the problem with funnels and pirate metrics and you know the the favorites that I love to pick on are like nqls and sqls is that like nobody knows what those mean it puts every customer in like these the same sort of buckets it assumes that all customers and all
products are the same it puts businesses or they I should say put businesses at the center of the business versus putting customers at the center right it's about the values of the business not the value to the customer that's being measured also it just kind of
feels gross for people right like this idea of pushing people through a funnel and then probably a a particularly relevant for SAS companies is that recurring Revenue businesses you cannot think about you know marketing and growth and and the business overall as
ending an acquisition otherwise you're not in business anymore and the vast vast majority of these models don't take host acquisition retention expansion all of that into account so yeah and a nutshell funnels are bad welcome to Lenny's podcast I'm Lenny and
my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies today my guest is Georgiana
Laudy Georgiana AKA Gia runs a consultancy called forget the funnel where she works Hands-On with SAS companies to help them unlock and accelerate growth as you'll hear she often finds huge unlocks and opportunities often doubling or tripling conversion at various points in their
product blows in our conversation she shares the exact process that she goes through to help companies figure out where their biggest growth opportunities lie and also how to execute on them we chat about how to identify your most important customers at a very
practically mapped their journey through your flows and set goals and then execute on your ideas there's a lot of wisdom and some fun stories packed into this episode so with that I bring you Gia I'm excited to chat with my friend John Cutler from podcast sponsor amplitude
hey John hey Lenny excited to be here John give us a behind the scenes at amplitude when most people think of amplitude they think of product analytics but now you're getting into experimentation and even just launched a CDP what's the thought process there
well we've always thought of amplitude as being about supporting the full product Loop think collect data inform bets ship experiments and learn that's the heart of growth to us so the big aha was seen how many customers were using amplitude to analyze experiments use
segments for outreach and send data to other destinations experiment in CDP came out of listening to and observing our customers supporting growth and learning has always been amplitude's core Focus right yeah so amplitude tries to meet customers where they are we just
launched starter templates and have a great scholarship program for startups there's never been a more important time for growing absolutely agree thanks for joining us John and head to amplitude.com to get started this episode is brought to you by
athletic greens I've been hearing about ag-1 on basically every podcast that I listen to like Tim Ferriss and Lex Friedman and so I finally gave it a shot earlier this year and it has quickly become a core part of my morning routine especially on days that I need to go
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athleticreens.com Lenny to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance Gia welcomed to the podcast thanks so much for having me Lenny it's my pleasure so we actually met over a decade ago I think maybe just around a
decade in Montreal I was working on my startup you were helping companies with their website optimize their websites then you went on to lead marketing at unbounds and a bunch of other great stuff so just to set a little bit of foundation for listeners can you talk
about what you've done in your career in like 55 seconds that's your time box okay so marketing for probably about 20 or so years which sounds completely ridiculous when I say it but I started working with my father's retail business very or like in the early early 2000s
honestly probably 2000 actually works there for a number of years and then eventually last and started freelancing worked at an agency terrible and then actually probably around the time I met you I had this little like sort of catalyst moment where I joined Twitter
in late 2008 and I discovered the like Tech scene and startups and that was again probably around the time that you and I met maybe 2010 ish and that was available and then I what's that 2011. 2011. see there you go so it was right around that time and then late 2011 I
decided the like supporting five six you know companies at a time in their marketing and stuff like that was was starting to get burnt out and I you know I was I was doing a lot and I was like what it would feel like to like sink my teeth into one brand and so I decided to
go in-house and I'm out west and joined the team at unbounce and I was there for five years and then in late 2016 early 2017 I decided it was like time to move on and so I decided to go back independent and just started working with companies and supporting them
through marketing and growth and product marketing and that's what I've been doing ever since but in mid 2017 I actually paired up with Claire or celentrop who led marketing at Cali Lee and her and I have been working together since about mid 2017 that's when we
launched forget the funnel and we you know started pairing up on working with companies and sort of married this like her customer research background in my like strategy marketing background and we developed this framework that we now use when we work with predominantly B2B
SAS companies that's who we work with right now awesome so we're going to spend a lot of time on what you've learned working with companies through forget the funnel why did you call it forget the funnel funnels are gross because I mean it's a really Antiquated
idea and it's not just funnels that you know we sort of take issue with it's you know buyers Journeys or even I remember actually in at startupfest 2012 I want to say Dave McClure was talking about pirate metrics and I was like huzzah marketing has a role post acquisition
everybody understands now and it was like a real moment for me but the problem with funnels and pirate metrics and you know the the favorites that I love to pick on are like nqls and sqls is that like nobody knows what those mean it puts every customer in like
these the same sort of buckets it assumes that all customers and all products are the same it puts businesses or they I should say puts businesses at the center of the business versus putting customers at the center right it's about the values of the business
not the value to the customer that's being measured also it just kind of feels gross for people right like this idea of pushing people through funnel and then probably a particularly relevant for SAS companies is that recurring Revenue businesses you cannot
think about you know marketing and growth and and the business overall as ending at acquisition otherwise you're not in business anymore and the vast vast majority of these models don't take post acquisition retention expansion all of that into account they also leave the
problem stage out so like the world that customers are living in prior to discovering you which is a really critical like that that context is unbelievably you know valuable especially for marketing and so delete that out of the equation is you know a big problem so yeah that's
in a nutshell funnels are bad okay so I'm excited to dig into a lot of stuff you've learned but a couple other things I just wanted to talk about to set the foundation one is can you talk about some of the impact that you've seen working with companies through the
process that you've come up with what kind of impact have you seen what kind of numbers have you seen I would say Far and Away the biggest most immediate impact of the type of work that we do is sort of realigning with that ideal customer generally the lowest hanging fruit
