The Growth System Behind Teams That Don’t Guess

Speaker A: We do not rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems. That James Clear quote has come up a lot lately in my conversations with founders. Because even when your team has big goals without a system, they fall back on guesswork. In the last two episodes, we talked about this. We talked about how this happens, why this happens. We talked about how even great teams can end up stuck in reactive decision making, particularly right now with so much going on. Uh, and we also talked about what strategic customer led teams do differently and how they make faster, better and more aligned decisions. But if you're still the one connecting the dots, the next most obvious question is definitely going to be, all right, tell me how to build this system. Tell me how to do this thing. So that's what this episode is about. Because strategy isn't a skill your team is born with, it's a system you put in place. So this episode I'm going to walk you through how to systematize growth inside of your team so that they can stop guessing, start making more better informed, aligned decisions, and so that you can finally stop being the bottleneck. So let's get into it. Welcome M to the Forget the Funnel podcast where we help SaaS and recurring revenue businesses stop guessing and start making more customer led and data backed decisions about how to grow. We're a product marketing and growth consultancy that helps teams learn from their best customers, map and measure their experiences to unlock your most effective levers for growth. If you're ready to evolve past best practices and other people's playbooks, because you know that what got you here won't get you there, then this show is for you. With that, let's dive into the episode. So the first thing that I want to touch on here is that it's not actually as hard as you think to do this. Building a system sounds complicated, I recognize that. But it doesn't have to be. Now, I'll admit the first time that I went through this process, it definitely took me nearly a year to figure it out. There was a lot of trial and error. And that's actually exactly why I want to go through this today. Because it doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be that complicated. And so I'm going to talk through the sort of step by step, I'm going to walk through it and then I'll sort of recap it and give you some resources so that you can dive a little bit deeper and get into the nitty gritty detail of it. But for this episode, what I want to do is give you the broad based understanding across the top of what this process looks like and how it can apply to you and your team and why it's such a valuable process. Now, it is not as hard as you think. It doesn't have to take very long. It can be maybe a couple of weeks. But what I want to stress here is that the very act of you and your team going through this work together is actually part of what is so valuable about it. So it's not just about the destination, it's about the journey as well. I know sounds a little bit cheesy, but it's very, very true. So the first thing that we need to do, despite maybe what you might be tempted to do, um, is to identify the customers that you want more of. Now I say despite what you might be tempted to do because I talk with a lot of founders that are really worried about the customers that they're not getting right now. And what I want to stress is that while that group of customers, lost customers are definitely valuable to learn from, they're not where you should start. And really what I want to talk through today is like, what is the most direct way to build a system that you can then layer on other learnings to later? And I, there's definitely building upon this system that you should do. And that's what I would recommend doing. If you're tempted to do like win loss analysis or learn from customers who churned, um, I would really, really encourage you to do that later. For the moment, suspend disbelief and just focus on the customers that you already have that you want more of. Once you've identified those customers, then you're going to understand, all right, how am I going to learn from them? How am I going to get inside of their heads? And the answer to that question will be different depending on how big of a list you're working, working with. So I'm not going to get into the, the nitty gritty here, but at a high level there's different research methods that you can employ depending on how many customers you have to learn from. Now, you may have fewer customers because you're earlier stage, you may have fewer customers because you sell to enterprise and you've got a higher acv, more complex product. Both of those situations are very valid. Um, basically what I recommend, broad strokes, what we recommend in that case is if you've got only like a couple dozen customers to learn from, you cannot risk surveys or AI moderated interviews. You've got to Use customer interviews because you need these conversations to be as fruitful as possible. You can't afford to take broad strokes. You've got to get as many of those conversations, uh, as possible, ideally run with a skilled interviewer. If you don't have a skilled interviewer on your team, would highly recommend that you do that and find one to work with. If on the other hand you have a couple of thousand customers that you identify in your customer base that you want more of, you can absolutely