More Customers Without More Marketing with Gia Laudi

0:00yeah thanks everybody for joining and I'm gonna talk through this process that Claire and I use to help companies get more signups without adding you know more marketing into the big mix and spending on on more marketing so I'll just get right into it here so in general you know I would say we're leads obsessed just across the board uh this is definitely the number one reason why people reach out to our team for help um you know but ninety percent of the time what we actually discover is that top of funnel or leads is not actually the solution to their problem in fact ninety percent of the time we find that

0:38uh websites traffic volume is okay uh and even relatively healthy but where things start to you know fall apart so to speak is that once people get to the website and they sign up for your product that's really where things start to break down so my goal is to help you figure out out of all of the opportunities you could pursue right now to grow revenue is more traffic more leads really your biggest opportunity or um is there actually a hidden breakdown further in your customers experience uh where you should be spending your time because once you know that uh you can make way more informed decisions about

1:14where to invest on the marketing side of things and how to invest your marketing resources and feel a lot more confident that in the investment bets that you do make so uh I don't actually need to introduce myself because Rob's did such a great job so I'll just pass Breeze right on through to this one this is Claire who rob mentioned um Claire and I uh co-founded forget the funnel together we are on a mission to abolish two things uh useless customer research and also generic or like spaghetti at the wall style growth tactics we really really hate both of those things um Claire has deep expertise on the

1:51research side of things and my MO is taking that research and turning it into Revenue new opportunities for companies and these are some of the companies that we've worked with so to tell you the story and basically walk through this process of how you can get more signups we're going to use an example a case study if you will the company is called life laps um they're gonna basically they're my tool to help you uh sort of understand and walk through the the process um it's not really all that important what they do but effectively they are a tool that allows you to create stop-motion videos on your phone

2:21um at the time that we started working with them they had a few thousand free users and paying customers um the problem or the opportunity at the time is that the CEO wanted to begin targeting B2B users rather than purely you know b2c who uh you know had been attracted to LifeLabs so far the hypothesis there was that there would be greater LTV um and the CEO's assumption really was we need to we need a we need a really effective PR strategy or we need to find influencers to partner with so I'm going to skip right to the end of this and I'm going to tell you right now now what the

2:56result was in working with them we were able to help the team increase signups by 93 I'm going to walk you through the process that we used to do that which is effectively this but before we dig into exactly this process I do want to sort of um you know make it clear that the process that I'm going to run through is actually um most is going to be most useful and most applicable to those of you who already have established demand for your product so happily paying customers um it is not as useful for pre-launch pre-launch products or customers or products rather that don't have paying

3:33customers requires a slightly different approach it's very related so it can still get a ton of value out of this process but we can talk about that maybe more at the end if that's your situation um there's some specifics to actually executing and implementing this type of stuff that I'm happy to dive into the details but um in an effort to actually get you know all this information passed on to you in 20 minutes I'm going to Breeze right past us and we can come back to it so again this process getting more signups without more marketing we'll just Dive Right into um starting with identifying who we need

4:07to learn from so who should we be learning from in order to get the answer to this question of where we should be focused in terms of marketing and revenue growth opportunities and not all customers are created equally um and in order to learn what we need to learn we need to ask and listen to customers who fall into these three sort of categories right number one they are paying customers stands to reason right you want to learn from customers who aren't paying us and that arguably are getting continued value from our products so if paid us ideally you know twice three times at least a few times

4:37that we know that we're getting continued value also they're happy with your product as it is today so I often describe this as your customers who you would have to pry your product out of their cold dead hands I kind of gruesome although we're near Halloween so maybe it sort of fits but the idea here is that we want to help you get more of these types of customers right your happy customers and then the other criteria in general that we'll be looking for when trying to figure out which of your customers we should learn from is those of you those customers who have gotten value recently

