Georgiana Laudi: Data-Rich, Insight-Poor – The Real Reason Your Growth Is Stalled

In this talk, Gia reveals how lack of customer insight is sabotaging your marketing and product growth efforts.

Slowed, inconsistent growth? You and your team might be unknowingly operating without the critical customer context you need to grow and scale your product experience. Crappy conversion rates, relying on generic personas, and marketing that falls flat are symptoms of a major problem: customer blind spots.

You’ll learn:

Relying too much on A/B testing and experimentation without real customer understanding is a massive waste of time.
Realign with your best customers and finally unlock the growth potential your product deserves.
Growth comes from better customer fit, not more marketing.
There are no shortcuts – deep customer understanding is the fastest path to growth.

Slides

BoSUSA24 | Georgiana Laudi | Data-Rich, Insight-Poor – The Real Reason Your Growth Is Stalled from Business of Software Conference

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Transcript

Gia Laudi

So I just found out that Mark doesn’t like me at all because this is my first BoS. That was a bit of a shock, but I was very happy when he asked me to join. I’m really happy to be here. It seems like a really awesome crowd and group.

I know majority of you are founders, but I would love to know just from a show of hands, just so I get a sense of all who is in the room, who are the product folks? Like, not founders, but product folks. Okay, so a fair amount. And what about marketers, like heads of marketing? Very few. OK, so rest of you, founders? Founders, raise your hands. OK, good amount. OK, that’s awesome.

So before I get into really what I want to talk about, I’m going to tell you a little bit about me and why I’m so passionate about this topic. And this is me in 2012.

I look at this and I’m like, first of all, get her some chapstick. But also, I look like a baby, but I’m actually 10 years into my marketing career here. So I’ve been doing this a while, and I’ve just moved. I’m from Montreal. I’ve just moved from Montreal to Vancouver to work for this tech startup, and I’m super excited.

There’s Nerf guns, and right out of the frame, there’s a ping pong table. It is exactly the quintessential 2012 tech startup that you think it is, and it’s largely bootstrapped and also largely marketing-led.

So I am feeling just the weight of the world trying to impress this team, help this company grow because, again, marketing-led means majority of the growth the leadership team is looking to marketing for the majority of the growth of the company. So I’m feeling so so much pressure, but I am absolutely terrible at prioritizing. I am doing all the things like, I think Matt yesterday had a list of all the marketing activities. I was doing all of the marketing activities.

We had really lofty goals and targets. And so every month, I was kind of in panic mode. Sometimes I was exceeding my targets, and other months I was narrowly missing them. Other months it was like the last two weeks or the last week of the month, and I’m sort of panic coming up with marketing campaigns to try to hit my goals.

Learning from Airbnb’s Customer Journey

And it’s around this time that I’m in San Francisco for a conference with my founder and CEO, and I reach out to Lenny Rachitsky. So Lenny is a really big deal today, and I promise I’m not like trying to name drop here, because he is critical to this story.

What a lot of people don’t know about Lenny is that he actually lived in Montreal for a couple of years while he was incubating his tech startup. So I moved over to Vancouver, his startup was acquired by Airbnb, so he moved back down to San Francisco. And so I’m in town, I’m like, Lenny, I’m in town. Let’s hang out. He says, come to the Airbnb headquarters that the office there and come for beer Friday. So I’m like, Awesome! This is gonna be great.

So we go to the Airbnb office, and it’s exactly what you think it is. I don’t know if any of you have ever been there. It’s really impressive. There’s multiple caterers on staff. The meeting rooms are all sort of modeled after their popular rental properties. It is really polished, really impressive. And so I’m like, where do you work? Because he was in the product team, and so he took us downstairs to the product team, where it’s all, I mean, this isn’t even that. This is not a real picture, by the way, I had to generate this one, but it was like open concept, like old coffee cups and papers everywhere.

And what I noticed when I was down there is that a lot of the desks were sort of facing this, like white wall. And on the white wall, I sort of noticed that there are, there were pieces of paper sort of taped to the wall in a line – about eight or 10 or so. I was like, why? What is, what are these pieces of paper here? And so I sort of lean in and what I realize is that this is actually the Airbnb customer journey. And I’m like, Well, why of these desks are facing this. This is obviously pretty important stuff. And so I go and lean in and what I had known at the time.

Again, I’m 10 years into my marketing career at this point, like I’ve been using all the tools. I know what a customer journey map is, but this thing was very, very different. It was nothing like the models that we’ve largely been relying on.

I had largely been relying on like funnels, right top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, like fly wheels and funnels and buyers journeys and Pirate Metrics. Pirate Metrics, I loved. It’s part of the reason why I got into SaaS to begin with, because I was like, yes, marketing has a role to play post acquisition. And so I know all of these models.

But the problem with these models is that they sort of they all flatten our view of customers. They assume, for all of us, that our customers are all the same, that our product experience is all the same. There’s no nuance at all in them, and this thing was nothing like that.

This thing was completely centered around the customer and the customer’s milestones and what they were experiencing in their lives. And it was illustrated as well, not with emojis, obviously, Airbnb later had a Disney illustrator illustrate this thing for them. They took this customer journey very, very seriously. And it included the emotional journey of customers along the path – like the highs and lows. Again, it was completely through the lens of customers – how they experienced value, their leaps of faith that they had to take in their relationship with the company, and how they make decisions about how to do things or not do things.

