their use of Sprout’s product, leading to a $2.1M increase in annual recurring revenue within 6 months.

• The most important part was not just the revenue increase, but gaining alignment across the organization through a cross-functional team. This ensured buy-in and successful implementation of the customer-led growth framework.

• A cross-functional team leverages each department’s existing knowledge, gets them invested in success through contribution, and reduces duplicate work through collaboration.

• Getting buy-in requires addressing resistance to customer research by emphasizing its importance, and resistance to cross-functional teams by providing a clear framework and approach to prevent dysfunction.

• The roles on the cross-functional team include a Champion to drive work forward, a Primary Stakeholder for high-level buy-in, Contributors/Secondary Stakeholders for expertise, and optionally a Facilitator to guide the process. Responsibilities are outlined for each role.

Providing timely input and review of work with feedback are key responsibilities for a Primary Stakeholder leading a Customer-Led Growth initiative. The Primary Stakeholder needs to protect the process and make sure key milestones are achieved, from forming the team to gaining buy-in to taking action. This includes drafting a project brief, choosing the team members and their roles, sending communication to schedule a kickoff meeting, and holding the kickoff meeting to launch the project. Conducting customer research by identifying the best customers to learn from, asking them questions about their experiences and insights, and analyzing the findings will help guide the initiative and uncover where marketing efforts should be focused. Regular feedback and input from the Primary Stakeholder is essential for keeping the team focused and progressing toward the goal of increasing customer understanding and growth.

This passage discusses the importance of learning from future customers, especially in the context of changing market conditions. Some key points:

• The company Paytouch originally focused on providing an all-in-one restaurant management platform, but the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted their target market. Restaurants were no longer growing and in need of complex platforms.

• Through previous customer research, Paytouch knew one pain point was managing orders from multiple delivery services. This pain only intensified during the pandemic when takeout became critical.

• Within their existing platform, Paytouch had features like online menus and ordering that could help “offline” restaurants without digital offerings. These restaurants now needed digital solutions the most.

• Paytouch realized they needed to quickly understand the new, urgent problems restaurants faced due to COVID-19 and shift their focus. Repackaging their online ordering features as a smaller, separate product could help both restaurants and keep Paytouch afloat during the pandemic.

• By learning from “future customers” - those offline restaurants now in urgent need of digital tools - Paytouch was able to pivot their strategy and potentially stay in business through the crisis by meeting changed customer needs. Understanding emerging pain points was key.

So in summary, the passage emphasizes the importance of learning from potential future customers, especially when market conditions change drastically, to help a business adapt and survive periods of disruption.

The passage discusses using audience research when a company does not yet have customers to gather insights from. It focuses on how Paytouch, a company that provided point-of-sale systems to restaurants, pivoted during the pandemic when their restaurant customers closed down.

With no existing customers to survey, Paytouch conducted audience research to understand the needs of restaurant owners. They studied online forums and communities to learn about pain points, solutions restaurants were trying, and messaging.

This informed the development of a new product called Dash, which enabled online ordering. Hundreds of restaurants signed up, allowing Paytouch to iterate the product based on customer feedback. Ultimately, 980 restaurants became Dash customers. Some later converted to using Paytouch’s original point-of-sale system as well.

The passage advocates for audience research when customer research is not possible. It provides examples of how to conduct audience research through online forums, surveys of website visitors, and social listening. The goal is to understand potential customers’ needs and how to position a company’s products and messaging effectively.

• Alistair, a marketing tool company, saw growth flatten out after initially achieving $2M ARR and 5,000 customers through heavy marketing investments.

• They decided to better understand their customers by identifying their “jobs-to-be-done” - the struggles, motivations, and desired outcomes that led customers to seek out a solution.

• Through customer research, they found two main jobs - the need to increase marketing presence, and the need to save time and automate marketing tasks.

• Understanding these jobs revealed their customers fell into two segments - “Newbies” just starting marketing, and “Pros” who already knew marketing worked but wanted automation.

• They realized they had been targeting both but Pros represented a better opportunity. They reworked their messaging and pages to focus on the Pro job of automation.

• This led to an 89% increase in trial signups and a 40% increase in trial-to-paid conversions, driving renewed growth.

• The process for identifying jobs involves analyzing customer research for struggles, motivations, and desired outcomes, finding themes, defining top jobs, and prioritizing one to focus on.

So in summary, understanding customer jobs helped Alistair uncover hidden customer segments, refine their messaging to better fit the strategic segment, and significantly improved their growth metrics.