5:10enough that they remember what life was like before so in general we say anywhere between you know your customers who um you acquired in the last three to six months we can go a little bit longer than that if need be but the idea is that we want them to have a memory of the pain and the problem that you helped them solve and so generally you don't want to go to your customers that have been around for a couple of years because they're going to start you know filling in answers and telling you what you need they think you want to hear as opposed to having that real memory right

5:40our memories tend to fail us so in this case of LifeLabs there's a few hundred customers that fell into this these three categories and so off we went so the next thing that we need to do is discover why did these amazing customers choose our product rather than all of the other options that were available to them and for that we're going to rely on the jobs to be done framework so if you're still relying on demographic data to think about your customers um then you may not be familiar with this comparison maybe some of you are are familiar with it though you know what do these two men have in common

6:11like almost everything right they're the same age uh they're both wealthy self-employed live outside of and spend a ton of time in London uh you know love international travel dogs sports cars Fine Wines they both have children they've both been married and remarried they have a ton in common and so we don't really want to rely on demographic data to learn you know from our customers it's not a helpful way to sort of think about them we prefer to use the jobs to be done framework which is based on the theory that people hire our products to get a job done so rather than just asking people what product do

6:43they want we want to try to understand what are they trying to achieve so it's essentially this idea some of you may be familiar with this I'm sure many of you are familiar with this this is that it's the essence of what we're trying to get to right they buy what our product enables them to do they buy a better version of themselves and so now let's look at the process that we use to find out what that is so we are going to use in the case of LifeLabs we were able to use a survey so is a survey as high will it be as high quality as running

7:11interviews absolutely not um but if you are in a position to be able to run surveys they can be really really effective and it can be really really quick it could take just you know two weeks send in an email uh with a survey you know and and get responses back with a couple of follow-up emails inside of two weeks uh is absolutely realistic uh the goal for the surveys though is that we want to get about 25 to 50 open text responses um which means we need to typically send this to about 300 to 500 uh customers so if you're in a situation where you don't

7:46have 300 to 500 customers either because you know your earlier stage than that or um you're in the Enterprise space and you're going to use a similar uh process to this you're just going to be doing it in interview format um with about 10 to 15 interviews so again about 25 to 50 responses from surveys meaning you'll want to send about 300 to 500 out or run about 10 to 15 interviews this is an example of the email that we use to send the survey we'll include I'm going to include this email template and the survey template um in a link at the end so uh you can

8:19all take grab a copy of that but essentially this is the idea that we we reached out to lifelabs's best customers that fit into those categories and we went ahead and asked asked them some questions so again if you're doing interviews you're going to be asking the same types of questions because we're trying to learn the same things so I'm going to run through each of the questions just to sort of help illustrate what is it that we're learning and trying to learn from these customers right so prior to using our product uh how were you solving this problem this question the responses to this question will give you a picture of what

8:49life was like before so what solution are you asking your customers to switch away from what solution are you asking them to fire in order to hire yours um this is probably the best and most important question of the entire survey when did you realize you needed something like us what was going on in your world right so um this one gets you that critical insight into that trigger moment um and you can imagine how many doors sort of open up for you when you understand um you know this for your customers I mean marketing lives in this space but also this is your problems the problem

9:22space that you live in um really really critical to understand this for those best customers how did you find out about us I don't really need to explain this one you know who did they talk to where did they go um why did you decide to choose us over the other options this question gives you your key differentiators right why they should choose you or the other options this is gold um this question right would deal breakers would have prevented you you from choosing our product this gives you insight into anxieties objections uh you know those types of things which are very important to know um and then my other favorite question

9:55is when you signed up what happened that made you feel certain you know that this was right for you I mean just think about what you can do with the answers to this question right um this Insight is incredible imagine actioning this across not only your marketing and and your you know your website but your product onboarding um it's so so powerful the answers to this question so love this one and then of course uh now that you have us in your life what are you able to do now that you weren't able to do before that's that better life that desired outcome right uh we want to help

