Claire Suellentrop: JTBD SparkToro Case Study

Claire discusses how Jobs to be Done helped rethink marketing at SparkToro.

Understanding the jobs customers hired SparkToro to do has impacted marketing and product strategy, from prioritizing features, positioning and all the way through the marketing stack.

Transcript

Claire Suellentrop
For anyone I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting here yet, I do see some familiar faces and some folks that have not met.

[Hi, Lucy. On my screen, you’re like right under my little window. So this is great feels like we’re sitting by each other.]

I am the co founder and CEO of forget the funnel, which is a boutique, growth consulting firm for SaaS companies. I’m also a previous speaker at Business of Software, I had the terrifying privilege of speaking about jobs to be done and messaging with Bob in the audience back in 2017, or 18. It was a momentous occasion, my slides broke, Bob like ran onto the stage to fix them. For me, it was a very memorable time. So that’s how I was lucky enough to get to meet Bob, and my business partner Gia and I both have long backgrounds in SaaS marketing, building and scaling, SaaS marketing teams. And so now we help scaling SaaS companies go from a lot of kind of piecemeal marketing tactics to really like putting a system for marketing in place and scaling up your growth engine marketing machine.

We have also taught a number of fellow consultants or freelancers, our process. Lucy, who is actually on this call, has gone through our certification programme, and is a kick ass growth consultant herself. Oh my gosh, you watch the one this morning. That’s amazing!

The discussion that Rand and I were going to have was going to be just kind of an open conversation on the story of he and his co founder Casey reaching out to Forget the Funnel for growth support for their product SparkToro. Rand is much more famous than I am. So I’m sure if everyone he already knows SparkToro is like an audience research or an audience intelligence tool. So it helps you understand where does your target audience go to, what sources of influence basically, do they lean on? Who do they listen to on social? What podcasts do they like? What YouTube channels do they follow? What publications do they read?

So Spark Toro went from beta to a public launch at the end of 2019 into 2020. So that was our first opportunity to get to work with them was to support them in their their go to market or original plan. But they have since reengaged with us, and we’ve gotten to help them kind of get to the next level of growth, using our framework, which is based heavily on jobs to be done a couple of times now. So like Lucy, for example, has been a part of that process. We’ve brought in other folks to help and learn. And it’s been a really interesting ride. I think we’ve I think we’ve worked with SparkToro, three or four times now, each time reevaluating what’s going on with their ideal customers. So relearning what’s the current like most pressing or biggest opportunity job to be done? Are they currently, you know, really doing everything they can to support those customers with that job to be done? Or are there other opportunities to do that better, and therefore grow the business?

So that’s been really interesting. I’m happy to kind of go through it chronologically or just take questions. But some notable I would say some notable highlights would be last fall, there was a particular job that we uncovered. Well, there were two actually at that time, when we dug in and learned about SparkToros customers at that point; their customers kind of broke into two segments, people who were well versed in audience research, so more established or, like more experienced marketers, who were very used to having to go figure out where to resonate with people. And then those who were kind of doing it for the first time. So maybe someone who’s founding their first company, and they’re DIY in it, or someone who’s newer in their marketing career and kind of getting their feet wet. So there were these two different jobs to be done.

One was helped me figure out how to even how do I audience research, how do I how do I build a marketing plan?

And then there was another job that we nicknamed the efficiency seekers, which was those more experienced customers who were already sold on the value that SparkToro provides, which is this information on your audience. And what they were really hiring product for was the speed instead of having to spend hours you know Googling around or manually looking for influential people, their audience follows on social media, Spark Toro could give them that audience data in a matter of minutes.

So we can take this in a couple of different ways. Like I am happy to chat through what our process is and how we help spark Toro. I can recruit my friend Lucy here and Lucy can walk through with me because she has also gone through this process of using jobs to be done for growth. I’m trying to think of what the most engaging format might be

Mark Littlewood
So we’ve talked a little bit about what SparkToro does, let’s just dig into the approach that you kind of took with kind of, because it’s no great secret, but I can’t really talk for Rand, but I think you know, there was a point where the day he was doing this thing, it was about finding that abusers influencers, helping people find them, it’s a really, really good product, but he was struggling to kind of get the momentum and the revenue for the core product up. So why don’t we talk a little bit about how you first started, what were your kind of first impressions when you started working on the on the product? What were you there to do?

