How to use Jobs To Be Done to create a laser-sharp SaaS growth Strategy

Georgiana Laudi

|

Co-founder

of

Forget the Funnel
EP
66
Georgiana Laudi
Georgiana Laudi

Episode Summary

Today on the show we have Georgiana Laudi, Co-Founder of Forget the Funnel.

In this episode, we talked about how Georgiana decided to focus on SaaS and build Forget the Funnel, the type of work they do for their clients, and how they evaluate the health of their client’s business to identify where there’s an opportunity for growth.

We also discussed The “Jobs to be done” framework, their process, how they set up, and conduct surveys in order to pull out what the customer’s jobs to be done are, and lastly, we talked about customer experience mapping. 

As usual, I'm excited to hear what you think of this episode, and if you have any feedback, I would love to hear from you. You can email me directly on Andrew@churn.fm. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter.


Mentioned Resources

Highlights

Time

Why Georgianna decided to focus on SaaS and build Forget the Funnel 00:02:10
What Forget the Funnel do for their clients. 00:03:30
How Georgianna evaluates the health of her client’s business and identifies where there’s an opportunity for growth. 00:07:04
The “Jobs to be done” framework: How Georgiana uses it to help her clients. 00:11:52
How they set up and conduct surveys in order to pull out what the customer’s jobs to be done are. 00:20:18
Customer experience mapping 00:26:52

Transcription

Andrew Michael  0:00  
Hey Gia, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure sir. For the listeners. Jia is the co founder of forget the funnel content series for growth leaders at SAS companies. She has also been working with SAS companies like unbounce FAQs and Sprout Social since 2009. And has been launching and building b2b and b2c brands online since y2k was a thing in three years, she built a team that grew revenue 900% and has ordered the 14 spots and Deloitte technology fast 50 without any major funding. So my first question for you is, why did you decide to focus on sauce? What is it about you that attracted you to find forget the funnel and work as a consultant and advisor to so many companies in the space?

Georgiana Laudi  0:42  
Hmm, question I love to answer actually. So I've been working in the marketing space for a long time, as you just noted, and I when I when I sort of made the switch over to working with startups and getting sort of involved in the in the tech community locally was exposed to this business model that is software as a service, which essentially turned marketing into something that wasn't just focused on acquisition, but was really a major driver for growth across the entire customer experience. So any company that you know, was solely focusing on marketing as an act as a as an acquisition strategy was sort of handcuffing themselves a little bit. And obviously there's a lot of potential post acquisition for marketing to add a lot of value.

Andrew Michael  1:32  
Absolutely, yeah, I think that sort of mindset when you bring it from a traditional b2c company that's not sauce and selling products outside. The marketing role changes quite a bit in terms of the areas of focus and where you specialise as well and it becomes a lot more areas to specialise. I think. Maybe you want to talk us a little bit about the type of advising that you do and what you do when you work with companies. So coming into SAS companies, what would that look like? When you work with a company like unbalanced or appcues.

Georgiana Laudi  2:02  
Mm hmm, well unbounce I was inhouse with four separate for five years I'm sorry. And so with that looks obviously, that looks a little bit differently obviously than the than the companies that I'm working with before that and since then, because I have a marketing title. Typically, founders will reach out with, you know, we need more leads, we need more acquisition, we want more signups we want to build you know, more, more, generate more awareness and generate demand. And they really are largely focused on more traditional marketing like we were just talking about. Generally what happens though, is very shortly after talking to them for sometimes it only takes a few minutes, it becomes really obvious that their biggest opportunity isn't actually marketing and acquisition but rather helping them get better at converting or activating or online. wording whatever terminology you prefer, the leads that they're the companies already generating. And so instead of, you know, filling the the the leaky bucket, as you say, helping them sort of figure out how to convert more of them into actually happily paying, you know, loyal customers. So that is a large part of the focus, especially now as you know, through the years, it's evolved a little bit from from just, you know, a little bit more straightforward marketing strategy through to helping them helping companies identify their ideal customers get really clear on what their ideal customers struggles are, what motivates them, their desired outcomes. Using the jobs to be done framework has been really, really a critical component for the last few years for me for helping sort of companies understand quite simply how to position themselves or put themselves in a position where they can help customers their ideal customers, which is a really, really important distinction that I don't think is made often enough, but help those ideal customers see value as quickly as possible, understand implicitly how your products can help them solve that struggle and get really get really clear on, you know, the sort of the long standing sort of relationship potential there is between, you know, the customer and the product. So, using that jobs to be done framework helps you sort of put the bones in place for and get a high level sort of view on what kind of experience you should be creating for those ideal customers. We work with companies to help them do that.