start with more broad strokes quality still qualitative research to learn from them, maybe with a qualitative survey or with AI moderated interviews to get a broader understanding of the makeup of the customer base that can actually speed this process up a ton. Obviously if you're not actually booking calls and dealing with no shows and rescheduling and things like that, it can help a ton to speed up the process. Also brings the cost down a little bit for you as well since you don't have to hire like a super skilled interviewer. Now we've got plenty of tools and templates that go into way greater detail on how to actually run research and the thing questions to ask. But I'm going to skip over the top of that right now just to go into and make sure that I hit on the broad understanding of how you build this system. And um, um, obviously I can go into a ton of detail. We've done other you know, episodes on how to run a really successful customer interview. You can go check uh, out that obviously we also have all of our templates and tools that you can go to our website and find. So I'm just going to skip right over to. Once you get inside your best customers heads, then your job is to identify their job to be done. And we really, really love jobs to be done for building out like as the source of truth, for building out a system for growth for your team to leverage. It is what we have found to be the absolute best tool for the job to understand what circumstances lead your customers to seek out something new. How do they make that decision? Who's involved, where they go, what questions do they ask? What convinced them to choose you over all of the other options? What can they do now in their life that they weren't able to do before? That high level documentary like understanding is just the backbone of this system that you're going to be building for your team. So if you can again identify the customers that you want more of, get inside their heads, learn from them, uh, run jobs, be done interviews or Jobs be done style research so that you can then among those customers, identify the jobs that your customers hire you to solve for them. And then what you're going to do is you're going to map what matters. And there's two ways that you map what matters. One of the ways that you map what matters is the things that they said really matter to them. So their top motivations or your top differentiators. You're going to identify the things that sort of float to the top of the list, right? What were the things that customers said most mattered to them and why they chose you over all of the other solutions. And you'll go through a, what we call a value mapping exercise where you take these top value themes and you map them to the specific parts of the product that deliver that value, either features or product attributes. And, and you map them across. And this helps a ton with your messaging strategy, but it also helps a ton to understand the sort of value chain and the order in which to introduce these different parts of the products and these different parts, uh, these different sort of like value themes to them in their experience with you. So the second way that you're going to map what matters is by mapping the customer experience. You're going to go from them being out in the world, experiencing the problem that you solve, struggling with the old way, all the way through to just choosing to make the investment to validate whether or not you're the right solution for them. Go through that evaluation phase until you, they reach value realization where they're like, yep, this is the thing that's going to solve my problem. They move into continued value where they're getting, you know, uh, value over time, they become a lifer customer and then into value growth where they can then expand on that value. So you're going to map that end to end customer experience through the struggle phase, the evaluation phase and the growth phase. So you're mapping in two different ways based on their jobs to be done. Again, value mapping and also, also customer experience mapping. Now what you do after that is actually where we start to talk about like the data and um, how we tie the qualitative back to the quantitative. And because you've identified this end to end customer experience, you've identified milestones in this customer experience. They're your customers leaps of faith in their relationship with you. And for each of those leaps of faith, you are going to identify a KPI. And this KPI is not MQL SQL. It's not sign up, it's not entered a credit card, it's not upgrade, it is tied to your customers actually getting value. So the really important exercise that you're running through here is you're identifying those leaps of faith and then you're figuring out what are the things that our customers do inside of our product or inside of our customer experience that demonstrate to us that they have reached a moment of value, true value first. Either it's the problem stage, the interest stage, first value, which we often talk about as product activation, value realization. We also, we often talk about that as product adoption, continued value, we often talk about that as product engagement and, and then value growth, which is often talked about as expansion. Now once you've identified all of those milestones, you will be able to relay that to a uh, KPI that tells your team that your customer has reached a moment of value. And that's what we mean