Customer Journey Mapping: Get Started in a Few Steps

What it really means to be customer centric

Louis: It wasn’t right. So, Gia, what does it actually mean to be customer centric?

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: It’s funny, I was recently speaking with a friend of mine who works for a big telecommunications company and she was like, the senior team is so excited. And when I say big, I mean huge, actually. I’m so excited. The senior team’s all excited. We’re going to be data driven. Yay, Data driven. And I was like, wait a minute, is that really super exciting? I understand it sounds good, but isn’t it more important to be like, customer driven? And she was like, I don’t understand what you mean. By the way, she doesn’t work in the marketing department. So I don’t. I didn’t expect her to know this or, you know, care about necessarily this because she works in hr. But I was like, you really should, if you have possibly, if you have a possible way of influencing them, please talk to them about being customer driven and not data driven. It’s just, you know, it’s a bit prolific these days. But there’s a good trend going towards being customer driven, which I love seeing, at least in the marketing space. People outside of it maybe are a little bit less attached to it, but. And they’re still on the data driven is important train. But I’m not saying it’s not important. But yeah, being customer centric. What does it mean? It means giving a shit about creating good customer experiences. It means giving a shit to ask questions and talk to your customers. And it means giving a shit to actually share that information and sort of disseminate those customer insights to the rest of the organization. So it’s not just somebody off in a corner with all this insight and not sharing the knowledge with the rest of the company so that everybody can be customer centric.

Louis: So from my small experience, it seems like a lot of people would agree with you. In fact, most people would say, yeah, I mean, that makes total sense. Why shouldn’t we focus on customers? They are the one paying our salaries at the end of the day. But it seems like a lot of people struggle to actually implement that in their day to day life. And I think this is something we’re going to talk about in this episode, Practical method to actually do so. But why do you think it’s so damn difficult for people to actually be truly customer centric to actually, to actually give a shit about customers.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: It’s a great question and I think that the answer is largely, especially I will say in tech and the startup space is because everybody’s so results driven. And it’s results for first sort of culture and panic culture a lot as well. And so there’s it seems, it seems like a luxury to sort of stop and be like, yeah, let’s do some customer research. It sounds like fluffy. It’s like brand development. It just sounds too soft and not like you’re barreling ahead enough or you’re not results driven enough when you’re like, wait a minute, let’s stop and talk to some customers, the execs, or not all. But I obviously can’t throw blanket statements about all founders. But a lot of founders, rightfully so, are very results driven and fiercely so. And so the only thing they talk about with their marketer is I need results and like, show me the money. And I air quote like, which is obviously a total blanket statement. But being results obsessed turns you into a conversion obsessed marketer, which sort of removes you from the experience, really. You start looking at these micro events that are super, super small in the grand scheme of things in terms of your opportunity and in terms of your customers experience that. Yeah, it’s just, it becomes hard to back away a bit and look at things a little bit more holistically and through the eyes of your customers when you are constantly being reminded that it’s do or die.

Louis: Amen. Yeah, it’s difficult to follow up on this because this is it, right? It’s a lot of focus on money making money, a lot of focus on generating results, but long term results, and I sincerely believe in this, generating long term results will only come from focusing on people first, focusing on customers first, and you will then generate the results you need. You can’t do it the other way around or else you’re just going to shoot yourself in the foot in the long term. So what does it look like in practice? Listeners love this type of step by step methodology. In this podcast they like to know how to actually do this, practically speaking. And let’s go about it. So how do you advise people to be truly customer centric and where does it start in your opinion?

Start with your company’s why using the golden circle

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: I always start at the top in likely the most painful place to start. But once a customer exists, it’s really, really before you can. Before you get customer centric, you have to know who you are and really define your purpose, your raison d’ Etre like for the company, basically, why do you do what you do, what gets you out of bed every morning and who are you as a brand and who are you as a company and what do you stand for is the first thing. And it sounds counterintuitive because obviously that’s like very me, me, me or we, we, we focused and not focused on the customer at all. But in order to speak to your customers in any sort of way that will potentially resonate with them or that you can connect with them, you really need to know who the hell you are instead of trying to be everything to everybody and yada yada. So I will always start by recommending some sort of brand development. I know for startups in particular this is harder to do because again, results were needed yesterday. However, it is really, really valuable to sort of stop and take an inventory of who you are and who you to be in your space. So that’s the first order of business is figure that out. Peel away the layers to the why you exist and what your true purpose is as a company and make it as inspiring as possible. It will help to get everybody on the team sort of amped up about what you’re trying to do. It helps everybody get on the same page and really passionate. And I think it has to come from a place of passion or else it will fall flat once you try to turn it into marketing. So I really love The Google Ventures 3 Hour Brand Sprint for this reason. It’s not perfect, but it is a really good exercise to run through at least at a bare bones early stage thing. It’s literally a three hour brand sprint where you get four to six people in a room and basically force them to think about really tough things and make really hard decisions because you, you sort of have to get it down on paper and then everybody sort of has to take stock in it and believe in it and be, and be prepared to be like, okay, that’s who we are next. But it’s really hard to do that. It can be very hard. So forcing everybody to agree can be difficult and forcing everything, everybody to agree on something that is actually inspiring to everybody is hard too. So it’s hard work, but it doesn’t have to be long. And so once you’ve done that then the next step is obviously after figuring out who you are as a business. By the way, I will add the Google Ventures three Hour Brand Sprint. One of the exercises in my favorite in it forces you to go through the Simon Sinek golden circle, which is basically defining the what, how and why. And that’s probably the hardest part, but the rest is really great too. And the rest of the exercises are sort of designed in a way to make sure that that one is actually resonates with everybody.

