Georgiana Laudi: You've probably seen this play out before. A team that's busy shipping features, launching campaigns, and holding lots of meetings with the results. They feel disconnected. There's no clear through line between effort and outcomes and no confidence that what's being done today is actually gonna move the needle tomorrow.
In the last episode, we talked about why this happens. And how even great teams can fall into guesswork without a clear system. So today, we're gonna shift gears to that because not every team stays stuck. Some teams operate differently. Some teams make better, faster, more aligned decisions without relying on heroics, gut feels, or top-down corrections.
In this episode, that's what I'm breaking down. What strategic customer led teams do differently and how they turn clarity into a competitive advantage. So let's dive in. 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 experiences. 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 the first thing that strategic teams do differently is they don't rely on guesswork. Their decisions are actually grounded in real customer insight and real customer data. They don't have to guess. They know what they're doing. They're not. Throwing spaghetti at the wall.
They're not vibe marketing. They are actually executing based on decisions that were previously made. They're not just going with the flow. They also have their customer journey mapped into milestones. So distinct, basically steps in their customer's experience where they know that their customer needs different things at different points in time in their customer journey.
These milestones are defined. Furthermore, the teams have priorities based on those milestones, so they know what customer experience is needed and also what that customer experience should be. And so teams have prioritized their work based on what is needed for a certain customer experience at a certain milestone.
Furthermore, I mentioned this. Each milestone has a KPI associated with it. So our teams know, these teams know they helped customers get from one milestone to the next. When they've hit this KPI, it's a leading indicator of success that helps. Focus on what we're doing and help teams understand, uh, what their goal is and how their success is going to be measured.
And it's tied to a customer experience and a customer actually getting to a moment of value. They also know exactly what stage they're solving for and when. So what I mean by that is. Every stage has different needs. Every milestone in a customer's experience has slightly different needs, has slightly different assets or materials or programs or campaigns that you're running.
And so those teams, these really strategic teams, they know exactly which milestone they're solving for, and they would know exactly the headspace. That their customer is in they know what their customer is thinking, feeling, and doing at each of these milestones, so they know exactly what they're doing.
They know exactly the space and context that they're solving for. They've also tracked what helps and what hurts customers getting from one milestone. To the next, and once they've done that sort of heuristic and gap analysis, they've looked at their end-to-end customer experience. They've identified which milestones they have the opportunity to improve, and they know exactly.
What darlings should kill, and what should be doubled down on by milestones? They identified an opportunity when they looked at the customer experience holistically and strategically. Ideas are also collected and then revisited, not I. Reacted to. So I'm seeing a lot of teams right now fall into the trap of shiny object syndrome, and this has always been an issue, by the way.
It's not like shiny object syndrome is a new thing, particularly in tech and marketing. But right now, shiny object syndrome is particularly. Prominent. There's just a lot going on right now. There's a lot of ideas being thrown into Slack. I mean, it's happening with my team, let alone in the teams that I'm working with.
I'm seeing this a lot. It used to be when a founder would forward an email and ask a question like, why aren't we doing this? And then the head of marketing or the head of product marketing or the head of growth would be like, I'm not really sure what to say with this. Am I supposed to change what I'm doing?
Am I supposed to reprioritize? There's a lot of that, and right now it's becoming more and more prolific because a lot of SaaS companies are having a hard time right now, and so they're throwing the kitchen sink at. You know, their acquisition model, they're throwing the kitchen sink at marketing, they're throwing the kitchen sink at product a adoption and product activation.
So there's a lot of ideas being floated around right now, and there's a lot of activity in the space, um, in a lot of spaces, particularly in tech. Um, and in B2B, and so it can be very, very tempting to, you know, react to these ideas that are being sent your way. Particularly if you lead go to market, it can be very, very tempting to wanna act on an opportunity because it feels like everything has to happen right now.
But strategic teams. They don't react. They collect information. They collect interesting inspiration. They are watching what the competitors are doing. They're seeing what's happening in their space. They see how the channels and the distribution models are being adapted and disrupted, but they're not just throwing out the baby with the bath water.
