Georgiana: "We do not rise to the level of our goals; we fall to the level of our systems." The James Clear quote has come up frequently in my recent conversations with founders because, even when a team has ambitious goals without a system in place, they often fall back on guesswork. In the last two episodes, we discussed this.
How this happens and why it happens. We talked about how even great teams can end up stuck in reactive decision-making, particularly right now, with so much going on. We also talked about what strategic customer-led teams do differently and how they make faster, better, and more aligned decisions.
But if you're still the one connecting the dots. The next most obvious question is definitely gonna be, right? Tell me how to build this system. Tell me how to do this thing. So that's what this episode is about because strategy isn't a skill your team is born with. It's a system you put in place. So, in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through how to systematize growth inside of your team so that they can stop guessing, start making more, better informed, aligned decisions, and you can finally stop being the bottleneck. So let's get into it.
So the first thing that I wanna touch on here is that it's not actually as hard as you think to do this.
Building a system sounds complicated. I recognize that, but. It doesn't have to be. Now, I'll admit the first time that I went through this process, it definitely took me nearly a year to figure it out. There was a lot of trial and error, and that's actually exactly why I wanna go through this today because it doesn't have to be this way.
It doesn't have to be that complicated. And so I'm gonna talk through the sort of step by step. I'm gonna walk through it, and then I'll sort of recap it and give you some resources so that you can dive a little bit deeper and get into the nitty-gritty. Detail of it. But for this episode, what I wanna do is give you a broad base understanding across the top of what this process looks like, how it can apply to you and your team, and why it's such a valuable process.
Now, it is not as hard as you think. It doesn't have to take very long. It can be maybe a couple of weeks. But what I wanna stress here is that the very act of you and your team going through this work together. It is actually part of what is so valuable about it. So it's not just about the destination; it's about the journey as well.
I know it sounds a little bit cheesy, but it's very, very true. So the first thing that we need to do, despite maybe what you might be tempted to do, is to identify the customers that you want more of. Now I say despite what you might be tempted to do because I talk with a lot of founders who are really worried about the customers that they're not getting right now.
And what I wanna stress is that. While. That group of customers lost customers is definitely valuable to learn from. They're not where you should start. And really, what I want to talk through today is what is the most direct way to build a system that you can then layer on other learnings to later?
And I, there's definitely building upon the system that you should do, and that's what I would recommend doing when if you've attempted to do like. Win-loss analysis or learn from customers who churned. I would really, really encourage you to do that later. For the moment, suspend disbelief and just focus on the customers that you already have and that you want more of.
Once you've identified those customers, then you're gonna understand, alright, how am I going to learn from them? How am I gonna get inside of their heads? And the answer to that question will be different depending on how big of a list you are. Working, so I'm not gonna get into the nitty gritty here, but at a high level, there are different research methods that you can employ depending on how many customers you have to learn from.
Now, you may have fewer customers because you're in an earlier stage, or you may have fewer customers because you sell to an enterprise and you've got a higher CV and a more complex product. Both of those situations are very valid. Basically, what I recommend is broad strokes. What we recommend in that case is if you've got only a couple of dozen customers to learn from, you cannot risk surveys or AI-moderated interviews.
You've got to use customer interviews because you need these conversations to be, too. As fruitful as possible. You can't afford to take broad strokes. You've got to get as many of those conversations as possible. Ideally, run with a skilled interviewer. If you don't have a skilled interviewer on your team, I would highly recommend that you do that and find one to work with.
On the other hand, you have a couple of thousand customers that you identify in your customer base that you want more of. You can absolutely start with more broad strokes, quality, still qualitative research to learn from them, maybe with a qualitative survey or with AI-moderated interviews to get a broader understanding of the makeup of the customer base.
That can actually speed this process up a ton. Obviously, if you're not actually booking calls and dealing with no-shows and rescheduling and things like that. It can help a ton to speed up. The process also brings the cost down a little bit for you as well since you don't have to hire a super-skilled interviewer.
Now we've got plenty of tools and templates that go into way greater detail on how to actually run research and the, I think, questions to ask. But I'm gonna skip over the top of that right now just to go into and, and make sure that I hit on the broad Understanding of how you build this system. Obviously, I can go into a ton of detail.
We've done other. You know, episodes on how to run a really successful customer interview, you can go check out that. Obviously, we also have all of our templates and tools that you can go to our website and find. So I'm just gonna skip right over to, once you get inside your best customer's heads, then your job is to identify their job to be done.
And we really, really love jobs to be done for building out, like as the source of truth for building out a system. For growth for your team to leverage, it is what we have found to be the absolute best tool for the job to understand. What circumstances lead your customers to seek out something new? How do they make that decision?