Claire Suellentrop
All right. Wonderful. Thanks for helping frame this. That gave me an idea, which is I’ve actually pulled up on my screen if it’s okay, if I share in a moment, I’ve actually pulled up the kind of strategy document that we put together to help Spark Toro understand their customers job to be done and figure out what to do next. So we can walk through that kind of as the chronological

1. Why did we work together?
2. What did we learn?
3. What was the impact?

Okay, is there a Lo Fi PDF appearing for everyone? Fabulous. All right. So when we initially note let me back up, not the first time we work together, which was to help bring SparkToro to market. But in a more recent, in a more recent iteration of working together, this would have been fall of last year. Spark Toro reached out because to the point you raised Mark they were getting because of the fact that a Rand is very much, you know, an experienced marketer and B has his own following. The company was seeing plenty of healthy website traffic, plenty of signups to the product, but free to pay conversion rates weren’t going as well as they wanted. Right. So they had a lot of people coming in performing an initial search for Hey, what influencers does my audience care about? What podcast does my audience listen to. And they wouldn’t get past maybe one or two searches, and then they would bounce again. And so the goal in initially working together last fall was to create a more engaging onboarding experience that would help more of those free users see the value more quickly. Ideally, if we could reengage folks who tried the product, and it didn’t stick, that would be great, too. And then the second two bullets, there were gravy, if there was opportunity to improve, you know, pricing, that’d be amazing if there was an improved opportunity to increase retention. Amazing. So these were really where we were focused. But overall, our bet was if we can improve onboarding, all of these other elements will improve as well. So that’s what we started with.

And Lucy, by the way, we did walk through this process with a cohort of, again, fellow freelancers and consultants, and Lucy was among those at one point. So if you if I miss any gold nuggets, definitely feel welcome to come off mute and chime in.

So with that said, first step, obviously, running the research. So I know that this is a bit blasphemous. But in addition to interviews, we do Lean on surveys, not because they get to the deep core of a customer’s job to be done. But oftentimes, from a messaging perspective, they still can give you some gold. Very controversial, controversial there. But we ran the research and then from the research and identifying of the jobs to be done, which we’ll go into in a moment. We were able to match what customers were hiring the product for, to the specific features that created that desired outcome for them, which is how we then pulled together a list of opportunities that Spark Toro had to leverage for growth.

I know the text is a bit small, I hope zooming in helps a little bit.

So as mentioned, we ran interviews, we ran surveys. This is just an informative slide from the presentation we shared with Spark Toro walking through obviously what the job’s been on theory is everyone here knows that already spent a whole day of jobs. And as we briefly touched on, kind of when I was rattling this off, I’m I’m going to go, where we landed was that prioritising a growth strategy that attracts those more experienced folks, the people who are used to audience research, they’ve been doing manual methods before, they really love how quick they can work in Spark Toro, would would be the bigger opportunity, which is always something I kind of want to slow down and pull apart.

So when uncovering your customers job to be done, at least we always see that, you know, at least two, sometimes three or more come to the surface. And there’s different ways of taking action on that knowledge, you can choose to go broad, and try to speak to all the different jobs that your ideal customers hire your product for, which is doable, but very challenging. Or you can focus on one at a time, and kind of knock them down like dominoes. So with Spark Toro, we had the newbie job to be done, which was helped me figure out how to audience research.

