← Positioning with April Dunford
Positioning with April Dunford
Customer-Led Growth: Why Funnels are Outdated with Georgiana Laudi
00:33:36
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- [00:01]
April Dunford
Welcome to the Positioning show where we discuss topics related to the practical application of positioning for marketing, sales and product teams. I'm April Dunford, a consultant, author, and the world's leading expert on positioning for B2B technology companies. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another edition of the Positioning show with me, April Dunford. Hey. I'm really excited for a guest that I have coming on today. Her name is Georgiana Loudy. I've known her for a long time. Decades. I. I think she's a lot like me. She's been around in tech for a very long time, worked inside companies for a long time. She was the vice president of marketing at a company called Unbounce and now she runs her own thing. She's become an expert in customer experience mapping. So this is understanding the customer's journey, not so much from our perspective with MQLs and SQLs, but more from the perspective of the customers and the customer's own success metrics. She's now the founder and principal consultant at a consultancy called Forget the Funnel. They work with tech companies, a lot of companies that are product led growth companies. So if you're like that, I think this might be a really interesting episode for you. And specifically they're looking at how to better understand your customers so that you can improve outcomes. She's also the author of a book called Forget the Funnel. Hey, same title. So really easy to understand. But if you think this is an interesting topic and you dig what we're talking about today, I would recommend that you go and buy her book because I've read it and I think it's great. Anyways, I'm really happy to have her on the show. And let's get right into it. Gia, it's so good to have you on the show. We've been talking about this forever. Like, I'm glad, I'm glad we actually made this happen because we keep saying, oh, yeah, I'm going to have you on the podcast. And then, then I never do. I don't know why. Because. Because I'm an idiot. But now I'm not. Because you're here.
- [01:59]
Georgiana Loudy
Yay. I'm so happy. I'm so happy to be here.
- [02:02]
April Dunford
So I'm gonna, I'm gonna start with this super obvious question that you probably get like 9 million times. So, like, your book is called Forget the Funnel. Your company's called Forget the Funnel. Like, why they hate on the funnels, man. Like, what did the funnels do to you?
- [02:18]
Georgiana Loudy
Yeah, yeah. This is a question I get a lot. Of course I Just don't know.
- [02:24]
April Dunford
It's kind of a, you know, a point of intrigue. It's like, what do you mean? Forget the funnel.
- [02:28]
Georgiana Loudy
Yeah. And then what? If not funnels, then what?
- [02:31]
April Dunford
Exactly.
- [02:32]
Georgiana Loudy
Yeah, exactly. So funnels are. Do we swear on this podcast?
- [02:38]
April Dunford
Yeah, I know. I don't know what happens. I think they mark it explicit or something and then people go, and you're getting spicy over in positioning land. But yes, we're away.
- [02:47]
Georgiana Loudy
Yeah, I just think they're really fundamentally very lazy and ineffective. So lazy. Because it like flattens our view of the customer. It really doesn't give our team a whole lot to work with, especially when it comes to actually like optimizing the customer's experience and trying to like increase conversions or do a better job or scale, you know, things like that. That's very hard to do when you think about your customers in such a generic way ways. And all these models sort of think about customers in pretty generic way. Like there's no world where your customer interacts with your product exactly the same way as every other company that uses a funnel. Right. Customers are, you know, multifaceted, full sentient human beings. They have, they have needs that differ from, you know, even your competitors products, let alone other products. So why would you use the same model to think about your relationship with your customers that everybody else does? Also a big reason is that, you know, this traditional funnel is, it sort of leaves out the beginning and the end. So there's nothing about what, what's going on in your customer's world before, you know, they experience the problem, their previous solution, that moment that, you know, they realize they have an issue that they want to solve. It doesn't take any of that into account. Account. So a lot of context gets lost and missed and not taken into account there. And then on the flip side of it, especially for recurring revenue businesses, if you think about your job as being done when somebody like converts to being a customer that is the bottom of the funnel, you're not in business anymore. Like what, what business are we in?
- [04:23]
April Dunford
Right.
- [04:24]
Georgiana Loudy
So it's really lazy and, and just an ineffective tool.