Who's involved, where do they go? What questions do they ask? What convinces them to choose you over all of the other options? What can they do now in their life that they weren't able to do before that? High-level documentary-like Understanding is just the backbone of this system that you're going to be building for your team.
So if you can, again, identify the customers that you want more of, get inside their heads, learn from them at run jobs, be done interviews or jobs, be done style research so that you can then, among those customers, identify the jobs that your customers hire you to solve for them. And then what you're gonna do is you're gonna map.
What matters, and there are two ways that you map what matters. One of the ways that you map what matters is the things that they said really matter to them. So their top motivations or your top differentiators, you're going to identify the things that sort of float to the top of the list, right? What were the things that customers said most mattered to them, and why they chose you over all of the other solutions?
And you'll go through what we call a value mapping exercise, where you take these top value themes. And you map them to the specific parts of the product that deliver that value, either features or product attributes, and you map them across. This helps a ton with your messaging strategy, but it also helps a ton to understand the sort of value chain and the order in which to introduce these different parts of the products and these different.
Parts these different sort of like value themes to them in their experience with you. So, the second way that you're gonna map what matters is by mapping the customer experience. You're gonna go from them being out in the world, experiencing the problem that you solve, struggling with the old way. All the way through to just choosing to make the investment, to validate whether or not you're the right solution for them.
Go through that evaluation phase until you reach value realization where they're like, yep, this is the thing that's gonna solve my problem. They move into continued value where they're getting. Value over time, they become a lifer customer and then into value growth where they can then expand on that value.
So you're gonna map that end-to-end customer experience through the struggle phase, the evaluation phase, and the growth phase. So you're mapping in two different ways based on their jobs to be done. Again, value mapping and also also customer experience mapping. Now, what you do after that is actually where we start to talk about like the data and how we tie the qualitative back to the quantitative.
And because you've identified this end-to-end customer experience, you've identified milestones in this customer experience there, your customer's leaps of faith in their relationship with you. And for each of those leaps of faith, you are going to identify a KPI. And this KPI is not. M-Q-L-S-Q-L, it's not sign up, it's not entered a credit card.
It's not an upgrade. It is tied to your customers actually getting value. So the really important exercise that you're running through here is you're identifying those leaps of faith, and then you're figuring out. What are the things that our customers do inside of our product or inside of our customer experience that demonstrate to us that they have reached a moment of value, true value first, either it's the problem stage, the interest stage, first value, which we often talk about as?
Product activation value realization. We also often talk about product adoption and continued value. We often talk about that as product engagement and then value growth, which is often talked about as expansion. Now, once you've identified all of those milestones, you will be able to relay that to a KPI that tells your team that your customer has reached a moment of value.
And that's what we mean when we say identifying these leading indicators of success. They are not lagging indicators of success like a trial to pay conversion rate or entry to a credit card. We did a whole other episode on KPIs. Actually, we did a two-part episode on KPIs. If you're interested in diving into that, I highly recommend checking out that episode.
So once you've identified those milestones, those KPIs, then you're gonna do the secret shopper thing. You are going to, you know, in the shoes of somebody with your highest priority job to be done, you're gonna go through your customer experience, you're gonna look at your marketing, you're gonna look at your website, you're gonna go through your onboarding flow.
You're going to see what it feels like to receive, you know, your emails, your in-app notifications, all of that customer experience. From end to end, you're gonna do the secret shopper thing. And then what you're gonna do is you're gonna figure out what do you start, what do you stop, and what do you continue now, start, stop, continue.
You don't have to go about it in that way. It's a well-known way to sort of, you know, think about when you're going through the customer experience. I highly recommend documenting. You might want to record yourself going through the experience, record your thoughts as you're going through it, and think through the lens of what we are not doing today that we should start doing.
What are the, what are the opportunities that we're missing? What is actually hurting the experience? And so we should stop doing this and what should you continue doing, but maybe optimize a little bit. That's just a helpful, you know, thing to keep in mind as you're doing this secret shopper thing. Then what you're going to be left with is this long list of amazing opportunities all along the customer's experience.
All these opportunities to Inc. To optimize customer experience and increase conversions for the business. And then your job becomes alright. What order do we do these things in? What do we need to tackle first? What are the biggest opportunities for growth here? And often what you're gonna be doing is you're gonna be. Hopefully, you are doing the sort of mental math on what's the one thing that we could do that would make the biggest impact on the rest of this customer experience.
Which has the most dramatic sort of business case behind it to solve for. Now, there are lots of reasons and ways that you might wanna make this decision. I'm not gonna get into that. It might be really obvious to you because you're gonna be like, oh wow, this thing is totally broken. We know we need to fix this.
In other cases, there are so many things to fix that are really gonna have to go through a prioritization exercise. I'm not gonna go into detail on that Now. If you are interested in hearing more about that, let me know. That's basically your job now to find and make the business case for your team, prioritizing fixing some of this experience, right?