Now, you might look at this and be like, yeah, yeah, it’s a customer journey. Like, what’s the big deal about this? But what you have to remember is that nobody was doing this at the time. Everything was very focused on like, life cycle, MQLs and SQLs. And this thing was nothing like that at all.

And so few of them really take into account the sort of before somebody is a customer or after somebody becomes a customer, right? Like the thing about the funnel, it sort of ends the bottom of funnel when somebody becomes a customer. So they don’t actually go far enough in their view of their customer’s experience, either.

These traditional models, you know, they don’t start here. They don’t start at this point where, like our customer is out in the world experiencing the problem that we help them solve. They’re struggling with the old way. They make a decision that they’ve got to solve this problem. They go on the path to find something new.

If our website does an okay job, then they go into sort of evaluating whether or not this thing can solve their problem, right? They may activate and adopt in inside of our product. And then everybody here is in a recurring revenue business model.

So the growth phase is also critically important, right after somebody becomes a customer, reaches that sort of value realization. What is that continued value that we’re providing to them? And even have opportunities to expand in their usage of the product of our products. So rarely do the these other models take this into account.

And also, whether or not we choose to think about our customer experience in this way is kind of besides the point, because our customers experience this – whether or not we choose to optimize it or prioritize it or curate it or design it, it’s kind of like our brand. Our customers experience something like this, obviously not a straight line, but something like this with our product and our brand and our team.

And so again, it’s kind of like this omnipresent thing, whether we like to think about it in this way or not. And when it comes to growing our product and gaining more customers, really, our team’s job, our job is to provide the most relevant and resonant experience possible and valuable experience possible for our customers.

This was the pivotal mindset shift for me.

It was that when we prioritize and optimize our customers experience and help them achieve their goals, we achieve ours.

That was my sort of pivotal moment. And so we took this back to the team, and within two years, we grew revenue by nearly 900%. Because we centered our view around this view of our customers, this understanding of how our customers experienced, you know, their relationship with us, this holistic experience. We were on the Forbes fast 50 lists and all that stuff, and it was amazing. It was great. But really the most important thing was that these customer milestones became part of our DNA. How we measured success, how we benchmarked, how we prioritized our projects, our team handoff points.

All of these decisions were made so much easier, really important for me as a head of marketing. This facilitated conversations with my CTO and my head of product. We had not only a shared understanding about our customers experience, but also a shared language in which to talk about it.

So if you take nothing else away from this time together, let it please be this. When we prioritize and optimize our customers reaching their goals, we can achieve ours. Now, obviously this is not about me, this is 100% about you. So I want to sort of switch focus now to really talking about why what I think is sort of standing in the way between you and achieving clarity and confidence and potentially even some growth like this.

So, I’m going to run through, actually, let me just like pause for one second. How many of you are feeling like your growth is a little bit stalled right now, like you’re not growing quite as quickly as you’d like to be? I know that might not be like a popular thing to admit.

Okay, so a fair amount of you.

So right off the bat, it’s really tough right now. Marketing is very hard. It is never been harder. The market is really, really tough. And we were talking about this at a round table yesterday. We spend on ads like it’s 1999 or something like it is, it’s pretty, pretty scary.

The other thing is that our teams are struggling a lot, and I’ll get into this. This might sound actually pretty obvious, and even the the talk yesterday made it pretty obvious about like alignment is a big issue, and our teams are actually having a pretty hard time for a couple of reasons.

Now, the back to the title of this talk, I think that we have an over reliance on data, and we’re making decisions in a vacuum, without being well enough informed, and also, I think we’re missing just a shit ton of context and nuance about our customers to help us make better decisions about how to grow. So before I get into it, I would love to do a little like thought experiment with you all.

The Problem with Traditional Growth

I want to know if you think Product A has a better outcome, or product B has a better outcome.

So product A is a great product. It’s the kind of product that even product managers love. The UX is solid. It’s solving a real, critical problem for customers. It’s really like an ace of a product, but their go to market, not as strong.

Product B, not a good product at all. Not differentiated. The people who use it don’t like it. The UX sucks. It’s not differentiated again, like it doesn’t really have anything special about it at all. Not a good experience. But their go to market is actually pretty solid.

Which one do you think has the better outcome? You can just yell it out. I love that I’ve heard a lot of Bs.

Yeah, there’s no world unfortunately where product A has the better outcome, and it’s depressing, but it’s true. So why is that? Because the market does not give a fuck how awesome your product is. Nobody cares about how awesome your product is. Your product probably is awesome, but it is really, really tough market to attract new customers and even retain them.

How many of you have seen this before? Who knows what this is? Yeah, this is a classic, right? Everybody sort of refers back to this. So for any of you who aren’t familiar, this is Scott Pranker’s Martech landscape. He’s been doing this now. Their team’s been doing this now for 13 years. 13 years, even in 2024 it still grew 27.8% over 2023 which actually really surprised me, because I expected there’d be a little bit more like attrition happening here. But in nerf gun Gia years, this thing had 350 products on it. It’s not over 9,000% growth.

What do you think that does to your abilities to attract attention and capture attention in your target market?

Many of you might be in markets that are maybe not quite as saturated as this. I hope not. Obviously, this represents a whole Martech landscape. I’m sure Edtech and Fintech and all the techs look relatively similar in terms of growth. Many of you are probably trying to grow and gain attention inside of saturated markets like this, and it’s really, really hard.

