Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel)

Traditional marketing funnels have long been the industry standard for tracking growth. Teams obsess over MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) and SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads), attempting to force prospects through a linear path that often feels disconnected from reality. However, for SaaS companies relying on recurring revenue, the funnel model is fundamentally broken. It places the business at the center of the equation rather than the customer, often ignoring the crucial stages of retention and expansion.

Georgiana Laudi, co-founder of Forget The Funnel, argues that sustainable growth requires a shift toward a customer-led approach. By mapping the customer experience through the lens of value delivery—rather than just acquisition—companies can unlock significant opportunities for conversion and retention. This approach moves beyond demographic personas and focuses on the "Jobs to Be Done" (JTBD), aligning product, marketing, and success teams around a single source of truth: the customer's success.

Key Takeaways

• Funnels limit visibility: Traditional funnels focus on acquisition and ignore the post-purchase experience, which is fatal for recurring revenue models where retention is key.
• Research your best customers: Growth strategies should be built on insights from high-value, recent customers who can articulate the "struggle" that led them to your product.
• Map the value journey: Instead of tracking sales stages, map the customer's journey from their initial struggle to value realization and habit formation.
• KPIs must track value: Metrics should measure whether a customer has achieved a specific outcome (e.g., performing a search, exporting a report) rather than vanity metrics like page views.
• Operationalize insights: Use customer language for messaging and align product onboarding to guide users directly to the features they value most.

The Problem with the Traditional Funnel

The concept of the marketing funnel and metrics like "Pirate Metrics" (AARRR) represented a step forward when they were introduced, acknowledging that marketing plays a role post-acquisition. However, in the modern SaaS landscape, these models often create silos and misalignment.

The primary issue is that funnels are business-centric. They measure value to the company—leads generated, deals closed—rather than value delivered to the customer. This perspective treats all customers as identical units moving through a standardized process, ignoring the nuance of user intent and the reality of their struggle.

The problem with funnels... is that nobody knows what those mean. It puts every customer in the same sort of buckets. It assumes that all customers and all products are the same... It’s about the values of the business not the value to the customer that’s being measured.

Furthermore, for subscription businesses, the relationship does not end at the point of sale. If a growth model ends at acquisition, the business is destined to fail. Retention, expansion, and advocacy are where the true compounding growth of SaaS lives, yet traditional funnels frequently leave these stages as an afterthought.

The Customer-Led Growth Framework

To replace the funnel, companies need a framework that maps the actual customer experience. This process involves deep qualitative research, identifying the "Job to Be Done," and mapping the journey from the customer's perspective.

1. Identifying Your Best Customers

You cannot design a journey for everyone. Attempting to do so results in generic messaging that resonates with no one. The first step is to identify your ideal customers. These are not necessarily the ones paying the most, but the ones who:

• Receive high value from the product.
• Are low maintenance for support teams.
• Have signed up recently (typically within the last 3–6 months) so they clearly remember their pre-purchase life.

2. Understanding the "Struggle"

Once identified, the goal is to interview or survey these customers to understand the context of their purchase. This goes beyond demographics. You are looking for the narrative arc of their decision-making process. Key questions include:

• What was happening in their life or work that made them seek a solution?
• What triggered the search?
• What anxieties or deal-breakers did they have?
• What is the ultimate "better life" or outcome they achieved?

This research reveals the Job to Be Done (JTBD). Customers don't buy products; they "hire" them to solve a problem or achieve a better version of themselves.

3. Mapping the Experience

Inspired by Airbnb’s "Project Snow White"—where the company hired a Pixar artist to storyboard the host and guest experience—Laudi advocates for creating a visual map of the customer journey. This map should cover three main phases:

1. The Struggle Phase: The customer is experiencing a problem in the wild. They move from "problem unaware" to "solution seeking."
2. The Evaluation Phase: The customer discovers your product and decides if it can solve their pain. This includes sign-up and initial onboarding.
3. The Growth Phase: The customer achieves value, builds a habit, and potentially expands their usage.

Defining Success: From Vanity Metrics to Value KPIs

A customer journey map is only useful if it is measurable. However, instead of measuring business milestones (like "trial started"), you must measure value milestones. For every stage of the journey, there should be a corresponding KPI that indicates the customer has achieved a specific level of success.

The Critical Milestones

First Value (Activation): This is the moment the customer experiences the product's promise for the first time. For a search tool like SparkToro, this isn't just logging in; it is performing a search and seeing results.

Value Realization: This occurs when the customer has fully "hired" the product to do the job. They have reached a threshold of engagement that suggests they are locked in. Using the SparkToro example, research revealed that long-term retention was tied to users who performed searches, created lists, and used the export feature. If a user didn't use lists or exports, they hadn't realized the full value.

Value Growth: This measures habitual usage and expansion. It ensures the customer remains engaged and is primed for upsells or referrals.

Unless they’ve reached that value moment, you can’t keep them on the train to something else... You need to focus on getting them to that value otherwise you can’t just keep firing off emails and hoping they’re going to jump back into the product.

Operationalizing Insights for Growth

Once the research is complete and the map is drawn, the final step is execution. This data should inform everything from website copy to product onboarding flows.

Positioning and Messaging

Your website's copy should reflect the "struggle" and the "desired outcome" identified in your research. High-performing copy acts as a mirror, reflecting the customer's own language back at them. In one case study involving a social media tool, simply realigning the website messaging to focus on a specific "Job to Be Done" increased site conversion by 89%.

Product Onboarding and "Win-Backs"

The journey map allows you to be proactive. If you know that "Value Realization" requires a user to use a specific feature (e.g., the export button), your onboarding emails and in-app checklists should guide them specifically to that feature.

Simultaneously, these metrics allow for intelligent "win-back" campaigns. If a user drops off before reaching the "First Value" milestone, marketing automation can trigger specific interventions to help them hurdle that barrier, rather than sending generic "newsletter" style content.

Conclusion

Moving away from the funnel is not just a semantic change; it is a strategic realignment. By viewing your business through the eyes of your best customers, you bridge the gap between marketing, product, and customer success.

The process does not need to be an endless academic exercise. Even a focused two-week survey sprint can uncover insights that double conversion rates. The market changes, products evolve, and customer needs shift. Leaders must continuously get out of their own heads and into the lives of their customers to ensure they are solving the right problems, for the right people, at the right time.