How to Achieve Customer-Led Growth, Forget the Funnel and do Better Product Marketing

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We have a great episode today.

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We are going to talk about how to do better product marketing, and we have an amazing guest to help us talk through this today Georgiana, welcome to the show.

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Hey, thanks for having me, eric.

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So we're going to talk about how to do better product marketing, which results in getting more sales with less program spend.

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So, before we jump into that, why don't you take a minute or two to talk a little bit about who you are and what you do?

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I'm the co-founder of a sort of boutique consultancy and we work with B2B SaaS companies on growth.

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Now, growth is obviously a problematic term and it means a lot of things, but predominantly what we're focused on is helping B2B SaaS companies do a better job at product marketing, and that means all kinds of things right.

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That means messaging, positioning, it means getting really intimately familiar with customers and it means actually identifying opportunities for growth.

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So that's what we do.

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We have a framework that we dubbed the customer-led growth framework.

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We wrote a book about it.

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Bit of background for me.

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How I sort of got to that was long time digital marketer, you know 25-ish years or so.

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I've been focused, though, on B2B SaaS companies since the early aughts, so, like 2010,.

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2011-ish got exposed to, you know, pirate metrics and recurring revenue model businesses, and I was like, yes, this is the world for me where marketing has a seat at the revenue generating table, and I've been sort of attached and fell in love with it and have never looked back.

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So, really focused on recurring revenue businesses and because I think that recurring revenue businesses have more to gain from focusing on post-acquisition marketing and product marketing than most businesses.

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They all stand to benefit, but particularly recurring revenue, where LTV is so important.

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Absolutely so.

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We're ready to be inspired.

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Why don't we start off by you sharing a story of some of the best marketing that you've done, that you're the most proud of?

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I think marketers have a huge role to play in post-acquisition.

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So what I mean by that is we've worked with a number of teams where they come to us asking about, like we need more leads, we need more traffic no-transcript and the founder of the company knew that there was an opportunity.

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It was like a B2B use case that she was interested in pursuing, and what she believed at the time, though, to pursue that B2B opportunity was that she'd have to launch, like you know, pretty sophisticated PR campaigns and ad campaigns and do like influencer marketing and, you know, basically launch these more awareness focused, you know marketing campaigns.

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By working with her was that we learned from her existing happily paying customers that the ways that they were getting value from the product were actually quite different Kind of funny for a B2B audience, but it was true.

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And meanwhile, on her website and in her marketing, she was using terms like 10 times faster and like quickly and efficiently, and she was focused a lot on more of the features versus the outcomes, and so we helped sort of steer towards that customer, that B2B, that more B2B use case, higher LTVs, right.

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So retention was higher, activation was higher, urgency was higher, and when we leaned into what those customers really cared about.

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Just by updating the messaging on the website, we were able to increase science by 93% and sales very quickly after that by nearly 20%.

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So that was a really short project with a huge outsized impact on the business.

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Yeah, it's interesting because the answer isn't always just dump more money into advertising or program spend.

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The answer is often just do a better job explaining who you are and what you do and why it matters to customers.

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Yeah, it's sad that I've watched so many B2B tech companies where you go to their website and people only look at a website for 30 seconds right, maybe less and if they can't figure out who you are and what you do from like the homepage or website, they're out there, they're onto something else.

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I've seen so many companies just fail because they couldn't do this product marketing key function of messaging and positioning that matters.

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Like they fill it full of brand buzzwords or they just explain features and people are like so what?

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And so I think that this is a big part of marketing that is really overlooked, because it's hard to communicate what you do, why it matters a front door to your business that says that, and a lot of people really struggle with that, and that's what you help people with, right.

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Yeah, exactly so.

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I think a lot of folks marketers, business owners, you know alike sort of fall into the trap of leaning on best practices.

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See, so so many companies do this.

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I've spoken with hundreds of founders over the years, or the past couple of years, that really have been, unfortunately, relying on best practices, relying on a marketing team that relies on best practices.

