Forget the Funnel: A Customer-Led Approach for Driving Predictable, Recurring Revenue

Book Review: 3/5 Impact On Me (Book By Georgiana Laudi, Claire Suellentrop)

Read more about the book here

Customer-Led Growth Framework

1. Get into the minds of your best customers.

2. Map and measure your customer experience.

3. Unlock your biggest growth opportunities.

   
   

This framework requires collaboration across many teams in your company—customer success, sales, product, and marketing. Since alignment across these teams is critical, you need leadership buy-in. Often, the first person (required) to read and implement this book will be an executive leader. So, not sure if I can change my startup culture.

It’s good to learn from customers who have recently started paying for your product and are happy with it. Focus on understanding their needs, not just their demographics. Needs evolve over time, so what your customer needs now may be different from what they needed before.

Use open-ended questions instead of closed ones. For example, you can survey 500 customers and expect around 10% (50) responses. You can also talk directly to prospects—your broader audience.

Write clear jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) statements for your customers. This helps in identifying what your users are actually trying to achieve.

In the world of recurring revenue, you must ensure that customers renew or upgrade their subscriptions. The traditional marketing funnel doesn't work well for SaaS because it has a start and an end. SaaS needs a different, ongoing approach.

In Chapter 4, the authors share a precisely worded questionnaire that you can put on your website. This helps you understand what life was like for users before using your product.

I liked the description of the first two steps in the customer journey:

• Step 1: The customer has a problem. They feel pain, frustration, or other negative emotions. They might be trying different ways to meet that need.

• Step 2: The customer realizes there is a solution and begins searching for it.

  
  

These steps felt real and relatable. They helped me think more clearly about how customers move from problem to solution. I had used similar steps in my JTBD consulting work (Using Hooked Model To Target 25% Improvement In User Retention For SaaS )

Reading about the success stories of the authors—whether in consulting or full-time roles—was inspiring. At the same time, it felt daunting compared to my own limited consulting projects.

I rate the impact of this book on me 3 out of 5. I liked that it had practical advice, persuasive anecdotes, and statistics. But I was aware of most of those from work or other books.