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What if the key to growing your business isn’t doing more, but listening more? Georgiana Laudi, co-author of Forget the Funnel, explains how customer-led growth flips the script on traditional marketing by using real customer insight to guide strategy, improve onboarding, and uncover the moments that truly move the needle.
Why Your Growth Strategy Is Backwards (And How to Fix It)
Most of us approach growth like we’re throwing darts blindfolded. We test button colors, rewrite headlines, and launch campaigns based on what we think customers want. Meanwhile, the people who already love our products are sitting right there, practically bursting with insights that could transform our businesses overnight.
That’s the core message I took away from my conversation with Georgiana Laudi, co-author of Forget the Funnel and the creator of the Customer-Led Growth framework. And honestly? It’s one of those “why didn’t I think of that” moments that makes you want to immediately audit everything you’re doing.
The Problem with “Test Everything” Culture
Here’s some contrarian thinking for you: the current obsession with testing everything is actually holding us back.
I know, I know. Testing is supposed to be the holy grail of modern marketing. But here’s what Georgiana pointed out—most tests are optimizing for the wrong metrics. You might boost your landing page conversion rate by 15%, but are those new signups actually turning into high-value, long-term customers? Or are you just getting better at attracting people who’ll churn in 30 days?
“A lot of experimentation is very shortsighted,” Georgiana explained. “You might move the needle on a conversion rate on a landing page, but are those leads going to turn into high lifetime value customers or not?”
This hits different when you think about it. We’re spending weeks perfecting campaigns that bring in the wrong people, while ignoring the goldmine of insights from the right people who are already paying us.
Your Best Customers Are Your Growth Crystal Ball
So who exactly should you be learning from? Georgiana breaks it down into three criteria that are brilliantly simple:
- Happily paying customers (obviously)
- Getting recurring value from your solution
- Recent enough purchases that they remember life before you
That third point is crucial and something most of us completely miss. You want customers who can viscerally remember how much it sucked to have the problem you now solve for them. Their pain is fresh, their relief is real, and their insights are pure gold.
Think about it—someone who signed up three years ago probably can’t tell you exactly what triggered their search for a solution. But someone who signed up three months ago? They can walk you through their entire journey, including all the moments where they almost gave up or chose a competitor.
The “Jobs to Be Done” Revelation
Here’s where things get interesting. When you talk to these recent, happy customers, you’ll discover something that might surprise you: they’re hiring your product to do completely different jobs.
Georgiana typically sees companies discover 3-5 distinct “jobs to be done” that customers hire their solution for. And here’s the kicker—most businesses try to serve all of them equally, which is exactly why their messaging feels generic and their growth stalls.
“If you continue to try to serve all of those customer jobs, you are going to continue the same old patterns that you’re in right now where it’s not resonating quite enough,” she said.
The solution? Pick one job and go deep. Really deep. This isn’t about abandoning other customer segments forever—it’s about choosing focus over trying to be everything to everyone.
The Onboarding Money Leak
Want to know where most companies are hemorrhaging potential revenue? It’s not in their acquisition funnel—it’s in onboarding.
Think about this logically: you’re spending all this money and effort getting people to try your product, and then you’re losing them in the first few days because your onboarding doesn’t actually help them reach those critical “aha” moments.
Georgiana’s framework focuses heavily on getting customers to what she calls “first value” and “value realization” milestones. For SaaS companies especially, if someone isn’t experiencing real value within their trial period, you’ve basically just paid for an expensive email address.
“If you offer a 14-day trial, your goal probably within the first couple of hours or days is to help that customer reach those critical moments of value,” she explained. “So that when their trial ends, there’s no debate about whether or not they’re putting their credit card down.”
The One Question That Changes Everything
If you’re thinking this all sounds great but overwhelming, Georgiana has a brilliantly simple starting point. Add one question to your primary website CTA (the one where people take action, not just download a lead magnet):
“What was going on in your world that led you to seek out something like this today?”
That’s it. Open text field. Let the responses pile up in a spreadsheet. After a few weeks, you’ll start seeing patterns that reveal exactly what job your customers are really hiring you to do.
This isn’t just data collection—it’s strategic intelligence gathering. You’re essentially asking people to tell you their story right at the moment when they’re most motivated to engage with you.