Rejigging, their entire strategy and their day and their week and their month around these opportunities. They're collecting them and then revisiting them when they're back to optimizing and creating better experiences for that particular customer for that particular milestone. They've already got their strategic roadmap.
They know what they're working on. They know the KPI that they're working towards. So if more ideas come their way, they say, that's cool. Future me is really gonna care about this. And they know how to compartmentalize it and park it and come back to it when they're solving for that part of the customer experience.
So one thing that I wanna make really clear here is that. The foundation is the customer journey and the milestones across that customer journey, our ability to help customers get from one milestone to the next. So there's that customer journey map, but the other really important foundation here that.
Or a piece of the equation that we cannot remove is the shared clarity. And so the entire team across product, marketing, customer success, sales, all of these teams have this centralized view of the customer experience of these milestones. And they all know what their role is in helping customers get from one side, uh, milestone to the next.
So again, there's an operationalized customer experience. Broken down into milestones so that we have the right context in which to try to influence our customers every step of the way. Provide value to customers every step of the way, but also the whole team has that same shared vision and shared clarity around that customer experience.
That is what makes strategic teams strategic. So speaking of strategy, I need to clear up here this. Misconception, and I don't actually think that it's, uh, that strategy is misunderstood. I think that just like in the moment, we tend to get a little bit carried away and call everything strategy. We, we, we throw around the word strategic and our strategy without really.
Getting real around what strategy actually means. And I think that a lot of founders, unfortunately, even though they know better, they in the moment, they can confuse strategy with vision and they can confuse strategy with. Big ideas and new ideas, and a lot of the time, unfortunately, new ideas are part of the problem.
They are the opposite of being strategic. And I know a lot of founders that want to help their team, they're genuinely trying to help their team, and so they bring new ideas to them and B, bring big ideas to them. But that can actually hurt the strategy, and it is not strategic at all because. A lot of strategy.
A big aspect of, of strategy is constraints, right? Strategy. Is a filter or strategy is the thing that tells you all of the things that you shouldn't be doing as much as it is about the things that you should be doing. It's about knowing what not to do and why, and it also provides the team with meaningful constraints that empower.
Go to market leaders, heads of product to actually say no and understand why they're saying no. That clarity around the customer and the customer, uh, journey is what actually enables real strategy. So now let's talk about the traits of strategic and effective teams. One thing that I have to mention, first and foremost is a shared language.
I know that this might sound a little ridiculous and, uh, like I'm going a little over the top here, but a shared language, I cannot overstate the value of how important it is that the team collaborate together every day. To build your product, improve the customer experience, acquire new customers, and help those customers adopt the product.
All of those people in the collaborative space, using the same language, are wildly, wildly. Impactful. And I don't just mean shared language around jobs to be done or, you know, different customer segments or how we define the ICP, although those things are very important. I don't just mean around what matters to the customer, but I also mean specifically these milestones of the customer journey that I keep talking about, these key critical sort of leaps of faith in our customer's relationship with us.
By drawing those dividing lines between these milestones and naming them, giving them a name, and aligning the team around them. We enable way better collaboration, way better decision making, but way better collaboration. So, in other words, what I mean by this is like I. I mean, we work with SaaS teams all day, every day.
I have seen the curtain of hundreds of SaaS companies, and I can tell you that the vast majority of teams don't have a shared understanding of what product activation, product adoption, or product engagement means. Just those three terms. They are so varied in terms of how different people interpret them, how the marketing team interprets them, how the sales team interprets them, how the customer success team interprets them, let alone the product team.
So, having a shared language for yes, your customer segments, their jobs to be done, and what your customers are trying to accomplish with your solution. Really, really important. But also. Very importantly, when it comes to actual implementation and execution and building of customer experiences, having everybody on the team speaking the same language when they say things like, I think this is gonna really help this customer segment to activate in our product or with product activation, or to adopt our product or to.