outcome is like realigning around like better positioning and messaging and identifying more resonant positioning and messaging that you know speaks to that context that I was talking about before right before people you know discover that you even exist have that
moment where they're like oh my God this has to change this sucks Ties That in ties in you know what they care about what is valuable about your product and then also that desired outcome I mean for for those in the know jobs to be done is like a bank sort of influence
here but if you can identify that type of information about your customers and get to know them at that level then you're in a way better position to be able to not only position your product but also use much more powerful messaging so typically what we do
is we'll like identify those gaps of like almost I mean not I shouldn't even say nine times out of ten 99 times out of 100 a company's website is not doing as much as it could do it's not being as effective from a messaging and positioning standpoint as it could so
websites tend to get update like we will do a lot of you know overhauls and messaging on a website and improve performance there one of my favorite examples of that is a social media tool that we worked with where we did really very simple research for them honestly
identified two different jobs to be done zeroed in on one of them and then updated the messaging on the website we shortened the trial from 30 days to seven the conversional website went up with this new messaging by 89 but the thing that I I love the most about that
particular story is that we didn't even touch anything after the sign up experience we hadn't even gone there and the trial to pay conversion rate increased 40 and we didn't touch it it was just because as a more qualified better fit customer was coming through
the door so there was more of them and they were better qualified so that's a really specific example that is very typical of this type of work there's other examples though like product adoption and using that messaging and positioning past the website even in the
product onwarding itself you know email and app whatever and just making sure that they're getting to and have the cons to get to the parts of the product that they care about the most which can increase you know child of paid or product activation you know with auto
books the product usage like the North Star product usage jumped by 300 or something then quite a short period of time after rolling out email onboarding right to support that product experience I know spark tour as well which I think we might end up talking about again when
we talk about the process they doubled their child to pay conversion rate when we worked with them because of post acquisition optimization to their messaging I imagine people are listening to this and they're like this is what I'm waiting for so I'm kind of like huge
win some huge conversion a success I'm curious how often do you find companies have something like this like a latent opportunity to double triple conversion like you know everyone's hoping to avoid like this yeah what's the general hit rate
so many I mean I would say pretty well every company we've ever worked with has not pretty well every company we've ever worked with has learned something new about their customers that they can apply at some juncture of their customers experience whether or not it
is in campaigns to reach the right people out in the world whether or not it's you know having a doing a better job with their messaging and positioning on their website or they their go to market or acquisition strategy on their website right like using a a Sandbox
account or like a faux freemium account right to get let people kick the tires of their of their product prior to getting on a sales call like that's a you know something that could potentially happen the post acquisition experience parents like I'm talking
about it is so often an afterthought somehow where that additional sort of layer I think part of the reason why it's an afterthought is because on product onboarding in particular and you've probably heard this too it tends to be kind of like no man's land like
who owns that is it marketing is it if it's freemium in my opinion it should be marketing premium is a marketing tool but like not everybody subscribes to that right not every you know company would necessarily agree that's the case a lot of companies might say no it's
product so we end up seeing a kind of a messy middle there because there's no natural handoff so pretty well every company that we've worked with has had an opportunity to improve especially product onboarding and and product activation awesome so basically everybody will benefit from
what we're about to talk about a hundred percent amazing yes all right we've got rap detention as a way to maybe transition into your process you told me that so uh you're visiting us up once and I invited you to the Airbnb office we're having a happy
hour and I give you a tour and you told me later that something you saw while you're walking around the office transform the way you think about growth and kind of inform the way we think about approaching this problem can you talk about that yes this is one of my
favorite so it was 2013. so you and I might have met in like 2011 and then a couple years later I was in town for a conference and yeah we toured the office like HQ and everything and of course it was all you know stars in my eyes because what a beautiful office too
right so it was quite like I would have remembered it regardless but we went downstairs very different from like the very polished upstairs went downstairs to where your up working area was where the the product team was and there were sheets of paper taped to the wall in a
bunch in a row and it was kind of it would have been easy to miss because kind of chaotic down there but it was the customer journey of an Airbnb customer through to post and what struck me I was like oh that's interesting like I'm in the middle of building one out
for us right leading up unbounds leading you know marketing and unbounce the time and I was interestingly with the customer success and was also with me so Brian Angley was there with me and it was the perfect sort of that him and I saw it together it was a customer
Journey that was focused on the customer so versus that pirate metrics problem or that you know the typical buyer's Journey problem that I was talking about earlier it was the complete reverse of that right it was Illustrated there where you know it was like the emotional
Journey was part of it the role that Airbnb played as a like direct touch points and also indirect like what was going on in the in the person's life that had nothing to do you know outside of Airbnb which I thought was really interesting is like the beautiful little
like my Milestones really encapsulated in a sort of snapshot way such that anybody walking by it or anybody you know being reminded that it existed could sort of understand at a glance what the goal was at each of those milestones and I was like holy this
is completely different it's this is completely through the lens of the customer versus the business and the grossness of of like the funnel is just so far removed from that experience that I was like Ryan look at this we need this music oh yeah this dude I took a
picture can't find it the life meets but we returned back to the office the following week and co-founder and head of product I had a CS so Ryan so Carter Gilchrist who's head of product and co-founder Ryan and I head of marketing the three of us sort of locked ourselves
in room for two days and made our own it was a circle it was like I mean looking back it's hysterical but it was sort of democratized to the rest of the team in a way be because it had that buy-in everybody was like oh yeah okay this makes sense and I understand and it
makes everybody feel a lot better about what they were doing this was about value delivering value at each of the points so that grossness sort of goes away and we're like oh cool like I don't want to be too Kumbaya about it but it was it was a bit of a moment and also it