Louis: So let me stop you right there because I think this is incredibly important and I’m glad you came back to this because I wanted to ask you more details about this first step. So the golden circle of Simon Sinek consists of, as you said, the what, the how and the why. But instead it’s more like the why, the how and the what. Right? So start with why. Your purpose, how you accomplish this purpose, and what do you do day to day to actually do this right? So can we.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: But when you, but when you build it for the first time, defining the what is easier than the why. So running through the actual exercise, I would start with the what and then the how. Like how you do it better than everybody else. And then you can be like, okay, now I’m starting to get somewhere. And you can actually define the why. But you’re right, start. You have to lead with why in terms of like, mindset after this. But as part of the exercise, it typically is easier to start with the what.

Louis: So give me an example of this exercise.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: An example of it, like in practice.

Louis: Let’s challenge you. Everybody’s gonna say Apple with this. So let’s, let’s pick something else and let’s do it together briefly. Let’s pick.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: I’ve got one.

Louis: Okay, do it.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Wistia.

Louis: Okay.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: They’re a great example of a company that, you know, they, and I don’t know that they’ve, I don’t know what framework they use and I don’t know,

Louis: but what do they do?

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Just define who they are, their sense of self. Oh, sorry, Wistia. I’m going to butcher what they do actually. But they’re a platform for, they host and do analytics for video for marketers. They’re a marketing tech company. But they have a very clear sense of self. They know exactly who they are and they know their, and I’m going to throw it like stupid labels, but they know their voice and tone. They have a really strong personality and, and just overall voice. And you can tell, you can tell it when they visit their, when you visit their website, you can tell when they, you just consuming even their, their support or their, their help articles. You know, they know who they are and that it’s, it’s really obvious that their people give a shit about what they do. And they all Sort of share the vision. And that’s not every company does that very well. They’re a great example.

Louis: So what is their what? As you said, they do.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: That’s funny. I don’t actually know what their what, how and why is. And that’s not the point. The point is not for your customers to be able to know why you do what you do. It’s a feeling. And I realize it’s not quantifiable, but it is a feeling that I get when I see any of Wistia’s marketing collateral. I’m not a customer of theirs, by the way, so take that with a grain of salt. But I, I get the feeling that they, My, my. I jive with what they jive with, if that makes sense. Like I can connect to their brand. I don’t know why they do what they do. I don’t know what their why is of their Simon Sinek necessarily. But it’s a feeling. It’s not like I couldn’t guess. I could maybe try to venture a guess, but honestly.

Louis: But let’s go through another example then so that we can really show what it means. So the Y starts with we believe X, Y and Z. The how is we do that by doing X, Y and Z. And the what is we do X. So the example that is always used is Apple. So Apple, just to simplify the what is we build computers. The how is you have to Google this. I don’t remember now the how is we do this by creating computers that are well designed or something along those

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: lines, beautiful, well designed products.

Louis: And the why is because we think we believe in something like simplicity or. No, we fight the status quo. We believe in.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Yes.

Louis: Fighting the status quo.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Think different. Yeah, yeah. For the, for the. I don’t remember that what that campaign was, but it was like for the believers or for the people who are basically fighting the status quo. Yeah, and that’s, and that’s obvious. And it’s obvious with Apple. But they’re always the sort of the de facto example in this case, which, so I don’t like when I don’t analyze Apple very closely in this regard because it’s just boring. But that’s why I like examples like Wistia a little bit better. And to counter the Wistia one, by the way, the company that I would say a good example of a company that doesn’t do this is like Salesforce.