Reengage or help customers become engaged. It is wildly helpful, especially when there are so many ideas floating around, um, because there's just so much happening in the space right now. So a shared language, I cannot overstate how important and how valuable that is. The other thing too is clear ownership of segments of customers, but also stages of the customer experience by team.
And I don't mean to be too prescriptive here, but it is very helpful for teams. I've seen this play out in real-time many, many times to draw. Dividing lines, somehow dividing lines and like areas of ownership is actually something that can pull a team together, ironically. Um, and that doesn't, you know, that doesn't sound like intuitive, but having your team basically feel ownership over.
Potentially a particular customer segment. A good ex example of this actually was when I was working with the team at Sprout Social. They had different teams dedicated to different segments of their customers. So, each one of their teams was really, really knowledgeable and deeply understood their customers in their particular segment.
It was a really unfair advantage because these teams became absolute experts. Small businesses, for example, or social media managers at bigger companies, or the executive buyer at the enterprise level. Each of those teams had a clear customer segment for which they were responsible. Most teams that we've worked with actually draw their dividing lines by milestone.
So the marketing team is responsible for the struggle phase, so generally like the problem phase, and, um, so generating, you know, traffic to their website and then helping that traffic on their website convert. That's table-stakes marketing. And then there is a dividing line where then depending on the type of, uh, growth model you use, if you're product led or sales-led, then that dividing line might flip over to if you're sales led organization, well now sales is the owner of that customer's experience.
Or if you're in a product led environment, it might be customer success. Or if you have both a product-led and a sales-led motion, then it might be split. You might have two different segments that have two different owners in amongst teams. Having those dividing lines is wildly clarifying for teams as well.
Milestones and segments of customers are really, really important. Now, the elephant in the room is that there are going to be some shared KPIs across some of these teams. You can't just have marketing, you know, throwing money at paid ad campaigns and then sending, you know, crappy traffic through the front door, and then all of a sudden your customer success team is dealing with garbage, or your sales team has like terrible leads that they can't close.
Obviously, there's a throughline there, so I think what can be really, really effective is sharing KPIs across teams. An example of that is that I actually have personal experience with it. I found it was wildly valuable to have a shared KPI with my head of customer success, and it just led to a lot of clarity over what part of the customer experience I was responsible for.
But we had, so we had our individual KPIs. Mine was like a new trial starting as an example. He was product activation, but we had a shared KPI and a lagging KPI. That was actually our trial to paid conversion rate, and we had goals and targets around that. So we had our leading indicators of success, and we mobilized our teams around.
And then we had our lagging indicator of success that we actually had a lot of targets set around. We used our leading indicators of success to to influence that lagging indicator of success, which was our trial to pay conversion rate. It was really, really effective. Another trait of strategic effective teams is.
Teams that can tag and organize insights by customer segment and by milestone. That is really, really important. So when you learn something new about customers and the customer support team and the customer success teams, they're always learning new things about customers. The sales teams are always learning new things about customers and product marketing.
Always learning things about customers, anybody paying attention. The founder is always learning things about customers, and those insights are taken, and they're organized. Now, I'm not saying you need some big gnarly spreadsheet necessarily, but you could have some sort of whiteboarding tool or some sort of repository.
We really like ai, uh, repositories for like research repositories, but we can organize. The insights by the customer segment or the customer job to be done. Which customer does this relate to? Which milestone of that customer experience does this impact? And we organize our insights in that way.
Ideas get. Prioritize not scattered. And what ha What I mean by that is there is a regular cadence of going back and revisiting what we're doing, just like any team does, you know, quarterly rocks or quarterly OKRs, this is the type of thing that needs to be revisited because new insight is gonna be coming in.
All the time. And so revisiting these opportunities, revisiting these insights, revisiting our customer milestones and how we're performing and helping customers get from one milestone to the next on a regular cadence is really, really important. Not just when we launch a new feature or a new product.
In this way, customer data is then anchored. Healthy debate is not about opinion. It doesn't become this like, well, this new opportunity just dropped into your My lap and And your lap, and so now we have to do something about it. Today. No, it gets revisited and weighed against the other opportunities that have also come in.