Why This Actually Works (And Why We Resist It)
The beautiful thing about customer-led growth is that it’s the opposite of guessing. Instead of throwing spaghetti at the wall, you’re making decisions based on validated insights from people who have already voted with their wallets.
But here’s why so many of us resist it: it requires slowing down. In a world that rewards speed and “growth hacking,” taking time to understand customers feels counterintuitive. We’d rather launch ten experiments than have ten conversations.
Georgiana puts it perfectly: “You’re wasting time and money by not doing this.” If you’re questioning your positioning, if your marketing isn’t resonating like it used to, if your close rates are declining—stop spending money on more campaigns. You’re filling a leaky bucket.
Making the Switch
The shift to customer-led growth isn’t about abandoning everything you know about marketing. It’s about grounding your marketing in reality instead of assumptions.
Start with that one question on your website. Then, when you’re ready to go deeper, have actual conversations with 10-12 recent customers. Follow the documentary approach—understand their full journey from problem recognition to becoming a raving fan.
What you’ll discover will probably frustrate you initially (you’ll see all the ways you’re making things harder for customers), but it’ll also energize you. Because suddenly, instead of guessing what might work, you’ll know what does work.
Your Next Steps
Here’s what I want you to do this week:
- Add the question: Modify your primary CTA to ask what led someone to seek out your solution today
- Identify recent champions: Make a list of customers who signed up in the last 3-6 months and are clearly getting value
- Start one conversation: Reach out to just one person from that list and ask if they’d spend 20 minutes sharing their journey with you
That’s it. Don’t overthink it. Don’t wait for the perfect research plan. Just start listening.
Because here’s the thing about being an agent of change—real change happens when you stop assuming you know what customers want and start asking them. The answers might surprise you, and they might just transform your business.
Customer-Led Growth Strategy Tips Episode Transcript
Rich: My next guest is a strategic advisor, author, and keynote speaker. With a passion for helping the tech industry turn customer value into revenue generating outcomes, she developed the Customer-led Growth framework and co-authored the bestselling book, Forget the Funnel. She works with high growth B2B SaaS like Bitly, Sprout Social Appcues, dbt Labs, EverCommerce, and more.
Today we’re going to dive into what customer-led growth can mean to your bottom line with Georgiana Laudi, or as her friends and podcast host call her, Gia. Gia, welcome to the podcast.
Georgiana: Thanks for having me, Rich.
Rich: Alright, so how does one find themselves focusing on customer-led growth strategies as their specialty?
Georgiana: Oh, as in how did I get here? As opposed to people who might need customer led growth.
Rich: Yes. I thought I was being clever, but I was just being confusing.
Georgiana: I get it. I get it. I’m there. Background mostly in marketing. Longest amount of time spent on the discipline of marketing, studied communications in university, worked as part of the family business for a while about a decade, about 20 years ago and really got into online marketing and digital marketing. So that was my background.
I was doing conversion rate optimization before it was really a thing, social media marketing, as it was just getting off the ground. But I really fell in love with digital marketing, and then I discovered Twitter, back when Twitter was cool.
And this was back in 2008, 2009, and discovered a local community, a local tech community, and fell in love with tech, fell in love with software as a service businesses and that business model. Particularly because the skillset that marketers bring to that business model is wildly advantageous because recurring revenue businesses depend and live and die based on their ability to build long-term relationships with their customers. And so I was like, Eureka, I found my people.
And so I dove into software as a service and tech businesses at around 2010-ish in, and I’ve never looked back. And so that marriage of tech and marketing, and now what people are finally starting to realize is product marketing and that discipline is finally making its way into the broader sort of understanding. I really just love it. And so that’s how I got here.
And customer-led growth is really the framework that we developed to help teams make better decisions. So Forget the Funnel started as a workshop series dedicated to in-house folks working inside of tech companies, largely in customer facing rules. And that’s a whole other conversation. But one of the things that we have found that is most effective for helping teams make better decisions, get more buy-in with stakeholders, have a bigger influence just on driving revenue, is really understanding customers and using customers as the sort of anchor for making better strategic decisions. And so that was where the framework came from, and that’s what we’ve been doing ever since.
Rich: Nice. So for those people who may not be as familiar with the term, how do you define “customer-led growth”?
