YouSaid · the spoken record

Georgiana Laudi

lines on the record: 71
first: 2022-09-29
most recent: 2022-09-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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, Sparpuros from SparkToro'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 to be done theory, which is basically this idea that.”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when they first launched, actually even pre-launch, Random Casey came to Clara and I to sort of help with their positioning messaging as they were sort of, you know, going forth to launch. I mean, 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 traffic and interest in Sparkoro, I mean, Rand is no small fish, right? So he's got a good audience built in, which is fantastic. But those that were getting to the website.”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 is a really important part of that. So the story that I was going to use to sort of illustrate this is there's a company that we work with from time to time. We've worked with them at least twice, yeah, arguably three times. So Ran Fiskin, who was the founder of Moz, he's got a new product. It's an audience research tool called Spark Toro.”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it really made it obvious to not only me, of course, but to everybody that, you know, there is that customer experience layer that marketers are so good at has such an incredibly important role. in driving revenue, right? Not just in building awareness, but in playing a major role in helping customers get value and catching them when they fall off and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it changed a lot for us.”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I did know that. I was very grateful to have seen it. Like, I didn't realize at the time, but it changed the way, like you said at the beginning, it changed the way that I thought about marketing.”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing because it 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 combay about it, but it was a bit of a moment. And also, it made communicating with especially the product team and the engineering team a lot easier for me. So we were using a shared language, you know, 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 KPIs, yada, yada yada. So it was amazing. And honestly, I mean, I can't credit only that, obviously, to our growth, but it was a pretty impressive couple years that followed that. And I think the alignment that that brought us was huge. Yeah. Anyway, that's the story, sorry. That wasn't super short, but it was.”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To sort of understand at a glance what the goal was at each of those milestones. And I was like, holy shit, this is completely different. This is completely through the lens of the customer versus the business and the grossness of like the funnel is just so far removed from that experience that I was like, Ryan, look at this. We need this. And he's like, oh, yeah, this is good. I took a picture, can't find it until life meets. But we returned back to the office the following week and a co-founder and head of product, head of CS, Orion. 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 a 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 because it had that buy-in. Everybody was like, oh, yeah, okay, this makes sense. And I understand. And it made everybody feel a lot better about what they were doing.”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unbounce the time. And I was interestingly with the customer success and was also with me. So Brian Engley 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 person's life that had nothing to do outside of Airbnb, which I thought was really interesting. It's like the beautiful little like milestones really encapsulated in a sort of snapshot way such that anybody walking by it or anybody, you know, being reminded that it exists.”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, this is one of my favorites. 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. We went downstairs to where your working area was where the product team was. And there were sheets of paper taped to the wall, like a bunch of row. And it was kind of, it would have been easy to miss because it's 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 on bounds, leading to marketing.”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 because premium's a marketing tool, but like not everybody subscribes to that, right? Not every, you know, company would necessarily agree that that's the case. A lot of companies might say, no, it's product. So we end up seeing kind of a messy middle there because there's no natural handoff. Pretty well every company that we've worked with has had an opportunity to improve, especially product onboarding and product activation.”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 doing a better job with their messaging and positioning on their website or their go-to-market or acquisition strategy on their website, right? Like using a sandbox account or like getting a faux freemium account, right? To get let people pick the tires 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 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”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which I think we might end up talking about again, 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.”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stories we didn't even touch anything after the sign up 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 benefit 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 of like product adoption and using that messaging and positioning past the website and even in the product onboarding itself, you know, email in app, whatever, and just making sure that they're getting to and have the columns to get to the parts of the product that they care about the most, which can increase child to paid or product activation. With autobooks, the product usage that the North Star product usage jumped by like 300% or something, then quite a short period of time after rolling out email onboarding to support that product experience. And SparkTor as well.”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, 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 on 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 conversion on a website went up with this new messaging by 89%. But the thing that I love the most about that particular”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 those in the know jobs to be done is like a bang 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.”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 particularly relevant for SaaS companies is that recurring revenue businesses, you cannot think about marketing and growth 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 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 context is unbelievably, you know, valuable, especially for marketing. And so delete that out of the equation is a big problem. So yeah, that's in a nutshell. Tunnels are bad.”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 at startup fest 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 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 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 of the.”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And sort of married this customer research background in mind, like strategy, marketing background. And we developed this framework that we now use when we work with predominantly B2B SaaS companies is who we work with right now.”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 and their marketing and stuff like that was starting to get burned out. And, you know, I was doing a lot and I was like, what would it feel like to like sink my teeth into one brand? And so I decided to go in-house and I'm Dout 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 Selentrop, who led marketing at Califully. 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.”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay. So marketing for probably about 20 or so years, which sounds completely ridiculous when I say it, but I started working for my father's retail business very, or like in the early, early 2000s. Probably 2000 actually works there for a number of years and then eventually left 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 and then I What's”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem with funnels and pirate metrics and 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 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? about the values of the business, not the value of 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 are particularly relevant for SaaS companies is that recurring revenue businesses. You cannot think about, you know, marketing and growth 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”
2022-09-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source