So let's. Talk about what some examples in action might look like. What, what does this actually look like and feel like in the day to day? So it might be a roadmap meeting where prioritization is really obvious, and actually the meeting can be pretty short because the team is done a really good job up until this point, compartmentalizing and organizing the opportunities and insights that have come their way.
Since you met last, a roadmap meeting where prioritization is really, really clear because customer insight and customer's jobs to be done and, and the customer experience across these milestones drives the backlog. A marketer proposing a campaign for specific customer job to be done or a specific customer segment, and it's tied to value themes, not random personas, not demographic based, not.
You know, based on the latest thing that they saw, but actually tied back to the customer that you serve and the specific things that your customers care about in your product. A product manager killing a pet feature or idea because it doesn't map to customer value, I. Now, I say that very deliberately, right?
This product team has got this very centralized view, just like the rest of the go-to-market team does of the customer experience. It becomes very clear to teams. I can, I mean, I cannot tell you how many times we've gone through our workshop format where the head of product and the product managers on the team, we go through a value mapping exercise together, and they're like.
Wow. This just gave me so much insight into my product roadmap. This helps me prioritize what has been sitting on our roadmap and what's been sitting on our backlog for such a long time. And so when you are heads of product and your product managers can kill a project on their own because they've seen that it's not gonna tie to customer value in a way that's going to be impactful enough, that is amazing.
That is what good looks like right there. At Unbounce, we use this approach to align our marketing team, our customer success team, our product team. Honestly, it was amazing. We centralized the team around this cu, this operationalized view of our customer experience. End to end, we had clear milestones, we had KPIs.
We were all speaking the same language, and the results were absolutely incredible. We drove 900% revenue growth within two years of operationalizing our customer's experience and getting an alignment into what they actually cared about. It didn't happen because we worked harder. It happened because we focused on the right parts of the customer journey for the right customers, and every team knew their role.
So now let's talk about why these teams are so. Rare. Now, there's lots of reasons. Uh, there's lots of forces happening right now and that prevents, uh, teams from being as strategic as they could be. Um, but truthfully, a lot of it comes down to the fact that a lot of teams are operating. Based on fragments of insight, uh, you know, scattered data about customers, ad hoc customer feedback.
A lot of the time it is about the quantitative, the volume of quantitative data that they have available to them. That has been prioritized over the years over qualitative data. And you can't make sense of quant data until you have qual data because the quant is the what, and the qual is the why. Qualitative research organized like a done style of research gives your team the framework within which to leverage all the quantitative data.
That you possibly have. I did a much longer podcast episode and talked about the exact topic of data richness and insights. If you are interested in hearing more about that, I would encourage you to check it out. But basically, the idea here is that teams just don't have a centralized view or a centralized way to think about the experiences that they're building.
And they just work with fragments of information. This is true in marketing as much as it is true in product. The other thing that keeps teams, uh, from being able to, you know, be more strategic and be more aligned and really effective is unfortunately, a lot of times founders actually think that things are really clearer when the team doesn't, and this one breaks my heart.
It is so, so common. And if you missed part one in this series, I would definitely encourage you to go and check that out. 'cause that is really, really, really common, right? Where founders feel like their team is guessing. Why does it feel like my team is guessing? And it is very, very often because founders think things are clear when they're not actually clear.
And a lot of the. Intel and insight and context and information basically about what you're doing, the vision and mission and thesis and you know what of what you're building lives inside of your head. And you feel like you've said it a million times, but it still isn't clear. Or because you as the founder, tend to live in the future.
Sometimes you are in the future and your team is in today, and that can be really, really confusing. So it often happens where a founder's like. Why is this such a mystery to everybody but me? And it's because the customer experience hasn't been operationalized across the team. There isn't enough democratized understanding of your vision, but also insight into the customer.
And so a lot of the time I find, uh, founders and even sometimes product owners assume that the team has all the information they could possibly need, but. There's a lack of alignment there sometimes because the goalpost moves sometimes because the industry is moving so quickly the way it is right now, and so there's just a lot of.
