Georgiana Laudi is a prominent figure in the SaaS and B2B marketing world, best known as the co-founder of Forget the Funnel (FTF), a company dedicated to helping SaaS businesses develop and implement customer-centric growth strategies, and the author of Forget the Funnel book.
Key Takeaways
(00:00-07:45) How to Build Real Customer Relationships
(07:45-17:09) Capturing Attention in a Busy B2B World
(17:09-23:10) Why Marketing Misses the Mark
(23:10-30:01) Redefining the Role of Product Marketers
(30:01-39:58) The Right Content at the Right Time
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Breaking the Funnel
Georgiana Laudi, co-founder of Forget the Funnel, champions a customer-centric approach that moves beyond the limitations of the traditional marketing funnel, particularly for SaaS and recurring revenue businesses where ongoing value delivery is paramount. She emphasizes understanding the customer's context and focusing on their "value promise" and "value realization" rather than solely on lead generation and transactional metrics. Georgiana advocates for elevating the role of product marketing to deeply understand customer needs and align all marketing functions around the customer experience, highlighting the dangers of volume-driven lead generation and the necessity for a relationship-focused mindset across all business functions.
1. How to Build Real Customer Relationships
Georgiana explains why the funnel model is a poor fit for SaaS and other recurring revenue businesses. In these models, the customer journey doesn’t end when a purchase is made—in fact, that’s just the beginning. Recurring revenue companies need to focus not only on acquiring customers but also on continually delivering value to keep them happy and engaged over time. The funnel, which traditionally focuses on moving customers through a linear process, overlooks this ongoing relationship.
One of Georgiana’s key criticisms of the funnel is its failure to account for the broader context in which customers make decisions. For instance, she explains that customers are often already dealing with the problem you solve before they even know your brand exists. Ignoring this context means missing opportunities to create more relevant and impactful marketing. She shares an example of working with a client whose customers often searched for an invoicing tool while sitting in their vehicles on job sites. Understanding this scenario helped the company design a better experience tailored to the customer’s real-world needs.
We find the funnel to be a sort of lazy way of thinking about customers, and it's also problematic—especially now. When we think of our relationships with customers in this flattened, simplistic, and generic way like a funnel, we lose all kinds of opportunities to create better experiences, deliver more value, and increase conversions overall. (Georgiana Laudi)
2. Capturing Attention in a Busy B2B World
Georgiana explains how companies often think about customers through the lens of what they’re worth to the business, rather than the value the business delivers to them. She believes this transactional mindset leads to a poor customer experience. Instead of focusing on "leads" and "prospects," Georgiana emphasizes looking at how well companies help customers achieve meaningful milestones in their journey—what Forget the Funnel calls "value promise" and "value realization."
Alex points out that top sales teams focus on customer value rather than just closing deals. He shares how some companies produce annual reports showcasing the real value they've delivered to clients, calling this "real marketing." Georgiana agrees, adding that many marketing teams get stuck producing overhyped case studies that don't resonate with customers.
Georgiana highlights how product marketing is often undervalued or misunderstood within many SaaS and tech companies. Product marketing teams are meant to deeply understand customers and create strategies that connect their needs to the product. Unfortunately, many marketing teams are forced to focus on lead generation instead of building strong foundations, leading to ineffective results and wasted effort.
Georgiana touches on a common issue in tech companies: marketers are often underpaid, undervalued, and disconnected from leadership. This leads to misaligned expectations, with marketing teams scrambling to meet unreasonable lead targets, which only worsens as layoffs and job pressures mount.
That’s actually where Forget the Funnel came from—the misalignment between marketing and tech, and the misunderstanding between leadership teams and marketing. Everybody thinks they’re a marketing expert because everyone is marketed to, so there are lots of opinions flying around. (Georgiana Laudi)
3. Why Marketing Misses the Mark
Alex points out that marketing skills are no longer confined to marketing departments. In today’s business environment, everyone—from salespeople to HR professionals—needs to adopt a marketing mindset. He argues that in the future, the best sales reps will think more like marketers, using the same communication and customer empathy skills.
However, the speakers agree that many marketers fall into traps, particularly with demand generation. For example, top-of-the-funnel efforts often focus on driving leads at a high volume, but the quality is questionable. This approach results in pseudo marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and sales-qualified leads (SQLs), which are numbers-driven rather than relationship-driven. This tactic leads to overwhelming customers with spammy, impersonal content and making a weak first impression.
Georgiana highlights how product marketing, when leveraged correctly, can help align different parts of the marketing function—awareness, demand generation, and content marketing—while keeping the customer’s experience at the center. She stresses the need for marketers to take a step back and see the big picture: Who is the customer? What problem are they solving? And how does their interaction with the product evolve?
4. Redefining the Role of Product Marketers
Alex shares his own experience as a former consultant who, despite a strong background, found himself gravitating towards focusing on product features and demos. He points out that many product marketers get stuck in the technicalities of the product itself, especially when working with sales teams. In larger enterprises, the tendency is to view product marketers as support for sales rather than as strategic leaders focused on customer needs. Alex questions whether there's a new wave of product marketers that go beyond this narrow role.
Georgiana responds by highlighting the often misunderstood and underutilized role of product marketing. For her, product marketing should be about deeply understanding customers—their needs, decision points, and "leaps of faith"—and translating this knowledge to guide teams across marketing, sales, and product development. She introduces the concept of the customer-led growth framework, where jobs-to-be-done research helps product marketers map out key moments in the customer journey. This includes understanding what customers are thinking, feeling, and doing at different points, allowing teams to reverse-engineer the ideal customer experience.
I’m not saying that a product marketer is responsible for executing and implementing the strategy for the end-to-end customer experience. What I’m saying is that product marketing is responsible for learning what the customer needs, getting intimately familiar with the ideal customer and their needs, the milestones, the major decision-making points, and the critical leaps of faith that your customer takes in their relationship with you. (Georgiana Laudi)
5. The Right Content at the Right Time
Georgiana addresses a common misconception: job titles aren’t what matter—what matters is someone taking responsibility for truly understanding customer needs and how those insights feed back into the rest of the organization. Whether a company calls this person the Head of Product Marketing or the Head of Customer Experience, the essential role is someone who segments the customer base, understands what ideal customers need, and ensures the company’s offerings meet those expectations.
Georgiana identifies three primary organizational models—product-led, sales-led, and product-led sales—each of which requires a different content approach.
Georgiana explains that in product-led sales, content plays a vital role at the awareness stage but becomes less important as buyers move into the evaluation phase. In these models, the product needs to speak for itself, allowing users to explore the product (e.g., through trial accounts or sandbox environments) and self-qualify before engaging with sales. However, she stresses the importance of re-engaging users—via email or other communication channels—because a large percentage of users might get distracted and never return to the product after their first interaction.
In sales-led environments, content takes on a different role. Georgiana describes how these companies should leverage programmatic communications to re-engage users during the evaluation process. However, she cautions that programmatic communication must be more than just swapping in a buyer’s name or title—it needs to feel personalized and segmented appropriately to the buyer's needs. While sales teams focus on one-to-one interactions, there’s an opportunity for marketers to use content and automation to enhance the overall experience, aligning it with the buyer’s journey without overwhelming them.
The title isn’t important. It’s about whether someone is thinking about the customer experience holistically and is responsible for understanding what customers—and ideal customers—need. That’s really important. Not all customers are created equally. We need to think about segmentation and how to get that intel back to the rest of the teams. Somebody has to be responsible for doing that. Whether you call that person the head of customer experience or the head of product marketing really doesn’t matter. (Georgiana Laudi)
Check the episode's Transcript (AI-generated) HERE.
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