Forget the Funnel

1. Customer-Led Growth: The Key to Sustainable Success in SaaS

The information you actually need to fix inconsistent, unpredictable growth is found in one place: inside your best customers' heads.

Shift from guesswork to insight. Traditional marketing approaches often rely on tactics and experiments without truly understanding customer needs. Customer-Led Growth focuses on uncovering deep insights about your best customers' experiences, motivations, and desired outcomes. This approach allows you to:

• Identify what life was like for customers before using your solution
• Understand what triggered their search for a new solution
• Discover why they chose your product over alternatives
• Learn how they've grown and changed as your customer

By gaining these insights, you can build a marketing strategy that resonates with the right customers, leading to more consistent and predictable growth. This approach has helped companies like Unbounce increase revenue by nearly 900% in just two years, without relying on paid acquisition channels.

2. Uncover Your Customers' Jobs-to-be-Done for Targeted Marketing

Jobs-to-be-Done: The struggle… That motivated customers… To seek a desired outcome.

Identify customer motivations. The Jobs-to-be-Done framework helps you understand the underlying reasons why customers "hire" your product. To uncover these Jobs:

1. Identify struggles, motivations, and desired outcomes in customer responses
2. Look for common themes across responses
3. Define the top few Jobs customers hire your solution for
4. Pick one Job to prioritize

For example, Alistair, a marketing tool for small businesses, identified two distinct Jobs:

• The need to increase marketing presence
• The need to save time and automate

By focusing on the "save time and automate" Job, Alistair was able to:

• Increase trial signups by 89%
• Boost trial-to-paid conversion rate by 40%

Understanding your customers' Jobs allows you to tailor your messaging, product features, and marketing strategies to address their specific needs and pain points.

3. Map the Customer Experience to Identify Growth Opportunities

A common "aha" moment for CLG Teams in the mapping process is "Oh, shit, we haven't been doing X," which quickly turns into, "Oh, shit, look at all the amazing opportunities we have to do X, Y, Z, and more."

Visualize customer journey. Creating a Customer Experience (CX) map helps you understand your customers' journey from their perspective, rather than focusing solely on business metrics. To create a CX map:

1. Break down the customer experience into three phases:
   • Struggle
   • Evaluation
   • Growth
2. For each phase, identify what customers are:
   • Thinking
   • Doing
   • Feeling
3. Define milestones within each phase

This process allows you to:

• Identify gaps in your current customer experience
• Uncover opportunities for improvement
• Align your team around a shared understanding of the customer journey

By mapping the customer experience, companies like Unbounce were able to identify key value moments and optimize their strategies, leading to significant revenue growth.

4. Define Customer-Led KPIs to Measure What Really Matters

When you improve the right leading indicator metrics, your lagging indicator metrics improve as a result.

Focus on actionable metrics. Traditional business metrics often fail to capture customer value or provide actionable insights. Customer-Led KPIs focus on measuring customer success at each milestone of their journey. To define these KPIs:

1. Identify customer actions that indicate progress at each milestone
2. Ensure KPIs are trackable and represent customer value
3. Focus on leading indicators rather than lagging indicators

Examples of customer-led KPIs:

• Struggle phase: New unique website visits
• Evaluation phase: Key feature usage (e.g., "10+ searches and 2+ lists created and 1+ exports generated")
• Growth phase: Monthly key feature usage + upgrade/review/referral

By measuring these customer-centric KPIs, you can:

• Track customer success more accurately
• Identify areas for improvement in your product or marketing
• Align your team's efforts with customer value creation

Companies like SparkToro have used this approach to double their free-to-paid conversions in just two months.

5. Bridge Success Gaps to Improve Customer Experience and Revenue

Where there is customer value to add, there is revenue to gain.

Prioritize customer success. Success gaps are disconnects between what your ideal customers need and what your current experience provides. To bridge these gaps:

1. Identify success gaps by walking through your CX map as an ideal customer
2. Choose one success gap to focus on, based on potential impact and feasibility
3. Develop specific projects to bridge the gap (e.g., in-app checklists, email onboarding series)
4. Measure impact using your customer-led KPIs

Examples of success gap bridging:

• SparkToro: Doubled free-to-paid conversions with an in-app checklist and onboarding email series
• CareerCake: Reduced lead-to-sales call time from one month to three days by revising nurture program messaging
• Life Lapse: Increased website visitor-to-user conversion by 93% by rewriting homepage copy

By systematically identifying and bridging success gaps, you can continually improve your customer experience and drive revenue growth.

6. Implement Cross-Functional Teams for Effective Customer-Led Growth

Getting out will require a shift in how you operate—but ultimately, it will relieve the time and energy burden by giving your team clear direction.

Foster collaboration. Implementing Customer-Led Growth requires buy-in and alignment across the organization. Create a cross-functional team to:

• Leverage existing knowledge from various departments
• Increase investment in the project's success
• Reduce duplicate work and break down silos

Key roles in a Customer-Led Growth team:

1. Primary Stakeholder: High-level decision-maker (e.g., CEO, COO)
2. Champion: Leader of a customer-facing department
3. Contributors/Secondary Stakeholders: Department heads with a stake in the outcomes
4. Facilitator (optional): Internal or external advisor to guide the process

By involving team members from different departments, you ensure a comprehensive understanding of the customer experience and increase the likelihood of successful implementation.

7. Integrate and Iterate Customer-Led Practices for Long-Term Success

Imagine what you could do if, every month or quarter, you bridged a new success gap and improved performance against another KPI.

Embed customer focus. To make Customer-Led Growth a permanent part of your organization:

1. Regularly update your customer research to stay current with evolving needs
2. Conduct periodic CX health checks to identify new success gaps
3. Continuously iterate on your CX map and KPIs
4. Foster a culture of customer-centricity across all departments

Best practices for integration:

• Schedule recurring customer research sessions (e.g., quarterly or bi-annually)
• Create dashboards to track customer-led KPIs
• Implement a system for collecting and acting on customer feedback
• Encourage cross-functional collaboration on customer-centric initiatives

By consistently applying and refining customer-led practices, you can create a virtuous cycle of improvement, leading to sustained growth and customer satisfaction.

Last updated: November 1, 2024