10:31customers reach this point of course but also use this knowledge on our website and throughout our customer experience as that sort of Promise of that better life this is what they're they're going for now one thing that you might notice is that and I mentioned this already these are all open text fields and uh none of this is multiple choice and the reason for that is that the voice of customer that you are you know capture if it's a survey open text field obviously if it's an interview you're going to record uh the call and transcribe it that voice of customer is so critical you also might be noticing

11:03as I went through the questions that for each customer we have this sort of documentary of how they met and fell in love with your product um and that's super super powerful so when we have those answers the next thing that we need to do is look for patterns so this is an example of like a Google sheet and an air table base for basically how we'll parse responses we're going to go question by question and look for themes um you know those themes are going to help us identify the different customer jobs you know our customers hire our product to solve and chances are you're

11:36going to identify a few key customer jobs um there's going to be a few you know there's going to be like two or three standouts when I say customer jobs by the way just as a sort of sidebar here where what we find and if you're familiar with the jobs be done in theory the customer job statement is a really helpful way for sort of encapsulating with these different groups uh the jobs of these different groups and so you can imagine how you would sort of apply the responses to those questions to this customer statement and you'll likely end up with two or three so we have a decision to make because we

12:13cannot continue talking to everybody right we want to have really effective and resonant messaging and and marketing and product experiences and so we need to decide right which one of these groups which one of these customer jobs represents the biggest opportunity for us and there's a few ways we can make that decision these are just some of the criteria that we can use to make that call so I'll explain the criteria and then I'll show you and explain what we did for Life Labs so understanding value right these are the customers that don't need convincing they don't need much hand-holding they implicitly understand what value your product provides

12:50um the other one I mean it stands to reason right very obvious uh do they have a willingness to pay a high willingness to pay do they understand the value of paying for a product like yours is there a a line item in their budget already for a product like yours um do they pay for similar types of products like yours High willingness to pay and then long-term potential discounts a couple things one is that this is not a one and done problem that they have this is likely um you know a problem that they'll want to solve over the long term also long-term potential you might see

13:22opportunities for expansion right to help them solve additional challenges after you help them solve that initial job to be done and then probably the most important one on this list is that they have an urgent problem to solve right especially now we do not want to be selling vitamins we want to be selling painkillers so as much as possible we want to identify and and prioritize if we can those customers that have an urgent problem to solve those are going to be the easiest customers to sort of resonate with you always want to be a painkiller not a vitamin there's a couple other questions interior that you might want to consider

13:56as well for instance industries that you have an unfair advantage in another interesting one sometimes to consider is do these customers congregate in a way that make them easy to Market to that's another one you might want to consider but in general this is how we would prioritize One customer job over another one when we're parsing that research and so for Life Labs it's sort of panned out like this right they had there were three dominant jobs we've eliminated one quite easily we didn't focus on that one but then we had a decision to make between two so the first group was newer to content creation and stop motion they

14:30were the biggest group by far tons of established demand already um but they were more likely to be using the tool and content for personal use versus a second group which represented more experienced creators smaller group but more likely to be representing a brand or business selling something likely to already be paying for other content creation tools and experiencing a real pain versus just you know curiosity so we dug in with a customer job like the second customer job so now our job is to figure out finding we have to identify the gaps between you know them and you um of this key group are we even

15:09speaking this person's language so we have to keep a mind our mind's eye on that job to be done do we address that in our materials and an easy place to start to answer that question is the home page so this is lifelab's homepage when we started working with them the message messaging was very focused on speed um which is there's nothing inherently wrong with this homepage I mean it looks okay it looks relatively good but um it was focused primarily on speed but when we went to the actual voice of customer with the actual words and phrases that these ideal customers use we have to ask ourselves are we are we

15:43speaking their language or are we using our own jargon um do we address their biggest anxieties that might be holding them back do we highlight the benefits and features that they care about most versus what we think they should care about um and with Life Labs we see that was all about creating you know created of an engaging content right you can see exciting and eye-catching elevate my content creative we see that there's a very different focus and so what we did was we leaned into engagement beautiful eye-catching you know we swiped you know their copy right from the voice of customer um and we still mentioned speed but it's