when we say identifying these leading indicators of success. They are not lagging indicators of success like trial to pay conversion rate or entered a credit card. We did a whole other episode on KPIs. Actually we did a two part episode on KPIs. If you're interested in diving into that more, highly recommend checking out that episode. So once you've identified those milestones, those KPIs, then you're going to do the secret shopper thing and you are going to, you know, in the shoes of somebody with your highest priority job to be done, you're going to go through your customer experience, you're going to look at your marketing, you're going to look at your website, you're going to go through your onboarding flow, you're going to see what it feels like to receive, um, you know, your, your emails, your in app notifications, all of that customer experience from end to end. You're going to do the secret shopper thing and then what you're going to do is you're going to figure out what do you start, what do you stop and what do you continue now? Start, stop, continue. Uh, you don't have to go about it in that way. It's a well known way to sort of, you know, think about when you're going through the customer experience. I highly recommend documenting. You uh, might want to like record yourself going through the experience, record your thoughts as you're going through it and think through the lens of what are we not doing today that we should start doing, right? What are the, what are the opportunities that we're missing? What is actually hurting the experience and so we should stop doing this and what should you continue doing, but maybe optimize a little bit. That's just a helpful, you know, thing to keep in mind as you're doing the secret chopper thing. Then what you're going to be left with is this long list of amazing opportunities all along the customer's experience, all these, these opportunities to optimize customers experience and increase conversions for the business. And then your job becomes all right, what order do we do these things in? What do we need to tackle first? What are the biggest opportunities for growth here? And often what you're going to be doing is you're going to be uh, hopefully you're doing the sort of mental math on what's the one thing that we could do that would make the biggest impact on the rest of this customer experience, which has the most dramatic sort of business case behind it to solve for. Uh, uh, now there's lots of reasons and ways that you might want to make this decision. I'm not going to get into that. It might be really obvious to you because you're going to be like, oh wow, this thing is totally broken. We know we need to fix this. In other cases, there's so many things to fix that you're really going to have to go through a prioritization exercise. I'm not going to go into detail on that. Now if you are interested in, in hearing more about that, let me know. But that's basically your job now is find and make the business case for your team. Prioritizing, uh, fixing some of this experience, right? And then the job becomes democratizing and embedding. So what you have at this point, right up till this point, if you're still playing along, you identified your, your best customers, you got inside. So you understand them from a uh, from a demographic and firmographic standard standpoint. You also got inside their heads. So you now understand them from a psychographic standpoint. Their jobs to be done. You mapped their end to end customer experience so you know those milestones. You've also identified the KPIs for each of those milestones so you know how to measure success. And you've also identified a bunch of opportunities to improve their experience and ultimately improve conversion. And so you've got all of these, you know, what I would call sort of like artifacts available for your team. Now this is an incredible system to work from and reference and utilize. But what I want to sort of warn against here is that systems need to be supported, they need to be democratized, they need a uh, ton of buy in internally and they need to be constantly kept up and maintained and supported and evolved and updated over time. And so there's a couple of things to think about here. One of them is you cannot do this in a silo. Do not uh, you can't have a team member like lone wolf. This. We've talked about that a lot in the past. You know, we've, we've talked to a lot of like heads of marketing or heads of product marketing or heads of product or heads of growth that will attempt to do this solo. Do not do that. Do this as a collaborative exercise. If you're a founder listening to this, this is something that like you, yes, you might want to choose a champion internally to lead this work. But it is critically important that you involve the major sort of strategic players in the company. Generally any heads of go to market teams, head of product should um, be involved in like anybody on the exec team should be involved in this process. So it's really, really important that you not only involve those people. We have done episodes before on who to involve and how and how to mobilize your team, how to choose who to involve. So uh, I won't get into the details of that, but involving these, these critical stakeholders and these team leads is really critical to democratizing these artifacts like down to their teams as well. So if you've got a head of marketing, the entire marketing team should be aware