made communicating with the especially the product team and the engineering team a lot easier for me so we were using a shared language you know the the the rest of the company who aren't necessarily customer facing really understood I think at a different level
you know what we were all doing together in kbis yada yada yada so it was uh it was amazing and honestly I mean I can't credit only that obviously to our growth but it was uh pretty impressive couple years that followed that and I think it the alignment that that brought us was
huge yeah anyway that's the story story that wasn't super short but it was it was big it's great it was a big thing yes we're gonna link to pictures of this on the show notes internally it's called project Snow White because yeah inspired by yes that's right yeah is inspired by
Brian reading the biography of Walt Disney and they needed to create these the storyboard basically to create Snow White because it was so complicated to make that movie might have been the first animated film with storyboards and and so it was basically like a
storyboard of a trip on Airbnb of a host and a guest and yeah a detail I forgot if I told you this but they're being be hired a full-time storyboard artist from Pixar to draw these keyframes I think I did know that I was very grateful to to
have seen it like I didn't realize at the time but it changed the way like you said at the beginning like it changed the way that I thought about marketing because it really made it obvious to not only me of course but and to everybody that you know there is that customer
experience layer that marketers are so good at has such an incredibly important role like in in driving Revenue right not just in building awareness but in playing a major role in helping customers get value and you know catching them when they fall off and and
you know all that kind of stuff so yeah it changed a lot for us and it informed the way that you approach your consultancy with food get the funnel and so as a transition to talk about that the way I'm thinking we approach this is imagine a customer what
is the process you go through what are the steps how do you go about helping a company figure out where they should invest what they're doing right and wrong I should also mention you writing a book about this that's gonna explain this whole process that's coming out
later in the year yeah so we'll talk about that at the end as well yeah cool I mean if I go down a rabbit hole and you want to pull me out and have me sort of unpack something let me know well the the process is pretty straightforward at the highest level the idea is
understand your best customers map their experience right like we were just talking about map their experience through the lens of delivering value to them make it measurable and then evaluate what you're doing today that is out of alignment with that
pretty straightforward I mean that's not that doesn't sound too hard of a job of course but research isn't a really important part of that so the story that I was going to use sort of illustrate this is there's a company that we we work with from time to time we worked
with them at least twice we yeah arguably three times so Ryan fishkin who was the founder of Moz she's got a new product it's an audience research tool called sparktoro and when the first launched actually even pre-launch Brandon Pacey came to Claire and I to
sort of help with their positioning and messaging as they were sort of you know going forward to to launch I mean the brand and Casey they're both very very thoughtful and they take their time with stuff and so they were just sort of you know looking for that extra layer of
like is this good enough to launch kind of thing and so we helped them with their positioning and messaging and off they went about a year later they came back because though they were doing a decent job generating you know traffic and interest in spartural I mean Rand is
no no small fish right so he's got a good audience built in which is fantastic but those that were getting to the website and those that were signing up for the product like that weren't those weren't issues but the people that were signing up for their free product weren't
converting to paid in the way that they believed they could and so we decided to work with them and basically go to the source and find out of you know Sparta was from Sparta's best customers what can we learn from them that we can then reflect back in
the product experience and the customer experience for them so I mentioned it before but we are heavy Believers in the jobs be done Theory which is basically this idea that people can buy your product they buy the better version themselves yeah yeah I don't need to
explain any of that but we use that to guide our research and was for tour we were in a position and the purists will hate me saying this but we were in a position to be able to run surveys so yes interviews are ideal always but we did think that we could
learn a ton from surveys to then if needed double down with interviews we didn't end up actually needing to run the interviews because the surveys that we ran were pretty decisive and clear in terms of what we learned so what we did was uh we identified structural's best
customers now what I mean by best customers is those that get a ton of value from your product doesn't exist 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 so generally we say that's like in the three to six month range right because if you go to somebody that's been your customer for two years they're just Gonna Fill answers with like what they think might have been going on in their life but if you ask customers who
remember what life was like before you're going to get a lot more interesting responses right a lot a lot more accurate sort of depiction of what was going on and so those are that's the with that criteria went forward surveyed their customers you know we're
trying to uncover from them what was going on in their life when they were seeking out a solution right what happened what was that trigger moment when they did start seeking a solution you know who did they go to what do they talked with you know what were their
influences which PS that's what sparks Pro does um this helps you identify those but also what were they looking for in a solution right what were the must-haves for them versus you know what were some of the anxieties that they had some deal breakers things like that so basically
unpackingly what is it that was critical for them in their solution and then of course what is it they're able to do now that they weren't able to do before so that desired outcome so out of that we identified a couple of different options like a couple of different jobs customer
jobs and um we have to prioritize one of course because if you start you know right off the bat like okay we're going to solve for all of these different customers jobs then you end up not being as resonant you're not you can't be as effective so we focused in on one and
the way that you make a decision on which one you focus on is similar to best customers right so uh High willingness to pay right there's no question whether or not they would pay for a product like yours the hand holding that they would need would be
minor or or less so and I say that understanding full well the difference between product lead and sales land I'm not saying that sales line is not good but sometimes there's a decision to be made if you're not if you're not set up today to support a sales letter a high
touch then you may want to opt for the more product LED approach and the reverse is also true if you've got a robust a robust sales team well then you might actually be better off you know leveraging sales more in that scenario and might want to attend towards that
but there's that criteria that you know you would think through so willingness to pay it's really obvious maybe the most important one is that they have an urgent problem so the whole painkiller versus vitamin thing you always want to be you know selling a painkiller so coup
has an urgent problem that needs solving not something that they might have a problem with six months down the line who has a high retention or even expansion potential is also really advantageous for very obvious reasons so customers who would have a long-term