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But also, another big problem is they look to their competition and so who they think their competition is, who they think their customers are comparing them to, and then they end up with this sort of watered down version of their positioning and messaging that doesn't actually help them differentiate themselves in the market.

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I just see so many teams guessing when they don't need to be guessing.

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You don't need to be relying on best practices and you certainly don't need to be guessing, and that's you know exactly what we sort of stand for.

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So, yeah, how we help companies do that is we do this like rapid style customer research which is based on the jobs to be done approach and the jobs to be done sort of methodology of learning what are your customers hiring your solution to do for them, and sort of getting a documentary like understanding of like before, how much it sucks to have the problem that you later help them solve.

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How they discover that you exist, how they make the decision about how to choose you, what that those you know aha moments are in the early stages of their relationship with you, why they decide to keep going with you, what really matters about your solution and stands out about your solution, and then, once they've reached sort of value realization and really making a decision about becoming a customer of yours, what does a happy, healthy customer look like and what do they need next?

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How would they sort of evolve and grow in their relationship with you as your customer?

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We help companies understand their customers at that level so that we can then look at what are they doing today, what is the positioning and messaging they're using out in the market?

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How are they articulating what they do for that customer on their website?

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What's their product onboarding experience look like, and so on and so forth.

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We identify all the ways that their customer experience and their product experience is currently out of alignment with what their amazing customers say they need and we sort of help teams reverse engineer that success and create better customer experiences to improve conversion rates across the customer journey.

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Yeah, I think this is hard for a lot of people to do, but you're able to do these projects with people in a relatively reasonable amount of time.

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You can do a messaging project with people in something like six months, right, and get people on track with this right Much less than that actually.

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So we do our growth sprints, which is where we run interviews.

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We run a nominal amount of interviews, like just a dozen or so meaningful customer interviews and I say meaningful very deliberately, because not all customer interviews are created equally, not all customer research is created equally.

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So we're very targeted in how we do our research and who we decide to learn from.

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We can do that research in about four weeks and then in the two weeks following that we can do that heuristic analysis of the customer experience and then after a two-week period, we run a workshop with teams where we sit down with all the major sort of players in that go-to-market motion and talk about all the opportunities they have available to them.

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So we actually do this in six weeks.

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That's amazing, I think, on the spectrum of some people say this is really easy and some people say it's really hard.

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I think that's a good sort of framing of it is that you can conquer this pretty quickly if you put some focus on it, and I think that that's just important for marketers to know, versus just dumping tons more money into advertising to try to get more leads, for example, or running more campaigns.

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So is this the reason for the premise behind your book of forget the funnel?

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Customer-led growth is because if you focus on messaging and positioning that really resonates with customers, it's not about just generating more leads.

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It comes a lot more naturally right.

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Yeah, 100%.

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And it reduces reliance on top of funnel, which, to be honest, is really volatile right now.

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We've all experienced this as marketers.

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I'm a longtime marketer.

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I've definitely experienced this myself.

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Where you know, it costs a lot more to run marketing campaigns.

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Today.

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It is a lot harder to stand out.

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I was just looking at the the MarTech landscape.

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Do you know the one that I'm talking about, the Scott yeah, yeah.

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It's grown,000% in the last 13 years over 9,000%.

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So in my earlier days and when I joined in-house and I started really getting into SaaS a lot, there were like maybe 300 companies on that landscape.

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On that MarTech landscape, there are over 14,000 now.

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It has never been harder to stand out.

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Marketing, I don't think, has ever been more challenging, and so I think for a lot of businesses, it just makes sense to do more with what you're already doing.

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You don't need to spend more on the top of funnel.

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There's a lot of value, there's money sitting on the table, so to speak, and with the leads you're already generating and the traffic that you're already generating.

