Stop Pushing Customers Through a Funnel: Georgiana Laudi's Customer-Led Growth Playbook

Georgiana Laudi has spent about 20 years in marketing, starting with her father's retail business, then freelancing and agency work before joining Unbounce in late 2011 and staying five years. She went independent in late 2016 or early 2017 and paired with Claire Suellentrop in mid-2017 to launch Forget The Funnel, a consultancy that works primarily with B2B SaaS companies. Her path—from website optimization to in-house marketing to a customer-research-led practice—set up her critique of funnel thinking.

Laudi argues that funnels, buyer journeys, and pirate metrics are antiquated models. Acronyms such as NQLs and SQLs are opaque to most people, and the models force every customer into the same buckets while assuming all customers and all products are alike. They put the business's values at the center and measure value to the business rather than value to the customer. That framing also feels wrong to customers, as if they are being pushed through a funnel.

For SaaS companies, the problem is even more concrete: a recurring-revenue business cannot treat acquisition as the end of the journey. Most funnel models ignore post-acquisition retention and expansion, which are essential to a subscription business. They also leave out the problem stage—the world customers live in before they discover the product—which is exactly the context marketing needs. That is why Laudi's shorthand is blunt: funnels are bad.

Laudi says the most immediate impact of this work is realigning a company with its ideal customer. The lowest-hanging fruit is usually more resonant positioning and messaging that speaks to the context customers were in before they discovered the product, the moment they realized something had to change, and the outcome they want. Jobs-to-be-done is a strong influence here because it focuses on what customers are trying to accomplish rather than on the business's internal categories. Once a team understands customers at that level, it can position the product and write much more powerful messaging.

She estimates that 99 out of 100 company websites are not as effective as they could be from a messaging and positioning standpoint, so website overhauls are a common first move. One social-media tool identified two jobs-to-be-done, focused on one, and updated its website messaging; it also shortened the trial from 30 days to seven. Website conversion rose 89%. The part Laudi loves most is that the team did not touch the post-signup experience, yet trial-to-paid conversion still increased 40% because more qualified, better-fit customers were coming through the door.

The same logic applies beyond the website. At Autobooks, product usage—the North Star metric—jumped by about 300% in a short period after the team rolled out email onboarding to support the product experience. SparkToro doubled its free-to-paid conversion rate through post-acquisition messaging and onboarding work. Laudi says practically every company she has worked with has learned something new about its customers that it could apply somewhere in the experience.

In 2013, during a visit to Airbnb's office, Laudi saw sheets of paper taped to the wall in the product team's downstairs workspace. They showed an Airbnb customer's journey through the stay and beyond, including the emotional journey, the role Airbnb played at direct and indirect touchpoints, and what was happening in the person's life outside the product. The milestones were captured in a snapshot way that let anyone understand the goal at each point. It was the opposite of a business-centered funnel: the whole thing was drawn through the lens of the customer.

Laudi returned to Unbounce and spent two days locked in a room with her head of product and customer success counterparts building their own version. Looking back, she calls it a funny circle, but the artifact gave the team a shared language and made the work feel like delivering value rather than pushing people through stages. Internally the effort was called Project Snow White, inspired by a Walt Disney biography and the storyboards Disney used to make Snow White; Airbnb had even hired a full-time storyboard artist from Pixar to draw keyframes.

The experience changed how Laudi thought about marketing. It made clear that the customer-experience layer marketers are good at has an important role in driving revenue, not just building awareness. Marketing can help customers get value, catch them when they fall off, and connect the work to the business outcome. That customer-led lens became the foundation of Forget The Funnel's approach.

At the highest level, Laudi's process is straightforward: understand your best customers, map their experience through the lens of delivering value to them, make that experience measurable, and evaluate what the company is doing today that is out of alignment. Research is the critical input. The goal is not to document every customer, but to learn from the customers who get the most value and to use their language and experience as the design target.

SparkToro came to Forget The Funnel before launch for positioning and messaging help, then returned about a year later. Traffic and signups were healthy, but free users were not converting to paid at the rate the team believed possible. Laudi and her partner went to the source: SparkToro's best customers. They wanted to learn what those customers could teach them and then reflect it back into the product experience and customer experience.

The team used surveys rather than interviews because the responses were decisive and clear. They defined best customers as people who get a lot of value from the product, pay, are happy, are low maintenance, and signed up recently enough—generally three to six months earlier—to remember what life was like before the product. The research asked what was happening when they started seeking a solution, what triggered the search, who they talked to, what they needed in a solution, what anxieties or deal-breakers they had, and what they could do afterward that they could not do before.

The research surfaced two customer jobs: one oriented toward marketers and service providers, the other toward data purists who wanted verifiable data. SparkToro chose the marketer-side job because it had an unfair advantage there. Laudi's prioritization criteria include willingness to pay, an urgent problem rather than a vitamin, retention or expansion potential, whether the customers congregate in an easy-to-market way, and whether the company has an unfair advantage. Choosing one job first does not mean abandoning the other; it means putting one foot in front of the other and doing one thing well before adding the next.