Louis: Like when you say Salesforce.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Well, because it’s obvious too, it’s like almost too obvious that like who the Fuck are they anyway? Like, what are they? What do they do is even hard enough to answer, let alone how they do it or why they do it. It’s just a, like. So I’m sorry for like the Salesforce fans out there, but it’s a bit of a clusterfuck in terms of trying to figure out, like, what do they stand for and why do they do what they do. And I don’t know, maybe it’s just their, their size, but size isn’t an

Louis: excuse because Apple, yeah, they, they used to have a very strong vision. They used to, Their, their, their founders used to have this, you know, this war against software or something along those lines. Like usually before that, before the software as a service world, there was basically, you had to buy licenses and all of that, and they enabled software over the Internet and they fought against that, which was quite cool. But then, yeah, I think they lost their way. Okay, so that’s step one, Figure out your why the golden circle exercise. What is step two?

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Doing the same thing for your customers. And I would say that, I mean, and this one, in terms of customer research, you’ve covered customer research with other guests and I don’t need to go too far down that path. But customer research is obviously a very important part of this. So figuring out, you know, meeting your customers where they are, basically in their struggles, in their emotional state, in how they’re trying to be better, whatever what it is they’re trying to achieve, but to try to meet them where they are and doing customer research in order to get a good sense of that. Now there’s levels of customer research. There’s like the MVP version like we just described with the three hour brand Sprint. And so there’s scrappy customer research that can be done and then there’s the right way, which is obviously takes a lot more time. But if we’re talking about a startup environment or a tech environment and this like results obsessed sort of environment, then it can be harder to do. So as the second stage, I would say a decent level of customer research, enough that you can build a hypothesis around what they’re struggling with, why they’re coming to you, what value you can provide.

Louis: I would suggest though that even though people have been talking about customer research in this podcast for a while, because it’s one of the core principle of good marketing, nobody has talked about your own method and your own way of doing stuff. So why don’t you go through just a bit about this? How do you typically approach this phase?

The scrappy customer research approach using two surveys

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: So the scrappy Version of this from my sort of perspective, and a lot of people will disagree with this. Good is surveys, which is a given, but not doing interviews. And that’s what’s not popular about it. Because interviews. I know, I know are super important. I know are, you know, they are crucial and critical. And I’m not saying never get on the phone with your customers, obviously do, but when you are trying to move super quickly, get results yesterday, particularly if you’re not a founder and you’re trying to do some customer research without really getting that buy in from the founder to do it, surveys can be an easy way to sort of set it up and continue working while the data comes in and you keep doing your job and keep learning and keep listening and then take the results and parse them in such a way that you can create a sort of hypothesis about what your customer’s journey is.

Louis: Okay, so what kind of questions are you asking them in this survey?

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Well, there’s two surveys that we would typically run through and this is a process, by the way, that I only adopted in the last year. Prior to that it was surveys and interviews and I was working for a bigger company, obviously, so funding customer research was a little bit easier. But now working with younger companies and trying to move more quickly, basically I’ve learned a scrappier way of doing it. I learned a scrappy way of doing it through Momoko Price’s ebook about value propositions, which I’m sure has been talked about before. I have learned quite a bit about this process by working with Claire obviously on this same sort of process and developing out training with her and workshops and so forth. And I’ve put it into practice with multiple clients of mine and I’ve seen great results, great MVP results. This is not final product by any. I have to add that sort of disclaimer to all of this because I know it breaks a lot of rules. But a customer survey to your highest value, most valuable customers and a web survey to sort of paint that the picture of the pre purchase journey and the post purchase sort of journey. And so with those two surveys, you can sort of paint a picture again of that customer journey and create that first sort of that first best guess at what your customer’s journey is.

Louis: So what question do you ask in the customer service?

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Right, sorry. Wow. I cannot remember exactly. But on the customer survey or on the web survey? Both. So the web survey is trying to uncover level of awareness or people shopping, they don’t know what your tool does or do. They know exactly who you are. Do they use a tool similar and they’re looking for exactly the type of tool that you offer that will determine what type of messaging you need to sort of lead with on your website. What are they looking for? Asking them for their what? Ask them for the one thing that they’re looking for. I’m going from memory here because I can’t remember off the top of my head exactly how these are framed, these questions, but that asking the what the one thing is that they’re looking for in this type of solution will help you determine the hierarchy of messaging on your. On your page a lot as well. And then I can’t remember what the other questions are. I think, I think it’s related to whether or not they’re making a. They’re in purchase mode or not.