of these artifacts and be able to leverage these artifacts similarly on the product side or for a product marketing function or for a growth function. So democratizing is really, really important. Embedding is really, really important as well. And what I mean by embedding is like you have these KPIs, you can start to set some targets around these KPIs. Now you also would want to include this customer, uh, these artifacts, right? Generally the customer journey, these KPIs and this list of opportunities. You're going to want to include those opportunities in your rituals, right? Maybe in your daily standup or in your quarterly planning. Um, you're going to want to come back to this sort of centralized way of analyzing the customer experience, analyzing customer needs and figuring out where your opportunities are to meet those needs. That needs to be embedded into the day to day of how you work. There are lots of ways to do that. I'm not going to get too far down the rabbit hole of talking about that here because I really just want to give you a broad understanding. But you know, dashboards, there's all kinds of things that you can do to obviously democratize and communicate it to the rest of the team, but also embed it into your day to day and into your team rituals, particularly your planning rituals. Now I often get asked at this point like so how often do you update these things? And the answer really depends right now, pretty often. And I say pretty often right now because things are changing a lot right now in teams. Um, I'm talking to a lot of founders and a lot of teams that are making some pretty drastic updates to their product. And so in those cases I would say you would do this more often. Um, so if you are moving a little bit more slowly then uh, I would say, you know, when you make a big enough change to the product where you believe your core value prop and the core customer that you serve changes critically important to do at those points. But additionally, if you are a very quickly moving team in a quickly changing sort of space and there's a lot of competitors coming onto the market and things like that, I would really encourage you doing this more often. Like maybe once a quarter or when there's a major launch, whenever one comes first. When I say launch also I mean like your P1 launches or your T1 launches, whatever you, however you tier your launches, um, if you've got a major launch coming up, absolutely, you've got to do this. And I would even consider it for some of your T2 launches as well or P2 depending on what you use. So more often right now, um, who knows, maybe it'll slow down uh, again one day. But uh, not that, not that tech was ever moving slowly but it's uh, it's increased pace. So basically you get the opportunity to be more organized. And if you didn't check out episode two in this little mini series, I would highly encourage you to do that because I talk a little bit more about being able to compartmentalize opportunities and um, not be too reactive. And so these tools are what give you this sort of like the way to organize opportunities so that you can revisit them on the regular and as they, as you need to make updates to the customer experience and improve conversions across your customer experience. So in a nutshell, the customer led growth process is basically this, right? Number one, get inside your best customers heads, map and measure their experience and then identify your biggest levers for growth. This is the crux of the sort of backbone of what the forget the funnel book is about. So if you're curious more about this process and to learn more about this process and if it might be right for your team, I would highly Encourage you to check out the book. We worked very hard to make it a short book, very actionable and practical book. And also, uh, we recently rolled out an AI book companion. So when we launched the book, we launched it along with a workbook, 110 page long PDF full of templates and tools and checklists and scripts, everything you could possibly need practically to go through this three step process. And recently we rejigged that to actually be an AI book companion. So the entire workbook, uh, the entire original workbook, plus about 15 or so new templates that lean into more AI, um, style research, uh, uh, repositories, things like that, um, are now included in there as well. So again, if you're interested in potentially using and building the system for your team to move away from guesswork, I'd highly recommend that you pick up the book and to go to understand this process in more depth. There's lots of stories and examples in there as well. And then go and check out forgetthefunnel.com workbook um, to get the tools as you go through the process. And then again, of course, if you ever get stuck on anything, this is what we do. Um, so if you do get stuck, you can always reach out to us for help. And uh, we do work with teams one on one as well. So the takeaway for this episode is hopefully, uh, you're realizing it's not actually as hard as you might think. And also try not to think just about the destination here because the very work it takes to get to this end result is so valuable and it really helps sort of anchor your team in what matters to customers, customer needs and figuring out how to meet those needs. And there's nothing that's more important right now. There's so much chaos going on in this space right now. There's so much activity that it