And then, the job becomes democratizing and embedding. So, what do you have at this point? Up till this point, if you're still playing along, you identified the best customers you got inside, so you understand them from a demographic and firmographic standpoint. You also got inside their heads, so you now understand 'em from a psychographic standpoint, their jobs to be done.
You mapped their end-to-end customer experience, so you know those milestones. You've also identified the KPIs for each of those milestones, so you know how to measure success, and you've also identified a bunch of opportunities to improve. Their experience ultimately improves conversion. And so you've got all of these, you know, what I would call sort of like artifacts available for your team.
Now, this is an incredible system to work from and reference and utilize, but what I want to sort of warn against here is I. Does that system need to be supported? They need to be democratized. They need a ton of buy-in internally, and they need to be constantly kept up and maintained and supported and evolved and updated over time.
And so there's a couple of things to think about here. One of them is you cannot do this in a silo. Do not; you can't have a team member like Lone Wolf like this. We've talked about that a lot in the past. You know, we've, we've talked to a lot of like heads of marketing or heads of product marketing or heads of product, or heads of growth that will attempt to do this solo.
I. Do not do that. Do this as a collaborative exercise. If you're a founder listening to this, this is something that, like you, yes, you might wanna choose a champion internally to lead this work, but it is critically important that you involve the major sort of strategic players in the company.
Generally, any heads of go-to-market, teams, or head of product should be involved. And, like anybody on the exec team, should be involved in this process. So it's really, really important that you not only involve those people. We have done episodes before on who to involve, how to mobilize your team, and how to choose who to involve.
So I won't get into the details of that, but involving these, these critical stakeholders and these team leads is really critical to democratizing these artifacts like down to their teams as well so, if you've got a head of marketing. The entire marketing team should be aware of these artefacts and be able to leverage these artefacts similarly on the product side for a product marketing function or for a growth function.
So democratizing is really, really important. Embedding is really, really important as well. And what I mean by embedding is like I. You have these KPIs; you can start to set some targets around these KPIs. Now, you also would want to include this customer, these artefacts, right? Generally, the customer journey, these KPIs, and this list of opportunities.
You're gonna wanna include those opportunities in your rituals, right? Maybe in your daily standup or in your quarterly planning. You're going to want to come back to this sort of centralized way. Analyzing the customer experience, analyzing customer needs, and figuring out where your opportunities are to meet those needs need to be embedded into the day-to-day of how you work.
There are lots of ways to do that. I'm not gonna get too far down the rabbit hole of talking about that here 'cause I really just wanna give you a broad understanding. But, you know, dashboards, there's all kinds of things that you can do. To obviously democratize and communicate it to the rest of the team, but also embed it into your day-to-day and into your team rituals, particularly your planning rituals.
Now, I often get asked at this point, like, so how often do you update these things? And the answer really depends right now, pretty often. And I say. It's pretty often right now because things are changing a lot in teams. I'm talking to a lot of founders and a lot of teams that are making some pretty drastic updates to their products.
And so, in those cases, I would say you would do this more often if you are. Moving a little bit more slowly, then I would say, you know, when you make a big enough change to the product where you believe your core value prop and the core customer that you serve changes. It is critically important to do this at those points.
But additionally, if you are a very quickly moving team in a quickly changing sort of space and there's a lot of competitors coming onto the market and things like that, I would really encourage you to do this more often, like maybe once a quarter or when there's a major launch, whenever one comes first.
When I say launch, also, I mean like your P one launches or your T one launch, whatever you, however, you tier your launches. Suppose you've got a major launch coming up. Absolutely, you've gotta do this, and I would even consider it for some of your T two launches as well, or P two, depending on what you use.
So, more often right now, who knows? Maybe it'll slow down again one day. But not that, not that tech was ever moving slowly, but it's its increased pace. So basically, you get the opportunity. To be more organized. And if you didn't check out episode two in this little mini-series, I would highly encourage you to do that.
'cause I talk a little bit more about being able to compartmentalize opportunities and not be too reactive. And so these tools are what give you this sort of like the way to organize opportunities so that you can revisit them on the regular and as they as you need to make updates to the customer experience and improve conversions across your customer experience.
So, in a nutshell, the customer-led growth process is basically this, right? Number one, get inside your best customer's heads, map and measure their experience, and then identify your biggest levers for growth. This is the crux of the sort of backbone of what the Forget the Funnel book is about. So, if you're curious more about this process and want to learn more about this process and if it might be right for your team, I would.
Highly encourage you to check out the book. We worked very hard to make it a short book, a very actionable and practical book. And also, we recently rolled out an AI book companion. So when we launched the book, we launched it along with a workbook, a 110-page long PDF full of templates, tools checklists, and scripts.