Georgiana: Yeah, it’s definitely not a term that has… it’s sort of like product marketing was 10 years ago, where there’s a lot of different interpretations to it, and really the name is not important. But what is important is basically using and relying on customer insight to help you make better decisions. You don’t have to guess. So the framework is really based on this get inside your best customer’s heads, map and measure their experience, and then leverage that understanding of customers and operationalized view of their experience to make better decisions and identify opportunities for growth.
And that’s a process that we do with the companies that we work with. It’s also the process that we covered and the framework that we covered in our book. It’s really just a step-by-step sort of blueprint for how to help your team make better, more informed decisions, and just not have to rely on spaghetti at the wall tactics like so many people do.
Rich: So this is always something that I find is a challenge. How do you decide who your best customers are? Does that depend based on the businesses that you’re working with, or is there an algorithm that would work for every single business regardless of their industry, size, et cetera?
Georgiana: Yeah, this is a really good question. It depends, of course. Like all good things, it depends. What I would say is the most straightforward way to think about your best customers and those that you have at your disposal to learn from is who are the folks who, this obviously depends on if you were in a pre-revenue or pre-launch situation versus post-launch. So if you have happily paying customers, they’re the subset of your happily paying customers that are getting a recurring sort of value from your offer. If you’re not a software as a service business or you don’t have a recurring revenue model, they would be the customers that come back all the time, right? They’re the customers that are extremely happy and the customers that you would want more of, that you would want to clone kind of thing.
The other thing, the other criteria to keep in mind when learning from customers is recency is wildly important. And this is something that actually a lot of folks miss out on is identifying the folks that are happy with your offering, have received some sort of recurring value and are engaged, but that also signed up recently enough ago, or purchased from you recently enough ago that they remember what life was like before.
And this is really important because I think this is a piece that a lot of people miss, is they think about the customer experience as something that happens at signup, but actually it happens at struggle. Your experience, your customer’s experience starts when they first experience the need for, and the struggle experiencing that need, for your solution. And so really understanding that problem space is wildly valuable, and I think a lot of people skip out on that.
So again, to think about the subset of customers to learn from, obviously happily paying, they’ve made trade-offs in order to choose you. They fired other solutions in order to hire yours, but they also made that decision recently enough ago that they viscerally remember how much it sucked to have the problem that you now help them solve. So that’s really important too, but.
Obviously, the answer to this question is quite a bit wider if you are talking about a company that wants to pivot into a new market or may not have happily paying customers yet, or pre-launch or something like that. But brass tacks, that’s how I would answer that.
Rich: Let’s say that we’re ready to start doing some of this customer-led focus. Can you walk me through the process of how that research is done? Is it a survey that we send out? Are we having one-on-one conversations? Are we doing focus groups? And I know marketing it depends, but to take this on, does it depend on the type of business and the volume of customers that you see?
Georgiana: Yeah, so one thing that I think we need to remember here is the goals associated with doing this work at all. And that’s really important when deciding who you want to learn from. It’s really important in deciding what research methods are you going to employ here. It depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.
So a lot of the companies that reach out to us, they’re in one of sort of three situations. One is we know we don’t know enough about our customers to make good decisions about how to grow. So they know they’ve got this knowledge gap.
So the second situation is something’s broken, our onboarding is broken, or our messaging or positioning is off. Or we need to move into a new market where we’re changing, pivoting on our target market.
And then the third reason, and so you can imagine how that would affect research, right? And what you’d want to learn. And then the third reason is, my team needs a more sort of systematic way to think about how to grow. And it’s time for us to grow up. And we know what got us here isn’t going to get us there. And we need an approach, we need to be able to take an approach as a team that gives us a system to work, with and a system within which to make better decisions as a group of individuals trying to make better decisions.
So again, you can imagine how that might impact things. So goals, your goals in even conducting this research, you’ve got to start there. And that’s also going to do a lot, too, for buy-in across the organization, because research is the type of thing that can often get stalled out because people have had bad experiences with research projects that have lasted months and led to more questions than answers. And there’s been a lot of crappy research done over the years and a lot of people have had bad experiences with that. So that’s another thing to take into account as well.