And then we had the efficiency seekers job to be done, which is I already know, I know what audience research is helped me speed up my process because I have a boss who’s putting pressure on me, or a client who’s putting pressure on me, I need to get this done. And I need to look good. So because these were more educated customers. And generally, we also found them to be more tech savvy within the product. Our assumption was, if we focus on these customers, or if we focus on attracting more of these customers, then we will get folks who better engage with the product and stick with it longer because they’re, they’re already sold on the value. So this was the focus job to be done that we’ve worked with. What was really frustrating them the struggle they felt that led them to look for something like Spark Toro was that they had previously been spending hours, you know, looking at other search tools. So looking at other marketing tools like Buzzsumo, using things like just a day of spending an afternoon like looking on Twitter for influencers, Googling around for podcasts, a lot of just manual data gathering to figure out how to build a marketing strategy to resonate with their target audience. So at some point, something would happen within, you know, each of their lives where they were like, I don’t have time for this anymore. Typically, we found that it was a client saying, Hey, can we trust these recommendations? Why these podcasts? Like, why should we advertise on these websites? Why this why that? Or it was a boss similarly challenging a strategy that they were bringing forward. And so suddenly, they needed to not only gather the data itself, but also prove the value or prove the legitimacy of what they were what what sources they were recommending they invest in.

And then you can obviously see that desired outcome. So I can quickly impress and gain my stakeholders trust was when they were like, Okay, this thing is working. This thing got me buy in from my boss, this time, or my client, this time, I’m going to keep using this for my future projects as well.

So with that in mind, knowing that that’s the value that Spark Toro provided, we could start thinking through, okay, what are the individual steps a customer with this job and beat on taste, when they’re looking for something like Spark Toro, and of course, what is what I have to see in the product to feel that value more quickly.

So the way that Gia, my co founder, and I do this is by customer experience mapping. So what we do is we essentially pull apart into three big phases, the struggle, the evaluation, and the growth phase. All those little individual steps that your customer takes when they’re looking for your product. The individual, well, we’ll get there in a second, but generally we sum these up as struggle is when you’re like, ‘This sucks. I need a solution.’ and you’re you’re looking at different options, and you haven’t chosen one yet.

Evaluation, typically, especially for a SaaS is when they’re on the website, they’re probably considering whether to sign up for a trial. Maybe they’ve gotten in the trial, and they’re in there for the first time and they’re finding their way around. Usually, evaluation into growth, usually, that’s where the purchase point is, again, especially in SaaS, so typically, we see like a financial metric happening between evaluation and growth.

Growth is when they fully embedded their product into their workflow or their day to day life. And they’re hanging on like, you could not pry your product out of a cold dead hands. That’s ideally what’s going on in the growth phase. Lucy’s she’s laughing because she’s heard me say that phrase like a million times.

So let’s talk through the customer experience map that we put together for Spark Toro’s efficiency seekers, those folks who are like, give me a faster way to build a strategy to attract my target audience that will impress a client or impress my boss. So we landed on a couple of individual milestones within each of those phases. This is, this is terrible resolution, I apologise because it’s just a PDF. If it’s helpful, I can actually go into the tool we use to make this and we can dig into it more deeply later on. But essentially, what we landed on is that there were generally two milestones in that struggle phase problem, which was basically represented by new unique visitors reaching their site, which, if we track that metric would help Spark Toro validate that yes, over time, you are reaching more reaching more and more people with this problem.

Be cool to see the tool, okay. I am more than happy to you know, what, why don’t I find where I have that open, we can just switch screens. And the resolution here should be a lot clearer once I get it up and running.

This, if you’ll bear with me, while I zoom in, it should be easier for us to actually read the text on. Okay, so now we’re way way way zoomed in. And the components of this this customer experience map are that struggle evaluation, and then over off the screen, that growth phase, the individual milestones, and this is important, a KPI at each one that represents your customer getting enough value at that stage to move to the next stage. Again, these are always unique to the company we’re working with and the customers job to be done. We’ll talk more about that in the first value and value realisation milestones. And then under there, this first set of boxes, like up at the I guess you could say it’s the first column, so to speak, are the indirect and the direct actions those ideal customers are taking. So those direct touch points are opportunities Spark Toro has to move more people further along more quickly. This is all pulled from that jobs to be done research. This isn’t a high, you know, this isn’t made up in a conference room. We’re getting all of this from those surveys and interviews. So it’s an it’s as close as you can get to an actual picture of what this search looks like, kind of put on a map and operationalize for a whole company to rally around. Below that are quotes from the research that help us stay essentially aligned with how customers describe the problem and their motivations and desired outcomes. I know there’s a lot on this screen. And I’m kind of you know, I’m too close to it mentally. So is there anything on this screen to be helpful to chat through before I kind of keep rattling on?