need for this type of product and even potentially have that need expand right or change over time and evolve in ways that you envision the product can can help them and then there's other criteria too so sometimes you might want to prioritize One customer job over
another it those customers congregate in a way that make them really easy to Market to that's an advantage or another advantage and this was the case for sparktoro is you have an unfair Advantage with this Market in some way and so there were two different sort of
customer jobs that were coming into Spirit tour one was more focused on marketing and service providers and marketing the other one's more focused on like data and those you know data purists and those that really wanted you know verifiable data well sparktoro has an
advantage on the marketer side more so than like on the data analyst side right so that was another thing too so with that we made the call to focus on one of those customer jobs yeah yeah go so there's kind of two parts of this there's figuring out who you're going to
go after and then what problem you're solving for them and which do you think is more important at this point because kind of step one in this process just to zoom out a little bit is figure out your customer and what their problems are so
that you can actually solve them well and do you start with here's who we're going to go after and then here's the biggest problem how do you you kind of think about it they're sort of they're sort of one in the same so because we learned from sparktoro's ideal customers
we already know that they're a fit for the product they're they're happy happily paying you know primary player try the metallurgical dead hands customers right they're they're the customers we want more of so we've already validated that there's a demand from that customer base now what I'm
describing about choosing between two different customer jobs is really just you know of those ideal customers which one which customer job you want to lean into it's not that you wouldn't necessarily still be able to solve for that other customer job it's just not
the one that you would lead with and I'm always cautious around this too because with sometimes with Founders what will happen is the there's a I sort of level said that like just because we were prioritizing One customer job in the short term doesn't
mean you can't serve that other customer job down the line a classic example of that is like products that serve both Brands and like agencies for example so the the the customer job for Brands will be slightly different than agencies and if you've got uh you know an advantage
with one you would just start with one and then you would go back after it that's a bit of a like level up the after the fact it's not part of the core core process it's what you would do after but it doesn't mean you can't solve for the other customer jobs it
just means put one foot in front of the other do a really good job of one thing first and then we'll add that on later I don't know if that like 100 answered your question yeah Okay the reason that you start here is like basically what you're trying to do
is help spark your in this example grow faster we were trying to help them figure out why they're free to paid conversion rate was lower than what they wanted right that that was the challenge they came to us with like we our traffic numbers are good even our signups on our
website are good like our positioning and messaging on our website is clearly doing a good job but once people get into the product there's not enough of them getting to Value you know quickly enough I mean they still had healthy you know help healthy customer base but they
knew that that number could be you know increased so we knew what we were solving for got it okay that helps and so step one here is figure out who do you want to focus on not just because a lot of people would go at this problem like okay conversion is whatever ten
percent how do we increase so let's look at this data let's look at they're bouncing let's look at why people are confused and your approach is no let's focus on the people we really want to get into this product and focus on making them convert and not as focused
as much on every on the general case of conversion right we would get to that though like that's a it's a really important part of the process but it comes after figuring out who you're even solving for right but it's definitely important to look at those numbers I
mean I'm not saying don't look at the data obviously you have to they wouldn't have identified a problem had they not been looking at the data so the the challenge that happens so so often and I mean this happens with a lot of teams particularly marketers all sort of
victim to this like tactical way of approaching things those are piecemealing things to like piecemeal and campaigns or programs to prove that you know we're doing something and we're we're driving up numbers and they don't take big enough sort of swings so this
is is this is like zoom out for a second figure out who is it that you even want coming through the front door I mean the um social media platform tool that I mentioned the trial to pay conversion rate bumped up 40 because it was a higher qualified person comes through
the front door right and so that it it matters so if you can zoom out and keep in your mind's eye that ideal customer job that thing that you're solving for like we're not at personas if you don't care about personas at all they're important when you start talking about
like advertising and targeting and like that demographic data that you have to know you know when you're doing advertising and things like that that is not what I'm describing here at all I find that jobs be done too helps sort of tie and bond marketing and product and
customer success together a lot more right because they you know all three of those teams are arguably four with sales should all be focused on the same customer that's not you know revolutionary so this is a just a sort of helpful way to do that and like
product teams know at the end subscribe for the most part to the jobs be done Theory so marketers should you know follow suit and there's a lot to be gained anyway on the marketing side so anyway the short of it basically is that because we knew we were we were focused
on increasing that freedom to pay conversion rate the next step after the job is the mapping right so it's identifying okay for this ideal customer what are those key milestones in their relationship with our product what are those big sort of leaps of faith is how
I sort of describe it I mean I don't need to explain the reason of the Airbnb customer Journey tells that story right like where's a value moments in this relationship where are they reaching value there's some examples of that for folks that are trying to do this for
themselves potentially and then also how many of these moments would you suggest people yeah so it's completely depends on the product and the customer for that matter I shouldn't move that part of it obviously that's important in general
though what we would do is we'd break it down into a struggle phase an evaluation phase in a work phase struggle phase is they're experiencing the problem life sucks they're using the old way something's got to happen they've got to solve this thing in general the struggle
phase would break down between like out in the world experiencing the problem and for the first time and another stage which generally we call so we call that problem and generally there would be another one called interest where it's like okay now they're starting to shop
around they're starting to they're getting into solution seeking mode right they might be on your website they might be on your competitors websites they're you know reading product reviews things like that that's like interest stage and then there's the evaluation phase which
generally breaks down I will say two or three Milestones within the evaluation phase I say two or three because if you have a more complex product more complex customer is the more likely scenario there may be more leaps of faith that they have to or more