So if you were a leader, like a founder or an entrepreneur, you’re the leader at that business, then you obviously have a lot more leeway with the type of research that you run. Versus if you are somebody in-house, you may have to take baby steps and introduce research in kind of smaller iterative ways to get a little bit of internal buy-in to then take some bigger steps.
With that out of the way, then the other thing that I would say is yes, it depends on how many people we have to learn from. So if you are in a situation like Bitly is a great example. So Bitly is the type of, I think they’ve got 6 million users, right? Really broad base of customers. And in all kinds of different flavors of customers, Fortune 500, solo operators, even down to B2C case scenarios. In that situation, you would start with broad style research, like a survey.
Thankfully because of AI, surveys are actually a lot richer in terms of what you can learn at scale than they used to be. So previously where you might have run a quant survey, which I would never recommend, you’d run a qualitative survey where you’d have open text fields, you’d ask maybe five or six questions, they’d be all open text so that you can capture really great voice of customer. At a certain point you end up with diminishing returns when you’re the one interpreting those responses, right? Because there’s a human being trying to understand all of those open text sort of responses.
So typically you’d cap out at about 25 or 50 responses before you start to see enough patterns, and the human ends up not adding any more value in their interpretation that it’s completely blown outta the water now. You can now either leverage AI for interpreting those survey responses or for running the survey. So again, if you’re in a situation where you’ve got a lot of broad base customers to learn from, I would definitely recommend starting with something like AI moderated interviews or qualitative surveys.
And then from there you can then organize what you learn from customers into groups of either meaningful segments or what they hired your product or service to or solution to solve for them. And then you can go a level deeper where I would really recommend actually getting on calls and running human interviews with about a dozen or so. And obviously, if you’re in a situation where you don’t have a few thousand or a few hundred thousand customers to learn from, if you’re under a couple of hundred, then I would just go directly to those interviews and run. Our favorite research methodology is really to run a jobs to be done interview, to understand what problems were customers trying to solve when they sought you out and chose you over everything else.
Rich: I’m thinking about our agency, and we may only have 30 to 50 projects or campaigns or clients that we’re running during the course of the year. I don’t know that sending out a survey is even going to get us the results we want. But having a one-on-one conversation with an owner or a marketer taking into consideration that recency that you mentioned, I might be able to glean some ideas and then just hopefully be able to extrapolate that into a direction.
Georgiana: Totally. And I would say the important thing there if you do need to go that direction, the thing to keep in mind is it’s really important that you speak to the person. And I recognize that this is a little bit different across organizations that have multiple buyers. But at the start, you’re going to want to talk to that person who experienced the problem that you help solve, was dealing with the old way, and also was the main sort of champion in the purchase decision.
Now obviously, you might be in a situation where you sell into enterprise and there’s multiple buyers, and that’s obviously very important to take into account. But start with those champions as opposed to just anybody inside of an account. It’s really important who you choose.
Rich: So some people are probably listening who are in the midst of running a small business or a medium sized business, and they may just feel like they do not have the time or the budget to do this type of research. What advice would you give somebody who does have limited time, who does not really have a budget set aside for research?
Georgiana: Yeah. So this is everyone, right? Every small, no small business has a budget set aside for research. I have yet to meet one, anyway. Larger organizations know what I would say in that situation is you’re wasting a lot of time not doing this. So this is the excuse that I both love to respond to and hate to respond to.
Because if you are questioning even at all, whether or not you need to make a change in your positioning, messaging, if your marketing is not resonating as much as it used to, if your close rate is starting to wane a little bit, or if you’re a software company and you’ve changed your offering to the point where you believe the value that you provide in the market has shifted, do not pass go. Do not spend one cent more on marketing. Because you were filling a leaky bucket.
And the tired analogy is very much true. You are going to make so much more informed decisions. Your experiments will be more effective, more fruitful, if you are rooting your activities in stuff that you know actually works and that is validated. You don’t need to throw spaghetti at the wall. There’s a better way to do it, and it’s going to expedite your decision making, and it’s going to expedite your ability to make a difference and resonate, and have more effective, overall marketing messaging, customer experiences that you’re building. You’re wasting time and money by not doing this.
Rich: Alright. I believe you. I’m all in. I’ve sent out my surveys.
Georgiana: I know, it’s the vitamin that nobody wants to take. But it’s also a painkiller. It can solve a lot of problems.