Andrew Michael  4:44  
Cool. Yeah, so you said quite a few things. And I want to unpack a couple of topics on this. I think this might even take us through here because I just did this thing alone. So the one interesting thing and I think it's definitely something that's not talked about enough and is this concept that You mentioned that most people as a marketing title they come to and they look for to acquire new leads or to try drive new traffic. And you quickly realise yourself that that's not the problem. And they need to be looking sort of further down the funnel in terms of activation and onboarding. And how does this typically go about? What is your process in in identifying this? Like, what is the conversation that happened with the client to the customer, three shots? And how do you know as well, like, when is the right balance between focusing on acquisition versus other initiatives further down, that will lead to activation or attention?

Georgiana Laudi  5:36  
Yeah, it's a really interesting question, because unfortunately, as so many things, it will really, really depend. But in general, when I can get to that sort of depth of conversation with the team, I do have some sense of the health of the business. And so if I can get sort of a picture of how far along the business is in terms of sort of maturity, size of team number of customers, things like that, then also get a good sort of sense of performance. So maybe traffic traffic in general is like the least important metric for me, but finding out how their website performs, how their Gen onboarding performs, so everything from you know, generating a lead or a sign up, whatever, you know, whatever that version looks like for that company all the way through to, you know, happily paying customer or even just a new customer and finding out what the health there is pretty quickly it becomes kind of it becomes obvious if you put together a couple just to string together a few of those pieces of information becomes quite obvious, where there's an opportunity for growth or where you should sort of where you could lean into first to get the biggest sort of bang for your buck, so to speak. You know, for your investment of time, generally Really, I won't say in all cases, because it's definitely not, you know, across the board, every company that has an onboarding and activation problem, not at all, but it is super, super common.

so if I, you know, if generally if I'm speaking about those numbers, and we're talking at that high level, about the business and about the health of the business, honestly, it starts to click in every everybody who's on the call, it sort of starts to click and become really, really obvious that like, oh, there is probably more we could be doing there. And, you know, when I, I don't like to talk in terms of like, what's a good conversion rate and what's a good, you know, onboarding rate because obviously, there's so there's so many things that influence that so I could never say from us, yeah, a blanket number perspective, but having all the other information about that business, what you know, the pre or story, the sort of marketing effort sort of looks like what kind of programmes are being run there. How the website sort of looks and feels and how you know, they're currently generating leads or demos or signups to, you know, general health and understanding of of retention, and what the product is about and who their market is generally you can, it becomes pretty obvious to everybody in the room, so to speak that where it is most advantageous to lean in, and I would say maybe 75 85% of the time, that'll be somewhere in the middle of the funnel in the evaluation phase during activation or onboarding.

Andrew Michael  8:33  
Yeah, I think it's one of those concepts as well, that it's definitely changing and the industry and is maturing. But when you think of the term growth, more often people don't think of the opportunities of growth being further down the funnel in terms of activation, and unbraid it's crazy when you think about the compounding effects it does have as well so like driving more traffic can only take you so far, but increasingly retention on the other end, especially in the SAAS business sector, the compounding effects just way outweigh anything you can do at the top of the funnel to try and drive. Yes, sir. You mentioned that as well. I think this is obviously one thing that one concept it's it's this mindset and the shift that needs to happen when you think about growth as well. It's it's not really just about bringing up through the door and getting signups but growth has different elements to it. And there's other ways to grow your company and growing your net MRR business. You started talking a little bit about then about the ideal customer profile. And you work with companies to identify this and this is something we've talked about a lot on the show, and I think it is because it's so central to the whole concept of retaining customers is you can only retain customers if you know extremely well who those customers are, what their pain points and their problems are and how you can best serve them and you mentioned jobs to be done framework. We chatted about this on. an episode maybe about six months ago. But I want to give a little bit of a recap again for the audience and go a little bit deeper on the jobs to be done framework. So maybe you want to explain to a sec, how you're using it with your customers what your process looks like, when working through the exercises with them. And then what do you expect to deliver at the end of this sequence? You've gone through jobs to be done exercise with the company?