Louis: So I can help you on this. So for the web survey, one of the questions that I like to ask that are related to this is why are you on this page right now? What are you looking for? That’s a good way to know there, as you said, what they are actually looking for to do. If it’s, I’m just looking around. If you have only I’m just looking around, then it’s, it’s not that good. If you have a lot of people that say I’m looking to buy from you, then it’s another subject. And then have you ever heard of the brand on this website before today? That’s the great way to know whether you have to, as you said, write a message that is, this is who we are, this is what we do. Or more message that, okay, you know who we are, let’s go. Right, so those are two stuff for the web survey, and then you talk about struggles and problems and stuff like this for the customer survey. So one question is, what is your biggest problem right now? What are you suffering from the most in this field? Right, right. Any other. For the customer survey.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: On the customer survey side, yeah. Basically, like what was going on in your world when you started looking for this type of tool and for the customer survey, remembering obviously that these are happy customers that you are serving well. So what was it that convinced you that we were the right tool for you? And further to that, like, you can dig a little bit further into that as well and maybe potentially pull out like the benefits or potentially the features that have meant the most to them or that they think is the most valuable to them, which can help you obviously prioritize your onboarding.

Louis: Do you like to incentivize those people to Reply to surveys. How do you typically do this?

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: No, no, I don’t. And you know why? Because I don’t think it’s needed. The web survey is harder for obvious reasons. Obviously people have a much less vested interest in responding to a web survey when they’re just shopping. So it can take a while for the results to sort of build there. Which is why I always encourage like get that set up as quickly as possible because it can take sometimes weeks to get some okay results from that. The customer survey, I don’t think it’s necessary actually, because if you’re talking to your highest value customers that are actually getting value from you, I think they have a vested interest in you being more successful. So I have never seen a need, I’ve never worked with anybody who’s needed to incentivize a customer survey.

Louis: Right.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: That type of customer survey, a best fit customer survey.

Louis: So the first question you like to ask is actually related to, you said something like what was going on in your world when you started looking for a solution like ours, Is that correct? So you basically try to paint the full customer journey from the first ever thought they had about your product or not your product, the first ever thought they had about solving the problem that you’re solving up until today. Right. So how does it look like? So the first question is, would be this one. Then you ask about the problems that they were hoping to solve. Then you ask why have they purchased from. Why have you purchased from us? To understand the benefits. Are there other questions that you like to ask?

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: No, because I try to max it at 5ish questions so that each question people will dive into a little bit more deeply. They’ll be more obviously willing to fill a customer survey that is shorter. You don’t want to take up too much time. And honestly also to risk people not abandoning the survey process and to get as much as possible in the shortest amount of time as possible, keeping it as short as possible. So again, mvp, this is five questions is not an end all, be all and often will be the impetus for running interviews. But in the absence of the interviews, these two surveys will put you in a decent position to put together a customer journey map. There’s a lot of other factors obviously that need to go into it, but you will be in a decent place to a decent place to start. And then your team, yourself as the marketer, your customer success, sales, product executive team are all also in a position to help build out that customer journey map. And really based on what they know about your customers and what they know about what you’re delivering and when and where they are and meeting them where they are. You can build out that customer journey map and really start defining for each of the stages and, or phases, depending on how complicated it is, what people are thinking, feeling and doing at each of those stages and building it out in layers in those types of layers. So the defining stages and phases part is actually it feels straightforward for a lot of companies, but it’s actually not. There’s the like, yeah, yeah, the awareness, yeah, the consideration and yeah, the loyalty or growth or customer or whatever you call the, whatever you call the typical last one. But depending on how complicated the buying process is or depending on how complicated the onboarding process is, that consideration phase might be. Might have multiple stages in it. You know, there’s the obvious, like, okay, people on the website are in consideration mode and people who are in our trial or onboarding. Even people, you know, even people a month in, two months in, could still be in consideration mode for a lot of tools, not all, but some. And you won’t actually know when that consideration phase ends unless you really know your customers. And you, and you run the risk of sort of abandoning the fact that people are actually still evaluating you and you’re like, oh, we got their credit card. Okay, cool, got them. Like, has nothing to fucking do with anything. They’re still very much in evaluation mode. So all that to say that consideration phase could be multiple stages, as is the loyalty or growth or customer phase at the end. That could be multiple as well.

Louis: So the stages, as you mentioned, awareness, acquisition, retention, referral, revenue, and all of those metrics that stages that people use are based on your company. Right.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: And they’re not based on not metrics though. I don’t attach metrics to those stages.

Louis: Stages. Right. They’re not based to me, they’re not based on companies, they are not based on your customer, they’re based on yourself. So as soon as you start doing the exercise that you just mentioned, as soon as you start understanding what the actual journey that people went through, you will realize that this doesn’t look like a five stage process. It’s very likely to be much longer than this and you will be surprised by the results. Right, so that’s stage three. So how do we map this? How do we go about mapping this customer journey?