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So not only do we help companies with positioning and messaging which, yes, will definitely help with signups but we also work with companies on their product onboarding and their customer experience onboarding, so that we make sure we're surfacing what your customers actually care about at the right time and in the right order.

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So it's this kind of idea of you know the right message to the right person at the right time.

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This is, finally, a framework to actually accomplish that in a sort of scalable way and sort of programmatic way that can be optimized over time, and that's exactly what we focus on and nothing pleases me more than helping align a team around that you know an ideal customer and that job to be done that that customer is trying to accomplish, and helping the team understand how they're providing value to those customers and at what stage and what's the most appropriate experience to provide them that experience and helping teams sort of see their role in delivering value.

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It's really really motivating.

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The leadership teams love it because the team is thinking strategically and they have a shared view and a shared language.

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And the individual practitioners inside of the companies teams really love it too, because they know that they're doing something of value.

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It's not just filling a funnel, it's delivering value to customers in a really appropriate way and helping customers accomplish their goals, which feels really good for everybody.

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I often say, when we focus on our leading indicators of success, helping our customers get to these meaningful milestones in their relationship with us our lagging indicators of success, like revenue, growth, benefit, Absolutely.

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I think that's 100% right.

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One of the things I'm quite sure about is that if marketers and sales teams rely on pushing, features or capabilities is what they lead with, they run into a brick wall pretty quickly because of the reason you said.

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There's 14,000 tools out there that people can use that all do things slightly differently some better, some worse and so the so what factor is what I'll call it.

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We have this capability and this feature.

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People just don't care if you can't get to talking about what customers really care about.

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And figuring out what that is.

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I think, is where the magic's at right.

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I would agree with that, except that the one caveat that I would add to that is it depends on your customer.

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So if you have, for instance, a technical buyer or your sort of functional user is also the champion that has been tasked with identifying you as a solution, like tasked with solving the problem that a company tasked with identifying you as a solution, like they're tasked with solving the problem that a company has in a B2B scenario, they might actually care more about features and capabilities and not so much about the benefits and sort of business outcomes.

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I find that's a trap that a lot of teams fall into, where they believe that they it's kind of like this best practice Actually, we did a podcast episode on this like features versus benefits, best practice, because, to be honest with you, what matters at the end of the day is exactly how you ended, what you just said, what your customers actually care about, and it's your job as somebody who responsible for product marketing or as a business owner to figure out what is the most appropriate experience for the right person at the right time.

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And sometimes again, sometimes it is business outcomes, but other times it's features.

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It's going to depend on your solution and your target customer.

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Yeah, I agree that at the end of the day, people they want to see what they're buying.

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So you can't ever be at the end of the spectrum where you're only talking about business outcomes.

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But I think that on the spectrum of those two things, a lot of people over index just on.

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Let me show you my thing.

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It's very we, we.

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Yes, it's like they, we, we all over.

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So if we, we all over their website, like what can do when we can solve this problem and we can do this for you, and like this is what our technology is.

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I think that happens a lot when, particularly when product teams are responsible for the website, they're very proud of the tool that they've built, but, to your point, it can be hard to read the label from inside the jar, and so a lot of teams do definitely fall into that trap.

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You're 100% right.

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I think it's about balance and the force, if you will.

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I think that you're right in that certain functions or industries or businesses might rely more heavily on.

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I need these capabilities, so they need to know those things as much as they need to know the business outcomes.

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But what I see when I go to a conference or a trade show and I'm walking down just talking to 100 companies, a lot of the companies they're really not a company, they're more a feature and so they just want to talk really about their feature.

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It's like my dog who just really likes to pee all over her own territory.

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I'm like I got it, but let's get beyond that.

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Does anyone care?

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You know, let's get beyond that.

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Does anyone care?

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So what's the secret?

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If I can ask you, you can tell us.

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It's just me, you and a few thousand people watching.

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What is the secret to coming up with the best messaging and positioning?

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If you had to say across all the clients, you work with a piece of advice that sort of goes almost across the gambit.