Cool. Oh, I saw you come off mute. I’m sorry.

Audience Member
I was just going to say how each of the different horizontals were applied or are applied and what is the difference between the different applications?

Claire Suellentrop
so the difference how they’re applied in other words, like what do you do with this after you’ve got this pretty map? Oh, yeah. Okay. Were you gonna was there? Um, I keep jumping in.

Audience Member
No, no, no, that that’s fine. That’s exactly where I was at.

Mark Littlewood
Okay. And also clear, just before you carry on, I’m getting a lot of messages from people saying this is brilliant. So keep going.

Claire Suellentrop
Very glad. Very glad. And I want to reiterate, this is completely unscripted. So if at any point someone wants to interrupt me throw something into the chat like totally welcome. Ideally, nothing. What did that guy even say? Did he say fu doesn’t matter?

Kirk
Gloss over it; its in the past!

Claire Suellentrop
Yeah. Okay, so yes, let’s get further into what this map is all about. So that to your very good point, Josh, we can talk about ‘okay, what are the implications here? What do we do with this?’

I think the best place to really make that more tangible is not in this struggle phase, but in Spark Toros customers evaluation phase. Because the evaluation phase is really lead the phase that determines you know, how well their onboarding goes, and how well how well they’re doing it onboarding customers now and their opportunities to improve. So I shouldn’t, I should mention that these these highlighted items in this in this top row, which represents what customers are doing highlighted items are things that were that actually weren’t happening that we were recommending, Hey, these are, these are things that you don’t do right now, that would be easy to implement to help out your customers.

So if I were to zoom in here, one second, for some reason, it just zoomed in on the wrong window.

We know that from research. And again, these are people who they’re looking for speed, they don’t have a lot of patience. They might be performing, you know, one or two searches in Spark Toro, and then if they’re not seeing enough value moving on. So they oftentimes would be wondering, like, how long is it going to take me to learn this thing? At the time, Spark Toro would give you as a free user, like testing things out, you would get like five, five free searches. So you know, what, if my searches aren’t working, I don’t want to, I don’t want to go over my searches. How do I do the search? Right? We’re seeing a lot of anxiety, and how long will it take me to learn this from the research? And what if I can’t get value from those free searches I’m getting, and I get locked out of the tool? Those were two major, like anxieties that were preventing people from moving forward in the product.

Once they once they got over those hesitations though, the people who did and they passed into the value realisation phase. Just describe why didn’t try it, nailed it. See, like, that’s amazing. Um, sounds like you are potentially an ideal customer, who has an opportunity to revisit spectro. Because we knew that these were the anxieties, and because we had learned from customers where the moments of value came through, which was they performed a search that gave them insights they didn’t know before. So for example, if I’m searching for my audience, my audience and Spark Toro serves me a list of podcasts I can use to reach them that I’ve never heard of moments like that, for for trial users were creating this like, oh, oh, sh*t, there’s like really good intel in here that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.

So we knew that getting a search right was a huge moment of value. And then we also knew that understanding how to act on that data was a second moment of value. And we learned from the research that a lot of people took that action of like sorting their data to make sense of it by creating a list. So the list feature in Spark Toro, you can use in many, many ways, but you might want to save a list of podcasts that you want to do guest appearances on, or a series of YouTube channels you want to run ads against. Maybe you have a list of influencers you want to reach out to whatever it might be, we we noticed that successful searches plus creation of a list typically indicated that a customer had kind of gotten it like it had clicked for them. And so people who made it to that first value stage, we defined as activated and that KPI was actually a combination of actions that the users took that they had run five searches and created one list. So by defining that KPI and to your question, Josh, of like, what do you do with this thing?

