Georgiana Laudi: So, you've got a great team, you've got a great product, and on paper, things should be working. But week after week, things still feel off. Your team is executing. They're shipping, they're launching, they're running campaigns, but you're still asking yourself why it feels like they're guessing. It's one of the most common things that I hear from founders when they reach out to me.
They've built something great, they've hired smart people, but they still feel like they're the only ones connecting dots. In this episode, I'm gonna be breaking down why that happens. Even when the team is talented, even when they're well intentioned and what to do about it, because the real issue is not the team, it's not the product.
It's the absence of a system that gives everyone the same level of clarity that you have in your head. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. Welcome to the Forget the Funnel podcast, where we help SaaS and recurring revenue businesses stop guessing and start making more customer led and data backed decisions about how to grow.
We're a product marketing and growth consultancy that helps teams learn from their best customers and map and measure their. To unlock your most effective levers for growth. If you're ready to evolve past best practices and other people's playbooks because you know that what got you here won't get you there, then this show is for you.
With that, let's dive into the episode. Okay, so today we're gonna be talking about why does it feel like your team is guessing? I've been working with B2B SaaS teams for what feels like forever. At least 15 years. I was in marketing 10 years before that, but about 15 years ago I started working specifically with tech companies, predominantly on their marketing and product marketing.
And there's just this very interesting relationship in tech with marketing. I. I've talked about this a lot over the years. Forget the funnel launched on the back of this tumultuous relationship between tech and marketing. It's just this weird juxtaposition, right? You've got these technical founders, and then you've got the work of bringing these technical products to market for non-technical people.
And so you're talking about the relationship with customers, how to talk to them, messaging, positioning, and all the nuances that go into communication and relationship building. When you have a recurring revenue model, and that has led to this, truly a plethora of founders reaching out to me over the years, and I mean literally hundreds of founders coming to me with the same core frustration.
It feels like my team is guessing. And it is wildly frustrating. I can understand that, especially for technical founders. They're like, why isn't there a system? Why does this feel so abstract? Why can't I tell what's working or not? So that's what I wanna talk about in more detail here. I wanna break this down.
What is really going on here? But before I get into it, the thing that I just wanna make really, really clear. This is not obvious already. This is extremely common, and it is not a criticism of your product or your team. In fact, a lot of founders who reach out say the opposite.
They say, we've got a great product, we've got happy customers, just not enough of them. And we've got a great team. I really like them. They're smart, they care, and yet execution feels. Too scattered. It feels too chaotic, and that's the thing that I wanna focus on here. It's not that your team doesn't care, it's not that they're not capable.
I don't necessarily think that it's a skills gap. I think that what's missing is structure, right? There's this famous quote from James Clear: you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. I might have gotten that one off a little bit, but you know what the quote is that I'm talking about, and it feels like we're guessing way too often, way more than we should.
That's because there is no system. So why does it feel this way? Why? What's, what's going on here? First and foremost, I just wanna call out the elephant in the room, which is that most founders. Even the ones that reach out to us genuinely believe that they've done everything that they were supposed to do, right?
I talk to my customers, and we've got a product market fit. Um, I hired a great team, but they recognize, obviously, because as founders do that it must be me like I must have missed something somewhere because performance isn't where it needs to be, and things feel way too chaotic, and I'm worried that the people on my team might not be.
Right fit. Maybe there's a skills gap there. Most of them know that the shortcomings in their team and in, you know, their company obviously are theirs, right? Because they're at the top of the food chain. But often, these founders make these false assumptions that they've done enough learning that they've done what they needed to do.
They talked to customers and they hired the rate team. That should be enough for them to execute, but it's actually not true. Teams are trying, they're working really, really hard. They're producing a lot, but they're also second guessing constantly. This feels like your team, right? A lot of activity.
Nothing's really hitting the mark. They're unsure often of whether what they're doing is actually going to work. And they're often basing their decisions on what competitors are doing or what they've done in the past, or what they think the founder wants. And actually, I wanna double click on this one because this is actually.
So much more true today than it used to be for teams. It can feel like a lot of effort. It can feel like we're throwing spaghetti at the wall until something sticks. Um, or at least it can look to the founders like that's what marketing is doing. And we get into this trap where we're trying to, like, we're, we're second-guessing ourselves.