Milestones heavier lift for you to take so we have worked with companies where the evaluation phase has been three or four milestones I would always default to as few as possible so if I'm I'm cutting it down to like lowest common denominator say a
first value would be the first Milestone within evaluation so you want to get them to that product activation really really quickly and then value realization is the Milestone where you're solving that customer job so they reach a point with your product where they're like hell yes
this is it and for the for the first time they reached this critical threshold of product engagement now what that product engagement is with your unique you know product for that specific customer is Up For Debate but there still needs to be that moment and
then there's the growth phase which is about the sort of continued value so getting to frequency of usage and that you know a healthy building that habit getting into a Cadence that makes sense what type of you know feature usage and product usage should you want to see
there and then what frequency becomes really important and then there's another Milestone generally after that where you're like okay cool they're they're in they're Pro now what else do they need what else do they need from a product and also how else can we amplify
them or work with them to you know either start teaching our tool to other people I mean there's all kinds of things that can happen about growth rate that's where the sort of the the promise of exponential growth with SAS sort of comes into play and as people listen to
this just to maybe help if it's not super obvious what people shouldn't imagine is like a little keyframe for like a storyboard frame of like here's something your customers doing right yeah we often talk about it and describe it as like the story of like how I met
and fell in love with your product right it's like this documentary of like being out in the world finding it realizing that like hell yeah this might actually solve a problem for us this this might be it right getting that enough value to convince them to keep going to full
value realization to continued value to Value growth this episode is brought to you by Maven I've been an investor an advisor and a customer of Maven from day one I even taught my product management course through Maven Maven is a cohort based learning platform where you learn
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learn more at maven.com Lenny now again like I'm I'm seeing that as if you know based at all customers and products and that's not actually the case sometimes it's more complicated than that but in general that is what we've found so that's what we did first
work to our customers based on the research that we did and there's the research that we do we basically take all the responses we identify the critical patterns and that's how we identify the customer job from those critical patterns right if we segment down just that customer drop we
can look at responses and say okay here's what they're likely doing when they're out in the world experiencing this problem this is how they described the pain of their current solution and then here's what they say about how their search for a solution started
here's you know what they told us about you know how they started to do that research or find a solution and then there's questions that are asked in the research like you know what was the moment that convinced you that our product was going to solve this problem
for you and the answers to that question are going to tell you what your first value should look like right what should that first product activation experience whatever language you like to use what should that look like for them what parts of the product do you need to push
right up to the front of that experience so they can get to it really really quickly after they sign up and then value realization obviously would be close to if not the desired outcome right of that customer job where you're solving that customer job and then
you've got all kinds of um generally what happens when I'm going through this process with teams is a all kinds of ideas start to come up about what more they could be doing even like post solving that customer job right especially the product team gets really
excited because they've got all kinds of ideas about where the product can go and so that really helps sort of tie already together too and we a critical part of that process obviously is identifying you know we have to measure success along the way there should be a kpi for
each of those stages in that customer Journey and for the most part they won't be a big surprise on the struggle side of things like people out the World experience the problem how are we going to know we're doing a good job reaching them we bring in new unique website
visitors right in general that would be the measure of success for the problem Milestone and then next piece of the puzzle like okay once they discover that we exist even if they are visiting you know reading product reviews and visiting competitor sites or you know
whatever we'll know we've done a good job of convincing them that we can help solve their problem and determine the people that we don't want right well no we've done a good job when you know the conversion rate on our whatever our our primary CTA is on our website whether or
not it's start a trial or request a demo or something like that that's the generally the struggle phase is very straightforward in terms of measurement that's like marketers bread and butter that's where they wouldn't breathe all day long where things start
to change though generally when we're working with companies is helping them figure out how should they be measuring first value or product activation and how should they be measuring actual product engagement and generally what we do there is we can associate basically
what they told us brings them the most amount of value with the product attribute or parts of the product that deliver that value and we try to tie the kpi obviously to some sort of product meaningful product usage of that key part of the product or
product attribute can you share some examples of that because that's a really important piece yeah so for I'll use structural as an example just because it's the one that we started with so for sparturo the customer jaw I don't remember the exact like customer job
statement necessarily but for them what they said were the parts of the product that gave them a ton of value was two specific features lists so being able to sort of organize their findings in a way that made it not only easy for them to organize within their own files but also
share because a lot of them with clients or you know type stakeholders that they want to be able to share with so lists were a specific feature that honestly was not it was in there but they weren't front loading the product experience with that right so it
was I'm not going to say it was hidden but it wasn't front and center enough so that was one feature that we could associate with like you know being able to organize the data being able to continue to build on it and make it like usable over time and also share and then
there was another feature as well which was an exporting feature again it's not that it was hidden but it wasn't front and center enough and so we tied kpis to them making use of those features coupled with you know obviously the core feature which is searchability it was
like pairing uh the search functionality with the list functionality and then pairing the search functionality with the list functionality with the export functionality it's it's a bit abstract me just like saying the words it's easier with a visual but the story is
basically like help them use the search functionality first right after that make sure that they're using lists and if they don't use lists Let's help them get back to using it so that they get to that important critical sort of value moment and then the same applies for you