- [04:28]
April Dunford
Overall, I think it's one of these things like we've been, you know, it's one of these things that we kind of feel like we gotta do it because we've always done it like that. You know, like when we talk about traditional funnel, like I gotta track, like, you know, I got, I got leads and they're converting to MQLs and those are converting SQLs and whatever. So we so, okay, so you know.
- [04:51]
Georgiana Loudy
I mean, that's the part that I can't stand. Yeah.
- [04:55]
April Dunford
What do we do instead? Like how do we. And I really love this. There's two things that you said there that I really like. One, I really like this idea that, you know, we can map this funnel but it doesn't necessarily help us optimize it. So this idea that I got this funnel but it ain't real actionable like that, that's actually a neat way to think about that. And then the other bit about saying I don't know what happened before they got into this funnel and then they, what do they do? They just plop out. Which of course we don't anymore because everybody's on subscription. So how do I solve those problems? Like what do I do instead?
- [05:29]
Georgiana Loudy
Yeah, I mean there's a process that we talk about in the book. We call it customer LED growth, but the name doesn't really matter at all. But essentially it starts with really understanding more deeply understanding your customers, their relationship with you, and then operationalizing that understanding so that your team can make, make better decisions and optimize the experience and have a deeper understanding of not only their impact on your customers lives, but also with their coworkers and adjacent teams and how they think about how teams think about their impact on customers lives and delivering value. So if you can do the customer research and understand that sort of journey that your customer takes with you from again before they know you exist, all the way through to expansion, more expanded and sophisticated ways of using your tool, potentially even referring other people to you. And you can sort of identify these moments of value and these milestones in your relationship. Then you can look at each of those and optimize them. And we also do a lot of talking about like identifying how to, how do we measure our success from getting from one milestone to the other. And that's. So that's something else that we could probably talk about a bit too is like KPIs and how do you develop them?
- [06:45]
April Dunford
That's amazing. Yeah, like how do you, like you've been doing this a long time now. How do you. So, so I'm a company and I'm listening to this thing like how do I know I got a problem that you can solve? Like, like, like, because I can imagine some companies come to you and they're like, we got this all figured out, you know, like, we know this or we don't know what we don't know. Like how do I know I got a problem that this journey Mapping stuff is gonna fix. Is it really? You know, I'm worried about how am I gonna optimize this stuff and I'm worried about that. Or is there some other, like, clues where you're like, hey, you don't know enough about your customers. Like, we're gonna need to go do some stuff.
- [07:26]
Georgiana Loudy
Yeah. So the typical things that we hear are, you know, we, we know we don't know enough about our customers. So they know that there's some sort of blind spot or they don't know what they don't know or there's a lack of alignment in the team. So like, the leadership team knows somebody has one understanding and somebody else has another understanding. And oftentimes it's even more than just two different views of the ideal customer. There's multiple. And so that's a big problem. So they know that there are blind spots, they know that there's lack of alignment. And also they know they can be doing better than they are today. So one of the big sort of trigger moments for companies to reach out to us is like, our growth has stalled. It's like flattened or stalled, and it's become inconsistent. We had this steady sort of incline. We knew what we were doing, we knew what to expect. And then all of a sudd sudden they feel like the rug's sort of been pulled out from under them and they don't really know why. And they know they can be doing better either with their messaging or oftentimes it's, I wouldn't say everybody comes to us with this. Like, we know we could be doing better with our customer onboarding. But I can tell you, product onboarding and those first key moments of value inside your product, particularly for product led companies, obviously there's a lot of money sitting on the table there. And so some companies know that coming in and others are just like, oh, we're not differentiated enough or we don't know messaging to lean into. We don't know why our customers choose us. And so oftentimes the outcome is like, okay, we're going to tell you why your customers choose you. And also we're going to help you help those customers get to value more quickly so that you're converting more of the marketing spend you're sending on the. To the front end of this thing.
- [09:02]
April Dunford
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like, I, I find this is a really big problem. Like, like me on the positioning side, there's a, I don't work with companies that have a zero touch sales model. So where, you know, you're Selling a thing and it's a hundred bucks or 200 bucks, you just transact on the website and there's no salesperson talks to you at all. And the reason I don't is because we don't know enough to do positioning. Like so, so we come in and I say, well, if they didn't pick you, what would they pick? And people are just guessing. Like, if you haven't done the research, how would you know? Like, you're literally just guessing. So I get these guys come to me, I send them to you.
- [09:44]
Georgiana Loudy
We appreciate it because I mean those are the teams that we love to work with because there's such a huge opportunity. And it's not because they've never done research or they didn't know at one time, but things change. The market changes, the product changes, the team changes. There's so many things that, you know, you have to sort of take into account and, and adapt for that. Like sometimes it can, it can kind of get away from you.
- [10:05]
April Dunford
Yeah, this is totally true. Like, like things and they change and sometimes they change in ways that you don't know. Like again, if you, like if there's a salesperson in deal somewhere, then this, then the salesperson knows a lot. Or at least the collective understanding of your sales team knows a lot. And so things happen. Like, and I've seen it in companies I've worked with where we got a sales team. Like all of a sudden some competitor that they come out of nowhere and, and you know, we don't see their marketing, we don't see their stuff, we don't know. But all of a sudden customers see them and we're like, whoa. And so we, you know, we'll get this thing where we're in the, we're in the sales meeting and the sales people are like, oh, we lost a deal to these guys. Oh, we're seeing these guys in the, in the deal world. Now imagine you didn't have a salesperson. You'd just be, you'd just be looking at the numbers and going, the numbers. Look at, look. Starting to look crap here, right?
- [10:55]
Georgiana Loudy
Yeah, 100%.
- [10:59]
April Dunford
How do you know?
- [11:00]
Georgiana Loudy
Yeah, 100%. And it, it always sort of blows my mind too, especially with these product LED companies where it's like, it's all about scale. Like, how are you going to scale if you don't know what you're scaling? Like if the actual experience that you're looking to create sort of programmatic communic around if you don't understand what problem you're solving and how to solve that problem and what part of your product to show them in what order and what value to communicate to them in what order. And that hierarchy of not only messaging but even just introducing your product. What's the most appropriate way to introduce your product? I don't understand like everybody, everybody's essentially guessing until they. It's the, it's, I mean it's the whole spaghetti, the wall.
- [11:45]
April Dunford
Right. So we will say this guess with great confidence.
- [11:49]
Georgiana Loudy
Yeah. Or there's data. Right. They'll use data as their, sort of, as their crutch to say like it's, you know, these little incremental changes are, are helping us grow or just to like prove their efforts. But at the end of the day they're sort of missing this fundamental understanding. It happens all the time with the companies that we, the teams that we work with, we, we leverage the jobs to be done sort of research met which is.
- [12:15]
April Dunford
Yeah, yeah, I want you to, I want you to talk about that. So like give us.
- [12:20]
Georgiana Loudy
I know you had Bob on. Yeah.
- [12:21]
April Dunford
How does this work? Yeah, yeah, Bob has been on. You know, I'm like, you know, we're, we're, you know, we're all jobs to be done over here. So I'm curious about that because, you know, it's, it's different, like it's such a different way of thinking about things like putting the jobs lens on it. So like I want you to talk about how this works. Like somebody comes to work with you, how do you guys work? And like how does that intersect with job stuff? I know that's a huge question, but.
- [12:47]
Georgiana Loudy
So what I was going to say is that what the advantage of jobs to be done, the jobs to be done approach gives us is that we can have 10 to 12 conversations with customers. Now there's a bunch, there's a lot of ways to get those 10 to 12 conversations. And not all customers are created equally. So like who you talk to is wildly important. If you're in a, you know, a lower ACV and you've got a few thousand customers, you'll want to run like qual surveys to qualify to get these conversations. So logistics aside, for a second, even if you are just having 10 to 12 really well run and very sort of targeted conversations with customers, you can identify the different jobs that people hire your product or solution to solve for them. Every single time we've run this and I just looked at the numbers, we've done this 80 times now in the past three years. We've run through this process beginning and end, 80 times. And every single time, we identify more than one job to be done, there's typically two or three jobs to be done, even among only those 10 to 12. And every single time the company thinks that those different jobs to be done are all the same, they think about their customers as all of those jobs under the same umbrella. And so they are thinking about, oh, well, some of them have this and some of them have that. So we're just going to say all of this to all of them. And so their messaging ends up being completely undifferentiated. It doesn't actually really resonate. You're talking to everybody, talking to no one, blah, blah, blah. But what the interesting thing is, when we do this research, we bring it back to the teams. We're like, well, you've got this one customer that looks like this and they really care about these, and then you've got this other customer that looks like this, and they really care about these things. And like, we think based on your business goals, type of product you want to build, the type of team you want to build, you know, what you're trying to accomplish, we think you should be focusing on this group of customers. And that conversation is like, we've been focusing on all of them for all this time. They sort of realize. And with the, you know, a couple of teams, it's like they've spent a lot of time and resources and money on advertising to this, like, big homogenous group of customers to attract all of them. And then when they finally break them down in this way, they realize that actually these customers over here are much higher ltv. They're easier to acquire, they're happier, they've got a higher willingness to pay. They don't. They're not in train on cs, all these things. And they're like, yeah, these are the customers we care about. So those are the ones that we drill into and really try to deeply understand. And those are the ones that we sort of map those, those critical moments of value across their customer journey from before you exist in their life. You know, what solution are they firing in order to hire yours? What was that moment that led them to seek out something new? How do they make that decision? Why did they choose your product over all of the other ones? What are they able to do now? All the standard job stuff. But once we understand that sort of documentary of that customer's life, we can figure out what the critical moments of value are. And if we can figure out what the critical moments of value are, then we can solve for those and we can measure them. And that's effectively what we do is we do that research, we operationalize the customer view and then we identify those milestones and then we identify KPIs. And the KPIs are the sort of leading indicators of success that then influence those lagging indicators of success, like revenue growth, which ultimately.
- [16:09]
April Dunford
So then instead of tracking all this like fakey funnel stuff, you've got this set of KPIs that you're looking at.
- [16:15]
Georgiana Loudy
That actually prove that we've done our job helping our customer get to moments of value. That's the other thing that I hate about the funnel and is like MQL SQL, sort of like, you know, generic models of thinking about customers is that they're completely focused on the value to the business versus customer value and the value that we're providing along the way. And so that's what this process is really designed to do.
- [16:39]
April Dunford
Oh, I love this thing that you're talking about that you're like, you know, you'll come back and say, well, you know, there's these kind of customers that use you for this and these kind of customers use for you. Why wouldn't you just focus on these one? Like a lot of the work I do, we end up having those conversations too. And so I'm curious what the reaction is with the teams. Like, does this turn into a big internal that everybody's going to wring their hands and say, oh my gosh, how could we not sell to these people? Oh, isn't that going to shrink the business? Like, do you have that? Like, I find you have people that are like, like, we don't want to give anything up, you know, but it's like, often that's the only way forward. Like, we can't get focused on anything that we, you know, we're totally trying to be everything to everyone, but we can't be anything to anyone.
- [17:22]
Georgiana Loudy
Yeah, I. Unfortunately, the answer is, it depends. Definitely been in both situations where there's no debate. Like, we almost don't even bother telling them about the other jobs to be done because we already know they're not going to be prioritized. We'll tell them that, like, hey, we also saw this. So, like, we need to do a better job of not bringing those people through the front door because it's clearly not aligned with what you want to do with this business. So sometimes there's that. We definitely have had conversations where there is a discussion around, like, okay, well, who are we going to target first. Who, you know, do we want to solve for both of these? And that's on the table. It is an option. We don't, it's not a zero sum game. But we do need to focus, you know, somewhere first. And generally in that situation what we recommend is we try to, we hone those sort of messaging around that ideal, that top priority job to be done. And then later what we do is we come back and we add another, some more assets like an onboarding experience, maybe a page on the website that's dedicated to that lesser important job to be done and we provide them with their own onboarding which, where there will be like, you know, messaging and an introduction of the product that makes more sense to them. So we actually tell them that you don't have to choose just one, you just got to start with one.
- [18:43]
April Dunford
Ah, yeah, I love that. I love that. I do think that's a better way to think about it. Like a lot of times, especially if they're venture backed company, they'll get very worried about, well, this looks too small. And I can't go and tell my investors we're just focusing on the small thing. And it's like, look, your investors are thinking about where you're going to be in 10 years. We're not saying you're going to focus on the little thing forever.
- [19:00]
Georgiana Loudy
Yeah.
- [19:00]
April Dunford
It's just if I only have to close 10 deals this year, why wouldn't I just close the 10 easy ones? I'm worried about the harder guys next year. Whatever.
- [19:09]
Georgiana Loudy
Yeah, you know, it's not very hard to convince. I have found like PLG companies to focus on one over the other because they know that there are limited resources, they know that they want those, the experiences that they build to scale and they know that the only way to actually effectively scale them is to focus and have really resonant messaging and high converting experiences. And so there's never been, we've never been in a, in a situation where they've said the opportunity is too small. They're all like, they, they see, they see dollar signs more so than the opposite.
- [19:40]
April Dunford
Yeah, that's great. You know, I want to, I was listening to you on somebody else's podcast and, and, and you were having this conversation about the kind of research you do in this customer journey stuff versus what we would traditionally in marketing call voice of customer. And I thought, oh man, let's talk about that. Because like, like do you get people like, do they come in and say what we really need is voice of the customer? Research. And you don't even actually know what they mean when they say that. Like, how do difference between the two things?
- [20:12]
Georgiana Loudy
I have never, never, never, never. No, I. And I probably it's because I have.
- [20:18]
April Dunford
People telling me they got to do voice of customer first.
- [20:20]
Georgiana Loudy
So funny. I think I know why, though.
- [20:23]
April Dunford
Are you from 1956?
- [20:25]
Georgiana Loudy
Exactly. So I think that might, that, that might be why. Right. I think the, the. The teams that we're generally talking to, not that they're young teams, but they're generally in a product led situation or product led sales where they're really thinking about increasing conversions and doing a better job of scaling their existing customer and product experience. So voice of customer is like, I've heard that term mentioned. I know it's probably important. I don't really know how to apply it. Do I care about voice of customer? Nobody really cares. And we actually did an episode about this on our podcast too, because, like, yeah, I think it's this voice of customers. This, like, what does that even mean? Right? There's like lowercase voice of customer. There's capitalized, like, what? So, like, who cares? Who cares?
- [21:16]
April Dunford
Yeah, we shouldn't mock it so much, but I mean, it's kind of one of those things that I think, you know, there's a kernel of a great idea in there and then it's surrounded with a bunch of bump. And so, like, I, like, I think, like, I do think there's some value in understanding how customers talk about stuff. And, and some. Definitely customer. That's what they mean, right? They're like, yes. Do they call this, you know, like, do they refer to their customers as customers or do they refer to their customers as clients or something else? You know, like there's, there's some stuff in there that I think is potentially powerful for your messaging. Same thing. But I've also had people come back and say, we're doing this customer research, but what they're actually doing is this voice of customer stuff. And I'm like, I'm not sure how this helps you understand.
- [22:01]
Georgiana Loudy
That's the problem. So if, if voice of customer is void of anchoring in a goal, that's where I take a little bit of issue with it. Right. Like, if your goal for voice of customer is better understanding how do we position ourselves in the market or how do we wrap? Which. What language should we be using in our marketing campaigns? Like literally in the marketing campaigns, then you will do a specific type of research to capture voice of customer for those who are in that situation. Right. And are in that context versus the voice of customer that you might lean into for someone, let's say, like adding a team member into the product or needing to, you know, use your product in certain ways. Your voice of customer would be a little bit different depending on is it an economic buyer, is it a functional user, whatever. So it's like voice of customer is great, it's super useful, but you, it needs to be grounded in a goal. It can't just be this like homogenous thing that's like this omni I, I. Even in our episode, I was like, there's just this, like, there's a, there's very historical context for voice of customer. This concept of voice of customer has been around for decades. And so everybody's just sort of turned it into other things. But we don't get a lot of like, hey, we need our voice of customer from like product led companies because they're like, just make them, just make.
