Forget the Funnel: Why Customer-Led Growth Unlocks Revenue That Traditional Marketing Can’t

Let me ask you a direct question: Do you actually know why your best customers buy from you? 

Not the story you tell yourself. Not the value proposition on your homepage. Not the features your product team is most proud of. 

I mean the real reason—the struggle they were facing, the alternatives they considered, the moment they decided you were the solution, and the milestones that made them stay. 

If you hesitated, you’re not alone. Most executives operate on assumptions about their customers that are partially true, occasionally accurate, and dangerously incomplete. And in a world where technology creates distance between companies and customers—especially in SaaS, product-led growth, and subscription models—those assumptions become expensive blind spots. 

Today, I want to share three transformative takeaways from a conversation with strategic advisor Georgiana Laudi who has spent over two decades helping B2B and B2C brands turn customer insights into repeatable, scalable revenue. Her approach is rooted in a methodology called customer-led growth, and it flips traditional marketing on its head. 

These aren’t theoretical frameworks. They’re battle-tested strategies that have unlocked growth for companies stuck in the “flat revenue despite high traffic” trap. And they apply directly to your business, whether you’re a SaaS founder, a product leader, or an executive trying to break through a growth plateau. 

Takeaway 1: Technology Creates Distance—Close It with Jobs-to-Be-Done Research

Here’s the paradox of modern business: the tools that help us scale—automation, self-service onboarding, AI-powered support—also create distance between us and our customers. 

For software companies, especially those with product-led growth models, this distance is structural. There’s no sales team building relationships. No account managers checking in. Customers sign up, onboard themselves, and either succeed or churn—often without you knowing why. 

And that’s a problem. 

Because when you don’t understand the job your customer hired you to do, you can’t design experiences that help them succeed. You can’t prioritize features that matter. You can’t write messaging that resonates. And you can’t identify which customers are worth investing in. 

The Jobs-to-Be-Done Framework

The solution starts with a specific methodology called Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD). The core belief is simple but profound: your customers are hiring you to do a job for them. 

That job isn’t just “use our software” or “automate a process.” It’s rooted in a struggle—a circumstance in their life or business that created an urgent need for a solution like yours. 

Understanding that job requires talking to customers and having them recount their journey like a documentary: 

• The struggle phase: What was happening in their life or business that made them realize they needed a solution? 
• The discovery phase: How did they find you? What alternatives did they consider? 
• The decision phase: What were the pushes and pulls? What anxieties did they have? What were their deal-breakers? 
• The growth phase: What milestones made them feel successful? What kept them coming back? 

When you conduct these interviews across a meaningful segment of customers, patterns emerge. You start to see the real reasons people buy, the real obstacles they face, and the real value they experience. 

And suddenly, you’re not guessing anymore. 

Why This Matters for Executives

Most teams are satisfied with a surface-level understanding of their customers. They know demographics, firmographics, and maybe some behavioral data. But they don’t know the context, motivations, and anxieties that drive decisions. 

JTBD research gives you that depth. And with that depth, you can: 

• Reverse-engineer success for future customers by designing experiences that align with their journey. 
• Identify which customer segments are worth investing in (more on this in Takeaway 2). 
• Measure what matters by tracking success milestones, not just transactional metrics like signups or MQLs. 

How to Get Started

You don’t need a massive research budget or a six-month timeline. Here’s a practical starting point: 

1. Identify 10-15 customers who represent your ideal customer profile—those who activated quickly, stuck around, and get real value from your product. 
2. Conduct 30-45 minute interviews using the JTBD framework. Ask them to recount their journey from struggle to success. 
3. Look for patterns across interviews. What struggles are consistent? What alternatives did they consider? What made them choose you? 
4. Map the customer journey from struggle to growth, identifying key milestones where customers experience value. 
5. Use those milestones as KPIs to measure your ability to help customers succeed. 

This isn’t a one-time project. It’s an ongoing practice that keeps you close to your customers even as you scale. 

Executive Action Plan: 

• Schedule JTBD interviews with 10 of your best customers in the next 30 days. Use a consistent interview guide to ensure comparability. 
• Involve cross-functional stakeholders (product, marketing, customer success, sales) in synthesizing insights. 
• Map your customer journey based on real customer stories, not internal assumptions. 