Everything you could possibly need practically to go through this three-step process. And recently, we rejigged that to actually be an AI book companion. So, the entire workbook, the entire original workbook, plus about 15 or so new templates. Lean into more as, you know, style research repositories, things like that are now included in there as well.
So again, if you're interested in potentially using and building the system for your team to move away from guesswork, I'd highly recommend that you pick up the book and go to understand this process in more depth. There are lots of stories and examples in there as well. Then go and check out; forget the funnel.com/workbook to get the tools as you go through the process.
And then again, of course, if you ever get stuck on anything, this is what we do. So, if you do get stuck, you can always reach out to us for help. And we do work with teams one-on-one as well. So the takeaway for this episode is, hopefully, you're realizing it's not actually as hard as you might think.
And also try not to think just about the destination here, because the very. The work it takes to get to this end result is so valuable, and it really helps sort of anchor your team in what matters to customers, customer needs, and figuring out how to meet those needs. And there's nothing that's more important right now.
There's so much chaos going on in this space right now. There's so much activity that it is. I have been finding in my conversations with teams and, you know, just in the, in the in tech, but also in marketing and growth and product marketing. There's just a lot happening right now. And so there is this frantic sort of activity that is occurring right now.
So, if you can go through this activity with your team and really anchor your team around like. Actual customer needs. There is nothing that is more valuable. Even if this feels like something that you might not have time for, I would really, really encourage you to take a step back in order to take leaps.
Forward. This is the right thing to do right now because there is a strong push towards vibe coding, vibe marketing, and busyness. There's a lot of busyness happening right now. Pretty well. Every market is being commoditized. Marketing is, and distribution is becoming more and more difficult and more and more costly.
So, to reorient your team around actual customer needs, and when I say team, I don't just mean your marketing team; I mean your product team as well, and the leadership team and the executive, right? To really. Get back to basics on what actually matters to customers and what are genuine customer needs, and live in that problem space a little bit more in the solution space.
I think you're going to find it a very fruitful activity and it is actually not as hard and it doesn't take as long as you might think. So, if you are interested, I would recommend that you check out the Forget the Funnel book. You can find it on Amazon. It's available in ebook and in Audible as well.
But I would highly recommend that you dig into what the process would be for your team. It's not actually as long or as hard as you think it will be. The other important thing that I want to call out here, and I kind of just touched on this, is making sure that you are putting customers at the center of everything that you do right now.
Again, I'm putting a lot of emphasis on it right now because SaaS teams are either like hair on fire or stuck in analysis paralysis. If you focus and orient your team around customers, customers, and the problem space, you cannot go wrong. It's the most meaningful constraint that you could possibly add to your team.
It is going to be the most strategic anchoring for your team in a moment like this, in like in the current landscape of SaaS. The other thing that you have to remember to do that is wildly, wildly important here and that this whole thing falls down if you do not do this. Successful systems need buy-in.
They need to be democratized across your team, and you need to be supported and integrated into your day-to-day. There is no point in doing this work if you are not going to support it. So don't loan Wolf it. Don't try to do this on your own. If you work in a team and involve other team leads and strategic partners, this is absolutely a team sport.
So, I would highly encourage you to not only do the work as a team but go through it as a CLG team, as we like to call it in the book. Chapter two is all about that, but also each one of those. Individuals that are involved. If they have a team, it is their job to democratize this through all the levels of the company and then embed it obviously into your rituals and into your planning and strategic work as you go.
So, hopefully, this sounds like a system that is accessible to you and available to you. It absolutely is. We've done this hundreds of times with companies, thousands upon thousands of companies, and teams have read our book and implemented this. I get emails all the time with thanks, and nothing makes me feel better than teams that say that they, you know, went through this process together.
And it has helped them, you know, again, sort of democratize customer understanding, reorient, so that they actually are a customer-led first team, data-informed, customer-led. That's what we always say. This is absolutely doable, and it is applicable in many situations. I know there are sometimes outlier situations like you don't have that many customers to learn from, or you're.
Earlier stage or your later stage, or your missing team, team members. And all of that is very true. Obviously, there's always going to be edge cases. If you get really stuck again, I would say, like, read the book and go to the workbook, which is now an AI companion. Or you can always reach out to us again; forget funnel.com.
If you get stuck, we'd love nothing more than to help you. But I really hope that this was valuable. I really hope that you. I got a sort of snapshot understanding of what the system actually looks like, like what this looks like behind the curtain. Because we, you know, we talk about the value of this type of work a lot, but I know that it's important to actually visit, like, what does the actual work look like behind the scenes?
So, hopefully, you got a decent sense of that today. And if you get stuck, just let us know, like I said. So, hopefully, that was a helpful run-through. And with that, I will see you next time. And that's. It is 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@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.