Georgiana Laudi  10:24  
Yeah. Well, the outcome is always different, because the outcome will, will depend on what that biggest sort of growth lever is that we've identified in early conversations. Like I said, most of the time are many, you know, in many, many occasions, that is the activation, but that's not always the case. So the outcome of the work of you know, identifying your ideal customers, job to be done, and then taking action based on that will completely differ depending on what that biggest opportunity is or that biggest Growth lever. So the process that we go through, again, we will lean in to the where we think the biggest opportunity is for the company, but we don't go so we don't go so narrow in focus that if another opportunity at another point in the customer experience sort of makes itself obvious that we can't change direction, obviously. So generally what we try to do is we will, so my business partner and I close on Trump and I, we go through a process of trying to identify what is the company think is the biggest problem, right? Where did they see the biggest opportunity? And based on that, and then also some research that we do. So generally, we don't like to spend months on research and we could absolutely, you know, do in depth research for a long period of time generally companies, especially in tech, they don't want to invest in months worth of research. totally understandable. So we try not to make, you know, we try not to try not to make our research process super long. But we try to do enough research so that we can develop a pretty strong hypotheses, and then build a customer experience on based on that hypotheses that we can then test with a certain segment of customers. So the process that we run through is a series of surveys and interviews that we can generally turn around in a couple of weeks, really, like it's it, we've gotten this to a really, there's really sort of a few key questions and a few key things that we try to identify and we can take that customer data that we collect, which is generally qualitative, but obviously we do lean into