We were talking about this yesterday at the round table as well – performance marketing and running ads. This is a really painful example.

So John Henry Scherck, he’s like one of the best in class performance marketers there are, and he was working with a company where he generated 600% year over year, high quality traffic, like qualified traffic, and it was completely wasted. He had to basically fire this client because they didn’t have their positioning and messaging locked in and nailed. So it generated nothing, all of this work and all of this amazing traffic for nothing. Because throwing ads at this problem is not a growth strategy, right? It’s actually creates an over reliance on a channel that ultimately often ends up providing you diminishing returns. It’s pretty well documented.

Rand Fishkin talks about this quite a bit, how relying on paid channels on is over time stops. It stops doing what it’s supposed to be doing, and it becomes less valuable over time. So at this point, you might be thinking, why is this marketer up there talking about not doing any marketing?

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Can you get more customers without more marketing?

So how are you supposed to get more customers if it’s not doing more marketing? And depending on your role and your background, you might have different opinions on what the answer to this is. But I’m going to break out a really novel concept that, thankfully, is gaining popularity in tech, finally.

It started, like 2022 certainly through 2023 and even now, I am so so happy to say that I’m seeing so many SaaS founders and teams finally talking about profitability and efficiency. Maybe we’re done with the days of growth at all costs, and move fast and break things. Finally, we’re starting to think about some of the opportunities that we may have. Imagine a world we didn’t need to spend on more ads. Imagine a world where we could do more with the traffic and the leads and the sign ups that we’re already getting.

Shitty Reality #1: The market has no fs to give

So I’m gonna tell you a little story about a team who reached out to us a little while ago. This is a social media tool. They been around for about four or five years, and they’re 2.5 million. They are about 5000 customers, and revenue growth had been flat for a year. They had no idea what to do. They had tried everything.

Now what you need to know about this team is that they are amazing at marketing. They launched on the back of just incredible content marketing, incredible thought leadership. This founder was really prolific, and built this company based on that thought leadership. And when revenue growth started to flatten out, this team was like, well, we got to do more of that. They doubled their writers. They invested in SEO heavily and they invested in ads, but nothing was helping. Nothing was really meaningfully moving the needle.

And so we luckily, they already had some happily paying customers. So we’re like, okay, let’s what do these customers know that we don’t know. What can we learn from these customers? Why do these customers come to them in the first place? And so we looked at this customer base.

Who here is familiar with jobs to be done? I want to see every hand go up. Okay, great. I’m not even sure if Bob is here.

But this is the two sort of dominant jobs to be done that we found in this customer base were these:

They were the SMBs looking to grow their business and grow their audience with this new marketing channel. They gushed over this content. They gave the team traffic and leads and sign ups to brag about they were. They went on and on about how amazing the customer success team was, which might be a little red flag that people are picking up on.
The second group of customers, though, they were the ones that already validated this channel, and they were utilizing it in their day to day, but they were sort of bogged down in the process. And so they wanted to start automating and this group sort of flew in under the radar. They didn’t need any promos or discount codes, which this team had been experimenting with quite a bit, actually, and they activated within the product on their own. So the team never really heard from them. They were very easy to miss.

And so taking the time to learn about their group of customers, they learned that they’d been over indexing on one of these sides, because it was very easy to sort of mistake this first group as their customers. They were the customers that this team talked to day in and day out. It was very easy to over index for them. This first group was much more present, but there were also higher costs to acquire them. And this second group, when we actually segmented them and looked at the data they are actually the higher LTV as well. So what do you think this team did with this information? What would any good team do with information like this? Finally at their disposal.

Well, they updated their website. They updated three pages on their website – their home page, their Features page and their pricing page. And they increased sign ups on their website by 89%. The fun fact: they also dropped their trial period from 30 days to 7 days, and they optimized their messaging to zoom in on the things that this second group of customers really cared about. And this is a really cool outcome, but it is not the coolest part of this outcome. The coolest part of this outcome is that their trial to pay conversion rate also increased 40%.

Three pages on their website. We did not touch their sign up flow. We did not touch their emails, nothing – just the three pages. So not only did they have more customers coming through the front door, they had more better fit customers coming through the front door, and they did not spend a cent on marketing.

So do you see now how you can actually acquire more customers without more marketing?

Profit Well found that founders and executives spend 75% of their time on marketing and acquisition. Like awareness focused marketing and acquisition, there’s so much opportunity on the table already, and this is what I mean about like profitability and efficiency.

Maybe some of you are familiar with this one as well. The study that was conducted by HBR, that found that 5% increase in retention can increase profits by 95%. And more recently, actually chart mogul, I just saw this a couple of weeks ago. Chart mogul did a study of their own – among 2500 SaaS and they found that the SaaS companies that had a net revenue retention of 100% and above grow twice as quickly as those that don’t. Twice as quickly. That is dramatic. If that is not motivating to optimize your post acquisition experience, I don’t know what is.

So again, the market is really, really tough. Stop paying for the privilege of filling a leaky bucket. It is happening more than I care to continue seeing how I have these conversations all the time, and it is just absolutely ridiculous. How many people are throwing their money away.