know the exporting features that we were talking about got it and to be clear you basically set a metric for each of these moments yeah Milestones yeah just whatever I mean you have to I mean it always surprises me when a team is like oh yeah yeah you're right we don't do
that I'm like what what do you mean so it's at a given Milestone unless they've reached that value moment you can't keep them on the train to something else like if they have any even discovered that really you know to them most valuable
part of their product you need to focus on getting them to that value otherwise like you can't just keep firing off emails and hoping they're gonna you know jump back into the product as if they're gonna care so a lot of what we do is actually proactive sort of customer
experiences whether or not in-app or email or whatever tool to help them get to that moment within the product and if they don't get to that moment it's measurable again that's why it's a kpi right then we can be you know sort of reactive in helping them get back in and
so identifying like okay or not they would say this like it fell off the train but just helping them nurture them back into the product didn't really discover that product that feature if they missed it the first time around so it's like proactive and pushing them
forward but then also catching them if they fall and the only way to catch them if they fall is if you're measuring something meaningful along the way so we have like a you know that storyboard that we were talking about we also have a map where it's like the experience to
get them to a certain you know value moment but then that win back experience to get them back in should they you know fall out for any reason I mean people get hungry and get distracted and like there's a ton of reasons why I mean there's a lot of stats on you know the
the percentage 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 the fact that so many companies don't have some sort of win back or re-engagement always kind of blows my mind
so just to recap and then we'll keep going with the the process step one understand what your customers are going through figure out the most important customer and their biggest problem then map out the journey that they go through the struggle they go through before they
discover your product the steps they go through to evaluate decide to use your product and then once they use your product then continue to use your product and using it more and more and then once you've figured out these steps and there's a rough number like 10 12
steps like what's a what's a good number just to put oh no I would hope six six okay I'm always trying to bring it down low it lowest only as long as it absolutely needs to be I mean that that goes for okay all pages landing pages same thing for customer Journey Mass
okay Airbnb had 12 I think so yeah yeah I like that okay and then you've come up with a metric to tell you if that step is performing well if they've gotten there did they get to that cool one last question before we move on to the next step can you give like two
maybe examples of like an actual moment say in spark tutorials case and then the metric that they use to measure if they've gotten to that point yes so the measure for Success at the that tips somebody over into evaluation is performing their first search so when
you're on their website it's you perform a search it's not signing up for trial or signing for free although it does tip you into signing a February when you perform your first search Society of getting your first search and seeing your first search results is that first
serve measure and then following that it is for first value it is using search again so generally I mean this is very product specific like I said but generally at first surge is like a kind of an experiment where you're sort of trying the tool on for the first time generally
searches start to get better when you do you know your second and third so we try to encourage at least five plus so that first value kpi is I think it was five plus surges Plus at least one list so it's the combination of those two things that have to happen before
somebody's gonna be really see what this thing does it's not that they won't get value if they don't use lists but because we know that's for pros ideal customers really had a ton of value out of lists people can hang out in that stage all day long if they want to we're
we're not going to worry about them we're going to worry about the people that really want the actual functionality of the real full like fully featured tool so that was the first value that's how we we would know that they got to product activation and
then the next one as I mentioned before is a combination of actually three things so it is conducting a minimum amount of searches within a stand of time creating at least a certain number of lists I can't remember exactly what it is and then discovering exporting at
least once and then that is they've reached a a meaningful enough threshold of product engagement and then value growth was that they do all of that on a regular enough basis so that we know they're not like a Flight Risk basically right so that we know that
they're getting continued value from the product and if they ever fall out of that ongoing engagement sort of measure of success then we can you know trigger either one-on-one Outreach an email whatever I mean obviously it can't be an app right because they're not logging
into the app then can't reach them but to uh to help them back in and to say hey what's up and can we help and is there anything that we can do and basically be proactive in getting them back in and then value growth I believe is I think it was expansion or upgrade in in their case I
can't remember exactly cool so you end up with these say six kpis yeah I imagine this becomes schools you track and then you probably pick one of these to focus on say a per year per quarter awesome yeah yeah hopefully not for a year okay per week hopefully short
because I mean I will say that with some of the kpis it's very straightforward right with new unique website visitors or the website conversion rate that is I mean depending on who owns the the website that's not something that should take you a year like you should never be
focused on only your websites conversion rate for a year hopefully but these other kpis and these other Milestones I mean I I have no disillusions about like if it impacts the product obviously there's a lot of implications there and so yes generally one you tip over into
that sort of in-app and more product experience timelines vary widely to say the least okay cool let's move on to the next step okay so after that point we had you know a rich voice of customer document that came out of that research we had a
messaging guide for them to use not only in their marketing materials but also through the entire you know sort of product experience and also identifying the parts of the product that were so meaningful and actually so their VP of marketing the new VP of marketing Amanda
and timidad actually ruled out checklist they built a checklist like a product onboarding checklist and also product onwardy emails and their trial to paid doubled like we we're like okay cool you know let us know if you need any help or whatever and they're like oh we're good
we got this and checked in two months later and their childhood had doubled I feel like you skipped the important step of hey we got kpis and then you're like oh we gave them all this information and so I'd love to spend a little more time
on there he came up with messaging for them positioning stuff yeah what what happens there this is the thing yeah the the they have a team in place right they've got very highly skilled and not a huge team but highly skilled you know a marketer there at the helm I mean not
the least of which is ran fishkin they're you know they're their CEO so basically what we did was we gave them it's like a framework so it's like here's the here are the bones of this right so got a messaging and positioning guide for you generally they're you know I mean when we do them
