Gia Laudi
Georgiana Laudi is the co-founder and CEO of a consulting agency called Forget The Funnel, where she helps SaaS companies scale and improve conversion rates through customer-led growth. She’s also a marketing and growth advisor to companies like MarketerHire, SparkToro, and Sprout Social. Previously, she was the VP of Marketing at Unbounce and has worked in growth marketing for over 20 years.
Communication Skills
A customer-centric journey map acts as a shared language that aligns cross-functional teams (Product, Engineering, Marketing) around value delivery.
"It made communicating with especially the product team and the engineering team a lot easier for me. So we were using a shared language. The rest of the company who aren't necessarily customer facing..."
Growth Skills
In SaaS, growth strategy must encompass the entire lifecycle, including post-acquisition retention and expansion, rather than stopping at the point of sale.
"Recurring revenue businesses, you cannot think about marketing and growth and the business overall as ending an acquisition, otherwise you're not in business anymore. And the vast, vast majority of th..."
Effective retention requires mapping 'win-back' experiences triggered by specific drops in measurable engagement milestones.
"The only way to catch them if they fall is if you're measuring something meaningful along the way. We have that storyboard that we were talking about. We also have a map where it's the experience to g..."
Marketing Skills
High-impact positioning connects the customer's 'struggle' context (before they find you) to the specific desired outcome your product enables.
"Generally, the lowest hanging fruit outcome is realigning around better positioning and messaging. And identifying more resonant positioning and messaging that speaks to that context that I was talkin..."
Effective messaging uses the customer's own language to prove you understand their problem and prioritizes what they value most.
"You want to reflect them back to them. That is what is going to show them that you understand the problem that they have and that your product has exactly what it is that they need. The hierarchy of m..."
Product Management Skills
Every milestone in the customer journey must have a specific KPI tied to meaningful product usage to track progress toward value realization.
"A critical part of that process obviously is identifying we have to measure success along the way. There should be a KPI for each of those stages in that customer journey... we try to tie the KPI obvi..."
Prioritize customer segments or 'Jobs to be Done' based on urgency of need, willingness to pay, and your company's unique market advantages.
"The way that you make a decision on which one you focus on is similar to best customers. So high willingness to pay... urgent problem... high retention or even expansion potential... customers congreg..."
Understanding the 'problem stage'—the context and struggle a customer faces before seeking a solution—is essential for effective marketing and product strategy.
"They also leave the problem stage out. So the world that customers are living in prior to discovering you, which is a really critical, that context is unbelievably valuable, especially for marketing...."
To get accurate data on the customer journey, survey 'best' customers who signed up 3-6 months ago so their memory of the 'before' state is fresh.
"We identified SparkToro's best customers. Now, what I mean by best customers is those that get a ton of value from your product as of exist today, pay obviously. They're happy. They're low maintenance..."