Shitty Reality #2: The team is guessing

So the next one that I wanted to talk about is teams are guessing. So I’m just gonna, like barrel on through to this one – most SaaS teams, most SaaS companies, are not started by folks with marketing backgrounds. How many of you founders had a marketing background when you started your company? 2,3,4, so not many.

And what happens? What? Why is this? I’m not trying to claim, by the way, that marketers should be the only one to start tech companies, obviously. But it does have a sort of inherent conflict baked into it, does it not?

Has anybody ever experienced that conflict between when there’s a founder who wants to grow a company, and they hire a marketer, and they look at that marketer and say, just get more traffic, more leads, more traffic, more leads. And oftentimes these marketers, they have very sort of high expectations on their head. Often it’s unfairly high expectations on their heads. And they’re often among the lowest paid at tech companies too. And this is kind of a recipe for disaster, right?

Because often what happens, not always, not for any of you, but often what happens is that inexperienced or mid career level marketers end up with C suite level growth targets on their head. And they become really disappointing and really fast.

And also rarely do these heads of marketing have the sort of social clout or the ability to gain buy in from their founders on some of their ideas, let alone get that all the team rowing in the same direction, right? Create alignment across the company around customers, and that’s really what I wanted to talk about next. This study, I don’t know if some of you may be familiar with this is definitely like a pre pandemic study that was conducted, but I’m sure we’ve all experienced some version of this in our lives.

This is not a surprise to anybody. There’s five main reasons why that caused this dysfunction, lack of lack of alignment, obviously, lack of goal clarity, and also the inability to meet customers expectations.

And it shows, so this was a study done by Salesforce, that found that only 45% of teams are actually able to pull off a consistent experience for their customers, from department to department. And now the biggest sort of elephant in the room, the one that you probably knew was coming, is it is a really stressful time to be working in tech.

It’s stressful for founders, but it’s also really stressful for teams. It causes all kinds of short term thinking, and your teams are scared to be wrong. They’re scared to mess up. They really want to prove their worth and show results to ensure some job security, and even if your team’s jobs are safe, everybody is feeling this pressure. I think probably everybody in this room knows somebody who has been impacted by the tech layoffs in the last little while.

Is it starting to remind you of something? It’s starting to remind me of something. It started to remind me of like Nerf gun Gia, right? The pressure to show results, scared to be wrong, desperate to prove my value, short term thinking.

I know you’re gonna, you think my next slide is gonna be a customer journey map, but it’s not.

The Role of Product Marketing and Alignment

What could fix this? What’s going to fix this? How could we get around this? What would solve this? Well, alignment, better alignment. And this sounds really, really obvious, but what could give our go to market teams, Marketing, CS, sales, product for a large part? What would help our go to market teams have more clarity and confidence, make better decisions about how to grow, create a better experience for our customers. See and prove you know, their role in driving value for customers, yes, of course, but also driving revenue for the company. What could do that?

Last week in Emily Kramer’s newsletter. She’s awesome, if anybody doesn’t follow her. She put this chart, and I couldn’t believe my eyes, product marketing is having a bit of a heyday, and so I think teams are starting to figure this out. In 2012, this thing looked nothing. Like this product marketing, the only product marketers being hired in 2012 were putting together sales decks. But I think teams are starting to figure this out. And yes, it’s going up and down, because obviously it’s been a little volatile. But in 2024, product marketing is actually recovering better than all of the other functions in marketing. This is, by the way, hires in just in the marketing team. And I’m totally here for it.

I think this is just, so this makes me so happy. I couldn’t believe this when I saw it, and I think it’s because people are starting to get the memo. I think founders and executive teams at tech companies are really starting to understand that there’s more alignment and cohesion is needed here, particularly if we’re trying to operate more profitably.

I just think this is a fantastic thing, but product marketing is often underutilized, that is a whole separate talk. But product marketing, if you let them, they are the folks that think about your customers experience holistically, strategically. They’re the folks that get super close to your customers, and then they bring that Intel back to the team and help everybody gain alignment and get clarity on what matters to who, when and why. And this is wildly empowering for teams.

So again, your team does not need to be relying on guesswork and busy work and short term thinking more deeply understanding our customers, our teams can finally see how they’re able to deliver value for customers, but also obviously for the business.

Shitty Reality #3: The data is dumb

Okay, so let’s get into the next one, which is probably my unpopular opinion. The data is often really dumb and doesn’t help us. And most people who talk about product growth and marketing your product will tell you that it is about the data. I’m not saying the data doesn’t have an important role, but we do over rely on it. And it’s hard to argue with numbers. I can totally understand why we would lean back on numbers in this way, it’s very hard to argue with them.

If you mess up on something or you need to validate or in buy in on your ideas, you go to the data, you got to prove it – I need the numbers. And if it messes up and it doesn’t go your way, well, the data said to do it, and it sort of relieves us of culpability. It’s like a Get Out of Jail Free card a little bit, especially when our teams are running scared about job security. So it relieves us of a lot of burden.

If we’re not sure which messaging is going to resonate with our customers, we can put it on a landing page and A/B test it. If we’re not sure if we’re getting more traffic, or our marketing is doing our job, then you know, we can log into GA and who cares about the quality of that traffic. We can just run the numbers and make it look like we’re doing something in marketing. If we’re not sure which features are going to lead to more upgrades, we can put them behind the pay wall, split our sign ups, and wait for the numbers to come in.