quantitative as well, especially when we're trying to identify who should we even be, you know, learning from which customers we should should we even be learning from, so actually, I should start, I should actually start there. So learning from the company, whether ideal With their most product fit their best fit customers are, we would look at those customers that probably didn't sign up so long ago that they forget that what life was like before they became customers. Not so soon that they have not yet activated in and turned their relationship with a company into you know, something that is in a engaging and that habit forming. And that has a frequency of usage that, you know, is what the company is aiming for, which obviously looks completely different than every company. So again, there's no no, I'm not talking about daily active users here. But I am talking about their best customers and really zeroing in our research on just those customers. So generally, we will be looking for a few hundred that we'll look to learn from with a few surveys and then we'll dig deeper from those surveys will go into interviews and from those interviews, we'll be able to To come out with patterns that we can recognise in there that will generally help us figure out, okay, of the customers that are super happy with this product right now. What what are the commonalities that we're seeing, and this is art more than it is science, I wish I could say this is, you know, a paint by numbers thing, and it's not. But if we can identify some themes, and then lean into those themes and figure out which group which you know, struggle that was being solved with struggle with struggle, did somebody come to this company with, with that felt the pain most, you know, viscerally that needed to solve that problem very quickly. They championed this the solution to this problem within their company. Obviously, I'm talking about to be a b2b situation here. And if we can find those groups and identify those patterns, then we can then go back to the executive team or the leadership team and And put them forth as basically options because it's not like we're going to say, Well, this is your best customer over here. Even though the company might, they might be on a different path, right there's there's a, there's a give and take there. And it's not always 100% straightforward which direction the company is headed in which problem or which customer they care about solving for the most market opportunity. There's a lot of things at play. So, we will work with the company to zero in on which one of those groups they are the best equipped to serve in the short term, but also balance that with the long term plans of the company, so that we can get onto interviews really find out get to that deeper level, and then identify their job to be done which is you know, I'm just being overly overly simplistic about it. We generally centre this around a customer job statement, which is when I I want to so I can and the when I is there situation or struggle, I want to help us identify patterns in their motivations and objections. And then so I can will give us a picture of what can they do now that they weren't able to do before they became a customer. And if we can get the answers to vote, if we can, you know, if we can come up with a job statement and figure out the answers to those questions, then we're in a really, really powerful position to influence not only activation, but we can influence the marketing, you know, the front end of this thing, we can completely reposition the company if we wanted to in the website and campaigns, we can completely we can influence activation and the onboarding experience in a really sort of meaningful way that communicates that the struggle obviously that gives them what they need to see in what order they need to see it during their onboarding. And then of course, helps them get to that sort of engagement moment. Where they're finally they've reached their desired outcome. Now there's one major caveat here in that once they have received, once they have achieved that desired outcome, when they become an engaged, loyal customer for that product and of that company, their job very likely changes into something else and evolves from that point on. So there is always more, there's always another job to be done. Once you've solved that first job and help somebody get to their first desired outcome. There is always another story there to pursue, where you might look to expansion opportunities, retention opportunities, all kinds of things that can happen post, you know, engaged or loyal customer. We call it you know, engagement. But I know companies call that a lot of different things, but that's generally our process for helping them identify their customer job for solving that first struggle that they come to the company with, which like I said, it helps us It helps us you know, different By hypotheses for what the onboarding experience should look like for that customer, it also puts us in a position to figure out which marketing channels to that we could leverage. You know, what kind of messaging we should be using on our website. Content opportunities, you know, I, there's lots and lots that can come out of just that simple research. Also, there may be more than one job that your company helps a customer solve. So you may decide that it's not one, it's two or three. And that's absolutely an option. And with a lot of companies that have worked with, we will try to address all three or maybe two, depending on the company. And then we can also serve up an onboarding that is most relevant to the given job, if that makes sense. So we can get pretty granular.

Andrew Michael  18:55  
Absolutely, like I think this is one thing that base camp obviously live and breathe when it comes to jobs to be done. And we actually had Ryan singer on the show as well talk about this from a product lens. He even went as far as talking saying like the how they interrogate their customers to be able to build the best product. So just to recap a little bit of what you were saying now is this process that you take generally would be starting, potentially, with quantitative data, looking to try and see like, Who is it this getting value out of the product, it's got set points, where they experiencing this sort of value proposition of it. And then you'd want to then look quantitatively, and ask various questions, trying to understand what their job what their pain point was. Maybe you want to talk us through a couple of the questions in regards in that first survey before you get to the stage where you start interviewing customers. What would the typical questions look like on that survey? How would somebody go about setting this up?