We're trying to please everyone. But also there's this added thing that's going on in go to market right now, which is. The elephant in the room, which is AI and the and vibe Marketing and vibe coding, which I'll, I'll get to, but Vibe Marketing is making, it's just changing the name of Go to Market. It's changing the name of the game for go to market teams and so.
Not only are the old playbooks, you know, what they did previously at previous companies not working, but also they're getting a million ideas thrown their way because everybody's so excited. There's just so much activity happening in the market. That and their own, I, you know, their own excitement as well.
Um, you know, you've got, uh, these really prolific marketing experts out in the world talking about how to produce. A hundred LinkedIn articles in 10 minutes, and you know how to do market research in 20 minutes, and really, all you're doing is scraping the internet. And so, like, what ideas are you gonna get from that?
Right? Garbage in, garbage out Style marketing is what you're gonna get from that. You're gonna get Vibe Marketing. I have nothing against Vibe Marketing if it's anchored in something of meaning. I was working with a team recently where their VP of Marketing in Confidence told me. He doesn't even know if he's making the right decisions anymore, and he's second-guessing everything.
And part of the problem for him that, that he mentioned was that like, my founder's really smart. I trust my founder, my founder's paying attention to what is going on in the market. So I trust their opinion. So when they send me things, I want to act on it. I get excited about it too. And you know, I start to doubt my own decisions and I don't know.
Whether or not I should go that way. So, I end up executing everything, and I end up doing way too much. And, um, I find myself trying to do too many things at once, and that's what's happening when you're. You know, that's what happens when you're surrounded by really smart people who have very strong opinions, and a lot of people have very strong opinions about marketing.
They always have. Everybody is marketed too. So we all feel like we have some level, you know, we know what, what good marketing is because we are all on the receiving end of marketing. So we all tend to have opinions about these things. But one of the problems is that everybody's got an opinion. And in addition, it's being sort of exacerbated right now because there's just so much more happening in the market.
There's a lot more marketing in the market than there used to be. And I, like, I can't even believe I'm saying those words. 'cause when I think back to, you know, marketing, marketing in 2010, you know, even then we're like, oh, content marketing, inbound thought leadership. You can't get away with that stuff anymore.
Those playbooks don't work anymore. But there's a lot of marketers, some marketers that are still relying on those o old, like thought leadership, inbound, you know, only sort of campaigns. And then you've got these other marketers that are going playing the volume game now and. That was the case five years ago where we're like, oh my God, there's so much garbage content on the internet right now.
How can you even stand out? And, you know, there are all these algorithm changes and things like that to address the fact that there is so much garbage content on the internet. I. Well, now what's gonna happen? That's 10xd, and it's probably going to be 100x. And so that leaves teams feeling really, really uncertain and doubting their decisions.
And so when. They've got people on the team sending them things in Slack, and their founders are sending them, you know, forwarding emails saying, why aren't we doing something like this? It becomes really, really hard not to second guess yourself. Even for people who are quite senior, you get pulled in a million directions without a clear, aligned system that grounds you.
What actually matters to your customers, because everything right now feels like it's open to interpretation and you're constantly adjusting and reacting and doubting. It is exhausting. I alluded to this. There's no system. I've talked about this a couple of times. This is the, the really the problem that I wanna, I wanna sort of make clear here that there is a.
Strategic clarity gap. It isn't necessarily a talent problem; it's a clarity problem. There's no shared language, there's no clear understanding of your best customer, and most importantly, there's no system for making confident and aligned, very important decisions along with the rest of your team, and just way, way too many ideas.
So it's not for lack of creativity, it's not for lack of ambition. If anything, there are more ideas than anybody has ever known what to do with, and without a system for filtering and prioritizing those ideas, everything feels a hundred percent possible, but then nothing gets done well. So, this brings me back to this system.
Now, I'm not gonna surprise anybody who's familiar with this podcast or with our material. A customer led growth is literally the framework. For not only gathering customer intelligence, but really, really importantly, the most important part of that is actualizing it and turning into something actionable for the team.