Rich: That’s a better way to look at it. Not a vitamin, but a painkiller.
Georgiana: Yeah.
Rich: Okay, so I’ve done my research. I’ve sent out my surveys. Maybe I’ve run them through AI for sentiment analysis, or I’ve gotten on a Zoom call with a handful of representative best clients, and I’ve done the interviews. What do I do now? What’s my next step?
Georgiana: So if you have run those conversations well, you followed a general narrative in those conversations. And by the way, I say ‘conversations’, but that could be your qualitative surveys or your AI moderated surveys or interviews. You have hopefully followed a series of questions that gets to the heart of what led somebody to need a solution like yours, why they chose yours over all of the other solutions. What was it that convinced them to choose you over all of the other solutions? What are they able to do now that they weren’t able to do before?
As you might be picking up on, this is like having a documentary-like understanding of your customer’s experience from, again, being out in the world, experiencing the problem that you solve, all the way through to singing your praises and becoming a lifer customer. I often describe as like the, you’d have to pry your solution out of their cold, dead hands kind of customers, right? You understand that customer’s life now at these individual levels from beginning to end because you’ve run research, hopefully through the lens of jobs to be done. And once you’ve run, let’s say you’ve run 10 conversations where you got that documentary-like understanding of all of their experiences, you’re going to, even as you get into your third, fourth, fifth conversation, you’re going to start to hear the same things again. And that’s a really good sign.
By the time you get to 10-12, there’s going to be some real patterns that emerge. And what you’re going to realize is that there are generally about three to five different, and I’m air quoting here like “jobs to be done”, that your customers hire your solution to solve for them. They’re not all going to be the same. You’re going to notice these groupings are going to emerge either because of the circumstances that someone was in or motivations. And you are going to need to make a decision.
At this point, once you identify these three to five jobs to be done… And by the way, I recognize I’m talking in terms that people are like, what? But this is all well documented. There’s material online if you feel like this is something that might work for you, there’s lots of material including our book on how to do this. But you’re basically going to need to make a decision. Because if you continue to try to serve all of those customer jobs, you are going to continue the same old patterns that you’re in right now where it’s not resonating quite enough.
And I think that, especially now as marketing is getting louder, competition is getting more fierce, markets are getting more and more saturated, the genuine moat that a lot of businesses have will be, and I call it ‘messaging’, but really what I mean by that is genuine customer understanding and contextual understanding that can be repeated back to your customer through really powerful messaging. And you can’t do that unless you start to think about your customers in a more narrowed way.
And it might be you just choose not to focus on one or two of your customer jobs that you identified in this process, and you zoom into just one. That would be ideal if you’re zooming into just one, because then you can really cut deep and really have an impact with that group of customers. You might be in a situation, some of the teams that we work with want to continue to address two, that’s totally fine. But I would absolutely recommend segmenting. There are all kinds of ways to do that. I recorded a podcast episode actually on how to think about segmentation, either in your marketing, on your website, in your onboarding. But that’s really what I would say is you have to choose one of these customer jobs.
And then your next step in the process is basically understanding their end-to-end experience and doing kind of the secret shopper thing. So it’s advantageous to have somebody outside of the building, so to speak, do this process. Go through this end-to-end experience and document the process, but wearing the hats or the shoes or the glasses or whatever of this customer with this jobs to be done. Go through your customer experience, look at your marketing, look at your website. Go through your onboarding. Look at those materials. Look at your product, or whatever experience you’ve provided, and really look at it through the lens of customers with that job to be done. And you are going to identify all kinds of opportunities to improve. You’re going to see all the ways that you’re dropping the ball, all the ways that you’re making things harder for your customer.
We talk about this as the customer experience mapping process, where you’re identifying these sort of major milestones in your customer’s relationship with you. And if you can operationalize those and identify these particular milestones, which we often refer to as the leaps of faith that your customer takes in your relationship with you. If you can identify those milestones, you can associate KPIs with those milestones that measure your customer’s ability to reach moments of value and get to one step to the next in your customer’s experience. All those opportunities, you’re going to understand how to address those opportunities and how to measure your ability to help customers get from one milestone to the next.