Mapping the customer journey in a grid format

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: It’s funny, the first customer journey I ever mapped was a circle. And that was like early days at Unbounce. My first ever one was the circle I remember very well. Ryan Angley, the Head of cs, myself, head of marketing, and Carter, one of the founders and head of product. We locked ourselves in a room for, I don’t even remember a day at least, and sort of mapped out this customer journey ourselves. And we did it in the form of a circle. Since I’ve sort of abandoned the circle model, even though it makes a lot of sense and I still think of it like a circle, but meaning your customers can do a lot to sort of feed acquisition and build awareness around your product as well. So I think that, I think there’s a pretty solid understanding around that. But essentially what I’ve ended up at is no two customer journeys will ever look the same. Depending on your resources, it could be you could just build it in a spreadsheet or in a Google Doc. It doesn’t have to be complicated. As long as you’re taking your customers into account and the rest of your team and what they know about your customers and their experience with your customers into account, you’re in a pretty good position to basically come up with a good naming convention for your phases and stages. And that may sound sort of gratuitous, but it is really, really important to have a Naming the phases of your customer journey is super important to the language that you use internally, but also making sure that it’s tied to the goals associated with each of those stages and giving a reference point for everybody, even engineering and product and everybody on your team to know, okay, we’re focused on this phase right now or this stage right now, or affecting change there. So the naming convention. And then again, like I said, the defining the, the touch points and what are people actually doing, not only digital touch points, but what they’re actually doing, how they’re feeling and what they’re thinking and things like that.

Louis: Okay, so let’s go back to it. So what are the. Let’s picture together. Like I’m picturing this huge blank piece of paper. You follow me, right?

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Yep.

Louis: So you draw this huge arrow from left to right.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: I actually do it more like a grid. So it’s with columns.

Louis: Okay.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: And rows.

Louis: So like a spreadsheet, the columns are the key stages.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Are the stages. Exactly. And there may be six or five or seven or whatever. And then the rows are the names of the stages.

Louis: Okay.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Across the top, a high level sort of description of what the stage, what it means that should be written in the, in the first person of your customer. So like I am XYZ at each of these stages. At the end of it, I’ll put KPIs also at the top underneath those. So where the team should be focused, what a meaningful KPI is for that stage. I will know that the customer has achieved that when they hit this certain KPI. And then below that, I’ll get into a little bit more of the nitty gritty, which is the doing the thinking and the feeling. Actually, I do feeling first and then thinking. I don’t know why. So feeling, doing, thinking, Doing, feeling, thinking.

Louis: Okay, so how.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Is there, like, a big reason for that? No, not necessarily. I just think it for. For, like, hierarchy sake. For people that are trying to grasp your customer journey. When. When looking at it. It is. It is. I put it in that frame just for them.

Louis: Sure.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: For other people.

Louis: So how do you. How do you feel this badass grid

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: with your customer feedback that you receive from your surveys, your two surveys, and by talking to your team. And again, it’s best guess, but I would do. I do the KPIs and the metrics associated. I do. Last, because really, it’s like, how do we dig into what’s meaningful at each of those stages? And you really got to talk to people. You have to involve everybody. The other reason, by the way, the thing I’ll add tack onto the side of this is the other reason that involving your team is so important and so valuable is that you need everybody to feel invested in this and you need everybody to believe in it. Because if you just go off and build this in a silo and then bring it to the team and be like, here’s our customer journey, everybody, everybody’s gonna be like a cool, like, so you had a fun, like, arts and crafts project over there, like, good for you. That has nothing to do with me. But you really want everybody to feel invested and to feel like, oh, there’s where I come in. Oh, there’s me. I see me in that customer journey. I see how I contribute to this customer journey, how my work contributes to the customer journey. So the super important sort of added benefit of involving other people other than obviously learning from them, is getting them involved in the process so they get. They invest themselves in it as well.

Louis: All right, so talk me through the way you actually go through each survey and are able to map out the key stuff into this grade. Do you actually go through every answer one by one? Do you summarize them? First of all, how do you do it?

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: So it’s not always the most cut and dry process, but you can parse it in such a way that you can uncover jobs to be Done. Again, this is like, I don’t pretend to be an expert in jobs to be done at all. But if you can, if you can get a clear understanding of the job that your customers are hiring you to do, you can sort of see their journey in that. So defining their struggle, their motivations, and their desired outcomes. That’s a customer journey, right? Like that, more or less. If you again, just use it as sort of a lens and lay it against that customer journey, they pair up quite nicely. Jobs to be done and a customer journey. So I think they’re very complementary and I always use them together. They’re just a different way of looking at the same thing at the end of the day. And so that customer survey can help you define the customer journey. But what you will quickly realize once parsing the data is that there are multiple jobs and you do not do the same thing for every customer. You may, you may, you may discover that people are in really different places when they come to you. How you actually take that customer data and turn them into customer jobs. And then customer journeys is work. It’s not, and it’s not easy work. And it’s easy to fuck up. It’s easy to, to follow a path because you’re like, oh, here’s this very, here’s this formula I’m trying to follow. And I have to abide by this formula or this framework of jobs to be done or customer journey. And then you could actually, you know, lose sight of meaning. The true meaning that that is, that needs to be gleaned from the customer feedback that you’ve received. So it’s not a perfect, and it can be messy and you may need to go back and, you know, check your assumptions. But what you can do is get some maybe two or three sort of highest value jobs to be done, defined customer jobs defined. And then you can build a customer journey to match that. You may need a different customer journey per job. In a lot of cases you do, because different customer jobs typically need different onboarding, and it may need such unique onboarding that they need different customer journey maps.