• The passage discusses identifying and defining the top jobs customers are trying to get done (jobs-to-be-done) by using a product or service. This helps understand customer needs and motivations.

• It involves analyzing customer survey responses to identify themes around customer struggles, motivations, and desired outcomes. The most common themes are identified.

• Using the top struggle themes, related motivations and desired outcomes are pulled out to draft initial customer job statements in the format of “When [struggle], help me [motivation] so I can [outcome].”

• It’s important to focus on solving one customer job at a time rather than trying to solve all jobs simultaneously. Criteria like urgency, willingness to pay, retention potential, etc. can help choose the top job to target.

• The process allows a company to deeply understand a target customer segment, their problems and needs, to better meet them with product, messaging and marketing. Defining jobs-to-be-done provides focus.

So in summary, it outlines analyzing customer data to define top customer jobs-to-be-done (problems customers want solved), then focusing product and marketing strategies around solving one job well. This helps drive clearer understanding and more effective customer acquisition.

• Mapping the customer experience focuses on delivering value to the customer, not just generating value for the business. It involves understanding customers’ emotional journey through different phases like struggle, evaluation, growth.

• Identifying the customer’s “job to be done” (i.e. the problem they hire the product to solve) provides insight into their specific value moments and opportunities to improve the experience.

• The customer experience is broken down into three main phases: Struggle (realizing a problem), Evaluation (trying the product), Growth (embedding the product long-term).

• Within each phase, the mapping considers what the customer is thinking, doing, and feeling to understand milestones and when they occur. This gives a window into their emotional journey.

• Customer data collected previously is used to create sticky notes capturing thoughts, actions, emotions for each phase. These are placed on a whiteboard to visually map out the experience.

• Mapping the customer journey in this way focuses on delivering customer value at each step rather than just generating business metrics like signups or purchases.

• SparkToro is an audience research tool founded by Rand Fishkin, former CEO of Moz, to help marketers gain insights about their target audiences.

• The customer’s main job is to explore and optimize marketing channels by getting easy access to useful and compelling audience insights.

• Mapping the customer journey phases (struggle, evaluation, growth) provides insights into what customers were thinking, doing, feeling at each stage to understand their needs and pain points.

• Questions from customer surveys and interviews reveal struggles like not being able to answer client questions, manually researching audiences.

• Insights into the evaluation phase show what impressed customers like the simple interface and quick insights.

• Growth phase insights show how customers now use the tool daily like creating lists for each client and adding new clients/team members.

• Mapping the customer journey helps SparkToro identify opportunities to evolve their product and continuously solve new problems for customers.

Here is a summary of the key points from the provided text on Oro’s CX map of the Struggle, Evaluation, and Growth phases:

• The phases identify the typical journey a customer goes through - Struggle, Evaluation, and Growth.

• Within each phase are milestones, which represent changes in how the customer is thinking, feeling, and acting.

• For the Struggle phase, common milestones are a “problem” where the customer feels frustrated with their current solution, and an “interest” where they see potential in a new solution.

• For Evaluation, milestones include an “activation” or “first value” point where they experience value, and an “engagement” or “value realization” point where the problem is solved.

• For Growth, milestones include “continued value” where the product is embedded in their workflow, and “expansion” or “value growth” where they increase usage.

• Milestones are identified by grouping similar feelings that customers express within each phase. Their actions and thoughts also shift between milestones.

• Real customer feedback is categorized into the appropriate milestones to demonstrate what they were thinking, feeling, and doing at different points.

• Identifying these journeys and milestones helps understand how to best support customers at each stage of adopting and continuing to use the product.

Here is a summary of key points from the provided text:

• Customer experience (CX) mapping focuses on the actual experience customers have with a product, rather than assumptions, to understand where customers’ needs are being met and where improvements can be made.

• Defining clear key performance indicators (KPIs) is important so different teams are not incentivized to behave in ways that undermine each other or the customer experience.

• Good KPIs measure customer value and actions that show customers are getting value from the product, rather than vanity metrics like logins that may not reflect the experience.

• Leading indicators of success are metrics teams can act on, like product engagement and activations, whereas lagging indicators like revenue reflect past performance.

• Each milestone in the customer journey map should have a KPI to measure if customers are progressing through that stage successfully. For example, new website visits could measure the initial problem discovery stage.

• Aligning KPIs to the actual customer experience uncovered through mapping helps ensure teams are focused on continuously improving that experience.