Takeaway 2: The Vocal Majority Is Not Your Best Customer—Segment Ruthlessly

Here’s a story that will sound familiar. 

A SaaS company in the MarTech space had been growing steadily through thoughtful content marketing and thought leadership. Traffic was high.

Signups were solid. But revenue had been flat for a year. 

No matter what they tried—more ads, more content, more features—nothing moved the needle. 

When they dug into customer research, they discovered something shocking: they had been optimizing for the wrong customer. 

Two Customer Segments, Two Very Different Jobs

The research revealed two distinct groups: 

1. The vocal majority: Small businesses new to social media, looking to grow their audience. They loved the content, engaged with customer support constantly, and were highly visible. 
2. The quiet high-value segment: Businesses looking to automate their social media posting. They activated quickly, rarely needed support, and had significantly higher lifetime value (LTV). 

The team had been operating under the assumption that the first group was their target customer—because they were the ones customer support talked to all the time, the ones commenting on blog posts, the ones asking for features. 

But the data told a different story. The second group was more profitable, had better product fit, and required less hand-holding. 

The Fix: Messaging and Positioning

The team updated messaging on just three pages—homepage, product page, and pricing page—to better address the needs of the high-value segment. 

The results? 

• 98% increase in signups from the website. 
• 40% increase in trial-to-paid conversion rate. 

Why? Because they were finally speaking to the right customer—the one who was already succeeding quietly but wasn’t being adequately addressed in their positioning. 

The Lesson: Segment Ruthlessly

Most teams serve too broad a customer base. They try to be everything to everyone, and in doing so, they dilute their messaging, their product roadmap, and their customer experience. 

The breakthrough comes when you identify the sweet spot customer—the one who has: 

• An urgent problem they’re motivated to solve. 
• A willingness to pay for a solution. 
• A sustained need that creates long-term value (especially critical for subscription models). 
• A strong product fit with your solution. 

Once you identify that customer, you can design everything—messaging, onboarding, product features, customer success—around helping them succeed. 

That doesn’t mean you stop serving other customers. But it means you prioritize ruthlessly and stop letting the vocal majority distract you from the high-value segment. 

How to Identify Your Best Customer

Here’s a practical framework: 

1. Segment your customer base by behavior, not just demographics. Look at activation rates, retention, LTV, and support needs. 
2. Conduct JTBD interviews with customers in each segment to understand their motivations, context, and success milestones. 
3. Analyze the data to identify which segment has the highest LTV, best product fit, and most sustainable need. 
4. Prioritize that segment in your messaging, onboarding, and product roadmap. 
5. Create scalable experiences that help that segment succeed without high-touch support. 

Executive Action Plan: 

• Run a segmentation analysis of your customer base. Identify the top 20% by LTV and analyze their behavior patterns. 
• Conduct JTBD interviews with customers in each segment to understand their jobs, motivations, and success milestones. 
• Update your homepage, product page, and pricing page to speak directly to your highest-value segment. 

Takeaway 3: Growth Unlocks Come from Aligning Customer Success Milestones with Business Goals

Most companies measure the wrong things. 

They track signups, MQLs, SQLs, and conversion rates. They obsess over funnel metrics and pipeline velocity. And while those metrics matter, they’re transactional, not transformational. 

They tell you what happened, but they don’t tell you why customers succeed or fail. 

The breakthrough in customer-led growth is shifting from transactional metrics to success milestones—the moments when customers experience real value. 

What Are Success Milestones?

Success milestones are the leaps of faith in a customer’s relationship with you. They’re not transactional moments like “signed up” or “completed onboarding.” They’re value moments like: 

• “I automated my first workflow and saved 5 hours this week.” 
• “I published my first report and my boss was impressed.” 
• “I onboarded my team and we’re all using the tool daily.” 

These milestones are what keep customers coming back. They’re what turn trial users into paying customers and paying customers into advocates. 

And when you identify those milestones, you can design your entire customer experience around helping customers reach them. 