And the popularity of product-led growth in the last couple of years has exacerbated this problem, for sure. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti PLG. The majority of the companies that we work with are product-led. But even the most product-led, the most data driven among us agree that understanding customers has to come first.

So Elena Verna? Who knows who Elena Verna is? More of you need to know who Elena Verna is. So she’s a big deal, and she’s very, very data driven, and she’s the one who will tell you that every company can leverage PLG, even the most die hard sales led companies can leverage PLG. But even Elena, she wrote an article about the four reasons why you might not be ready for PLG. And I was like, what Elena saying you’re not ready for PLG? Like, how is that possible?

The very first one out of her list of four, the very first one was about, if you don’t have predictable and say and sustainable marketing and sales loops, that there is probably a disconnect between what you think your customers want and what they actually want. And I know that it can be very, very tempting to find out and try to learn what your customers want by looking at the data. But the data can’t tell you who your best customers are or what matters to them. I told you that previous story, but I have another one.

Case Study: Invoicing Tool

So an invoicing tool. We’re actually still working with them today. When the President reached out, this is what he said, So this invoicing tool has got a couple 100,000 customers, couple 1000 sign ups every month but their free to paid conversion rate was not really budging. This team had data for days. They were a self professed data factory, tons of experimentation.

And despite all this data, despite all this experimentation, they weren’t able to sort of meaningfully move the needle on their free to pay conversion rate. It was still too low. Nothing was really changing. And so again, in that scenario, we decided to look at their customers, and what do their customers know that we don’t know? And again, we found two sort of dominant jobs to be done emerged in that group.

So two groups of customers, and it’s not always two, by the way, this is for simplicity’s sake, and telling the story. But really, in this scenario, there were two big groups that showed up. And in our research, when we talked to customers, the first group was the group that was looking for an invoicing tool. They just wanted a straightforward invoicing tool. So when they found this one, they activated really quickly. They generated their invoice, they sent it off to their customer or their client, and they were super happy. And their NPS was super high.

The second group, they were a lot more discerning. The second group was a group that was already invoicing with something right they wanted to be able to generate invoices like on the job site, from their truck. Let’s say, before they even leave their client. And so these customers were way more likely to be fumbling around with pen and paper or spreadsheets or Google Docs and sometimes QuickBooks, but they really just wanted a tool to help them with their mobile invoicing. But they were so much pickier because they already had a previous way. So they had all kinds of customizations they were looking for but this invoicing tool, thankfully, could accommodate those customizations. So these customers, ultimately, even though their NPS was lower at the out of the gate, and even though their activation rates were lower out of the gate, they ultimately ended up being the higher LTV customers overall.

So you can see how easily this team could fall into this trap of looking, oh, well, these are high NPS customers. They’re activating, they are the best. The data was never going to tell them and help them see the differences between these two groups, and so they had been sort of over optimizing and over indexing again for this poorer fit customer, and their data had kind of been lying to them all along because they weren’t looking at in the right way. So it’s really easy to see how we can get stuck in this trap of looking at our customers as this like big, homogeneous blob of data in the aggregate of what customers are doing, instead of why they’re doing it.

So obviously, this insight dramatically impacted how this team thought about their customers, how they positioned and used messaging to position themselves against the old way. The product onboarding that they used moving forward, certainly their expectations for activation rates and LTV and conversion rates. And then obviously, of course, their experiments too. The experiments that they were running, were so much better informed now, because I’m not saying that incremental experimentation is a bad thing. There’s definitely room for this if it’s based on a foundational understanding of what matters to your customers. And if we’re honest, we know damn well that this experimentation, the arrow doesn’t always go to the right.

A lot of the time, what we’re doing is we’re running tests for the sake of tests. And I think it was Elena Verna who’s talking about new Heads of Growth. This blew my mind. New heads of growth in their first three months, should expect a 97% failure rate. Like I just think that is wild that we have just like normalized that. I think it’s nuts.

So again, the vast majority of folks are going to tell you that you need to be looking your analytics and your heat maps and optimizing your marketing campaigns and your ads and your sign up funnels and all of that stuff. And I’m not saying that that stuff is not valuable to do, but unless and until you’ve got a foundational understanding of who it is that you’re serving, that data is lying to you, you can’t trust those numbers.

Okay, so speaking of numbers that we can trust, and you’re probably like, how on earth do we get from this to data? What does this thing have to do with data? So I gotta talk a little bit about, like, how we get to the why underneath this, and then we’ll make our way back to data.

So again, if we can understand and have this sort of documentary, like understanding of our customers, like jobs to be done talks about so much, then we can actually get to the the why. So we ask questions like, what was going on in your world? What was the old way that you were struggling with? What was that previous solution? What wasn’t working about it? And you can imagine, like with the invoicing tool, it was like the dude in his truck fumbling with a spreadsheet on his phone. And then ultimately, trying to learn from them, why would they choose us over all of the other solutions? What are some of those motivations, anxieties or deal breakers they may be experiencing in that sort of relationship with us. And then, really importantly, obviously are our customers able to do now that they weren’t able to do before? And you know, what impact does that have on their lives? And then, really importantly, by the way, for recurring revenue businesses too, and those looking to lean into net revenue retention, what’s the next thing that they need to do? What’s the next job to be done on the horizon for them?