• Measuring only “traffic” like website visitors would include people who aren’t truly interested customers, like existing users just logging in or frequent blog readers. It wouldn’t accurately represent potential customers.

• More meaningful metrics to track customer interest and progress would be things like downloads or demos completed (showing they want to learn more) and first use of the product/search functionality (indicating engagement beyond just visiting).

• Tracking actions that show customers exploring core features and deriving value, like repeated searches or creating lists, provides insight into their evaluation process and whether they are finding the product useful for their needs.

• Continued, ongoing usage metrics paired with a time interval (e.g. monthly) are important for the growth stage to demonstrate the product is still providing value long-term and retaining the customer.

So in summary, focusing only on generic traffic misses the customer journey, while goal-driven metrics aligned to interest, evaluation and growth better illustrate engagement and potential conversion/retention.

Here are the key points about identifying and bridging customer success gaps:

• Use your customer journey map and customer insights to understand where customers are struggling or facing friction in their experience with your product/service. Look for gaps between what customers need and what you currently provide.

• Physically go through the customer journey yourself in the role of an ideal customer to spot gaps. Review each milestone and key touchpoints.

• Identify the success gap that is causing the most harm or lost opportunities. This is often where many customers reach one milestone but few progress to the next.

• Choosing the gap to focus on first should have the biggest financial payoff if improved, leverage existing resources, be actionable in the short term, and excite the team.

• Brainstorm solutions to directly bridge the top priority success gap. Come up with ways to remove friction and better meet customer needs and expectations at that point in the journey.

• The goal is to operationalize customer insights by identifying where customers struggle most and focusing efforts on improving the experience in a meaningful way at that point to drive better outcomes and metrics.

So in summary - use customer research to find points of friction, prioritize the biggest opportunity, and strategize tangible solutions to bridge the identified success gap. This helps make customer insights actionable for improving the experience and business results.

• It is important to share the customer experience (CX) map and insights company-wide so that everyone understands how their work impacts customers and the business.

• When sharing, reiterate the value, thank contributors, show data/research, introduce milestones and KPIs, and explain future use of the CX map.

• Being truly customer-led means focusing on the customer’s experience every day.

• Leverage the priority customer job and CX map as decision-making tools across departments. Examples include using it to guide annual/quarterly planning, individual projects, redefining targets/KPIs, creating KPI dashboards, and tying research back to the map.

• This helps ensure everyone’s work contributes to the customer journey and improves key metrics, rather than random activities. It provides a shared understanding of how roles impact the customer and business success.

In summary, the key is sharing insights widely, then operationalizing the CX map on an ongoing basis across all teams/projects to keep the business focused on truly understanding and delivering value for the priority customer. This leads to continuous improvement and growth.

• The book emphasizes moving away from thinking of marketing as a “funnel” and instead seeing customers as whole people in a meaningful relationship. It introduces the Customer-Led Growth Framework.

• The framework involves deconstructing the customer journey into critical phases and milestones to understand opportunities to optimize the experience. This opens up ways to reach customers, prove understanding of their problem, and help them achieve value quickly.

• Implementing the framework will give teams confidence in their strategies to drive sustainable and scalable growth, rather than guessing. Every person across all teams will understand their role in customers’ success.

• As the business scales or the product matures, the framework provides a blueprint to iterate and build on learnings. It can be reapplied for new customer segments or markets.

• Acknowledgments are given to a variety of people who provided support, feedback and collaborated on the book to help difficult concepts be understood and articulated clearly. Their input was invaluable in making the book better.

Gia wants to thank her daughters for inspiring her to write the book, even if they are too young to understand it now. She also wants to thank her husband for his constant support and for being her “Dead Sea.” She thanks her mother for her spirit and grit, and her father for his vision and pushing her to be her best.

Claire wants to thank her family for supporting her move across the country to further her career. She specifically thanks her grammy, grandfather, and the line of Suellentrops for instilling her entrepreneurial spirit. She thanks her partner Stephen for being her person and for how they have grown together. She also thanks her friend Blake for his emotional support during challenging phases of writing. Lastly, she thanks her co-author Gia for everything involved in co-writing the book.

The authors bio states that Georgiana and Claire co-founded Forget the Funnel, a consulting firm helping SaaS companies reach and retain high lifetime value customers. Georgiana is passionate about turning customer value into revenue and has worked with startups since 2010. Claire has helped SaaS companies grow to multi-millions in recurring revenue by leveraging customer insights for marketing and growth programs. They have both spoken internationally on customer-led growth approaches.