So we call that the customer experience mapping process, and then the identifying your growth opportunities on the ladder, on the other side of that. So there’s some work to do. But what I find happens is it is disheartening in some ways because you’re like, I just redid my onboarding. We spent months rebuilding this thing, or we just redesigned our website, or we just rewrote these pages on our website. And you start to realize, oh, actually we’re not using the right messaging. Our hierarchy of messaging is not right, or the order of events that we’re introducing our product to customers doesn’t make as much sense. And so that can really suck. But at the same time, you can get really excited about the fact that you can make better decisions now, and it’s so much easier.
Rich: And it’s better to make a U-turn, than is to keep driving in the wrong direction. So I love the whole thing about the customer mapping and these milestones, and we’re trying to get them from one place to another. Can you anchor that at all for us? Can you give us an example of somebody you’ve worked with and maybe one specific thing, just so we have an understanding exactly of what that might look like?
Georgiana: Yeah. So in general, we talk about the customer experience through the lens of three phases, struggle phase, the evaluation phase, and the growth phase. The struggle phase is what it sounds like, your customer is experiencing the old way. They’re struggling with the old way. They realize, nope, can’t do this anymore, need something new. And then they start their sort of active seeking out of a new solution, and they may get introduced to you or your offering in some way and may land on your website. And they’re still in this situation, this struggle phase.
They’re on your website, they’re still struggling with the old way, and they’re looking at your solution against potentially some of your competitors. Again, still in the context that they’re struggling with the old way. So we still call this the struggle phase, right? They discover your solution and they decide, this sounds like me, they understand exactly what my problem is, and I’m going to give this a try. And so they go from the problem in general. The struggle phase, we say it breaks down in like the problem milestone and interest. And then we move into evaluation.
And so this is when somebody actually takes a leap of faith on your website and decides that I’m going to hand over some information, either because they’re going to book a demo with you, or they’re going to try your product or whatever it is. Then we move into evaluation phase where here’s where there are variables. So depending on how complex your solution is or how complex the organization of your customer is, the evaluation phase could vary in milestones.
What we have found is there’s often like the first value milestone and the value realization milestone, but sometimes when there’s more complex situations, there’s also one in the middle where it’s like value promise. Think of enterprise software where you might need a proof of concept, right? There’s more involvement of additional stakeholders that might be more complex. That sometimes happens, but we try to keep it as simple as possible. So again, the evaluation phase. First value realization.
And then there’s the growth phase. And this is the one that gets neglected the most, unfortunately, but particularly for recurring revenue businesses. And I cannot think of any business that does not want recurring business or recurring revenue in some way, shape or form. So the growth phase is really where we’re considering and thinking a lot about delivering continued value to our customers.
And then really importantly, the next one would be value growth. So some sort of expanded value in some way, shape or form. And that will look very different depending on your solution. If we’re talking about software, that might be expanded usage of your product, it might be referrals or reviews, or becoming an evangelist for your product. Who knows, right? There’s all kinds of flavors of what value growth might look like. But I break it down in this way because it’s helpful as a sort of blueprint for figuring out does this apply, but you still have the job of understanding your customers, what’s going through their head. We think about it through the lens of thinking, feeling, and doing.
So generally, what they’re feeling will help you understand what they’re thinking. And what they’re thinking will generally help you understand what they’re doing, like the actual touch points. So if you can do that for each of those milestones and you can identify ways to measure your ability to help customers get from one milestone to the next, then everything starts to make a lot more sense in terms of how to optimize the customer experience.
So pretty well every company that, and we’ve gone through this process over a hundred times with SaaS companies, and I’ve done this hundreds of times with teams. And generally, we’re looking at about those six or seven milestones. And very often, 10 times out of 10, there are ways to optimize messaging across every single one of those milestones.
But very often as well, the second thing that I would say is the most common is onboarding, is where the most amount of money is being left on the table. And I say that because if you don’t have a solid onboarding experience, then all the investment you’re making at the front end of your customer experience is, again, back to the leaky bucket. So that’s generally where we’re focused, is messaging and onboarding and helping help customers reach critical moments of value to convince them to keep going and to fire their old solution and reach that value realization and make a purchase decision.
Rich: And you’re in a SaaS world, so onboarding is critical in that SaaS world. Where does onboarding come? Is that before or after the free trial? Is that before or after I put down my credit card for good?