Georgiana Laudi  19:50  
Right, so there are two different surveys that we use often and one is at the website sort of shopper level and the other one is at that for that A group that we just identified as being best fit customers for this will best fit customers, I'm sorry, best customers, because it might not, they might not all be the best fit customers, but they're the customers that we can say with confidence are loyal and, you know, not likely to churn. So because the questions that we ask those customers, which again, I mentioned this before, but they are recent enough customers in that high value sort of category, that they remember what life was like before, because we're trying to paint a story, essentially, we're trying to write the story of what life was like before how you were solving this problem prior to finding us as a solution. What was the moment that you knew that this was going to be the right solution for you? And then the sort of typical like now that you have our solution, what are you able to do now? You weren't before. So there's a series of questions that essentially tries to pull out what that customer jobs Siemens is, right? So you know, what was going on in your world that led you to sign up or to seek a solution, actually. And then the other questions that I just mentioned, but that survey, which is only about five to six questions maximum, sometimes there's a segment in question that we will add in there, just in case. Depending on the the group that we're serving, we may need to add a segment in question, but it depends on what information the company that we're working with has about these, these customers. And we'll complement that also with a survey that's run on the website, which identifies the level of awareness of people who are shopping with the in on the website, so of the people who land on your website and who are seeking a solution, how many of them are, you know far along in the research process or how many of them are seeking this solution for the first Time and they don't even know what solution like yours does, are they you know, solution aware product aware. And so we try to find that out as well on the website side. And then for people who are shopping for a solution, how they're currently solving the problem that they have, and whether or not that's a competing product or some sort of alternative way, you know, spreadsheets being the classic alternative way that you would solve, solve a problem that you know, software solves, right. So thinking in terms of might be the old way or the manual way of sending things. The calendly alternative solutions example is great, and that, you know, when people are evaluating calendly, they're not comparing calendly to a direct competitor. They're comparing Kent calendly to the pain of trying to manually schedule calendars or calendar events and meetings. So that's the classic. So we try to figure that out as well on for people who are seeking a solution. Then what other questions on the website survey? Hold on? Let me see if I can search my memory here. Oh, yeah, the what? what it is that they believe. So the people who are shopping for solution, what it is that they believe is the most important thing in solving that. So what's that? What's the biggest pain there? What are they looking for most in a solution. And that is really helpful as well, even though it may not translate to what you will offer them during onboarding or activation down the line. It does help you. It does help you figure out what to sort of double down on your website and maybe the hierarchy of messaging on your website and how you sort of introduce the solution to them. Anyways, and then we take those two surveys and we compare the two of them and we really use them to sort of strengthen each other. And from there, generally, from the customer survey, we can identify who the who it is we need to get on a call with. Surveys are not always ways possible. There are scenarios where interviews are the only scenario we have to, we have to start with interviews. And in some scenarios where there's a bigger customer base, we can use surveys to help us narrow down who to run our interviews with. And that's one of our favourite ways to get to qualify people to get to prioritise them rather for interviews

Andrew Michael  24:25  
you want to be speaking to and then obviously, I think then the next step would be on the interview is really just sort of trying to dig out as much detail around the questions you'd be asking in the survey. Yes, exactly. And coloured in. Yeah. Cool. And then so this then like you mentioned, you're then presented to the company with a jobs to be done and just there's so many different ways that this information can be used. And when we think about in the context of sort of churn and retention it's really about like helping the product team build the product that's going to solve the use case for the solve the specific pain point and job to be done that the customers the marketing like you say really speaking to their problem and it's speaking to their job. So you're not getting people signing up and then reading one thing on your marketing page, but then experiencing something totally different in your product. And I think it is a really, really powerful tool just to learn the entire organisation behind helping your customers achieve what they need to be achieving and getting to the point to where the experiencing value in your product and building habits around it.

Georgiana Laudi  25:24  
Yeah, the operationalizing of this insight is really, really critical. So once we can get alignment with a company on, you know, the highest value job that we want to focus on our highest value, you know, customer group to focus on. Generally what we will do is go to customer experience mapping, which is essentially taking that customer job and identifying for the entire customer experience everything from experiencing the problem that you solve all the way through to expansion retention and referral. And if we can basically map the customer experience at the whole way we try to identify as much as possible with that research and through the interviews as well identify what the biggest leaps of faith are that these customers have to take in their relationship with you. And generally there are a handful. So again, that job statement is a really critical sort of milestone to get really clear on with a company but it is the start of the of the story. But once we can get alignment on that, then we can we can map the customer experience identify those milestones, or those we call them, you know, a customer success milestones or leaps of faith and dig into each of them through these lenses of what are people doing, when they're experiencing each of these stages of the customer experience? How are they feeling? What is motivating them? What objections might they have at each of these stages, and then we can identify them Through that process of identifying these these milestones, we can figure out exactly where the where where to invest our time in first. And in general, like I said before, it tends to be during that evaluation phase. But that's not the only place we zoom in on. For each of those milestones, we will identify a key performance indicator that is most indicative of the customer, achieving that customer success milestone. So generally, companies will use all they signed up on the website or they entered their credit card or you know, their daily active or weekly active whatever user they've hit this engagement moment. And we tend to rely on KPIs like that a lot as a SaaS companies, but when you can flip the sort of mindset of the entire business and all the teams really around, what are our customers leaps of faith? What are our customers milestones in their relationship with us, and then measure how Good have a job we are doing at helping our customers through each of those milestones, then we can get much more directed in our focus and and our strategies and programmes that we implement in order to help customers through each of those stages. And that is a really powerful way to operationalize this customer job. And then you would actually want to create one of those customer experience maps for each of your customer jobs, though they may be similar from job to job. So for instance, if you're if you're if your sass company has, you know, multiple segments that you maybe you have, maybe you sell to brands and to agencies, for example, you would probably need to have a couple you should have a different onboarding, and dif slightly different messaging, you will need to have slightly different messaging for each of those groups. And so each of those groups need its own customer job and its own customer experience map with its own KPIs and measures of success. And when your team is trying to solve for each of those customers, they should be, you know, holding just that those KPIs in their mind's eye, and what those customers need at each given milestone. It sounds kind of abstract when I'm just like speaking it and without any sort of visuals I want to like, I'm like waving my arms around. But