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Stop listening to the experts.

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That's probably the first thing that I would say is stop listening to the experts.

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Stop relying on best practices.

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Stop throwing spaghetti at the wall.

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The answers to your growth challenges live inside the heads of your best customers.

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It is your job to pull that out and operationalize it for your team.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, I think get out there and talk to customers is the number one thing that people can do.

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You know you mentioned, you know doing interviews.

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I think people are often willing to give their opinion, their advice, if you simply ask.

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That's my experience through the lens of learning and we're trying to make our solution better for you.

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You'd probably be surprised at the response rate.

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Honestly, customers are especially your happiest customers, which are the ones you should be learning from.

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They're invested in your success.

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They want to see you succeed, but I do know of a lot of companies that have just a mental block.

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We don't want to bother our customers but, at the end of the day, your customers are invested in your success.

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But at the end of the day, your customers are invested in your success.

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They want you to succeed and we have found that happy customers particularly are very happy to help in my ICP and I ask them for their advice and feedback.

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A lot of people will still spend time and go out of their way to be helpful and say, well, I'm not the one that you should be selling this to, but if I was you, here's what I would do, and then they give me some of the best ideas I've ever heard.

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So if you just take that really open mindset and you let them talk for 80% of the meeting is sort of my role you tend to learn a lot of really great things just by getting out there and talking to folks who could be a customer.

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And if they're not the right customer for you, well, who do you think would be the right customer?

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Like sometimes what you're thinking.

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Even at that level it needs some challenging.

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So I've learned some really interesting things just by doing what you just suggested.

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So I recommend that to everybody.

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Yeah.

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If you're in an earlier stage environment, I would definitely recommend that kind of customer development.

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But if you're in a situation where you have happily paying customers, I actually would prioritize learning from those happily paying customers.

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They've they made the choice to, they made the decision to choose you over the other options.

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They've put money where their mouth is, they've made trade-offs in order to adopt your solution.

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So I would lean I would lean on those customers that have that are successfully getting value from your solution today because they, like I said, they are invested in your success and they're very happy to, to, you know, to help you succeed.

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We do talk about this process in our book as well, so one thing that might be interesting to folks who are interested in learning more about this process and maybe trying it themselves the book that we wrote called forget the funnel.

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We were very, very careful in making sure that it was very practical and very short, so it is a short book.

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You should be able to read it in just a couple of hours and decide whether or not the customer-led growth framework is something that could work for you ie, doing some customer research and then actually operationalizing it and acting on it.

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And for those of you that are in-house as well and sort of practitioners and want to try this yourself.

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There's a workbook that goes along with it as well, full of, like templates and tools and checklists and scripts, and, you know, interview questions and email outreach, even like it's all kind of there.

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So anybody who's interested in trying it out, I would highly recommend that tiny, tiny little investment.

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Awesome, and you also have a podcast on the same topic where you drill deeper in to this as well, right yeah, yeah, totally, we do.

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So I'm going to link to both your book and your podcast in the show notes so people can dig in and learn more about this topic if they like.

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Is there anything you'd like to add that I didn't ask that you think is important for people to know on this topic?

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At the end of the day, customer research sounds scary, sounds long, sounds expensive, sounds problematic and it is hard.

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Customer research is hard but it is totally, totally doable and absolutely worth it.

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There are all kinds of studies that prove that teams that conduct and operationalize customer research are far more successful than those that don't.

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It's well-documented.

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There's a reason why people say talk to your customers.

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The trick is just don't just talk to them.

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Actually do something with what you learn from those conversations and actually act on it.

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That's the last thing I think, probably to put the cherry on top.

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Nice.

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I agree 100%.

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That's great advice.

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So appreciate being on the episode today.

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I encourage everyone to check out your book and your podcast.

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Really appreciate you sharing your story and your insights here today.

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Thank you very much for your time.

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Cool.

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Thanks so much for having me, Eric.