Using Customer Intel to Fix Acquisition, Adoption, and Retention

Georgiana Laudi has helped teams double conversions, dramatically increase adoption, and cut churn by grounding growth decisions in real customer insight. In this session, she’ll break down the customer-led framework behind those results — and how to apply it to your own product.

What we'll cover:

• How to stop guessing about what's driving (or killing) conversions and retention.
• How to get the deep insights you need without months of research.
• The simple customer-led framework that helped Sparktoro double their trial-to-paid conversions, Autobooks increase product adoption 300%, and Synked Up reduce churn by 50%.

Gia (Georgiana Laudi) is a longtime marketing exec, strategic advisor, author and speaker. She loves nothing more than helping product teams get the clarity they need to scale with confidence. She co-created the Customer-Led Growth framework (and co-authored the best-selling book, Forget The Funnel) to help pinpoint exactly where to concentrate your efforts so you can align your team and scale faster.

→ Want Gia's customer interview questions and email outreach templates? Send her an email (gia@forgetthefunnel.com) and mention you're from the SaaS Institute. 

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In this expert session, Georgiana (Gia) Laudi — founder of Forget the Funnel — walks through a practical, repeatable framework for Customer-Led Growth (CLG) and how B2B SaaS teams can use customer insight to improve conversion, activation, and retention without relying solely on top-of-funnel tactics.

The core idea: the fastest and most reliable path to profitable growth is deeply understanding why customers buy, how they experience value, and where friction blocks progress, then operationalizing those insights across product, marketing, and onboarding.

What is Customer-Led Growth?

Customer-Led Growth is not a replacement for product-led or marketing-led growth. Instead, it’s the foundation that informs when and how those other models work best. By grounding decisions in real customer motivations and behaviors, teams can focus on changes that meaningfully move revenue and retention — not just activity metrics.

Gia shared a three-step CLG framework that teams can use regardless of company size or go-to-market motion.

The 3-Step Customer-Led Growth Framework

1. Identify the “Big Jobs” Customers Hire Your Product For

Rather than focusing on small UX tasks or feature usage, CLG starts with understanding the core job customers are trying to accomplish in their business or role.

Best practices:

• Focus on qualitative Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) interviews, typically 15–30 minutes.
• Prioritize paying, active, and recent customers to avoid recall bias and outdated market signals.
• Aim to identify 3–5 primary jobs that explain most buying decisions.

These interviews uncover:

• What triggered the search for a solution
• What alternatives were considered
• What success looks like from the customer’s perspective

This becomes the anchor for messaging, onboarding, and roadmap decisions.

2. Map Customer Success Milestones to Value Moments

Next, translate those jobs into a customer journey that reflects how people actually reach value over time.

This involves:

• Mapping key milestones from initial struggle → evaluation → ongoing success
• Defining leading indicators that signal whether customers are progressing
• Connecting those milestones to product behaviors, onboarding flows, and education

Instead of tracking generic engagement metrics, teams focus on the specific actions that correlate with customers achieving the outcome they bought the product for.

This milestone map can then guide:

• Onboarding design
• Feature prioritization
• Lifecycle messaging
• KPI selection

3. Audit the Experience from the Customer’s Point of View

With jobs and milestones defined, teams can audit the entire experience to identify where customers get stuck, confused, or delayed in reaching value.

This step helps surface opportunities to:

• Introduce key features earlier in the journey
• Improve discovery and education
• Reduce friction in setup and adoption
• Clarify messaging around outcomes, not just features

The output of this step often feeds directly into:

• Problem-focused landing pages
• Segmented onboarding paths
• Product dashboards aligned to value
• Strategic roadmap planning

Even small improvements at key points in the journey can compound into meaningful gains in conversion and retention.

Turning Research Into Action

For running customer research efficiently and translating insights into execution:

• Target customers who are actively using and receiving value from the product.
• Expect to run ~10–30 interviews depending on experience and customer base size.
• Use live interviews when possible for highest signal, supported by other methods when needed.
• Convert interview themes into value maps that connect customer goals to product workflows.
• Segment onboarding and messaging based on top jobs instead of forcing all users into the same experience.

Importantly, customer research should not live only with one person. The goal is to create shared operating models so product, marketing, and growth teams can make aligned decisions without constant interpretation.

Common Growth Challenges (and How CLG Helps)

During the session, several recurring patterns emerged that many SaaS teams face:

• Low conversion despite strong traffic: Often caused by messaging that doesn’t reflect urgent customer problems.
• Conflicting positioning: Different customer segments arriving for different reasons, all seeing the same generic homepage.
• Activation gaps: Customers signing up but not reaching meaningful value quickly enough.
• Overreliance on sales or audits: Useful short-term, but not scalable without stronger self-serve and onboarding flows.

Using CLG, teams can:

• Identify which segments have the highest urgency and willingness to pay
• Align messaging to real buying triggers
• Design onboarding paths that reflect different customer goals
• Reduce friction earlier in the journey instead of adding more acquisition volume

Why Small Improvements Matter

Gia highlighted that growth often comes from improving what already exists, not just adding new channels.

Examples discussed showed that:

• Adjusting messaging and onboarding flows can significantly improve trial-to-paid conversion
• Surfacing the right feature earlier can dramatically increase activation
• Even 1–2% gains at key funnel steps can compound into large revenue impact over time

Customer-Led Growth helps teams identify where those leverage points are, rather than guessing or copying tactics from companies with different customers.

Key Takeaways

• Growth strategies work best when they are grounded in real customer motivations and value moments.
• Jobs-to-Be-Done research provides clarity on why customers buy and what success means to them.
• Mapping customer milestones helps teams focus on leading indicators that actually drive revenue.
• Segmentation based on customer goals enables clearer messaging and better onboarding.
• Small, targeted improvements across the customer journey can outperform large top-of-funnel efforts.

For teams looking to improve conversion, retention, and expansion in a sustainable way, Customer-Led Growth offers a practical framework for aligning product, marketing, and onboarding around what customers truly care about and what drives business results.