- [23:23]
April Dunford
This work from these big, these big old school ones will come in and say we need. I also think it's kind of a consumer concept that is sort of crept over into B2B then you know, there's a lot of stuff that the B2B people look at and go, why the heck would we do that? But it makes perfect sense on the consumer side. But I know nothing about consumer, so I can, you know, that's a consumer thing.
- [23:42]
Georgiana Loudy
I mean, one of the things that we produce when we work with customers is literally called the voice of customer brief. Does anybody ask us for it? No, they don't ask us for it, but we, we have to put it together. Like it's part of our process to take those conversations and parse it through the lens of the jobs to be done. And we lean on voice of customer to, to parse that meaning. And then we've got this document that we can then use to do multiple things with. We can go and map the customer experience. We can also go and produce a messaging strategy for them based on that Voice of customer. So we love voice of customer. We're big, big, big fans. But it's just not something like nobody shows up asking us for voice of customer. They just want results. They want to improve their results, basically.
- [24:30]
April Dunford
So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so here's, here's the, you know, we're getting near the end of our time together. But I, I, I got, I got one I want to ask you because, because everybody asked me this and I'm like, why do I get this question? But it's like, we can't avoid this question right now. So if I want to do this stuff, this customer journey mapping stuff, and there are probably people out there listening to you saying, like, can't we just do this with the AI?
- [24:56]
Georgiana Loudy
Man, do you really get this question that often?
- [25:00]
April Dunford
All the time. They're like, why, why, why can't we do this with the AI? And so the AI away, like, can I? You know, because a lot of these tech companies, if they got a lot of customers and a lot of data, they think they can sort of analyze the data out of, you know, to figure this stuff out. Is there a way that AI can help us do this? Is there a piece of this that AI can help us with? Is there anything good here that we could do with AI? You got any bright ideas? Nobody ask you that question. I get it all the time.
- [25:31]
Georgiana Loudy
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I've been asked that question, but I don't get asked that question from like the founders that get in touch with us. They're not asking us about AI, they're just like, we just need to, we need somebody to figure this out for us. I don't care what tools you use, just like, like get us to the right answer.
- [25:47]
April Dunford
That's the right answer. Like, that's the right answer right there. I don't care what tools you use.
- [25:52]
Georgiana Loudy
Exactly. So, but to actually answer the question, I would be very nervous. If you are a founder and you've got a product marketer or head of growth or whatever, that's saying, like, I'm going to do some scraping of the Internet for some voice of customer and I'm going to have AI analyze it and that's going to be our messaging strategy run. That is so scary to me because the bets that people are making on these outputs are really high stakes. That's what makes me nervous is I've heard people, oh, I can parse this transcript of a sales call or, you know, this, you know, social forum or whatever, these conversations. And they actually think that that's meaning and it's not. It's just words. And you know, words have to actually be interpreted and have to have meaning. And so if you're relying on AI to pull meaning out of a conversation, that is, that is what is scary to me. That said, after you understand and have. That meaning generally requires. We've, in our experience, it requires a human being to actually understand energy and anxiety and like things that an AI would never be able to understand once a human can understand. And again, like leaning back on jobs to be done, can think about the customers through that lens, then sure, have at it. Like, if as long as that foundational understanding is there data way more meaningful, leveraging tools like AI, way more meaningful. But it's the foundational understanding that we find is like pretty well nine times out of 10 missing. And that's the piece that, like, you cannot skip. Like, you've got to actually do the work and then leverage all the tools you want. But you have to understand what you're actually doing. And that's, I think, what is missing.
- [27:37]
April Dunford
Yeah, I'm in total agreement with you on that. Have you ever done last. Last question. Okay, you've done like 80 of these now. Like, you got good stories. Like, you ever, you ever, you ever gone into one where you got a result that was really surprising that you, you know, you thought it was going to go one way and then it went somewhere else?
- [27:57]
Georgiana Loudy
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's hard to say that in, in retrospect, like, we had no idea that this was going to be the result, because I don't. It. It all kind of feels natural afterwards, which is nice, right? It all, it's all like everything clicks into place and makes sense and you're like, ah, of course, of course. That's what the An.
- [28:16]
April Dunford
You know what? Good positioning. Good positioning is exactly like this too. You get to the end and you're like, how did we not just see this at the beginning?