Different jobs require different customer journeys

Louis: So give me a brief example of a job from a customer perspective. Okay, with Wistia, again, let’s just take the example of Wistia. So why, what are people marketers in particular hiring Wistia for? They might be hiring Wistia for.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: You know what? I’m too afraid to like bastardize Wistia to be honest.

Louis: That’s okay. We will, we will bastardize another one.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Well, I have a simple example. I work with a client right now who’s B2C financial tool, personal finance tool. And they have some customers that go to them to get out of debt. They have some customers that go to them because they are like, do it yourselfers in terms of like, they really like to know everything about what’s going on. There’s a term for these people, and I can’t remember the name of it, but it’s like, it’s these people who basically like micromanage everything in their life. They’re fiercely in charge about. Of everything in their life. Highly efficient people. And so they like to use spreadsheets which happens to be tied directly to this product. And then there’s a third job, let’s say, which is people who are frustrated competitive. So, so like let’s say Mint customers or Mint users. So frustrated competitive users. Yeah. So the. They may need, they obviously need very different messaging, right? A getting out of debtor needs. They may not be the most prolific spreadsheet user in the world. So they may need time to get up to speed with like, how is a spreadsheet actually going to do this for me? They may need, on top of that, they may need education about getting out of debt itself. Right. So the product education and the problem solving education is a component for them, on the other hand. So the onboarding would be very different versus somebody who understands how the tool works. They’re very tech savvy, they’re very, they’re control freaks and they know exactly what they want. And so then they’re like, I don’t need to know how to get out of debt. I just want like, give me the TLDR on how to use your tool and then get the hell out of my way. And then there’s the third one, which is I’m really used to having my hand held by Mint. You know, I, you know, I’m used to like, very like a lot of restrictions and now this is blown wide open for me. So I need a bit of help on how to use your actual tool. So you can see how those three different jobs require very different, not only marketing experiences and sort of nurturing experiences, but also onboarding.

Louis: And this is it, right? And it’s obvious when you talk about it this way, right? So when I’m looking to go out of debt and use these products and when I’m looking to manage my finances better, you can already picture that those two people will need completely different experiences. But yet most of the time what we do, and a lot of companies are guilty of that is, we just try to provide a blanket type of experience that will work for anyone and therefore works for no one. So I assume that step four, once you’ve built those different journeys, and maybe you need to start with a very simple approach that selects the most important job, the one that has the highest ratio of customer or potential customer to have this job, let’s say they want to get out of debt. 80% of people are in this category. Well, you might want to map this journey first. And then what is step four? So once you have this kind of first version of the map, it’s not going to be perfect, but at least people have pitched in into it and help you build it. What do you do with it?

Defining meaningful KPIs based on customer behavior

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Well, are we, we’re talking about just one customer job for the moment, one customer’s journey. Because if we’re focused on only one, then what I would do next is defining meaningful KPIs. So I mentioned this before, but it’s really important not to gloss over it. What are the, what are the metrics that are affected? What, what are the actual things that you’re looking for that are indicative of somebody having success at a given stage? So that might not be they gave you their credit card. And a lot of ways it’s not. So it’s not like payment source added is not a KPI of somebody seeing value in your tool, for example. But a lot of people use it that way and they’re like, okay, marketing’s focus is payment source added or credit card added or trial started or whatever. When that is only transactional and has nothing to do with the customer’s experience, it has more to do with the mechanics of how your company operates and way less to do with that. So I would go, I would then define meaningful KPIs for each of the stages and then the fifth stage is of a job. Does your current onboarding, does your current marketing, does your current customer’s experience do of affecting that KPI that you’ve defined, that very meaningful KPI that you’ve defined and sort of taking inventory of where you’re at and where the biggest opportunities are that you’re missing. Because at that stage it becomes really obvious what you’re not doing. The lowest hanging fruit or biggest opportunities are like punch you in the face and what needs improving. Also it becomes really, really obvious too, particularly if you’re looking at just that one customer job or that one customer’s journey.

Louis: So give me an example of a meaningful KPIs.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Well, my favorite one that I always use is like paid us twice and has been using our tool for at least three months, for example, that being when you can finally consider somebody out of the evaluation stage.

