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

Traditional marketing and sales models typically focus on customer acquisition metrics like conversion rates through sales funnels, rather than measuring what happens after purchase.

The vast, vast majority of these models don't take post-acquisition, retention, expansion, all of that into account. So yeah, in a nutshell, funnels are bad.

Georgiana Laudi is speaking about reflecting customers' language back to them in product messaging and marketing communications.

You want to reflect them back to them. That is what is going to show them that you understand the problem that they have and that your product has exactly what it is that they need.

What I mean by best customers is those that get a ton of value from your product as it exists today, pay obviously. They're happy. They're low maintenance. And very importantly, they signed up for your product recently enough that they remember what life was like before.

Research takes a long time and that research can often lead to more questions and can slow everything down. You can end up in analysis paralysis, but it doesn't have to be that way. It can be very straightforward, honestly, in a survey scenario.

I think it's like 70% of people log into an app, log into a product once and never come back. It's wild. So the fact that so many companies don't have some sort of win back or re-engagement always blows my mind.

We didn't even touch anything after the signup experience. We hadn't even gotten there and the trial-to-paid conversion rate increased 40%, and we didn't touch it. It was just because a more qualified, better fit customer was coming through the door.

MQLs and SQLs are Marketing Qualified Leads and Sales Qualified Leads. Pirate metrics refers to the AARRR framework (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue).

The problem with funnels and pirate metrics and the favorites that I love to pick on are MQLs and SQLs 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 puts businesses at the center of the business versus putting customers at the center.