Customer-led growth

Gia Laudi, co-founder of the consultancy Forget The Funnel, explains why traditional marketing funnels fail recurring-revenue SaaS businesses and walks through her customer-led growth process. The conversation covers jobs-to-be-done research, mapping the customer journey into milestones with KPIs, and messaging and onboarding changes that improved conversion for companies like SparkToro.

01Key learnings

• Stop treating growth as ending at acquisition; for recurring-revenue businesses, retention, expansion and post-signup activation must be part of the growth model.
• Start by identifying your best customers: those who are happy, pay well, have an urgent problem, and signed up recently enough to remember life before your product.
• Survey recent best customers about the trigger moment, alternatives considered, must-haves, anxieties, and desired outcomes, then distill the patterns into one prioritized job to be done.
• Map the customer journey in a handful of milestones (problem, interest, first value, value realization, growth), and define a measurable KPI for each one.
• Find the specific product features that deliver first value for your best customers and push them to the front of onboarding, using proactive emails or checklists.
• Build a messaging guide grounded in customers' own language, ranking the value themes they say matter most, and use it across marketing, onboarding and copywriting.
• Create win-back experiences that re-engage users who stall at a milestone, since most users who log in once never return.
• Ground the research in recent customers and a few weeks of survey work rather than assumptions, since founders always learn something new about their customers.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.