Once we have that customer value defined KPI, we can then look at the product and say, Okay, what are all the things that might prevent someone from successfully performing these five searches and creating this list? How do we make that way easier for customers? How do we hide all the other functionality that’s going to overwhelm them and really bring these things front and centre? And there were a lot of suggestions that were proposed for that. Again, doing a product tour walk through like a short video of ran showing like hey, I’m Rand, here’s how to do a search. Here’s how to make a list. Spark Toro implemented a, like a Getting Started checklist that kind of live in the product and help people know how to take you know step number one, step number two step number three, to get to creation of a list. Previously, Spark Toro had no onboarding email sequence apart from like a welcome email they were a bit concerned about being marketers naturally Rand and his co founder Casey were very sensitive about bombarding their users with too much communication. But they realised we’re not even teaching people that lists exist as a feature like we have obviously some opportunity to better communicate here.

So under Standing these these columns, the steps that people go through, and then defining them their KPIs based on when the customer feels value is what then helps you look at your product experience and say, Okay, now I understand all the things that are broken, or that are preventing my customer from moving through this map more efficiently, and also getting more more volume, like a higher volume of people to move through it. I can talk more about the particular changes that are made that were made to the experience or can keep going through the map. Let me see, I’m just gonna check the chat and see if I’ve missed anything. Okay, no, nothing yet. I will pause though, any, any questions to kind of help direct the conversation from here? Because I could just keep rambling all day if I’m not careful.

Okay. In that case, I’m going to keep rolling. But again, anyone is welcome to interrupt me at any time. So, getting on from activated to value realisation. So we describe first value. We often like in first value to like the the term aha moment, it’s when the person first realises like, I think we get this different tools and approaches. Okay, cool. So we can keep going here on different tools and approaches. When we go for it, we typically define first value as that aha moment, and then value realisation is that moment when your customer hasn’t just gotten to a Ha, but like, they’ve checked all the rest of your specs, so to speak, they’re doing their due diligence, and they’re like, Okay, it had my first number one most needed thing, does it have my second needed thing? Does it have my third do? What do I really want to like, take out my credit card and pay for this. So again, we defined value realisation for Spark Toro as using specific features that we had learned from the research were valuable to customers. And then continued value and growth is the same process.

Oops. Let me momentarily check in on what else from the actual presentation was Spark Toro might be helpful to cover here. The key performance indicators already chatted about those

Mark Littlewood
Whats was the sort of end result? What was the outcome of this set of sessions? Was it a series of ideas, hypotheses, experiments, recommendations? What was the?

Claire Suellentrop
Yes. So there were a number of recommendations that were made. And there were a couple that the team did actually go ahead and implement. Naturally, you can only do

Mark Littlewood
so I’m more interested in the ones they then push back on. Why did they push things?

Claire Suellentrop
You know, it’s not so much pushback as bandwidth.

Mark Littlewood
So prioritisation?

Claire Suellentrop
Exactly. So I’m back in that slide deck that we presented. Number one, there was a recommendation that they start speaking on their website and in their product about the ability to gather all of this intelligence very quickly, no more spending hours, you know, Googling around. So

updates to the messaging were a big piece of this,

adding a an email onboarding series that helps people understand how to conduct a good search that would yield valuable results.

And then how to save those results to a list was another recommendation that they did implement.

Here’s a mock up of that kind of in-app checklist option. So right here, again, it doesn’t look exactly like this in real life. But this would cue you as a new user to kind of click through and it would, it would actually show you step by step, how to understand the product and how to get to that point of list creation. Those were the those were the three things that the team did implement new messaging, email, onboarding, and the setup of this inept checklist that, again, I feel like it’s important to reiterate, didn’t just give people hey, here’s an overview of the product, but really, really zoomed in on those specific features that helped them see the value based on what was learned from the research, big difference between general walkthrough versus here’s the first thing you do to like to bet that this product will work for you.