they're like five to seven pages long they hit on the value prop they hit on the you know major competitive advantages they hit on the major value themes that you want to focus on those value themes can be broken down by the emotional benefits and the functional
benefits tied to the product attributes that derive that value and so that document and there's there's more that goes into it but that messaging guide basically can be used as the Baseline for all kinds of marketing collateral and material but also email onboarding
right so when they're writing their email sequences for whatever it is they're trying to solve for throughout that custom whatever Milestone they're solving for they can use that as their Baseline like this is what we're going for this is the the goal here and that
messaging guide rolls up to the job to be done so it's like God the job to be done is sort of like the top line and then we've got that messaging that serves that job to be done and then we've got the sort of operationalized customer experience with those
milestones and kdis and then you sort of zoom in on like where is the experience most broken right now we already knew that for spark tour we knew that we wanted to influence that first early product experience so that's where we zoomed in and and decided on what
programs they should just sort of roll out and email onboarding was a natural as was the checklist for folks that want to work on messaging say so you you kind of just like hey here's a bunch of messaging advice any tips for how to message well how to
think about messaging once you have a sense of your journey maybe some goals any just Pro tips here you could share oh boy um I mean that research and the voice of customer I mean I'm always going to go back to that that's you can you can guess and you can do you know use your
best judgment and you can use internal uh sort of stakeholders and and you know the the internal team knowledge and I'm not saying that that is not valuable and that you shouldn't use that at all you can but it should never come before learning from and listening to your best ideal
customers and using the language that they use you want to reflect them back to them right 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 and the hierarchy of messaging is
really important as well right so I mean there's the classic like sometimes it's hard to see you know the label from inside the jar so it's really helpful to get out and be like okay how do customers see us and generally you can identify the hierarchy of what is
important to them right what is the thing that they say is most valuable about their product what was that you know aha moment or was that first value moment or what is the thing that makes you stand out over everybody else and like it can literally be a numbers game
if you take you know 100 100 or so survey responses you can break that down like here's the thing they said they cared about most here's the thing they said they shared about second most and third most like not to be so paint by numbers about it but and it there's you
know there's art in the science but in general you want to reflect back what they said they care about not what you think is the coolest thing about your product that's obviously not the best way to go and that's something that like we all inherently know but it becomes
really hard when there's a lot going on and things are changing and the product is evolving and there's a lot of teens and people are coming and going it's easy to lose sight of that especially when you're just trying to you know get out the door so that messaging
guide is mentally like okay here we are like this is this is where I'm this is my Baseline these are my guard rails for everything that we produce it's also really handy to hand off to copywriters right when you bring in I mean not just copywriters lots of people but
particularly when you're producing copied providing that messaging guide is like solar platter for them is your book or is this available anywhere the template that you end up sharing with a customer just like here's a guide to the layout messaging recommendations I've
yet so many there's so many people templates and stuff yeah we can I'll include a couple links so great we've got lots of stuff like that yeah okay great a few final questions around jobs to be done yeah so you said that they doubled their conversion from free to
paid amazing what was their job to be done in the end and then and then I just have a few questions about the jobs he was when you're struggling when they're struggling to identify opportunities that aren't as obvious so generally when you're doing
you know marketing research you'll end up signing the same things over and over again and if you are a service provider or if you're in-house for that matter and you're like tasked with always coming up with like novel and new and more more you tap that pretty quickly
and so what customers were coming to them for was like give me more I need I need to impress I need to impress here like I need more to work with I need to identify opportunities that I wouldn't otherwise be aware of actually that was exactly what it was I helped me identify
opportunity as I wouldn't otherwise be aware of and the so that so that the customer job statement is when I and in a certain situation help me which is filled in by what those things that they're looking for those motivations so I can which is the desired outcome the
help me was about I believe it was like in a way that is organized and that is shareable and like usable over time that I can like build on and really you know rely on over time and the desired outcome was about I mean this isn't going to be surprising but like it was
about getting stakeholder within and getting people on board with and sharing and and looking good but looking like a pro right and doing their job more effectively and driving better results for either their their own team or for their clients awesome we got there we
lost a little bit over jobs to be done I don't I imagine many people listening have no idea what this is so maybe as our final question uh can you just kind of explain what this framework is and how folks can learn to use it or for any resources you recommend yeah it comes to
money I mean I had a heavy influence for us definitely is Bob mesta who's one of the original Super Architects of jobs be done there are lots of materials online for jobs I am not the foremost authority in jobs at all there's I think it's
jtbd.info is a good website there's a there's a bunch also Bob mesta wrote a book called demand side sales that goes into it there's also there's also lots of books written about jobs we've done when coffee make kale is one that a lot of people love I digress point being
that what matters is identifying what it is that customers are trying to accomplish so demographic data doesn't matter the classic example is like could you look at oh King Charles now the example has changed if you look at Ozzy Osbourne and and it was Prince Charles
the original but now it's King Charles if you look at those two men they're the exact same age and live in the same area they both have a dog they both love cars they both you know from a demographic standpoint they are identical but they obviously lead very
different lives what motivates them is very different and so like that is where typically personas sort of fall down and so would jobs be done does is helping figure out like what is that you know desired outcome what is that in better life that customers are seeking out
you're just the vehicle to get them there and so that that's all it is it's like I mean there's so many tired analogies that I don't want to use them but milk sticks maybe what's that the milkshake analysis the milkshake one is the is the it's not even the analogy I
think that was like the original one of the original job stories that is the milkshake one any other things you want to share about the process that you go through with the companies things you've learned before we get to our very exciting lightning round yeah one of the
