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Social Media Marketing Podcast
Driving Predictable Recurring Revenue With Customer-Led Growth
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- [00:01]
A
I have some really exciting news. We just released our second annual AI Marketing Industry Report and it's free. You'll be surprised by how often marketers are using AI and the tools that they're using. This is a comprehensive study of more than 730 marketers and it covers how marketers are applying AI to their work, the benefits of AI, the big concerns marketers have, and a whole lot more. Even though I'm the author of this research study, I can say with full confidence that this is the most comprehensive study of AI adoption among marketers that I have ever seen. Get your free copy now by visiting social mediaexaminer.com AI Report 25 this might be just what you need to get your boss or your clients moving along with those AI initiatives you want to start. Get it now@social mediaexaminer.com airport25 hey, it's Michael Stelzner here. After running Social Media marketing world for 12 years, I've noticed something fascinating about the marketers who attend. They usually fall into two camps. Camp number one is those who show up because they have to. Their results are declining. They're scrambling to catch up. And camp number two is those who show up because they want to. They're already achieving a level of success, but they know that change is coming and they want to go so much further. Both learn valuable insights, but their outcomes are completely different. As Emily Ray Shutti said, I came away with a million ideas and new creative ways to approach my work. My business has since doubled in size and revenue. The AI revolution is here. Instagram algorithms keep shifting, Facebook's ad costs keep rising, and the list goes on and on and on. What type of marketer will you be in 2026? Join thousands of marketers at Social Media Marketing World 2026 this April in Anaheim, California. Save big when you register today at Social MediaMarketingWorld.info welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want more exposure, more leads and more sales. Today I'm going to be exploring how to create a really high converting experience for future customers from the moment they first think about even exploring your products and services right on through the end. And and I'm going to be joined by Georgiana Lotti and we're going to really dig in deep to some fascinating concepts that are going to help you solve a lot of your recurring revenue problems. If you are selling any kind of product or service where you have customers coming back time and time again, you're going to find today's episode absolutely fascinating. And by the way, if you're new to this podcast, be sure to follow the show so you do not miss any of our future content. Let's transition over to this week's interview with Georgiana Lotti. Helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide. Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Georgiana Lottie. If you don't know who she is, she is the co author of Forget the Funnel, a customer led approach to driving predictable recurring revenue. She's also hosted the Forget Funnel, the Funnel podcast and co founder of Forget the Funnel, a consultancy that helps B2B SaaS founders achieve scale. Gio, welcome to the show. How you doing today?
- [03:52]
B
I'm great. Thank you so much. I recognize a lot of repetition there. But hey, what works, right?
- [03:57]
A
Hey, it's smart branding. It's really smart branding. So today we're going to explore a framework to help businesses grow. Whether you are a SaaS company or not a SaaS company. I'm very excited to dive in. But before we go there, I'd love to hear a little bit of your story. How did you get into marketing?
- [04:13]
B
Well, I mean, the actual story of how I got into marketing is a, that's a, that's a great question. But that was an eternity ago. I studied communications in university and I just sort of got pulled towards the Internet. So I never did traditional marketing. It was always online marketing. And I just sort of was pulled in that, that direction and I never kind of looked back. And then around, that was early 2000s and then around 2010, actually it was about 2008, 2009, I discovered Twitter and, and then Twitter pulled me into the local tech community and then the local tech community really pulled me into SaaS. And then I was like, okay, this is where marketing has a really critical role to play because SaaS businesses understand the value of marketing post acquisition and marketing's impact on revenue growth. I'm still talking about that to this day. But back then I was convinced that this was the place for me. I've never really looked back. I love SaaS and recurring revenue business models partially for that reason. Now what I would describe, what I do is much broader than, than marketing. But really the, the heart was really there.
- [05:16]
A
Tell us a little bit about Forget the funnel. Cause it's such an interesting headline.
- [05:19]
B
Yeah. So it sort of came from working in tech, especially at the time where it was sort of born from was this sort of general disdain for marketing in tech. You know, not a lot of necessarily understanding or some unfair expectations or just unrealistic expectations of marketing sometimes by some tech very product focused founders, tech focused founders really just not understanding marketing very well and really, you know, having unrealistic expectations also in marketing and a lot of customer facing teams really getting stuck in the weeds and being bogged down in the weeds of execution is another part of it. And then really the name comes from when you're in and running a recurring revenue business, the funnel has no role. Right. The funnel is sort of meaningless. It's a lot more about, you know, that the story starts when somebody becomes a customer. It doesn't end there. And so there's this whole world to explore, you know, before like in the problem space all the way through to product adoption, product engagement, expansion, loyalty. So that's the reason for Forget the funnel.
- [06:28]
A
I love it. And there's so many different kinds of businesses that are listening to this podcast today. We've got businesses like mine where we have a membership or a conferen and there is like a recurring nature to the kinds of businesses that I do. And then of course there's software companies that are listening and of course there's consumer based companies that are listening. There's people that have local businesses that care about recurring revenue. So the whole concept here I think is really fascinating. And the word that we kind of talked about when we were prepping for this show was customer led growth. That was kind of the phrase we came up with. So if marketers pay attention to this concept, we're going to talk about what is the upside because I do feel like there's something special here that we're about to unlock.