Because once we understand our customers at this level, we can start to understand what they’re thinking every step of the way, how they’re feeling that emotional journey. This often helps us figure out what the different milestones are, and then ultimately, of course, what our customers are doing. And I don’t just mean the direct touch points with your product, obviously, I’m also talking about the indirect actions that are going on in their lives, right in their environment, maybe in their office, maybe in their adjacent tools that they’re using, or their workflow.

Because once we have this, once we can understand our customers at this level, then we are actually going to have some KPIs worth talking about, and some data worth talking about. Some some kind of North Star KPIs, but for all of these milestones in our relationship with our customers.

So again, tying back to this right when we prioritize and optimize, now we can start to optimize based on these KPIs, when we can optimize for our customers reaching their goals, we can achieve ours. And for those of you that are still like, this is still too kumbaya for you, I’m going to tell you another story.

Case Study: Rand Fishkin and SparkToro

So who knows, Rand Fishkin and SparkToro? So Rand founded MOS years ago, he launched SparkToro, I think it was 2019. And we actually worked with this team. So I this represents SparkToro. Lots of traffic, lots of sign ups. I know it sounds like a wonderful problem to have, but it means nothing if people are not converting into paying customers, right?

And so Rand knew that their free to pay conversion rate was lower than it should be, than it could be. So we went through that same experience where we tapped into the customer, the happy customers that they had, and we learned from them. I’m going to tell you that part of the story.

The part of the story that is interesting here, is really what we did with that. We identified those amazing customers, and we sort of leaned in there. We started to map what those customers said mattered to them, said was so valuable to them, to the specific parts of the product that delivered that value. And with that knowledge, we were able to sort of reverse engineer their success. We could see the ways that they were using the product in this like happy, healthy, continuous, valuable way. And what we learned was that there was a part of the product that was delivering sort of an outsized impact for customers that was being introduced way too late. And so many of the new sign ups, they weren’t even ever seeing this feature at all.

So we worked with the team to move it up earlier into the product experience. And the team understood the assignment. They updated. They used an onboarding checklist, the tools are not important, the onboarding checklist. And also they started talking about this feature in their onboarding emails. And again, like I said, they understood the assignment. They doubled their free to paid conversion rate. Doubled.

Again, no more marketing. Imagine what doubling your free to paid conversion rate would mean for your business, right? So this was their unlock. They were able to identify this feature and find this feature, and this was only one of the takeaways by the way that we learned with them.

So again, when we’re talking about these KPIs, we’re really talking about leading indicators of success. So those the numbers that tell us and that help our team see their role in helping customers achieve their goals like we’ll know that we’ve done our job when we can reach these KPIs. So our leading indicators of success give us a lot more feedback about what our team is doing in the day to day. And they impact, of course, our leading indicators of success. We all know this impact our lagging indicators of success, like revenue growth, like our free to pay conversion rate.

This is really, really important. Because our team is going to know what it takes to help our customers get from one success milestone to the next. They’re going to be equipped with all the information they could possibly need to make really, really good decisions. And this is how we tie being customer led to being data informed. And if we do this, well, we will have achieved the Holy Grail – the right message, the right person at the right time.

Okay, so again, our data is often lying to us. Be really, really skeptical of the data that you are relying on day to day. Imagine how much more powerful your experiments would be if you had this sort of foundational understanding of your customers.

Shitty Reality #4: No time for shortcuts

So last one is no time for shortcuts. What on earth do I mean by no time for shortcuts? We rarely take the time to take a step back in order to take two steps forward. So if I asked you again, most of you are familiar with jobs to be done. If I asked you these questions about your customers, would you be able to answer them? Like all of them, like five of them, like three of them, right? This is the kind of understanding that we need about our customers. We have to be able to answer these questions.

I’m gonna make it even more painful. Imagine you ask these questions to your head of marketing or your head of product, or even other people on the leadership team, your co founder. Would you all answer these questions in the same way? No, you wouldn’t.

So it’s highly likely that you don’t have that shared understanding across your team. So why do so many people, like we have so many conversations with founders and teams hundreds over the past few years, and I can tell you with certainty, 9 out of 10 are guessing, needlessly guessing. It’s painful. They’re guessing about what to do. They’re looking they’re relying on like best practices. They’re looking at what other people are doing in other markets with other customers and other products, and it just blows my mind. Or they’re relying on channel experts to tell them what to do and how to grow. So how do we get stuck here?

Research is fucking hard. It’s really hard. I don’t even like to use the word research, because it just has so many negative connotations. I’m sure we’ve all experienced some version of research that has gone off the rails. Garbage in, garbage out. Research that takes months, sometimes more, costs tens of thousands and sometimes more and never really gets a good result, or worse, way, way, way worse – run research that just dies on a shelf.

I understand that research is hard. I do understand that it is hard, but we choose our hard. Has anybody heard that lately? It’s all over my Instagram feed like we choose our hard. I love it because it’s so true. We do choose our hard. Does this feel like the shortcut, fumbling around and guessing and running experiments for the sake of experiments, paying for ads to fill a leaky bucket? How us marketers like to talk about leaky buckets, right? Desperate to show results.

Or is this the shortcut? Getting inside our best customers heads, even leveraging just a couple of conversations, ideally like 10 to 12 jobs to be done interviews right get inside our best customers heads, and then map and measure their experience, and then identify where you are dropping the ball, identify where your current customer experience is out of alignment with these amazing customers. Which is the shortcut? I don’t want to brag, we do this in six weeks. You can absolutely do this.

So again, this is not about research, although it kind of is. It’s about making that research actionable. It is absolutely the shortcut. There are lots of benefits. I won’t go I’m not going to read this slide because I know you already know. But for those of you that may need a little bit more convincing and need some data, there have been studies on this. I don’t even want to read this, but 54% greater return on marketing investment, 18 times faster sales cycle, 10x improvement on customer service, all on and on and on.

So your product is awesome. It’s probably awesome, and you can absolutely have an awesome go to market as well. This is totally achievable, if any of this has resonated as at all, at all, at all, at all. My next recommendation would be, and this feels really ridiculous, but we did write a book on this process, and why I recommend it is because it’s really short, and I’m not trying to be self deprecating by saying that we worked really hard to make this book really, really practical and really short.

So if anybody is interested and think that this process might work for you, I would highly recommend checking it out again. It’s not expensive and it’s very short. It’s not going to take you long. If you’re working inhouse, there is a workbook that goes along.

If you’re an in house practitioner, there is 110-page workbook that goes along with this book, with all kinds of like templates and everything you could possibly need.

If you’re a founder, I would recommend reading this book, maybe on the flight home. And then if any of that, any of it sort of resonates with you, just pass it on to your team. Thanks all.

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Q&A

Audience Member

Thank you very much. Great talk. I think that we are aligned in our company with most of the things you talked about, so that’s positive. However, I would like to get back to the beginning of your talk, where it showed that marketing technology map, because our company is one of the dots on that map. So my question to you would be, so what if we are in such saturated market, because still, you know, if, even if we do everything what you said, still there is a high chance that nobody ever hears about us from the customers. So any advice is how this could be applied to actually, at the very beginning, you know to like how to increase the awareness that we are the right company for these jobs to be done.

Gia Laudi

So do you have customers today?

Audience Member

Yes.

Gia Laudi

Okay. I mean, I would wager that there is an opportunity to narrow in on your very, very happy customers, the ones that you have a bit of an advantage with, in that customer base. And then you can hone your sort of messaging like in the social media. I mean, social media is a very competitive space and saturated space, but honing in your messaging really, to resonate as much as possible. I’m certain there’s an opportunity to do that. Have you done have you conducted any research? You have Voice of Customer?

Audience Member

Yeah, we do have researchers on our stuff, like, who do that on regular basis with our clients? So we do.

Mark Littlewood

When was the last time you did a customer interview?

Audience Member

Last week. I was actually here in the US, like during just that.

Gia Laudi

Well done. What’s the product?

Audience Member

It’s a content management system platform or digital experience platform.

Gia Laudi

Yikes, okay, yeah.

Audience Member

Okay, so let’s take that offline. So you know, it’s not embarrassing. Like, thank you, though.

Audience Member

So, love the talk. And teams build the metrics to see how they’re doing, and then you realize the metrics off because you did, you had some sort of insight. And the story I tell myself, and love for you to validate this, refute this, is you kind of come up with this insight. You’ve got this new metric now you’re tracking to that that gets you to a point where you stall, or you maybe you’re un optimized at that point, and so you have to do a new insight. I’m just curious, how do you know? Because at some level, you have to measure that, but at some point that measurement isn’t the right thing, and you need a new insight to go look and have those kind of aha moments that you talked about. So I’m curious, like, how do you take those out?

Gia Laudi

Are we talking about product engagement?

Audience Member

Well. Like, for example, you were saying, Hey, we broke down the customers, and we’re optimized. They were optimizing for these customers, the big NPS for customers versus long term value customers, right? Like, how do you like, because at some point there’s some metric that you’re tracking that you think you’re doing good. How do you know when that metrics not right? Like, how do you how do you dig for that insight. When do you know to do that?

Gia Laudi

Yeah, well, when things sort of, in that case, there was a KPI that they couldn’t move. Actually, in both of those stories there were, there was something that they weren’t able to budge. They had tried the old way, and nothing was really working anymore. So I guess they had reached some sort of like saturation with what was possible.

But in terms of activation, if we’re talking about, like an activation metric, generally, when we come up with activation metrics, we’re going to what is continued value look like from a product use standpoint, and we work backwards from that. And so again, if it’s like trying to think of a good example. So the spark Toro example, it was like using the lists functionality. We saw that a happy, healthy customer was logging in at a certain cadence. It had nothing to do with like weekly active or daily active or monthly active users. I think most people probably understand that’s only half the story. But what was that sort of meaningful product usage. What did that look like at continued value? So in that that ongoing, successful, high retention customer, and then we sort of back that up through like, what is the the sort of natural progression of how they should be using the product?

We can also look at customers who are very successful, high LTV customers, and reverse engineer their experience. That’s really important. That was where that was where that the invoicing tool sort of went awry. They were just looking at the front end of their customer experience. Was that, without optimizing for those that had that were, in the long term, successful. So I think it’s like you have to, you have to, obviously start somewhere, but at a certain point you may get sort of diminishing returns on your efforts, and that would probably be a good time. Also, honestly, most of the teams that we work with, they would come back and work with us again when their product evolved in such a way where they were like, we’re not 100% sure what their real value was or if their market shifted pretty significantly, that’s usually a good time to sort of revisit, like, everybody needed to do this post COVID, right? Because everybody’s decision making courses were very different.