The Customer-Led Growth Process

Here’s how it works in practice: 

1. Conduct JTBD research to understand your customer’s journey from struggle to success. 
2. Map the customer experience from the struggle phase through evaluation to growth, identifying key success milestones. 
3. Define KPIs around those milestones—not just transactional metrics, but measures of your ability to help customers succeed. 
4. Align your team around helping customers reach those milestones. Product builds features that enable milestones. Marketing communicates the value of milestones. Customer success coaches customers toward milestones. 
5. Measure and iterate based on how well you’re helping customers succeed. 

The ROI of Customer-Led Growth

When you align your business around customer success milestones, several things happen: 

• Activation rates improve because onboarding is designed to help customers reach their first success milestone quickly. 
• Retention increases because customers are experiencing ongoing value, not just using features. 
• Expansion revenue grows because successful customers are more likely to upgrade, add seats, or buy additional products. 
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC) decreases because word-of-mouth and referrals increase as customers succeed. 

This is the compounding effect of customer-led growth. You’re not just optimizing for short-term conversions; you’re building a flywheel where customer success drives business growth. 

How to Implement This in Your Organization

Here’s a 90-day roadmap: 

Weeks 1-4: Research and Discovery 

• Conduct JTBD interviews with 10-15 of your best customers. 
• Identify patterns in their journeys and define 3-5 key success milestones. 

Weeks 5-8: Mapping and Measurement 

• Map the end-to-end customer experience from struggle to growth. 
• Define KPIs around success milestones (e.g., “% of customers who reach Milestone 1 within 7 days”). 
• Conduct a gap analysis: Where is your current experience out of alignment with customer needs? 

Weeks 9-12: Alignment and Execution 

• Facilitate a cross-functional workshop with product, marketing, sales, and customer success to review insights and prioritize opportunities. 
• Update messaging, onboarding, and customer success playbooks to align with success milestones. 
• Launch experiments to test new approaches and measure impact. 

Executive Action Plan: 

• Define 3-5 success milestones for your ideal customer based on JTBD research. 
• Shift your KPI dashboard to include success milestone metrics alongside transactional metrics. 
• Facilitate a cross-functional workshop to align your team around helping customers reach those milestones. 

Bringing It All Together: The Customer-Led Growth Flywheel

Let’s connect the dots. 

1. Close the distance with JTBD research to deeply understand your customers’ struggles, motivations, and success milestones. 
2. Segment ruthlessly to identify your highest-value customers and prioritize them in your messaging, product, and customer experience. 
3. Align around success milestones to create a flywheel where customer success drives business growth. 

This isn’t just a marketing strategy. It’s a business strategy that aligns product, marketing, sales, and customer success around a single goal: helping customers succeed. 

And when customers succeed, your business grows. 

The Cost of Assumptions

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most executives are making decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate assumptions about their customers. 

They assume they know why customers buy. They assume they know which customers are most valuable. They assume they know what drives retention. 

And those assumptions are costing them growth. 

The companies that break through growth plateaus are the ones that replace assumptions with insights. They talk to customers. They map journeys. They measure what matters. 

And they build businesses around helping customers succeed. 

Final Thoughts

If your growth has stalled, if your signups are high but revenue is flat, if your team is working harder but not seeing results—the problem isn’t your product, your marketing, or your team. 

The problem is that you’re optimizing for the wrong things. 

You’re chasing the vocal majority instead of the high-value segment. You’re measuring transactional metrics instead of success milestones. You’re making decisions based on assumptions instead of insights. 

The solution is customer-led growth. And it starts with getting close to your customers. 

So here’s my challenge to you: Schedule 10 customer interviews in the next 30 days. Ask them about their journey. Listen for patterns. Map their success milestones. 

And then build your business around helping them succeed. 

Because when your customers win, you win. 

Listen to the full episode on C-Suite Radio: Disrupt & Innovate | C-Suite Network 

Watch the episode: DI 115 How to Use Customer Insights for Scalable Growth | Gia Laudi’s Proven Strategies  

This article was drafted with the assistance of an AI writing assistant (Abacus.AI’s ChatLLM Teams) and edited by Lisa L. Levy for accuracy, tone, and final content.