- [07:15]
B
I'm glad you think so. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. And yes, very applicable. I would say that most businesses, most companies think of themselves as recurring revenue businesses. Maybe not as directly as a software, as a service company would, but subscription model, any, you know, E commerce too would think of themselves as recurring revenue. So this is very applicable across the board. And we did write a book about this process and we've, you know, even though we work mostly with B2B SaaS companies, I've heard from hundreds of people outside of that industry that really have gotten a lot of value from customer led growth, which is the framework that we unpack in this book. So what you get from customer led growth, I mean, I almost don't know where to begin, but the biggest thing I would say, particularly for marketers, the main takeaway for marketers is a lot less guessing about what to do. Your strategy, your go to market strategy becomes much, much clearer and you no longer have to operate in experimentation and hypothesis mode. You can make really well informed decisions about what to do and how to grow. And the other really added huge benefit to customer led growth is that it's also a framework that you share across functional departments of, in your company. And so marketing and CS and product and sales. Sales have a much more organized and sort of operationalized view of the customer experience and their role in it. And so it's not just to the benefit of, of marketing. That also helps sort of, you know, build a lot more bridges to your adjacent teams as well.
- [08:51]
A
Love it. Okay, so there's some groundwork that we might want to cover here a little bit. Right. So before we get into how to do all this stuff that we're about to talk about, is there any kind of concepts or mindsets or any kind of like, things we need to discuss before we get into this?
- [09:07]
B
I mean, I would definitely say the biggest one is there being an agreement and alignment on the, you know, on the team that the customer should really be at the center of your growth strategy. I'm not saying that. What that doesn't mean is everything the customer says is true and you should always follow customer feedback. That's not what I mean at all, but an agreement that if your customers are successful, you would be successful. As long as the team is in agreement on that, then customer led growth will work for you because it is really about, you know, thinking about the customer as being the center of gravity, thinking about delivering customer value as being the center of gravity and operationalizing the way you build strategy, but also operationalizing your team around delivering that value to customers. So that's definitely a do not pass go. That's the, you know, must have alignment. The next would be, I mean, maybe where a lot of people start with this, but a really deep understanding of customers. We can talk, you know, a little bit more about how we do that and how we recommend doing that. But having a really deep understanding of your ideal customers is obviously another critical input here.
- [10:13]
A
When we were prepping, you also mentioned that sometimes quantitative data, which marketers focus on, is sometimes not the right focus. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
- [10:24]
B
What a Time to pull that one in. So yes, I completely agree and I think that's, I mean that's kind of what I was alluding to before when I was saying like operating and I. In experimentation mode. A lot of teams do that and I can totally understand why. It's actually part of why we started, forget the funnel. Was this sort of need by a lot of go to market teams, particularly marketing, this need to prove that we are doing something, prove that we are taking action and making progress. And sometimes the superficial quant sort of data can pull us in directions that just aren't helpful or that just lead to sort of scattershot strategy. We hear that a lot from the founders that reach out to us. Like our team is great, I know they care a lot, they're super smart. But the strategy feels scattershot. And a lot of the time that's because marketing teams are operating based on like quantitative, like the. What the data says to do before centering on who. Who is it that we even serve. What do they care about? Not at a demographic or quantitative level, but at a qualitative psychographic level, like what motivates these customers. That's really where things need to start. And then you layer on the quantitative later. It's. Quantitative is very, very important. The data is very important. But we really advocate for starting from a foundation of qualitative insight first in order to contextualize the quantitative. That was a lot of qualquant back and forth.
- [11:49]
A
Okay, so I think what I'm hearing you say is a couple things. Number one, the, the non negotiables that one should have if you are to adopt. What we're about to share here is that the customer is at the center of the objective of growing. Right. Like a deep understanding, which we're going to get into very shortly. In addition, if you're too focused on the wrong quantitative data, which is the things that are measurable, right. Like click through rates and impressions and views and all that kind of stuff. It sounds like what I'm hearing you say is that can send you false signals that get you down rabbit trails that get you in trouble. Is that really what you're saying?
- [12:29]
B
Yeah, it's just. It's often a distraction. Not always. Again, if that foundational work has been done, then it can be great and it can layer on understanding. But nine times out of 10, that foundational level is not there. And if it is there, it's out of date and antiquated. Especially now because the market is changing so, so quickly. So Yeah, a lot of the time it's busy work. It's like activity does not equal progress. And that is kind of the, the, you know, the mess that we sometimes get into. And I'm more and more I'm describing this as strategic quicksand. Especially right now there's a lot of busy work and desperation to show activity because of all the things happening in the market, especially in tech. So it's just, it can be a bit of a mess. And I've heard from far too many folks in house, you know, struggling with this. So it's a very real thing.
- [13:22]
A
That's a perfect transition into something you said multiple times, which is deeply understanding customers. I'm assuming that's where we begin. And if so, talk to me a little bit about this, A lot about this. I know you have a lot to say about this.
- [13:36]
B
Yeah, I mean what I will start with saying is that I understand that teens appetite for research is not always equal. Right. Like some teams, some organizations have a bigger appetite for research than others. We generally operate on the assumption that there is not a big appetite for research and that research is a means to an ends and, and not, you know, the, a lot of people have had bad experiences with research, research that has led nowhere, research that has led to more questions than answers, research that gets dusty on a shelf, not effective research. And it happens a lot. We've talked about that on our podcast before. It is, people have mixed histories with research for that. I, there's a couple of things like I, I don't tend to center everything we do around customer research because really at the end of the day, what we're looking for is genuine insight and genuine understanding into what matters, the actual signal in all of that research that we do. But then also the really important part and why we exist like our, our reason for existence is making sure that research actually gets used and operationalized and leveraged and turned into actual positive customer outcomes and revenue growth overall. So it's a means to an end. Now I say all that to say that's one sort of side of the coin. The other side of the coin is we never advocate for more research than is absolutely necessary. And so when we do research, we do very rapid style, very laser targeted research, but it's laser targeted at the high level. And what I mean by that is we're looking for customers, jobs to be done. A lot of people have some familiarity with, with jobs to be done, but just the, you know, the TLDR version of jobs to be done really is like deeply understanding what customers are trying to achieve, the progress they're looking to make with your solution. And so it means deeply understanding what's the context, you know, what, what's going on in their world when they're struggling with the old way, what is that moment that leads them to seek out something new? Once they decide, you know, that they have to have something new, what steps do they go through to evaluate potential options once they do find you on a short list, what is it about you that really convinces them to give it a try? What stands out to them? What convinces them to keep going? What demonstrates to them that you're going to help them solve that job to be done? And then ultimately, what can they do now that they weren't able to do before? So I'm very zoomed out at the 30,000 foot view. But if you can understand that sort of documentary under story of your customer, then you've got the answers that you need.
- [16:10]
A
Cool. I want to dig in here a little bit because when I asked, where do we begin? You started talking about research, but you did focus mostly on like people's maybe disdain, general dissatisfaction with research. But I think what you're really saying is we need to understand who our customers are. Right. And not, not just any customers, but certain customers. Right. So just get specific a little bit for everybody who's out here about the why behind this and a little bit of the how and then we'll get into the jobs to be done. Because I feel like we just need to unpack this a little bit more.
- [16:46]
B
Yeah, totally. So the why is essentially I have to talk about who first. And the who is really, really important here. So I mentioned before, we never advocate for big, long research projects. We're always looking to do really laser targeted research. And what we have found is the most effective research that you can do is learning from your customers. Who are the happiest, those that you would have to, you know, pry your product or solution out of their cold, dead hands. Like those are the customers that we want to learn from. Really importantly, when recency, I mentioned before that, you know, and everybody is acutely aware the market has dramatically changed in the last six months. And so another really important factor here is recency. So we want the people who have made a decision, made a, you know, experienced the problem, made a decision to try you, made a tradeoff in order to choose you, and they did it all within the last couple of months, let's say.
- [17:44]
A
Why is that?
- [17:44]
B
Yeah, well, because we don't want them to we're talking about 10 to 12 conversations that we're going to have with these folks. We do not want them filling the gaps in their memory. We want them to viscerally remember how much it sucked to have the problem that you now help them solve. Right. So we want them to be very, very close, as close as possible to that problem space. But we also want them to have experienced value with your solution. So we need that arc in their story to be, you know, as fresh as possible in their memory.
- [18:14]
A
Okay, so when we're talking to these customers, tell us a little bit about how we would do this. Let's say that I am able to do this myself and I want to talk to, let's say, 10 of my most recent customers who are like overly overjoyed and they've been onboarded in the last three to six months. Let's say, hypothetically, what are we looking for when we're talking to them?
- [18:36]
B
These conversations, I mean, they're called switch interviews. There's, that's the, you know, technical term for the type of interview that you're writing here. But really what we're looking to uncover is their job to be done. So we're looking to have them basically walk us through what happened. We don't want conjecture, we don't want opinions necessarily. We want to understand what actually like walk me through that experience. We're just asking them to tell us the story of what happened and what stood out and why they made certain decisions and who was involved. Especially in a B2B purchase decision. There's other people involved. So that's a really important part of the process. Often. What was it about our solution that convinced you to keep going? Like, what stood out to you? We're asking those types of questions, deal breaker questions, anxiety questions, motivation questions. And when we work with teams, we have these conversations. We can get this story within 30 minutes. So we're having 10 to 1230 minute conversations with these ideal customers. Right? So there's a segment of your customers that you would describe as very happy and recent. Right. And getting a lot of value from your product today. Have 10 to 12 conversations with those customers and you will start to see patterns emerge. Like as you are having these conversations, you're going to start to hear the same things. And as soon as you start to hear the same things over and over again, you know, you're going to realize, okay, there's I'm get, I'm reaching pattern saturation here. If you're not hearing the same things after 10, 12 calls, you probably need to do more calls until you do start to see those patterns emerge. But eventually you're going to hear, you're going to reach what, you know, the research nerds call the pattern saturation. And then, you know that you can stop running interviews. Generally, we reach pattern saturation within 10 to 12 conversations, and that only takes about, you know, two weeks to do those interviews. I'm not talking about a big research project here.
- [20:23]
A
Okay. So when we were prepping, you said that there was a scheduling tool that you've been working with that you could share a little bit about how that story went. Maybe there's a different one that's on top of your mind now.
- [20:32]
B
Yeah, well, I'll just tell that one because it's an easy one to call back to, actually. So this is a team that we worked with not too long ago, and they're in the. Yeah, social media scheduling space.
- [20:43]
A
And.
- [20:44]
B
And they were like their growth had flatlined and they didn't really know what to do, but they were great at content marketing. And also their ads performed generally pretty well in terms of signup, but revenue was flat, so they had steady signups. But again, revenue, there was nothing they could do that really influenced the revenue number. So they did what they do best. They did more content marketing, they ran more ads, but nothing was really moving the needle. So when we started working with them, we ran through this exercise, like I just described to you, where we, you know, identified what was that subset of customers that were really, really happy, getting a ton of value and that had signed up recently. And we had 10 to 12 conversations. I believe it was maybe even 10, I can't recall exactly. And what we found was there were two major groups of customers that showed up in their customer base that showed up at their front door. Right. Those that were looking to grow their audience, and the other that was looking to automate their processes and how they had been working.
- [21:45]
A
You call these jobs to be done. Right. Is that what we're talking about?
- [21:48]
B
Okay, yeah, exactly. So the two main. I mean, there was a third one that showed up, but really, these are the two dominant jobs to be done. And what was really interesting about that, learning that these two different groups were showing up at the front door, was that this team had been targeting both of these jobs to be done as if they were one individual. For the history of the company. They just assumed that everybody showing up at the front door had both of these jobs to be done, but they didn't. They were actually two genuinely different groups of Customers showing up at the front door. And so what we did was we went through the customer led growth process. But I'll skip to the end where essentially we updated their messaging strategy to focus more on those automators because those, those looking to grow their audience were very vocal. They were definitely, they were the vocal majority. So it was very easy for the team to sort of index on that first group because they were the majority.
- [22:37]
A
But they weren't the ones where the revenue was coming from probably. Right, right.
- [22:40]
B
And that second group, they were onboarding more quickly. They were not contacting cs, they were sort of flying in under the radar. Meanwhile, sticking around for the retention in that group is a lot higher as well. So this team had been conflating these two groups of customers under one banner for literally years. I think it had been five years and they had never pulled these two apart. So when we split the messaging and really focused the messaging on that second group and we updated three pages on the website, the homepage, the product page and the pricing page. And with the just messaging changes, not, not even any really major design changes, just from a messaging standpoint, the conversion rate on the website increased 98%.
- [23:20]
A
Wow.
- [23:20]
B
But way more interesting than that was their trial to pay. Conversion rate increased 40% and we didn't touch anything other than three pages on their website, which meant not only were there more people coming through the front door, but they were higher quality as well. And that was just from understanding these two different groups of customers showing up.
- [23:40]
A
Have you ever attended a conference and came back with all sorts of ideas and you were fired up, but you struggled to get everyone else on your team to be on the same page? Well, here's what I noticed after a dozen years of social media marketing world. When one person attends, they get great ideas. But when a team attends together, they create something much bigger. Think about it. One person learns about AI and marketing. A team builds out an AI strategy, one person discovers Instagram tactics, A team redesigns their entire content approach. Noah Stanley told us, quote, I will bring multiple members of my staff next year. The mindset, openness and amount of time the experts gave to us was head and shoulders above other conferences, unquote. When your team attends together, you can cross pollinate ideas in real time, divide and conquer to cover more ground and return with a unified action plan, not just a bunch of scattered notes that you never get around to. Plus you've got a built in support system. When you try new strategies and you're back at the office, the company seen the Biggest results from social media marketing world. They're the ones investing in team transformation. Bring your team to Anaheim this April and multiply your impact. Learn more@social mediamarketingworld.info okay, so so far what we've discovered is that we really need to talk to our best customers, our happiest customers, to kind of reverse engineer the jobs that they are doing, the major jobs that they are doing. And then I'm discerning, because I'm a data guy, that you were able to look at these two different groups and kind of determine where they fit into the actual customer database. And that was some work that you probably did after you did these interviews to kind of put these customers into different kinds of buckets. And that's when you discovered, whoa, we've been like, actually targeting. I mean, if you're targeting two different groups of people with the same message, you're targeting none of those people. Right? I mean, that's the problem, right? Like, you're just creating confusion because they don't care about the other half of the message. So this is valuable. And this was like a major aha and wake up moment. So once you've actually discovered these jobs to be done, talk to me a little bit about what comes next, because obviously we're right now still in the research phase. This story you shared with us, you've gone way beyond the research phase. But once you've got some preliminary research, you've identified. I forget what you call this. This thread. What did you call the thread that in the switch interviews, you said you're looking for this pattern or whatever.
- [26:10]
B
Oh, like the documentary, like, understanding of your customer's journey. Basically, we call it a customer experience map for a couple of reasons which I can get into.
- [26:18]
A
Well, let's talk about that, because obviously that's getting into the next part. So once you've actually discovered these interesting insights, like, what the heck do you do with it?
- [26:26]
B
Yeah, so, I mean, the first thing that we do once we learn of these different jobs to be done in the customer base is we go back to the team and we say, hey, team, these two different groups of customers are showing up at the front door. Oftentimes it's three, by the way, sometimes four. But for sake of simplicity, in that story, there were two that were a main focus. There's a decision to be made. Because especially right now, this is a really critical part of this process is really deciding which job to be done. Do we want to focus on moving forward? Because we can't, you know, Serve everyone. And we have to put one foot in front of the other, particularly for the, you know, benefit of the team and understanding how to put one foot in front of the other. We generally advocate for prioritizing one job to be done. There are cases where you might want to marry two if you absolutely need to, but I would do that under advisement only. So really prioritizing one job to be done is really important part of this process. Now with the, you know, wearing the hat of or in the shoes of or wearing the glasses of or whatever of this customer, with this job to be done, you are now going to basically go through the end to end customer experience. You're going to do the secret shopper thing. We call it like a heuristic. We look at marketing campaigns, we look at the website, we look at the onboarding experience, we look at the product experience, we look at the emails we're receiving, we look at the upsell flows and the expansion campaigns and customer education. We go through the entire customer experience again completely through the lens of a customer. With this job to be done. That's a really, really important lens to review all of this through. And because we're going through the end to end customer experience with this new understanding of customers, we are going to see all of the ways that our customer experience is out of alignment with that ideal customer.
- [28:07]
A
Okay, real quick here because I know that we're going to talk about all this, but there was this section in the middle of our interview where we're going to talk about how to map and measure this experience. I would like to talk about this experience map. I think you might have just briefly kind of gone over it real quick. But I think it'd be really valuable for us to dig in on this.
- [28:26]
B
For sure. Yeah, I was teeing it up. So once we've gone through that customer experience, we are going to understand all of these sort of major leaps of faith in our customers relationship with us. And what I mean by that is even the stage where our customers don't even know that we exist, but when they're experiencing the problem that we are going to help them solve. So the problem space wildly important. Way too many customer journey maps leave the problems stage out which is I think a massive, massive oversight and really, really problematic. So there's the problem stage and then we move all the way through to expansion and growth. Now we tend to think of customer experience maps as being organized into three major phases. The struggle phase where they're struggling with the old way, the evaluation phase which you can, you know, deduce, I'm sure that you know, is them evaluating the solution and then ultimately deciding that it is going to solve their job to done. Then there's the growth phase, which again recurring revenue businesses, they live and die in this growth phase. Right? So having acquiring somebody as a customer is the beginning of the story. So the growth phase is really about ongoing value being delivered, ongoing engagement, but also expanding on that value. And so there's a lot to talk about in the growth phase. We don't nearly enough get to talk about the growth phase because we're everybody's so hell bent on acquisition. Marketing, by the way, has a role to play across this entire customer experience. But, but basically our job is to figure out in those three phases what are the major milestones in our customer's relationship with us where they need to experience value in order to continue to the next stage. And so we call that customer experience mapping. The number of milestones will completely depend on your solution, your customer, how complex either your customer is or your solution is. So you know, we never say there's four stages or there's five or there's six or there's seven. You can't really think about it in that way. It's genuinely for you. So this is why, this is another reason why we take issue with funnels because they're formulaic and generic. They don't actually reflect your customers or your experience. So that's the customer experience mapping process.
- [30:33]
A
Real quick, on this map process, can you give us an example maybe of a client and kind of like help us understand what you discovered in each of these three phases just so people can wrap their head around this thing.
- [30:46]
B
Yeah, so great example. Actually your audience might know a little marketer called Rand Fishkin who's on the show and Amanda Natividan, SparkToro. We actually worked with SparkToro not too long ago and they have a really crystal clear sort of way that we were able to unpack their customer experience and identify where they were missing an opportunity. So one of the things that we learned about their customers was that there was, and I don't have to get into the, you know, specifics here, but there was a feature that was being introduced like an, a product attribute, a part of this product of SparkToro that was being introduced too late. So it was after activation, after onboarding in the more like what you would consider the like product engagement stage. When somebody has become a customer, then they get introduced to this feature. But what we realized was that was Actually a key motivator for people even choosing SparkToro. And so we realized is when we moved that feature, the introduction of that feature feature and how it was introduced up in the customer experience to the what we call the first value or the adoption stage, they doubled their child to paid, I'm sorry their free to paid conversion rate because we got to move that now obviously it's credit fully to the team. You know, they understood the assignment when we mentioned that this feature was buried too far down as their customer experience. They knew exactly what to do and we made a couple of recommendations. They rolled out emails, they rolled out in app product onboarding that introduced this feature more sooner and they again they doubled the free to pay conversion rate, which is huge.
- [32:19]
A
So just help me map the struggle and the evaluation, the growth phase maybe through the, through the Rand experience. Like just so without getting super detailed, just so people can understand like the kinds of discoveries that they might be able to make if they were to do something similar.
- [32:35]
B
The first thing you definitely need to do is identify what are those major milestones so I can talk through them at a high level and then I would talk about how to optimize because you optimize at the milestone level, but you gotta know what the milestones are first. So we talk about the struggle phase. Generally we're talking about two maximum three milestones there where it's the problem space. Somebody's out in the world, they have the problem that you have, they're struggling with the old way. And then there's the interest stage where they go into active solution seeking mode and they discover that you exist. They may land on your website. Generally I would say that interest stage ends when somebody either books a demo or attends a demo or signs up for your product for free, or starts a trial and then we move into evaluation mode. And evaluation mode, it is wildly important that we demonstrate value as quickly as possible. It doesn't, obviously it's not going to be full value, but we call it first value because we need to help people see value quickly enough that they don't abandon shit. Because I think there's a stat that's 70% of people who sign up for a product log in once and never log back in again. So it's really, really important that we demonstrate this like promise of value in the product as quickly as we possibly can. And there's a lot of different mechanisms to do that, but I digress. And then depending on the complexity of your product, in some cases there's a, you know, a Milestone in the middle. But I'm not. I'm going to skip over that one. Because the more most important one at the end of evaluation is what we call value realization. And that's when somebody has fully adopted your product and is like, eureka, this thing has solved my problem. I'm in. I'm going to invite my team. I'm firing the old way. I'm done with how I used to do it. This is me forever. I'm like, I'm a lifer now. And that is the end of the evaluation phase. When we've like, quote, unquote, solved their job to be done. Then in the growth phase, it is about delivering continued value. Generally, the growth phase looks similar across the teams that we've worked with. Sometimes it's a little bit more complex, but in general, it's continued value and value growth and continued value. That's when you get to break out more of the toys in the toy box. So some of the more advanced features or adding additional team members or moving into adjacent teams, potentially that would be in value expansion or value growth rather. And so that growth phase is where we start talking about net revenue retention. We're certainly talking about retention, but we're also talking about net revenue retention. And because we've operationalized the customer experience in this way, we have KPIs for each of those milestones. And that gives us a very measurable way to see what milestone, what stage in the customer experience is our customer, so that if anybody falls out, we can be proactive in helping them get back in. So we can either reach out to them or we can send them emails, but we'll know when they are at risk. And so for the continued value milestone, that would be a lot about, like, retention. Are they showing any signals of, you know, early attrition or churn that we can, you know, see and get ahead of to retain them and then value growth? When we, you know, start thinking about upsell or moving them to annual or moving into adjacent teams, there's all kind. Again, it's very product specific, but that's how generally the customer experience breaks down across those milestones. Once you have those milestones identified and the KPIs identified, you go back to that secret shopper experience where you saw all of the ways that your customer experience is out of alignment. Now you get to optimize for one KPI and each of those milestones. It is just a much more organized, systematic way of optimizing your customer's experience.
- [36:13]
A
So this is really interesting across Multiple levels. Because we've got these three parts of this customer experience map, and I'm imagining an actual map in my mind. We've got the struggle phase, which is the phase where customers are dealing with struggles, perhaps using a competitor's product or service and they don't know a better way. And then you've got the evaluation phase, where presumably they are going out and looking for solutions or looking specifically at.
- [36:41]
B
Your solution, at yours. Yeah, I recognize I'm not precious about the names of these things.
- [36:46]
A
Okay. They're finally at the point where they're. They're aware of who the heck you are and they've gone out and they're now analyzing whether you are the solution that they're seeking. And then we've got the growth phase. Now this is intriguing because if I think about marketing in the way that I traditionally think about marketing, marketing is mostly targeting people that have the struggle or that are actively evaluating. And typically it's somebody else once they're a customer who handles all this stuff. Right. And what I want you to make the connection on is, okay, we've got customers who have been through the struggle phase, which is why you want to talk to them within the last six months. So they remember the struggle. Right. And you've got customers have gone through the evaluation phase, and the reason you want to talk to them is because you may not have even identified what the little tiny wins are along the path. Right. You might just have lucked out, you know, because a lot of marketers throw spaghetti against the wall. It sticks, and they just fire more spaghetti against the wall. But what you're advocating for is like, hey, let's get a little bit of insights into the customer so we can identify all those little actions that they took during that evaluation phase in particular, and the actions they likely took when they were just in the struggle phase. Because all of this is incredible fodder for you to eventually use in your future messaging and marketing, Is that right?
- [38:12]
B
A hundred percent, yeah. And it, by the way, it's not only the marketing team. Obviously you can imagine that a CS team or product team or sales team, obviously the entire go to market function.
- [38:23]
A
Sometimes small businesses don't have those teams, though. You know what I mean?
- [38:27]
B
Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%. So, yeah, we call it the struggle phase generally. You know, you'd think of like traditional marketing as being focused on the struggle phase.
- [38:36]
A
Right.
- [38:36]
B
And the struggle phase, why we call it that, it's like they're still struggling with the old way, so they might be an early evaluation, they might be comparing you to other solutions, they might be using nothing, they might be coming into a new job, they might be using a spreadsheet. So many times it's a spreadsheet that you're actually competing with. Right. So they're struggling with the old way, they're still using the old way. And they're in that early evaluation phase. That's what we call interest. And then that milestone really becomes about like your marketing reaches them in the problem stage. And then your website, your landing pages, that early, early sort of experience is really the interest stage. And then once they actually get into like evaluating your solution, then we switch into like actual solution evaluation, evaluation of your solution for solving their job to be done. So yeah, organizing the customer experience in this way really gives you like, you can go really deep on all of those milestones. And if you've got KPIs that demonstrate the way we describe KPIs is like, we'll know we've done our jobs delivering value to customers when they reach this KPI. It is not a transactional KPI. I'm not talking about MQLs, SQLs. I do not care. No, no customer cares about them becoming an MQL. Right? That's not a thing. Also, MQL's are highly problematic for many reasons.
- [39:56]
A
That's a whole explain what tech that is for people that don't even know what the heck that is.
- [39:59]
B
Like a marketing qualified lead, right? So you might say, okay, got it loaded in e book. That means they're marketing qualified. Like I see that doesn't mean anything to your customer. It means something to you. Maybe it means something to your, you know, your marketing automation platform, but it means nothing to your customer. So when we talk about KPIs, it's really like our customers experience enough value to convince them to keep going. And we have this measurable way of demonstrating to us that we've done our job. So that's how we think about those KPIs. When we work with teams, we literally map the customer experience and we go milestone by milestone and we say like, is this a good way to demonstrate to the team that we've helped customers get from one milestone to the next? We unpack these milestones through a couple of different lenses. The thinking, feeling, doing, that's a bit of a detail, but it is really, really helpful to unpack it in that way to ident all of the opportunities.
- [40:50]
A
Tell us a little bit about that.
- [40:51]
B
Yeah, so. So the process that we go through really because we've. We understand that customer at that much deeper, more psychographic level. Right. We're not talking about the transactional moments. We're talking about, like, what were they, what was the progress they were looking to make, what actually motivated them to continue moving forward? And we really zero in on the things that they actually care about that actually matters. What we have found with teams over the many, many years that we have been doing this is we tend to throw the kitchen sink at our customers with a lot of stuff that they do not care about. That's why I mentioned that, like, when you reach the, you know, after value realization, when they reach continued value, that's when you can break out more of those toys in the toy box. But they're not ready for those toys at the beginning of the evaluation phase. Right. They're really looking for the one thing that really matters to them. So we are oftentimes telling teams to remove a bunch of stuff from their customer experience, particularly through the. The onboarding experience, as we optimize either the, like in app experience or emails or whatever, and really staying focused on what customers actually really care about. And it simplifies things immensely.
- [42:03]
A
So you mentioned earlier the secret shopping concept. So tell me a little bit about what we're doing there.
- [42:09]
B
Yeah, so that's essentially the. The work of going through the customer experience through the lens of somebody with that job to be done. And it can be a tough, grueling experience, especially for teams who have recently updated their website or recently overhauled their onboarding or, you know, what have you. Because all of these teams are working on this stuff actively. So it can be tough to go through this experience and then realize that, oh, I just spent six months on an email campaign that completely misses the mark. Like, nobody wants to do that.
- [42:48]
A
So what are we looking for when we're actually doing the secret shopping?
- [42:51]
B
Yeah, yeah. So it. It definitely helps to be outside the jar when doing this type of work. It helps to be outside of the jar when doing the customer research as well, by the way. So it is a bit of an advantage. And obviously we have a. Just a ton of diplomacy when we're communicating the stuff back to teams. But like, again, a lot of times we're just overwhelming our customers with a bunch of stuff that they care about a little bit instead of really zeroing in on the stuff that they care about a lot. And we're leaving money on the table, you know, or filling a leaky bucket, whatever analogy you want. So that's a lot of what we're doing is basically identifying all of the ways that our customer experience is out of alignment with what those customers are actually really care about. We go through a start, stop, continue kind of activity where we're looking at the things like what is actually hurting your customer experience, what might be actually causing people to drop out that you just need to straight up stop doing. More often than not, it's something that they are doing but needs to be updated, especially with more mature teams that they've got programmatic comms in place, they've got email nurtures in place, product onboarding in place. A lot of the times we're making updates, largely simplifying product onboarding experiences, email campaigns and things like that. And then there's the things that you genuinely need to start doing. So that might be, hey, you have more complex customers and they need a sales touch, they should, they need a call here to walk them through this process or hey, your customers, they don't want to be on a sales call, get out of their way, just let them into the product and this is the way to introduce the product. So sometimes we're telling you teams that as well that they can, they should introduce either like a self serve product experience. Sometimes that happens a lot where customers are just like, I know exactly what I want, I don't want to get on a sales call. The sales call was almost a deterrent to signing up. A lot of times we're introducing flows like that either in app or email or. And sometimes it's actually reorganizing like the information architecture on a website where a website is way too complicated, talks about like industry and vertical when like everybody showing up has the same job to be done and there's nothing really about solving that. So websites also, we tend to talk about websites a lot and the, the IA of a website and things that might be missing or things that just should be cut or things that need to be optimized. So again we go through that start, stop, continue and then for each of the milestones we have a list of opportunities. And then with all of those opportunities across all the milestones, we do a prioritizing workshop with the team.
- [45:23]
A
Okay, so what I'm hearing you say is that every single communication touchpoint, whether it be an ad, an email, a signup form, an autoresponder, an actual login, all these different touch points, we should audit them and we should make sure that we put on the glasses of the ideal customer and we need to ask ourselves does the message and, or the experience attract or Repel that ideal audience. And if it repels them, you'll identify some obvious areas where it repels them. And you didn't state this, but I'm assuming you begin a split test at this point and you prove the hypothesis out. Is that typically what you do or no?
- [46:05]
B
So that comes later. That would come after prioritization, right?
- [46:10]
A
Assuming you prioritize the list. I mean, you would want to put it to the test, would you not?
- [46:14]
B
Yeah, exactly. But there's some ways to do that that are more impactful than others. Like, I wouldn't go into conversion rate optimization on a website. I would go to, we need to write a whole new messaging strategy.
- [46:29]
A
Redesign the whole damn thing.
- [46:31]
B
No, not redesign, actually.
- [46:32]
A
Oh, the message strategy. Not. No, I don't mean design.
- [46:35]
B
Messaging is all like, every single team that we work with gets a messaging guide because every single team that we work with learns something new about their customer, focuses in on what they actually really care about. And so we develop a messaging strategy and deliver them a messaging guide. That messaging guide can do a lot of things. It can influence the website, obviously. It can influence customer onboarding. It can influence marketing campaigns. So first thing, messaging strategy always gets prioritized. After messaging strategy, then we would go to what part of the customer experience is actually causing the. The biggest, like, the most damage? 9 times out of 10, it's the customer onboarding. I mean, the website obviously is a. A fast follow, because oftentimes the website is writing checks that the customer experience can't cash, and that happens a lot. But often we're focused on customer onboarding and making sure that those product fit customers are actually turning into paying customers. That's generally the most important thing. Also, actually, I will say sidebar, if you've got retention issues, retention is number one. So let me just assume that retention is healthy in this situation. Then it's customer onboarding. We're literally reverse engineering customer onboarding. And then it would be, again, depending on the size of your team, you might be able to do these things at the same time. But if you've got a small team, I would fix customer onboarding first, then I would fix the website, then I would fix. And I would turn off marketing campaigns, especially if you're spending on ads. Pause those reallocate resources to fixing the foundation before you turn your ads or any of your marketing campaigns back on.
- [48:07]
A
Well, Georgiana Lottie, we have just tapped the surface of what's in that brain of yours. I know that there's so much more there. And if folks want to discover you or follow you. What's your preferred social platform? And if they want to work with you, where do you want to send them?
- [48:22]
B
Yeah, I mean, I try to be active on LinkedIn. I have a hard time these days for many reasons, but LinkedIn would probably be the social platform of choice for the moment. But really, forget the funnel. Com is the right place to go to find out about how to work with us. We also, as I mentioned before, we have a book. It's very short, very practical, so it's easy to read. It's not a big theoretical thing. And the book actually comes along with a workbook as well, with a lot of templates and tools. So if you want to try to DIY this, you absolutely can. If you want to do it in just a couple of weeks, reach out to us.
- [48:51]
A
Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today.
- [48:53]
B
Thanks for having me. It was fun.
- [48:55]
A
Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@socialmediaexaminer.com 687 if you're new to the show to be sure sure to follow us. If you've been a longtime listener, would you let us know what you think about this show by giving us a review on whatever platform you're on? And feel free to share the show with your friends. And do check out our other shows. The AI Explored Podcast hosted by me and the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner. This is the year to finally come to social media marketing world 2,026. Grab your tickets right now by visiting socialmediamarketingworld info.