is, I have been finding in my conversations with teams and um, you know, just in the, in the, in tech, but also in marketing and growth and product marketing. There's just a lot happening right now. And so there is this um, frantic sort of activity that is occurring right now. So if you can go through this activity with your team and really anchor your team around like actual customer needs, there is nothing that is more valuable. Even if this feels like um, something that you might not have time for, I would really, really encourage you to take a step back in order to take leaps forward. Um, this is the right thing to do right now because there is the strong push towards vibe coding, vibe marketing and busyness. There's a lot of busyness happening right now. Pretty well. Every market is being commoditized. Marketing and distribution is becoming more and more difficult and more and more costly. So to reorient your team around actual customer need. And when I say team I don't just mean your marketing team, I mean your product team as well and, and the leadership team and the executive. Right. To really get back to basics on what actually matters to customers and what are genuine customer needs and live in that problem space a little bit more in the solution space. I think you're going to find it a very fruitful activity and it is actually not as hard and it doesn't take as long as you might think. So if you are interested I would uh, I would recommend that you check out the, forget the funnel book. Uh, you can find it on Amazon and it's available in uh, ebook and in audible as well. Um, but would highly recommend um, that you dig into what the process would be for, for your team. It's not actually as long or as hard as you think it will be. The other important thing that I want to call out here and I kind of just touched on this is like making sure that you are putting customers at the center of everything that you do right now. Again I'm putting a lot of emphasis on like right now, right now. Because SaaS teams uh, are either like hair on fire or stuck in analysis paralysis. And if you focus and orient your team around customers, customer needs, the problem space, you cannot go wrong. It's the most meaningful constraint that you could possibly add to your team. It is going to be the most strategic anchoring for your team in um, in a moment like this, in like in the current landscape of SaaS. The other thing that you have to remember to do that is wildly, wildly important here and that this whole thing falls down if you do not do this. Successful systems need buy in. They need to be democratized across your team and you need to be supported and integrated into your day to day. There is no point in doing this work if you are not going to support it. So don't lone wolf it. Don't try to do this on your own. If you work in a team, involve other team leads and strategic partners. This is absolutely a uh, team sport. And so I would highly encourage you to not only do the work as a team and go through it as a CLG team like we like to call it in the book, Chapter two is all about that but also each one of those individuals that are involved, if they have a team it is their job to democratize this through all the levels of the company and then embed it obviously into your rituals and into your planning and strategic work as you go. So hopefully this sounds like a system that is accessible to you and available to you. It absolutely is. We've done this hundreds of times with companies. Thousands upon thousands of companies and teams have read our book and implemented this. I get emails all the time, uh, with thanks and nothing makes me feel better than teams that say that they, you know, went through this process together and it has helped them, you know, again, sort of democratize customer understanding reorient so that they actually are a customer led first team. Data informed customer led. That's what we always say. Um, this is absolutely doable and um, it is applicable in many situations. I know there are sometimes outlier situations like you don't have that many customers to learn from or you're earlier stage or your later stage or your missing key team members. And uh, all of that is very true. Obviously there's always going to be edge cases. If you get really stuck again, I would say like read the book, go to the, to the workbook which is now an AI companion or you can always reach out to us again @foreget the funnel.com if you get stuck. We'd love nothing more than to help you. Um, but I really hope that this was valuable. I really hope that you got a sort of snapshot understanding of what the system actually looks like. Like what does this look like behind the curtain? Um, because we, you know, we talk about the value of this type of work a lot but I know that it's important to actually visit, like what does the actual work look like behind the scenes. So hopefully you got a decent sense of that today and if you get stuck, just let us know. Like I said. So hopefully that was a helpful run through. And with that I will see you next time. And that's it for this episode of the Forget the Funnel podcast. Thanks for tuning in. If you have any questions about the topic that we covered, don't hesitate to reach out on LinkedIn or you can visit our website at, uh, forgetthefunnel.com also, if you found this episode helpful, don't forget to subscribe and help spread the word by leaving a rating or a review. Okay, see you next time.