it really can help teams to figure out where to focus, where the biggest opportunity is, and what mindset people are in the the language they use, you know, when they are experiencing these different stages, so whether or not they're onboarding into your product, or whether or not they're on your website, I mean, customers will use very specific language and have very specific objections or motivations depending on what leap of faith you are asking them to take next. And so if teams can have that sort of fleshed out for them, And have access to that information, they can build much more powerful strategies and programmes to help customers through those milestones. And so when we're with a company when we're working with a company on this, we will develop KPIs for each of those, you know, leaps of faith that customers go through, and then start doing some benchmarking. how good of a job are we doing? Where Where is there room for improvement? That is either a relatively easy for the company to implement, but you probably even more importantly, where are we, you know, falling down the most where's the biggest opportunity for growth and generally we'll prioritise you know whichever one that we think there is the biggest opportunityfrom a from the perspective of revenue loss now right so you will not fix your you know, you're not going to fix the, your marketing. When you're when you're onboarding is not helping anybody, you know, onboard into your into your product or activate in your product. There's no point in investing in marketing before. You have that. Problem fix. So that's a perfect example of priority number one, make sure activation is you know, up to speed actually, priority number one is engagement. If you are not able to retain customers, you've got bigger problems than activation and signups you don't have a business, you don't have a business. Exactly. So all of this by the way, the mat the major caveat in the background, here is your comm your product has to be you know, it has to be retaining happy customers, if you are not in a position to if you don't have engaged customers, then that's obviously the first place you should be focused. But then after that, helping them helping new customers onboard into your product as seamlessly as possible with the least amount of support from your team as possible, because that's super costly, and a sustainable and scalable way. Well then you're in a really good position to turn up the dial on marketing.

Andrew Michael  31:49  
Yeah, definitely. This is something as well, like we spoke about in the previous episode with Holly Gibson from GoDaddy and the concepts of sort of KPIs and focusing on vanity metrics. As opposed to real KPIs that are delivering value to your customer. And ultimately, I think what they found as well was similar to what you're saying now is like, their customers had a job to be done. When they came in, it wasn't setting up a website or creating a new page, which was like some of maybe the typical KPIs that companies would select. But they realised that through their customers setting up a web page, it wasn't that they just wanted a page on the internet that said, if they're a barber shop, they wanted to get bookings, if they're an e commerce store, they wanted to get sales. And then they started switched their measurements of focus to actually how many sales are we driving for e commerce sites, how many bookings are hairdressers making using our platform? And really then reverse engineering backwards along the user journey and seeing Okay, what do we need to do to get more traffic to the site, which we know gets more bookings? And then what are the sites doing that do this and then they sort of took this approach backwards and brought that back all the way up into their marketing as well and then made sure that they had the right KPIs and focus on the customer value as opposed to sort of their own internal vanity metrics and like signups and things that need nothing, especially in the subscription business if you're not delivering value. Cool, I see we're running up on time as well. So I saved the last question for last today. I mentioned earlier that asked everyone that joins us show. Let's imagine a hypothetical scenario now and you've joined in your company or you've come into new company and the CEO of the company is asked you to try and help turn turn around turns not doing good at this company, and they're struggling to retain customers, and they want to try and see results in 90 days, first three months. What would you be wanting to do with your time to try and get some results for this company in those 90 days?