Scattered happening right now. Speaking of that's the next thing that's standing in teams' way. A lot of teams are moving too fast, which is, I mean, it's kind of a crazy thing to say, but a lot of teams are moving very quickly because of how quickly things are changing in the market and how desperate they are to take action.
Um, but a lot of the teams are also running scared right now. That goes for leadership teams as much as it goes for go to market teams and product teams. There's just a lot of change happening right now, and so a lot of change happening means a lot of activity is happening and there's a lot of sort of scattered thinking and teams are moving too quickly and unfortunately many of these, many times what that leads to is.
Teams are running very quickly in the wrong direction, and I cannot think of a worse outcome than a team moving quickly because there's just such an exciting time right now in tech, and we can just be so much more effective. So, teams are often moving too quickly and making scattershot decisions. It is leading to, unfortunately, a lot of underperformance, but it also leads to layoffs, and it's not the only thing that's leading to layoffs.
There's a lot of, of sort of movement in that space right now, as I'm sure everybody is acutely aware of. Uh, layoffs in tech over the last couple of years have led to just a lot of job insecurity. Couple that with how quickly the industry is changing right now. It's just not a great combination for your team to feel like they don't understand the big picture.
They don't really know what the big picture is because the big picture is changing a lot, but also they're so desperate to show their value that they're just, it's just activity for the sake of activity. There's also teams that are moving too slowly and they're stuck in analysis paralysis because maybe they've lost sight of the big picture.
Maybe the leadership team has, too. There's nothing better at that moment than aligning around who we serve. Recorded an episode recently about the four first principles. That really helps teams that are either moving too quickly or too slowly to reorient around what actually matters to enable better decision-making.
So if you are feeling like your team is in that situation, you might wanna check out that episode. Without that shared system for thinking about your customers, right? Either those that are, uh, you know, they've adopted your product already and they're engaged with your product, or maybe they're the customers that are becoming less engaged with your product.
You can have a meaningful discussion with your team when you've got that systematic. An operationalized view of your customer experience. It's really, really powerful because without a shared system, even great teams will default to chaos. It's not a people problem, it is a systems problem. So you might be thinking, I.
Wow, I can't even imagine the things that you might be thinking. I actually can imagine what you might be thinking. 'cause I'm talking to lots of founders right now. I know that you might be thinking my team is not ready for this, or we're too small, or this is overkill. And what I would caution you against is that overkilling is a waste of time and money.
On shit that doesn't work. That's what I think overkill is. And so I don't think it would, it's ever a bad idea or ever a. Poor usage of time to reorient your team and align on your team, around your customers and around the problem that you solve and the different milestones in their customer experience that you're solving for so that you can improve the, the customer experience.
And what I mean by that is so that you can improve conversion rates, you can improve your, the conversion rate on your website. You can conv improve and, and increase the conversion rate of your. Free to, to paid, uh, you know, product experience. You can improve retention and expansion. All of those things, reduce churn.
None of those things are a poor use of time right now, but you cannot do that in a meaningful way, and you cannot do that outside of you trying to do it alone unless you've got an operationalized view of your customer experience for your team to reference. And so that's what strategic teams actually do differently, is that they have that centralized view.
They know how to compartmentalize. Strategic teams are built. They are not born. This is not something that happens by accident. This is not the case; this does not just look serendipitously. Your team is gonna start thinking strategically and effectively and use their time wildly efficiently. Strategic teams are built by putting a system in place that gives teams clarity, clarity, and language.
MG, the constraints they need. Constraints are so important right now because it is wild out there. So now that you've seen what's possible, the question becomes how do you build it? And honestly, it takes less time than you think. It's easier than you think it is. So, in the next episode, that's what we're gonna talk about.
We're gonna dig into how to build that repeatable system, and we're gonna get really practical and really specific about the steps you need to take to do that, to get everyone aligned and executing in a repeatable way that helps you grow. See you 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.