Audience Member

All right. So, well, we had a conversation yesterday, and I explained you that, like we provide, we have different type of contracts, we have different type of services, we have different type of projects, and right now we are also been building the product. So how if we want to make changes, for example, to our web page. Which things should we prioritize if we have so many different things?

Gia Laudi

Yeah, that is a really tough situation to be in, for sure, I to be honest, it’s not an ideal situation to have to solve for all of those people’s problems with one asset. That is, it’s problematic, like, you should probably be splitting your unless they splitting your traffic. But splitting the traffic to your website, to the different offerings, and positioning the different offerings separately so that people can understand the value. Like, why? What problem does it solve does it solve their problem? What and what value does it provide? Because otherwise you’re just casting too wide of a net. It’s the brush strokes are just way too wide to actually resonate with with anybody. That’s not to say that you can’t have, you know, a home page, but zeroing in on the on the right positioning and messaging for a multi you’re not only describing a multiproduct. You’re describing like a multi offering, right? Because it’s custom software that you’re doing.

Honestly, I I would almost consider doing like separate websites for your separate offerings, otherwise you’re never going to be able to, like, cut deep enough through to the heart of what people are actually trying to achieve with you. It’s going to feel like a nice to have because you’re trying to cover too many things. It’s going to feel too much like a vitamin instead of a painkiller. Like I don’t know how you would, how you would do that with given how many things that you were doing, the only reason I didn’t know that is because of the conversation we were having yesterday, right? But I would, I would try to split it out if I were you.

Audience Member

And the other question I have is, like, most of the conversations we have had here are related to product. What happens when we’re talking about services? And, like, if the service is like, yeah, building custom that, like custom software. So how can we, like, translate all this information that it’s not product, but it’s a service.

Gia Laudi

I mean, it’s the same thing. I when I say feature, just sub that in for like, the parts of your solution that provide value. You can still do this type of research and find out what matters, why they choose you. I again, because of the conversation we had yesterday, I happen to know that you’ve got some really cool sort of differentiated value in your service offering. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Is getting cutting through to the heart of that. What makes you different? Why would somebody choose you over all of the other options, finding out what is actually going to resonate with these ideal customers that have a high willingness to pay, urgency to solve the problem really important, and leaning into those parts of your service offering with software, it’s features or feature families or product attributes, and in your case, it just happens to be how you deliver on your service, but it’s the same thing at the end of the day.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Mark Littlewood

Amazing. Have we got one more? Last question.

Audience Member

All right, hopefully this so you showed that table a little bit earlier with the different parts of the value and like, thinking, feeling and doing in the minds of our best customers, but we’re typically dealing with, like, a decision making unit. And of course we have our customer champion, but how do you solve for that with what you’re talking about. Because different things matter to different people at different times, just as you noted with the individual customer.

Gia Laudi

So that’s absolutely achievable with this we work with B2B SaaS predominantly. In almost all of those cases, there’s multiple people involved in the process. Generally, what we do is we will focus on the person on the Champion, right, the person who’s tasked with solving the problem and really enabling them to bring other people along for the journey. But if you don’t get that champion, you got nobody. So really enabling them to be very successful is the name of the game. And especially if we’re talking about the sort of front end of things, our champion isn’t always our functional user. So that’s another sort of variable in there to take into account. But the front end of this, right, that sort of the struggle and evaluation phase should largely be focused on that champion and helping them gain the sort of own the sort of buy in internally. And then you need, what we sometimes do is we’ll do the customer experience map, and we’ll have, like, the champions path, and then the economic buyers path, and then if there’s a functional user or a technical buyer, we’ll also account for them as well.

But really, at the end of the day, the focus should still remain on that champion, because if you don’t have them, you have nobody. But that economic buyer absolutely like finding out what they need. Sometimes we’ve done research where we’ve learned from the champion first, and then we’ve sort of moved on to find out, like, what was it for that economic buyer that helped them make a decision and they may need slightly different things, and you can craft your assets and your messaging or your calls, depending on what your model is for that other buyer.

But again, the champion is like, if you don’t get the champion, you get nobody. And I know a lot it’s hard to do that, because I know a lot of B2B SaaS rely on an economic buyer. But it’s not likely your economic buyer that’s landing on your website. It’s not likely your economic buyer. Sometimes it is obviously, but in many cases, it’s that champion who’s like kicking the tires and figuring out if they even want to float it up to that economic buyer. I don’t know if that fully answered your question, but I would say, like, dig in and find out what matters for all of them. If they’re all critical to closing the deal, you have to learn about all of them and what matters and they might be slightly different. Actually, it’s very likely it will be different.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Mark Littlewood

Thank you, Gia. We appreciate you.

Georgiana Laudi

Co-founder, Forget the Funnel

Georgiana’s been building and launching brands online since Y2K was a thing and has been marketing online since 2000. Starting in marketing, she identified the huge opportunity for product-focused growth early in her career when she discovered customer experience mapping. She’d discovered her calling.

Gia believes companies often misunderstand their entire relationship with customers. From the initial customer problem you solve through engagement and expansion – value should not be measured by transactional moments and business metrics, but on customer’s success milestones and product engagement KPIs.

She’s worked with high-growth B2B SaaS companies including Unbounce, Sprout Social, Bitly, Appcues, SparkToro, Invoice Simple and more.