Georgiana Laudi  33:40  
Well, I would definitely want to know where the what At what point in the customer experience is the majority of the turn happening? Is it during activation? Is it at that engagement stage or is it post post engagement and and into sort of, you know, the more further along in the relation Is there a point where you're not able to solve their problem anymore because they can't evolve with you as a company. So if I could, zero, I mean, it's kind of the same as, as before, I would be zeroing in on the stage and the customer experience that the company is doing. Not as good of a job. So where are we losing the majority of people, but the process would be the same I can the process that I just described to you before with the research and identifying job and and then mapping the customer experience and then developing those KPIs that is work that can be done pretty quickly. You know, will it need to Will you need to continue to iterate on it in the future 100% but I can absolutely be done in a quarter. So three months would be quite enough time to develop a really, really strong hypotheses about where and the customer experience the team needs to zero in on and improve the experience. So That's it. I would I would spend it doing exactly what I was just describing before. Yeah,

Andrew Michael  35:04  
for sure. I definitely think that's obviously, a great way to go about it is really just trying to understand where the biggest drop off is following the sort of the jobs to be done framework again, and making sure that you focus on delivering value to your customer.

Georgiana Laudi  35:19  
as well. Also important to that chart. I mean, churn is one of those one of those concepts that is, it's so complex, there's so many different perspectives that I would be wondering if the if the, if the customers that are churning are high value customers anyway, are they even customers you should be trying to retain. And if they're not, then that's also a really great opportunity to turn things around earlier in the customer experience and doing a better job of expectation setting and articulating the problem that is solved and for who and how. So churn isn't. It's one of those I mean, I mean, you and I know you know this well, but it's one One of those terms that you don't just try to fix churn just as a blanket across the board with all customers, that's not really an effective long term strategy. But really identifying the most powerful customer job and customer experience that you can be creating for customers that will stick around and will turn into loyal, happy long standing customers. That's the the best place to focus.

Andrew Michael  36:29  
Absolutely. Not everyone is the right customer. And sometimes you need to fire someone with him as well. And as you mentioned, obviously, the show was built off the back of that it's such a nuanced problem. So many different factors influence it that and I loved as well that you throughout this talk as well. you've alluded to giving specific numbers because I'm also of the nature that benchmarks are total bullshit, I would say, especially when it comes to like SAS businesses and churn and retention because what supplies your business It can be totally different in another business and just saying, okay, we have a monthly churn rate of 3% might be great for your business might be terrible for others as well. Like, really trying to understand what that means for your business is more important than anything else. Cool. Well, it's been a pleasure having you today just anything like Final Thoughts you'd like to share with us before we leave any ways that the audience can keep up to speed with what you're up to? And if you'd like,

Georgiana Laudi  37:28  
Yeah, sure. Uh, Twitter's probably the best place to find me. Twitter handle is GG i a kind of a silly handle that I grabbed back in like 2009 I could have had my first name really stupid. But yeah, Twitter's probably the best place to find me and check out forget the funnel calm. We, my business partner and I Claire sell and Trump. We do produce content for anybody responsible, really for growth at a SaaS company. And yeah, we would love to see you over there.

Andrew Michael  37:58  
Awesome. Well, thanks so much for today and I wish you best of luck going forward.

Georgiana Laudi 38:02  
Thank you. It's nice talking with you. Yes

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Georgiana Laudi
Georgiana Laudi
About

The show

My name is Andrew Michael and I started CHURN.FM, as I was tired of hearing stories about some magical silver bullet that solved churn for company X.

In this podcast, you will hear from founders and subscription economy pros working in product, marketing, customer success, support, and operations roles across different stages of company growth, who are taking a systematic approach to increase retention and engagement within their organizations.

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