the sort of objections that we often get to this type of work is that research takes a long time and that research can often lead to more questions and can like slow everything down you can end up in in sort of like analysis paralysis but it doesn't have
to be that way it can be very straightforward honestly in a survey scenario like with Wix factoro in just that scenario I have lots of examples of companies where we run surveys it can be a couple of weeks like two or three weeks you can actually come out with you
know something solid to move forward with and you don't get stuck in this like the bickering or the the the sort of you know the all those stakeholders the too many cooks in the kitchen like you you can come to something decisive you can get value out of that the other
thing too the other objection we get a lot from Founders in particular is because they build products to solve a problem that they had which is cool and it definitely makes you one of the most knowledgeable people about your solution but products change markets change
customers change uh teams change in a ball not everything can live inside of your head and there's a ton of value in getting learning and getting inside the heads of your best customers that like you may has been really close to the Inception of the product but if any span
of time has changed it will all you'll always learn something new I've never been in a scenario like this where a Founder has not learned something new from their research and been able to leverage it in a way that makes their their product experience better
awesome and we'll come back to how folks can reach out to you if they want to experience this process can work with you learn more but before we get there we've got this for a very exciting lightning round I've got five quick questions for you we'll go through them
quick whatever comes to mind that's the that's what we're doing okay so okay okay what are two or three books that you recommend most to people looking to get better at marketing I very very rarely read marketing books um but there's two that I think are are pretty foundational in the recent so
obviously Awesome by April Dunford I'm sure you've proved that one a ton it's kind of like required reading I would say especially for Founders and I told April when she first wrote them I'm going to require every single founder I work but to read your book before we
work with them because it's like foundational you have to know that and then the other one that I really enjoyed Flipside was hooked by nir Al so that one was great too but like I said I don't read many morbidden books the other one that I would be remiss not to
mention is ours that we're writing about the process which is you know really about like the step-by-step how to do this thing so as much as like we love going through this process with companies I sort of took a page from April here too and that like telling the
process and having people be able to rule this out and do this internally themselves has been like wildly gratifying we do it with a training a training program and this is our next sort of step and not in in like you know getting out into the world even more so
you absolutely can't do this stuff yourself and so that process is later in that book and then another book that I read recently which has nothing to do with marketing at all but was like really nice was four thousand weeks I don't know anything that right now oh
yeah I enjoyed it it was a nice sort of like coming back to like base a bit I don't know if when I read it was just like I just finished it a couple of weeks ago it was just the timing was perfect I feel like what's going on in the world right now and how everybody's
probably feeling right now it's a it's a good solid it's a good solid read for for now I'm enjoying it I just started well encourage me to keep reading it yeah okay favorite recent movie or TV show I have young kids I just bought a second property I were like renovating
like three houses right now I I do not watch movies almost ever uh the only thing that I'm currently binging is YouTubers that do like DIY interior design and like renaults reason being that my partner and I bought a property with four very very old Cottages like
Lakefront tiny little like almost like tiny houses like little cottages and we are like slowly renovating each of them so my sort of fill is learning about interior design and like DIY home rentals that's yeah who's had the most impact on you in your career
this is the worst question I hate saying this but it's probably my dad I have to say my dad because he's like a an entrepreneur Drew and Drew and I remember very vividly I worked I worked for him for I think eight years early in my career and one of the things
that he always sort of said was like it was the joy of the business like he didn't care what it's like it doesn't matter what you're selling like he could be selling anything but it's the joy of Entrepreneurship and I that really sat with me and so even when I was in-house
I always knew that I needed to do you know something on my own and be sort of in charge of that journey and I and his joy in it is has has impacted me a lot and he was the reason why I knew I was always going to do this other than that I would say I have an incredible network
of women that I have been very lucky were part of a group that we call shine crew I think I'm supposed to like copyright or something to somebody because I think the term shine theory is what it's based on basically but I'm very very lucky to be like heavily
influenced by April Dunford Tara Robertson Joanna weed Talia wolf and then obviously my business partner Claire you know obviously changed everything for me to having that like partnership in business I don't think I would have I definitely I don't think I
would have wasted this long so yeah definitely a huge influence for her what's one thing that helps you stay focused and productive during the day definitely carving up time like time blocking I do a lot of time blocking like our in advance with like a little
brain Emoji like safeguarding my time something else that we also do because we're a small team and we use slack obviously something else that we do to protect each other's time is we like time not time and stamp but we put like a little code in all of our messages
that's like either like you don't have to listen to this before the end of day or it's timely or it's no rush so that we know when we need to mentally process messages in slack so we can only we can drop in there just periodically and the only other thing that I would say that I
do maybe once a month or once a quarter is we do time we're pretty buttoned up about our time tracking and so we go back and it sort of Keeps Us honest about how our time is actually spent um and then we can sort of like adjust and time block accordingly to sort of
make up for like the shortcomings of our previous quarter and it was really clever I haven't heard of that trick with themo G4 you can do this later we actually just use no rush or EOD like for end of day or timely we do have like a the alarm Emoji is the like now this
is gonna be dealt with ASAP amazing Gia thank you for making time for this final question where can folks find you online how do they pre-order your book how can they learn more and then also just how can listeners be useful to you thank you for asking a
Twitter is probably the best way my Twitter handle is atrocious GGI is me on Twitter I'm on LinkedIn every once in a while obviously my email address is Gia forgetthefunnel.com so if anybody has any questions whatever feel free to email me if you want any templates or
whatever that don't get included in the show notes just ping me I know problem about that and then forgetthefunnel.com we've got a book page where there is a wait list for the yeah we're gonna do pre-sale and then the published book like the public physical published
physical book will be early in 2023 but we are going to do pre-sale because getting in those hands went on Love It Gia thank you for being here thank you so much for having me thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to
the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode