Georgiana Laudi: evaluation

Transcript context

…Awesome. So we're going to spend a lot of time on what you've learned working with companies through Forget The Funnel. Why did you call it Forget The funnel? Because funnels are gross. I mean, it's a really antiquated idea. It's not just funnels that we sort of take issue with, it's buyers' journeys or even... I remember actually at Startup Fest 2012, I want to say, Dave McClure was talking about pirate metrics and I was like, "Huzzah, marketing has a role post acquisition. Everybody understands now. " It was a real moment for me. But the problem with funnels and pirate metrics and the favorites that I love to pick on are MQLs and SQLs is that nobody knows what those mean. It puts every customer in the same sort of buckets. It assumes that all customers and all products are the same. It puts businesses, or they, I should say, puts businesses at the center of the business versus putting customers at the center. It's about the values of the business, not the value to the customer that's being measured. Also, it just kind of feels gross for people, this idea of pushing people through a funnel. And then probably a particularly relevant for SaaS companies is that recurring revenue businesses, you cannot think about marketing and growth and the business overall as ending at acquisition. Otherwise, you're not in business anymore. The vast, vast majority of these models don't take post-acquisition retention, expansion, all of that into account. 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. So to delete that out of the equation is a big problem. So yeah, in a nutshell, funnels are bad. Okay. So I'm excited to dig into a lot of stuff you've learned, but I have a couple other things I just wanted to talk about to set the foundation.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.