- [28:23]
Georgiana Loudy
Right, yeah, yeah. So in general, what happens is we identify and figure out that this team has been focused on the wrong customer for way too long, and then they've dumped a bunch of resources into a customer that was not actually that. That was not actually it. And I don't want to say that like, it's that they were targeting the wrong customer. It's that they were thinking about their customers as this homogenous thing and they weren't deeply enough understanding the context in which people are making decisions and all the nuance. Again, these are like full, sentient human beings and so really deeply understanding. And giving your team that deep understanding is really, really empowering. So what I will say is that what has happened with a couple, with every, you know, almost every single company that we've worked with, we've identified, you know, okay, we're going to go focus in over here. Their eyes kind of light up because they all of all, alignment, clarity, focus, finally is like, good, we're all pointed here. But what has been a bit heartbreaking, not shocking, is that they've been. They've been sort of pointed in the wrong direction for so long and there's this sort of realization that like holy shit. We just sunk multiple years and lots of revenue and lost time into pursuing too generic of a, of a, a customer. And so one example that I love to tell because the outcome of it is just such a great story. So this team that we worked with, amazing marketers, their content was like off the charts, incredible. Traffic was great. Lots of really vocal customers just absolutely loving their stuff. And their revenue had been flat for a year and they didn't really know what to do. They just kept throwing marketing at this thing and they spending more on ads and more content. They built out their content engine, they were focused on SEO and like these E courses in this really elaborate content and it was top notch content. The problem was they were focused on the wrong customer or they were focused on too many customers trying to do too many jobs to be done. And so there was a very vocal group of poorer fit customers getting all there. Right. They were sort of stuck in the air and things. So the customer success team was like, well, that's our customer. Because they were getting all the airtime. They were the ones sending the support tickets. It's being super.
- [30:46]
April Dunford
I've seen this. I've seen this.
- [30:48]
Georgiana Loudy
Yeah. And meanwhile the high ltv amazing customers are flying in under the radar, right? And they're the ones that were successful. They stuck around for longer. You know, they had slightly more sophisticated needs but like way higher ltv, lower cost to acquire, didn't give a shit about any of their content. Like they didn't come for the content, they came for the actual product. And with that team, we updated three pages on their website, their homepage, their features page and their product page. And we really, it was really their messaging that we shifted to focus on this higher quality customer. And the signups on their website increased nearly 90%. But the really cool part is that their trial to paid conversion rate, three pages on their website, their trial to pay conversion rate increased 40%. We didn't touch anything other than three pages on their website. And they had, they'd spent years just dumping money into ads and content. And so that like I love that story because it's so like crystal clear how easy it is for that to happen. And we see that happen a lot.
- [31:58]
April Dunford
Wow, that's awesome. I love that story too. Oh, this has been awesome. I'm glad we finally did this. How can people find you? Because they're like, shit, I need some of this, this. How can they find you.
- [32:09]
Georgiana Loudy
I mean, forget the funnel dot com. Check out our website. Get in touch with me. Gia, forget the funnel. Really easy. Yeah, reach out. I mean, I'm on LinkedIn sometimes, but.
- [32:22]
April Dunford
LinkedIn, we are all feeling good and bad about l. Yes, that's right. That's right.
- [32:29]
Georgiana Loudy
But websites, the best, for sure.
- [32:31]
April Dunford
Yeah, yeah. But forget the funnel dot com. All right? We'll make sure we put some links in the show notes and all that stuff. Well, thank you you so much.
- [32:37]
Georgiana Loudy
Thank you.
- [32:38]
April Dunford
Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you're listening to this podcast and you're thinking to yourself, hey, my company could use some help with positioning, maybe we should talk. So, as a consultant, I work with tech companies, but very specifically B2B tech companies that have a sales team. I don't really have a size requirement. I work with very, very large businesses, but I also work with growth stage companies that are as small as 10, 20, 30 million revenue. The work I do with companies is focused on getting a very tight definition of how you win in the market and then taking that and translating it into a really compelling story that clearly answers the question, why pick you over the other guys? If you're interested in learning about how we might work together, you can visit aprildunford.com consulting thanks again for listening.