Louis: So this is behavioral, meaning that this is based on what people have done in the past, not what people are maybe doing or anything like this. So this is rooted in action. And I think this is one of the criteria for many meaningful KPI. It’s rooted in customer behavior because we’ve repeated that many times over in this podcast. People are very bad at predicting what they want to do or what they will do. And the only thing you can really judge and base things on is what people have done. So this is for example, for a customer to define an active customer, pay twice, use the product more than 20 times. For a subscriber that could be subscribed, confirmed the email, and received and opened more than five emails. You can, you know where we’re going with this. So. Yeah, exactly. Right.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: It’s an important process defining that, defining those KPIs is not a small job at all. Like it can actually take. It can take quite a bit of time to get it right. And also considering the fact that you are going to be moving forward with this and hopefully keeping this customer journey at least the, the core pieces that we’re talking about right now for a long time, you want to make sure that you get this right. So. And again, the buy in is really important. Another thing that defining these KPIs is really beneficial for is for defining where does one person’s job end and another’s begin, which can be really important for sales and for CS and marketing, particularly those three. We’re talking about customer experience here, not product experience, obviously. So it’s those three teams or people that are the most affected by those things. So particularly CS and marketing. Deciding where marketing ends and customer success begins is a really important decision and so, so important to the people, like the individuals just at the individual level from like, how is my performance being measured? Am I doing a good job? You know, what are my targets for this quarter? Just that shit that what these marketers are responsible for should be rooted in actual meaning attached to these customer journeys which have been rooted in your customer’s experience. So setting performance targets for your team that aren’t rooted with the customer experience is a big mistake.

Louis: Right. Well, Ja, thanks for going through this step by step with me. I know it’s not easy to go into that level of details, but you did great. So let’s switch gears a bit and move on to more personal stuff which is even more difficult to answer.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Oh great.

Marketing fuckups and lessons learned

Louis: I’m curious, we mentioned you worked with Unbounce for quite a few years. You have a lot of experience in marketing and you work with a lot of clients. I’m curious what has been your biggest marketing fuck up to date?

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Oh God. Big market is marketing fuck up? Wow, that’s a great question. One comes to mind that always comes to mind when I think about fuck ups that actually affected the bottom line of like revenue was a pricing page test. And Ollie Gardner will remember this one well, but it was a pricing page test we were running on the Unbounce website where we can’t remember where we were testing up top. But basically we pushed Free below the, below the fold without realizing that we pushed it below the fold and it took us two weeks to realize what the hell we had done and what that actually meant to the business.

Louis: Just to describe, you had the pricing page but above what you can see on the screen you only had paid plans. And then below that you had to scroll to see the free plan. So you. Basically what happened was people.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: We stopped getting free signups. There was a lot of learnings that came out of this obviously, but free signups dropped and upgrades from free to paid obviously were affected. It became more obvious then. This was like an early day fuck up. This was years ago. But we started prioritizing our free users after that a lot more. I shouldn’t say prioritizing because it’s not that they weren’t important, but we started optimizing their experience a little bit more and taking, taking that opportunity more than we, we had before. It was really just, it was a simple test we were running on the pricing page. It really wasn’t like a big deal, but a couple weeks in the big. The biggest fuck up was not that it happened. I don’t care. That happened. That was great. We learned a lot. The biggest fuck up was that I didn’t know. It took two weeks to figure it out. It would have been a great test had I accounted for it, but it was. I had no explanation until I realized, oh wow, that must be what, what happened?

Louis: And did you get in trouble?

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: No. God no. Not at all. But it was. I never got. I don’t typically get in trouble when I, when I have a job, when I have a boss, I don’t typically get in trouble because I beat myself up about fuck ups way more than enough so nobody else needs to beat me up on them because I take my work like to maybe an Ultra high level of accountability, maybe.

Louis: I’m curious then, while we are in the transparency side of things, have you used any sleazy, shady, aggressive marketing tactics in your career?

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Entire career? I think maybe, and this would be laughable, maybe to a lot of people, but the thing that made me feel dirtiest as a marketer was SEO. And not the good kind of SEO, obviously, but the bad kind. The kind where you’re like putting footer navs together and you’re like naming your links and your footer just the right keyword. I’m like, what, what am I doing with my life?

Louis: Like, when was that?

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Oh, God, years ago. Like over 10 years ago. I have no, I have done that since I. Because I, in the moment I was like, what am I doing? This is, this just feels like this has nothing to do with the customer’s experience. This has nothing to do with, you know, being helpful or providing value or like, you know, if you can do both, that’s what you should aim for. Like be SEO friendly and user friendly. But I, I always default to being user friendly over SEO friendly. But that was maybe like the. What I didn’t like the other thing that I, that I probably did. And this is again, this is way pre mind balance. This is back when I was, I was running an e commerce website. I became very conversion obsessed. It’s easy to do in E commerce, obviously. Well, it’s easy to do always, but it’s particularly easy to do in E commerce, I find. And I became obsessed with very, very, very, very, very small details for too long. Luckily, I am also the type of person who’s hyper brand sensitive. So I never like messed up in terms of the company. Just I disappointed myself in not thinking holistically enough for like a period of time. It was a learning.