It's the process of operationalizing customer intel for the team. That is what can close this gap, because what it does is gives the team a shared language, a shared system, for making decisions about what actually matters. To your actual customers. It's not about scraping the internet. It's not about the latest idea.
It's not about what your competitor is doing. It's rooted in what actually works for you. So, how do you know if this is what is happening with your team? So you might be asking yourself like, is it actually the fact that the team doesn't have a system? Or is it that I just don't have the right team? Or is there a skill gap on the team?
Maybe I need to hire a vibe marketer. Maybe I need to hire a head of marketing or a CMO that is AI native, if there were such a thing. So let's talk about what the signs would be. So red flag, you're still the bottleneck. Whether self-imposed or not. So if you are still needed to make decisions about your go-to-market activities, that is a MA major, major red flag here.
That does not necessarily mean there's a skills gap in your team projects. Also getting stuck in endless feedback loops is a big warning sign as well. Another warning sign is your team getting excited about a campaign and bringing something to market, but they can't actually root it or explain what, what the strategic anchor is for that idea.
They get really excited about something. They don't know, and they can't articulate. If you ask them, and you're not even necessarily always asking them, but if you ask them, would they be able to tell you why this particular campaign might be effective, why this particular? You know, maybe it's a marketing campaign.
Maybe it's an email series. Maybe it's a direction you wanna take your newsletter. Maybe it's an onboarding. Why can they actually answer why it is aligned with this strategic direction that you need to take this company, the strategic direction that is actually going to resonate with your customers?
This kind of guessing shows up in subtle ways. Constantly rewriting copy, uh, launching half-baked campaigns. This is a really important one. Building features that don't actually tie to customer value. So, this whole vibe coding thing is the same thing as vibe marketing. It leads to a lot of things coming to market without really.
Knowing or understanding why we're bringing this thing to market, why are we prioritizing this thing? It's not because your team isn't good; it's because they don't have a system to guide them. They have no guardrails, so execution becomes scattered. You stay stuck in every single loop. So, really, that is me naming the real issue so that you can actually address it.
I don't think it's because your team isn't good. I think it's because they don't have a shared foundation to guide their decisions. Maybe you should try giving them this strategic guidance, this strategic framework to work within, and then see what happens. See if their performance improves, and see if they start making better, more strategic decisions.
You need a system to help. Helps you prioritize to know what matters most to your best customers or to validate what's working and what's not. You might need to kill some darlings. That is totally okay, but you gotta decide what to kill and, what to keep and what to double down on. Because if you don't have that, the result is scattered execution.
That's not focused, it's not aligned, and you as the founder, end up being the one who still has to connect the dots. So the takeaway. That I want you to leave this episode with is a lack of clarity leads to a lack of confidence. Your team genuinely wants to be strategic. They just need the right inputs.
So when you can remove the guesswork and operationalize customer understanding, you can stop relying on heroics or instinct, and you can create a repeatable way to make better decisions and ship better things. Grow more consistently and more effectively. With all of these amazing ideas that your team is getting, they can compartmentalize them with the guardrails that they need to and execute them in a way that actually works.
The team does not need more ideas or more urgency. They need clarity. They need to know who they're building for and what actually matters to those people, and how their work directly contributes to delivering value to those people as well. So the next thing that I wanna talk about is. What does it look like when a team actually has this foundation?
Right? What happens when you do give your team that foundation? What do strategic customer-led teams actually do differently? And that's what we're gonna talk about in the next episode. In the meantime, I hope this was clarifying. I hope it makes you feel a little bit better that you're not alone. This is not your problem.
It might not even be your team. Problem. In fact, I wager it's probably not, it's a systems problem. So we're gonna talk about what does that actually look like? What does good look like for a system like this? In the next episode, I hope you'll join me over there. Okay. Till next time, and that's it for this episode of the Forget the Funnel podcast.
Thanks for tuning in. If you have any questions about the topic that we covered, don't hesitate to reach out on LinkedIn, or you can visit our website at www.forgetthefunnel.com. Also, if you found this episode helpful, don't forget to subscribe and help spread the word by leaving a rating or a review. Okay, see you next time.
