418. Forget the Funnel ❌
The Customer-Led playbook for bringing empathy into your marketing
Hi there 👋
Over the past few years, I’ve been lucky to cross paths with Georgiana (Gia) Laudi and Claire Suellentrop. They’ve run marketing at legendary startups like Unbounce and Calendly, and now they run Forget the Funnel, which advises startups on how to grow through a customer-led approach. I’ve learned a ton from them. 🧠
In addition to founders, they are authors! Their brand new book, Forget the Funnel: A Customer-Led Approach to Driving Predictable Recurring Revenue came out just a few days ago.
They sent me an early copy, which I LOVED.
And they were generous enough to provide me a handful of copies to give away to you, too!
To enter the giveaway, simply click the “like” button on this newsletter, and I’ll do a random grab of three winners and we’ll send you a book. 🎁
Wishing you a great week ahead,
Kevan
(ᵔᴥᵔ)
Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world and my time at Oyster, Buffer, and more.
Say hi anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
The Tactical Guide to Empathy: How to Craft Messaging that Converts
Sustainable growth happens when your marketing is overflowing with empathy.
This isn’t a new idea. More and more companies are working on understanding their customers and reflecting their customer’s experience in their messaging, marketing, and positioning.
But a question that is a lot more nuanced and discussed much less frequently is:
How the heck do you actually do this?
How do you create marketing, messaging, and positioning that overflows with empathy?
We’ve seen two paths that companies take when they set out to understand their customers and develop empathetic marketing:
The “Guesswork” path. This is when you take your best guess and try to assume what your customers want. This path works sometimes, but most of the time doesn’t meaningfully move the needle.
The “Customer-Led” path. This puts you right in front of your best customers to uncover their story. You then use their words and experiences to craft stronger messaging and positioning for them.
We prefer #2. Which is why we’ve built the framework around it.
Let’s dive in.
The Customer-Led path to empathy
Step 1: Identify your Best Customers
Not all customers are created equal.
You want to learn from your best, your “pry it from my hands” customers who:
Understand the problem your product solves and have personally struggled with it.
Pay for the value your product provides without hesitation.
Have an ongoing need for your product (not a one-off use case).
Have reached what we call “value realization,” meaning they’ve clearly solved the problem they wanted to solve using your product.
Began paying recently enough that they remember what life was like before they found your product (ideally three to six months ago; up to a year ago for some products).
These are the customers you want to learn from, since these are the customers you want more of.
“So, I shouldn’t talk to people who didn’t like my product? Won’t I learn something from them too?”
You absolutely would learn something from them. But not only are they a more challenging audience to identify and reach, these aren’t the customers you want to clone. In fact, dialing in your messaging would (hopefully) prevent wrong-fit customers from buying in the first place.
Step 2: Start Asking Them (the right) Questions
Customers aren’t product experts.
That’s ok, because you’re not asking them about the product or features you should build. Instead, you are looking for the pains and needs behind their actions and desires. Understanding customers’ psychology, not their opinions, is at the heart of the questions you ask
Before we dive into what to ask let’s briefly look at the how.
How to Ask Your Customers Questions
No matter what format you use to gather customer data (more on interviews vs surveys below), the goal is the same: you are trying to build a storyboard of customers’ real, step-by-step experience. This experience spans from life before they ever knew they needed your product to the ongoing value and growth they’re now enjoying.
Getting good, usable data about your customers experience relies entirely on how you word your questions. Avoid inviting opinions (what would you think if we made the button blue?), leading questions (you didn’t really need that reporting feature, right?) or closed questions (did you like the onboarding experience?)
Try to gain an understanding of what happened that pushed your customer to seek new solutions, then ask “what happened next?” until you have the complete story.
Open-ended questions give you rich insight into not only the customer’s experience, but also the customer’s voice, which – bonus – guides the words you should use in your marketing and overall messaging.
What to Ask Your Customers
Now that you know how to ask, here’s what to ask:
How are you using [product name] day-to-day?
When did you first start using [product name]?
Okay, so with that timeline in mind, take me back to life before [product name]. Prior to [product name], what were you using instead? If you were using a combination of any tools or products, what were those?
Tell me about the moment you realized [old way] wasn’t cutting it. What caused that moment? What compelled you to look for something different?
Where did you go to look for new solutions? Did you try anything else before [product name]?
How did you find out about [product name]?
Why did you decide to choose [product name] over other options? Can you recall anything that stood out to you?
When you signed up for [product name], what happened that made you feel certain it was the right solution for you?
Now that you have [product name], what's the number one thing you're able to do that you weren't able to do before?
What do you wish [product name] did that it doesn't do today?
Notice that these questions ask customers to report on what happened: the situation that led them to be dissatisfied with their old solution, actions they took, and specific details about the product that stood out to them.
“Should these all take place in the form of customer interviews?”
Here’s a simple filter to use:
If your pool of ideal customers is 500 people or more, start with a survey. Betting on an average survey response rate of between 10-15%, sending it to 500 happy customers will give you enough responses to feel confidence in the data you gather.
If you have fewer than 500 people in your best customer pool—or if you have time and resources for only one research method—choose interviews.
With that said, interviews can be performed at any company size, and aiming for 10-15 interviews of your best customers should give you enough data to begin noticing patterns.
<aside>
👉 Two Free Guides to Take the Stress Out of Customer Research
This wouldn’t be a “How to” without some tangible resources to act on. Both these resources (and many more) are in the workbook that accompanies our book.
✅ Make setting up and giving interviews a breeze with our Interview request email template + interview blueprint
✅ Create surveys in a heartbeat with our Customer surveys guide
</aside>
Step 3: Bridge the Gaps Between Your Customer’s Voice and Your Company’s Voice
Once you’ve identified your best customers and asked them questions to uncover what led them to buying (and loving) your product, you’re likely to be left with a ton of information to make sense of.
These stories you’ve gathered have the key to empathetic messaging.
Here’s a brief story about how we helped Autobooks use their research to bridge their customers’ success gaps:
When Claire began working with Autobooks, the team had run interviews with their most engaged customers - those who were using the product frequently and loved it.
Claire parsed and analyzed the transcripts from those interviews to identify the gaps between what customers were saying, versus what Autobooks’ messaging was saying.
After identifying patterns in the research, a lightbulb turned on: up to that point, Autobooks emphasized that the platform was an “all-in-one”: invoicing, bill pay, bookkeeping, accounting, and so much other good stuff. But the research showed that only one feature set actually got small business owners through the door: online invoicing and payment processing.
Customers didn’t understand and didn’t have time to sort out an all-in-one finance management platform. And that was Autobooks’ key takeaway: they needed to narrow down their messaging and highlight the one feature that made their customers’ lives easier.
Everything about how they talked to small businesses needed reworking, and this new realization served as the foundation.
A new message emerged:
“Give your customers a way to pay you by credit card, right into your bank account.”
The result? The team saw a 64% increase in the rate of small business owners signing up for Autobooks after first learning about it (from 14% to 23%). What’s more, they saw a 300% increase in the number of customers accepting credit card payments through their platform on a sustained basis.
And given that processing payments is how Autobooks generates revenue, these were pretty exciting outcomes.
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We hope you found this useful!
To learn more about using empathy in your marketing through Customer-Led Growth, check out our new book.
Get a paperback copy of Forget the Funnel now OR snag the Kindle version for only $0.99 until tomorrow, May 15.
If you have any questions about Customer-Led Growth, email us@forgetthefunnel.com.
If you ever want to explore how CLG could fit into your company, book an intro session.
✌️
Gia, Claire, and the Forget the Funnel Team
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, Vox, and Polly. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
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