The result of that, and it’s not going to show up in this deck because this is the strategy deck itself. But when we checked in with the team about I want to say it was about three months later, they had seen a doubling of their free to paid conversions. And it wasn’t As if they were at a tiny, you know, they went from 1% to 2%. I don’t have the numbers in front of me now. But it was a more significant doubling than that. And that has stayed consistent since then. So it wasn’t just, you know, kind of an anomaly. It stayed consistent. And since the running of this work together, we’ve actually, we, I should say they Spark Toro has included this, this workflow of

• do the research,
• understand the jobs to be done,
• map that back to wherever their customer journey is weakest,
• and implement changes there.

They’ve incorporated that process into, like every product development cycle they go through, so that they can make sure they’re making decisions based on their ideal customers job to be done, and not only on gut feeling alone. Again, I don’t have that on a fancy screen. I’m wondering if let’s see, oh, these are even more suggestions. Discussions on pricing. To the point about the limited searches earlier, there was a big discussion around limited search searches actually turning people off from using the product versus getting in and running searches until they got something of value. So there was a, there was a time recommended. And even with just three of lots of recommendations, there was significant uptick in that free to pay rate. Talk about customer funnels, you’ve even spoke to product interested in the process you use to decide a milestone is a milestone. Oh, really good question.

I’m sorry that I just saw that. How do you decide what what milestone is a milestone?

Audience Member
that like, sometimes it’s just one, I think it’s really under misunderstood. So I’m interested in how you like, decide that and have the status this many years 10 was fine.

Claire Suellentrop
So a lot of it has to do with the complexity of the product and the complexity of the buyer. Right. So if I’m considering, like, I’m trying to think of a really, really simple app, like a consumer type app. Okay, recently, I bought a desk treadmill, and there’s an app attached to the desk treadmill, so that, you know, while I’m here, like from my phone, I can turn it on the success in that is like I downloaded it, when I tap it, the treadmill turns on, done, like a pretty, pretty simple experience of getting success there. Obviously, if the treadmill broke, then it’s a different story. But that’s like the most, that’s probably one of the shortest customer experience maps I can think of, from the evaluation stage and onward.

Total opposite end of the spectrum is you’re selling into an enterprise organisation. And you have a really complex product. And you’ve got, you know, the the champion, the person who wants to purchase and then they have a CFO, they have to convince, and they have their boss they have to convince, and they have to train their team, that type of product is gonna have a lot more stages in it. Because there’s so many more checkpoints before they can make the purchase and feel the value. So I know that that’s not a direct answer. And I can, I can try to be a bit more tangible, or give more examples. But hopefully that kind of paints a picture of like the two ends of the spectrum.

Just one on questions. How many people did you talk to? How’d you manage to talk? Oh, and did you manage to talk to people who fell from the funnel? Great question.

So how many people we talked to I would, because this was a good like six to nine months ago, I don’t recall, I want to say it was several dozen. I would have to like go back into our documents and really pull that apart to give you a concrete answer. Let’s safely say around 20. I can see that it was at least that. And in terms of talking to people who fell from the funnel and didn’t get all the way through. We reserve talking with people who aren’t getting value for other types of projects. So when we’re working with a company that doesn’t have all of these like bespoke milestones in place, they don’t have a customer experience map. They don’t really understand their customers job to be done from the get go. We start by focusing only on customers who are highly engaged, and they are happily paying like they didn’t sign up and forget. And they’re just paying you because they don’t check their credit card bill. They’re saying they they’re using you all the time. The reason being those are the people that we want to clone, right like we want to go get more of those people. And so we did not focus in this project on people who didn’t who didn’t make it through. Even though that is warranted, especially like once this map is in place. You know if we continue if Spark Toro continues to have people who don’t convert which will always be the case, that’s a really good opportunity to then send an exit survey or do an exit interview and understand from those people. Hey, what about this still isn’t working for you? I hope that’s helpful.

What else we got?

Mark Littlewood
Unless there’s any other new ones? Yeah, I mean, it’s like, just flies by is when you make it up as you go along, doesn’t it?