16:19not the focus um and so you can see there's a stark contrast in the value proposition here right and then the messaging strategy here and I I already gave away what the results were 93 increase in sign ups on the website when we updated the messaging strategy in this direction just remember the CEO came to us thinking that they had an acquisition problem right wanting to launch PR uh campaigns and influencer you know style campaigns but after a couple of conversations a really simple survey um it was clear that the product marketing and positioning and the messaging was the real opportunity zeroed in on that ideal customer lifted

16:52messaging and copy straight from the survey results and uh you know the results were were incredible we did it really quickly we spent no money on uh any trying any new channels or any marketing experiments um similar process was used when working with meet Edgar identified you know an ideal customer job lifted that new messaging three pages updated on their website my the favor my favorite part about this story is that the trial to paid conversion rate increased 40 we didn't touch anything but three pages on the website um so that just goes to show you what a what a higher quality better product fit customer coming through the front door

17:28can do um with not a big lift auto books similar style uh research done here in this case it was interviews increased signups but also product usage sparktoro Amanda I spoke yesterday I believe um Amanda was able to run with you know we ran surveys for sparktoro and develop identify that better messaging and lifted the VOC and she was able to update the onboarding experience and double the child to pay conversion rate for them and they came to us they had lots of signups just not enough people converting it to becoming customers and so this is really really powerful for them I'm gonna stop because I'm running

18:05into just a bunch of examples there's lots more examples where they came from similar with uh Sprout social so hopefully what I what I hope everybody is sort of picking up on from this is that top of funnel more traffic you know it's often our white whale and and we you know we look to that for growth uh all too often this is especially true going to be true in 2023 you know increasing Revenue might actually be much closer to home than you think uh traffic is really really expensive marketing experiments are super costly I take a ton of your team's time or your time so once you've

18:42optimized your messaging and your customer experience to match your ideal customer job to be done right really understand what's invaluable to them then when you can turn up the tile on marketing you'll feel so much more confident that you're going to get that Roi from that marketing that it's actually going to be worth all that effort and and that investment so um the other thing that I hope too is that it's really obvious to everybody that not only is this a really actionable way to drive more signups for your product in terms of messaging but the answers to the questions that you know I ran through there from your ideal

19:15customers gives you yes you can update your website for sure but you can also update your product onboarding you've got you've got insight into what activation you know meaningful activation and engagement looks like for your best customers so you can develop kpis and understand that more holistic customer experience for them opens up a customer marketing opportunities expansion marketing opportunities and then yes of course awareness focused marketing to get you more traffic of course um so as Rob mentioned we did write a book on this topic it's super practical like a step-by-step guide it is available in pre-sale right now the print version is going to be available

19:51in early 2023 but there is a digital version available right now and then as promised the resources that I mentioned are available at that link in there there's the email template and the survey questions if anybody has any questions about running survey I'm sorry interviews and the specific interview questions you can shoot me an email me my email address is on the slide there if I've left anything out or you have any questions obviously we also work with teams running Sprints in this format and that should be it for me I have not been able to pay attention to the chat but hopefully um oh I'm taking a look now and I am

20:27seeing there's a couple things in here so Rob I don't know if you are um around and want to jump back in I'm around hello yeah let's let's do some questions um I'm gonna I'm gonna start us off because I have at least two questions okay out of my own head having seen that I love the example of you have this survey you learn a bunch and then you change it you change a headline and and it it you know you change all the copy in it it uh converts to more trials or to more purchases yeah how you mentioned that sparktoro did a similar process but they

20:58then they already had people signing up for trial and it was that they weren't converting right so it wasn't like you didn't change copy on a page for them there was something around onboarding or whatever could you summarize like what did you do there because I'm fascinated by that next step yeah yeah so so the product onboarding or product activation step you mean yeah so it's really honestly this type of research gives you a I won't call it copy because this isn't really about copy it's more about messaging strategy but the other thing that this research provides you is insight into what matters to customers which then allows you to map that to the