Louis: And since it’s the podcast, since you’re listening to this podcast from your house or like working, going to work or cooking or whatever, you haven’t seen Gia’s face when she was talking about SEO and all of that. She really did this disgusted face because

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: she really hates SEO. SEO. I love SEO. I started in SEO. That’s what got me excited about actually about marketing. That was where I dove in first. I guess that was where I first felt yucky. The dark side of it.

Louis: Yeah, the dark side. What do you think marketers should learn today that will help them in the next 10 years, 20 years or 50 years?

Building relationships across departments as a marketer

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: I mean, there’s the obvious stuff like market, like you want to be marketed to and provide value and yada. Yada. But what I think doesn’t get nearly enough attention is again the relationship between marketing and other teams. Marketing and customer success. Marketing and sales. Marketing the product marketing and engineering. Marketing in the executive team, particularly at tech companies it’s not a given that the marketer, even the most senior one or in many cases the only one, has a seat at the table and it’s, you know, getting being taken seriously as maybe a non technical person at a tech company is. Has challenges associated with it and building inroads with the executive team and the engineering team. All the departments for that matter can go a long way to being more. Being a more effective marketer. And so that inter marketing is very interdisciplinary. You can’t operate without these other departments. But I would say further to that, building relationships and inroads and learning to advocate for marketing internally, being a champion for other departments and their needs and how marketing can help CS and how marketing can help sales and vice versa and product and engineering. Advocating for marketing internally is not an easy task, particularly at a tech company. And that’s what I would. That’s where I that’s one of my favorite topics particularly because I’m extra sensitive to the tech side of things. And marketing maybe not getting everybody hates marketers, right? I mean that’s not, you know, you didn’t name that for that for a reason. But at tech companies it’s a little bit different in that it’s all about product first typically. So yeah, just being an advocate for marketing and representing marketing well and being helpful and being a team player and speaking for how marketing drives business value doesn’t always come naturally to everybody. Particular people who are like earlier in their career and so learning those skills is really, really important to being an effective marketer at a company.

Louis: What are the top three resources you would recommend our listeners to check out?

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Well I mean considering the topic I was just talking about and considering that I’m also a marketer, I would be remiss, not to mention forget the funnel obviously. So forget the funnel. I know was mentioned earlier but basically what we do is we run free weekly workshops for SaaS. Marketers focused a lot on this type of customer centric type marketing, but also that advocating for marketing piece, that getting out of the weeds piece, thinking more strategically part of the job that I don’t think gets talked about nearly enough. So definitely the forget the funnel workshops I would recommend. We are also next month in March we’re launching a more guided training version of this. So it’s a much more I think Guided like a much more handheld sort of process of going from mindset all the way to going through customer research, brand development, the entire process, customer journey development, a lot of the stuff that we talked about today. But in a more guided sort of 12 week programs we are going to be doing a training and then other than that in the SaaS space particularly I really love the think tank Slack community which is a big. It’s a big one I think the biggest. I don’t know but it’s one of the biggest communities of marketers. I would highly recommend that Nicole Elizabeth demarais runs it and everybody is really helpful and giving and like there’s a channel that is all about like I need help this week and you can go in there and ask anything and you will have undoubtedly people like raise their hand to help you, which is amazing. There’s a lot of really cool channels in that Slack community. And then also she just launched a newsletter. There’s only been once, it’s brand new but because it’s Nicole I have no doubt it is going to be jam packed of like SaaS goodness is called Sunday Brunch. She just launched a newsletter that I think if you go to her website you can sign up.

Louis: So yeah, it’s Nicole Elizabeth Demeray.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: That’s right.

Louis: We’ll add that in the show notes of the episode obviously as usual but just google it as well as you have heard me saying this name or Gia telling her name and you’ll find it somewhere. Yeah, she’s great. Forget the Funnel is a great show. I love the name as well. It’s pretty cool and I actually been on it recently so I’ll send you. I’ll put that in the show notes as well as a link because that was quite fun. So Gia, you’ve been absolute pleasure to talk to. Learned a lot from you. Where can people connect with you?

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Twitter is probably the best place. My Twitter handle back at my poor decision making skills back in late 2008. GGiia is my Twitter handle. Don’t ask and I could have gotten my first name. Don’t even get me started on not taking my first name at the time it was available. So Twitter and then my company is abettercx.com right.

Louis: Thank you.

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi: Thank you.

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