You sort of said that you were doing some questionnaire stuff, as well as actually interviewing. What’s your sort of take on jobs to be done and data and how you can use data to infer things from a job? I was at Bob’s to be done. But that was because Bob’s right in my eyeline and he started laughing when I said this, but you know, interviews are really critical, what happens when you start using data?

Claire Suellentrop
What happens when you start using data? What kinds of data are you referring to? Like, like survey data? Or?

Mark Littlewood
I guess that could be partly survey data? Or are you using any sort of analytical or analytics data? That could be website use searches? Are you using that to infer or is that outside the scope of

Claire Suellentrop
Gods going wild? So in situations like this one, we typically use that as benchmark points. So in terms of let’s say, like website analytics, if we if we have access to a company’s, you know, Google Analytics, for example, and we can have an understanding right now of, you know, what’s the page value of their homepage? How many people go from homepage to trial or homepage to pricing or something versus how many disappear? That’s a helpful starting point to then understand, when we update the messaging to resonate with people who have this job to be done? How much better? Are we converting them? Or, or not? Right. So that’s it. That’s one way of using it. Um, another thing that we’ll do in cases where it makes sense is, while we are learning from customers, will also run a website survey for a short period of time that is designed to help us understand when someone’s on the site and deciding to take action, like when they are in evaluation mode themselves. What are they thinking? And are they does does their expectation of the site match with what the product actually does? Where are we is the company somewhere totally off base in who they’re attracting to the website or how they’re describing the product? That’s another way we can use survey data to understand like, where the opportunities are. Yeah, this could go on. I mean, this is endless.

Bob Moesta
So we talked about the Autobooks earlier around the sales process and how they change the sales process. But Claire was actually very involved in helping with the small business part of it. So it’s a two sided market, like I went and helped them with kind of how to sell to the banks. But Claire, and Chris basically went off and uncovered the jobs of the struggling moments of small business to use the app, why they would actually do billing through it. And then Claire, Claire did some amazing things around long form email that that most people would say, doesn’t work. But through prototyping, and seeing, it just had tremendous, you know, effect to helping not only, you know, helping to kind of help small businesses not only use it in and get on board, but then how to remind them that that was there, instead of having to use PayPal. And the crazy part is if you look at deposits from small businesses, the same set of small businesses, six months before and six months after the deposits had almost grown 10x at the bank. So it’s just this notion of how did you know Claire was able to translate those jobs into kind of, look, here’s what you’re worried about. Let me show you the next step. Let me show you the next step. But it was kind of amazing. There’s a there’s a great podcast on jobs, media and radio. I’ll put it in the chat. But that I think that’s that’s another place where I just think that there’s you know, it’s the it’s the aspect of once you have the jobs, what can you do with it, and that’s why I think it’s really powerful.

Claire Suellentrop
Yeah, there’s, um, and thank you for going and finding the link Bob, and it was all BoS credit that Bob introduced me to Chris and we got to work on that together. But yeah, the the applications of the framework are endless, whether it’s driving more awareness of the product or a product to improving the sales cycle to improving onboarding, like with Spark Toro, like with audiobooks all the way through to, you know, and this is a bit of a dud, but like new innovation and new product opportunities, oftentimes, companies will will reach out to us because they have a marketing problem. And then we’ll run the research and do that customer experience mapping and then they’ll realise, whoa, there’s so many other ways that we can use this intel to increase not only acquisition, but also engagement and long term adoption. Gia and I are working on a book that breaks our framework down and Autobooks is like is Chapter Three basically. I just sent it to Chris like a couple days ago.

Claire Suellentrop

co-Founder & COO, Forget the Funnel

Claire has spent 10 years helping SaaS companies go from startup to scale-up by turning customer insights to fuel revenue-generating marketing & growth programs. 

She’s worked with bootstrapped founders, VC and PE backed teams and global corporate teams including Wistia, MeetEdgar, Death to the Stock Photo and many other fun SaaS companies. She’s passionate about demonstrating the impact of adopting a customer-led approach to business growth.

Before co-founding Forget the Funnel, Claire was Director of Marketing and #2 employee at Calendly.

Check out other talks by Claire here.

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