21:34specific parts of the product that deliver that value and that's the tie for product onboarding and product Activation so we can I mean it sounds reason to that if you can connect what matters to customers and those sort of value themes to the specific parts of the product yes put that on your website for sure but also carry through that message in your product experience and so for spark Toro that's what we did we had identified those value themes but they weren't being leveraged inside of the product when somebody signed up for the or you know started a free account with sparktoro and so that's what the

22:06team was able to do and I like full credit to Amanda on that she executed like perfectly but she was able to connect the specific parts of the product and what parts of the product to introduce and in what order does that make sense it does yeah that makes a lot of sense I want to jump to a question from an audience member Ben asks if some customers have been with us for a while a year or two would you recommend skipping those customers it sounds like only new customers are the most helpful so um this one's this one is tricky I would say don't do it the reason being is that

22:43the world in which they may have made this purchase decision might be a completely different world than today so that's true because of the pandemic but it's also true because of the recession and so if somebody you know was making a purchase decision when uh we were in an economic boom that's very different than somebody you know in a recessionary market or post-pandemic uh the decision-making criteria you know the the the um the criteria that you needed to hit on it was probably a little bit different so I would recommend more recent because of that reason but also because of the sort of recency thing that I mentioned when I was uh when I

23:21was running through it which is we want those people that remember what life was like before and two years is a long time we've stretched nine months but we don't like to go that far if we can avoid it honestly if there's not enough just do interviews with your more recent customers yeah is is there well I have two more questions um one is so we've talked about converting you know you did the example of converting from the hit the page and they convert to a trial and then we talked about um uh sparktoro where it's like they're in a trial and it's onboarding yeah have

23:54have you used this to go out and find more like I do want more top of funnel like let's say I just have a trickle and now I know oh my gosh this one group really really and it's not my demographic but it's by you know the things you talked about how do you translate that into like a marketing approach so do you mean for a group of customers that you don't like for a group of customers you don't yet have or a trickle of them you know let's say let's say I have an audience of you know 5000 on my email list and I have a SAS app

24:26and they're cut and and then I've emailed all of them and I have 50 customers and it's like oh my gosh this one segment really gets a lot like what do I do next like do I right Facebook you know I I'm just curious if you have done that before yeah I mean it happens a lot right where it's kind of the same process where you figure out oh these are actually our highest value customers these are the customers that we want more of and they represent you know a subset of our existing customer base I would say talk to those specific customers and when you have when you ask

24:56these this style of question you're going to get a ton of insight into you know where they were when they realized they wanted to solve this problem who they talk to where they go to and then you can sort of Follow that um you know that path and go down those rabbit holes and learn more about that space you know we use sparktoro not not to sport tour all over this but spark 12 is a great tool to do that but the source of where you're looking should be based in those customers not in people who you know may have an interest in your product or may one day be

25:29interested in paying for your product you should always prioritize those customers that are already validated as you know getting value and have a willingness to pay uh versus audience research now there's scenarios where you may not have any customers in that segment in which case your only choice is to do audience research but as long as you have even a handful I would absolutely recommend start by getting on you know a call with them asking this style of questions to them and then after that uh going out into the world so to speak and and to those watering holes to learn more about them very nice Matthew has a question for you

26:05he asks how would you approach a product that solves different problems for different user groups I need to know that is that how you'd approach it I need more information different problems for different and different products so that sounds like two different products to me right uh borderline I mean actually I have worked with um accompanying exactly this situation recently um where it was two very unique products but they were and two different plans and actually through the research we realized only one of them was bringing people through the front door only one of them actually um you know represented a big opportunity a bigger opportunity and in

26:48truth the one of the products represented the best sort of go to market motion and the other product represented a great expansion um opportunity post acquisition for that first problem so to speak does that make sense I don't know if that answers this question obviously I would need more yeah yeah so Gia thank you so much for coming out thank you so much for having me yeah that's our last question of the day and uh hope to connect with you soon okay awesome thanks

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