After choosing the customer job, the next step is mapping the key milestones in the customer's relationship with the product. Laudi describes these as leaps of faith and value moments, the story of how a customer met and fell in love with the product. The journey usually breaks into a struggle phase, an evaluation phase, and a growth or work phase. The struggle phase includes the problem and interest stages; evaluation includes first value and value realization; growth covers frequency, habit, and then expanding value or advocacy.

Laudi defaults to as few milestones as possible—often around six rather than ten or twelve—because complexity should be added only when the product and customer require it. First value is the first milestone in evaluation, where the customer gets enough value to keep going; value realization is where the core customer job is solved. In growth, the team looks for frequency and cadence, then for what the customer needs next or how they can amplify the product to others. Each milestone needs a KPI, because without measurement the team cannot tell whether customers reached the value moment or fell off.

On the struggle side, measurement is familiar marketing territory: new unique website visitors for the problem stage and conversion on the primary call to action for the interest stage. After signup, the KPIs should be tied to the product attributes customers said deliver value. For SparkToro, the first-value KPI was at least five searches plus at least one list; value realization required a minimum number of searches within a set time, a certain number of lists, and at least one export; growth meant doing that on a regular enough basis to avoid being a flight risk.

The measurement is what makes proactive and reactive customer experiences possible. The team can push customers toward the value moment with in-app messages or email, then catch them if they fall off. Laudi cites the commonly repeated statistic that around 70% of people log into an app or product once and never come back, which makes win-back and re-engagement essential. If a customer misses the valuable feature the first time, the company needs a measurable way to bring them back.

The output of the research is not a report that sits on a shelf. For SparkToro, Forget The Funnel produced a rich voice-of-customer document and a messaging guide the team could use across marketing materials and the entire product experience. The guide is typically five to seven pages and covers the value proposition, major competitive advantages, and value themes broken into emotional and functional benefits tied to the product attributes that create them. It becomes the baseline for collateral, emails, and onboarding sequences.

SparkToro's team, led by its VP of marketing, built a product onboarding checklist and onboarding emails from that foundation. Two months later, trial-to-paid conversion had doubled. Laudi emphasizes that the consultancy provided the bones and the framework; the in-house team had the skill and context to execute. That is why the work is customer-led rather than consultant-dependent.

Laudi's messaging advice is to start from the voice of the customer and reflect customers back to themselves. The research should reveal the hierarchy of what customers care about—what they mention most, second most, and third most—rather than what the company thinks is coolest about the product. That hierarchy matters because it is easy to lose sight of the customer's view from inside the building. A messaging guide also acts as guardrails for copywriters and anyone else producing customer-facing work.

SparkToro's customer job was, in essence, 'help me identify opportunities I wouldn't otherwise be aware of.' The customer wanted that help in a way that was organized, shareable, and usable over time, so they could build on it and rely on it. The desired outcome was about getting stakeholders on board, sharing the work, looking like a pro, and driving better results for a team or client. That job statement is more useful than a demographic persona because it describes the progress the customer is trying to make.

Laudi credits Bob Moesta as a major influence and points listeners to jtbd.info, Moesta's book Demand-Side Sales, and When Coffee and Kale Compete. The classic illustration is that Ozzy Osbourne and King Charles are the same age, live in the same area, have dogs, and love cars, so they look identical from a demographic standpoint. Their motivations and lives are obviously very different, which is where personas break down. Jobs-to-be-done asks what better life the customer is seeking and treats the product as the vehicle to get there.

A common objection is that research takes too long, leads to more questions, and slows everything down. Laudi says it does not have to: in a survey scenario like SparkToro's, the work can take two or three weeks and produce something solid enough to move forward. That speed also helps teams avoid analysis paralysis and stakeholder bickering. The point is to come to a decisive direction, not to create a permanent research program.

Founders often object that they already know the customer because they built the product to solve their own problem. Laudi respects that founder knowledge but notes that products, markets, customers, and teams change, and not everything can live inside one person's head. She says she has never been in a scenario where a founder did not learn something new from customer research and use it to improve the product experience. Founder intuition is valuable, but it should not come before listening to best customers.

In the lightning round, Laudi recommends April Dunford's Obviously Awesome as required reading, especially for founders, and Nir Eyal's Hooked; she also recommends Four Thousand Weeks and mentions the book she and Claire Suellentrop are writing about the Forget The Funnel process. For staying focused, she relies on time blocking, Slack messages coded as no rush, end of day, timely, or alarm, and regular time tracking to keep the team honest about how time is actually spent. She points listeners to Twitter (@ggi), LinkedIn, gia@forgetthefunnel.com, and forgetthefunnel.com for the book waitlist; the published book was slated for early 2023.