Georgiana: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think there’s a lot of misconceptions around that. So generally, there’s no hard and fast rule on this. Because the most important thing is your leading indicators of success. So I’ve reached an a-ha moment in this product where I’ve experienced first value, versus the lagging indicators of success. Like a trial start or a trial end or credit card being entered. We really prefer to focus on product activation, product adoption, product engagement. So like actual value being experienced inside of the product. Which is why a lot of product teams really this framework and the way that we work because it is so anchored in the product experience, delivering value. So it’s hard to say, I can’t give a blanket response in terms of like where it would line up with the trial.
In general, you should be doing a good job of helping customers reach, if not product activation, product adoption inside of a trial experience. So if you offer a 14-day trial, your goal actually probably within the first couple of hours or days is to help that customer reach those critical moments of value. So that when their trial ends, there’s no debate about whether or not they’re putting their credit card down.
Rich: All right. Now on the Agents of Change podcasts, we’re always looking for ways that we can make a difference, make a change. Do you know of a widely accepted piece of advice when it comes to customer research that you actually feel is holding back businesses, or just really bad advice, in your experience?
Georgiana: So many, I’m not sure where to start. There’s so much. The first one that came into my mind when I heard the question was test it. And a few reasons for that. The other one you should be selling benefits, not features. I also take issue with that. Or that, and this might be surprising coming from me, like the customer is always right and you know that what customers say they want must be what they want. That’s often not the case. And it’s your job to see around that.
But the test it one is probably an easy one because it’s so prolific right now, especially with vibe marketing. It’s all about testing things, and I’m not against testing or experimentation at all. What I am against though, is wasting your time on tests that are useless and that aren’t actually going to move the needle on revenue. So they might move the needle on a conversion rate on a landing page, but are those leads or those signups going to turn into high lifetime value customers or not?
And I think a lot of experimentation leaves out that really critical component. A lot of testing and experimentation is very shortsighted. And so again, if you can learn from these amazing customers that have made trade-offs in order to choose you over all of the other solutions. The experiments that you’re going to run on the other side of that are going to be so much more fruitful through the lens of actual revenue generation versus just conversion rates on a campaign or a page.
Rich: Alright. For somebody who wants to become more customer-led in their marketing and growth strategy, what’s one step they can take after listening to this episode?
Georgiana: What I would say is a really amazing thing that you can do that actually does not have a very big lift at all, and that could convince you to keep going with this, is on your website, on your primary CTA on your website, whether or not it’s signing up for a free trial or signing up for a demo or something like that, not a lead. I’m not talking about signing up for a lead magnet here. I’m talking about a primary CTA on your website asking the question of somebody who’s just taken a leap of faith and decided to give you the time of day, asking them what was going on in your world.
Now, this doesn’t have to be exact copy, but something close to this, “What was going on in your world that led you to seek out something like this today? What led you today to reach out?” And have that be an open text field. And even if all you do is let the responses to that go into a doc or a spreadsheet or something, after not too long, you are going to see some patterns emerge. And that can be wildly valuable. Because that’s going to start to tell you, what job are we actually doing for our customers? And I think even just the responses to those questions are going to show you, there is a lot more to learn there and there’s a big opportunity. So that would be something that you can probably turn around in a week, not even.
Rich: Awesome. For people who want to learn more about you, Gia, want to learn more about Forget the Funnel and your book, where can we send them online?
Georgiana: Yeah, forgetthefunnel.com. Obviously it’s a great place to go. There’s a link there to find out more about the book. We were very deliberate in writing a short book, so it’s not this big, long, theoretical, it’s very practical. There’s also an AI workbook companion that goes along with the book that includes a bunch of templates and tools and scripts for running this type of research and then leveraging it and operationalizing it. So we try to make it super, super practical. That would definitely be the thing that I would recommend if anybody’s interested.
Rich: Alright, and we’ll link to all of those resources in the show notes. Gia, thank you so much. I really appreciate our conversation today.
Georgiana: Thanks for having me.
Show Notes:
Gia Laudi is a strategic advisor, keynote speaker, and co-author of Forget the Funnel. She helps high-growth companies turn customer insights into smarter, revenue-generating decisions using her Customer-Led Growth framework. Learn more at ForgetTheFunnel.com and connect with Gia on LinkedIn.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.