Relying on Your ‘Top of Funnel’ is a Mistake You Can’t Afford in 2024

The Forget The Funnel Podcast

The numbers are in:
SaaS growth is flat or down. Cost to acquire customers is up.
Global startup investment over the last twelve months reached $285 billion — a 38% decline year over year, according to Crunchbase*.
Gone are the days of ‘move fast and break things’. SaaS leaders are being forced to think about efficiency or risk running out of runway.
And we think this is a really good thing.
Why?
Finally, rather than spending more on the ‘top of the funnel’, founders are looking more closely at their positioning, messaging, onboarding and early product experience as the powerful growth levers they are. Also, more than ever before, it’s not just mature SaaS companies leveraging customer marketing for post-acquisition expansion strategies.
In this episode, Georgiana Laudi & Claire Suellentrop dig into building resilience to the top of funnel challenges facing SaaS right now - from tactics to help lower the cost of acquiring new customers, to growing revenue by focusing on expanding your existing customers.
Discussed:

• Why it’s now more complicated than ever to acquire new customers in SaaS - and the missed opportunity in successfully finding ways to expand revenue from existing ones.
• How to lower CAC and increase efficiency across the ‘funnel’ - from getting ridiculously close to the customer through research to building scalable customer experiences and programmatic communications.

Key Moments:

[4:44] Georgiana and Claire outline the reality facing many SaaS companies right now - a focus on profitability, slowed growth, and diminishing returns on once-reliable growth tactics.
[8:20] The pair discuss why the evolution of customer expectations has led to the skillsets of SaaS teams becoming outdated in an era where net dollar retention is down across the board YoY - and the role leaders play in exacerbating this problem.
[12:44] Georgiana unpacks how investing in an existing customer base by expanding on the value you already provide can unlock new opportunities for growth - and some of the ways you can practically do this.
[19:01] The pair share their recommendations on how to address lowering the cost of acquisition and increasing efficiency across the board, from optimizing the customer experience for new sign-ups to getting ahead of customer attrition and expanding your existing customer base.
[26:40] Georgiana covers the importance of focusing on the buyer champion across marketing and messaging and the danger of trying to talk to too many personas simultaneously - especially in enterprise sales.
[30:50] The pair shares practical tips on how to better program reactive and proactive email marketing campaigns to attract new customers and retain/expand old ones.
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*Source: https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/global-funding-data-analysis-ai-eoy-2023/

Follow Georgiana on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgianalaudi/
Follow Claire on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairesuellentrop/
Read the uber-practical Forget The Funnel book: https://forgetthefunnel.com/customer-led-growth/book
Check out Forget the Funnel’s website: https://forgetthefunnel.com/
Get the free Forget the Funnel workbook to help you implement Customer-Led Growth: https://forgetthefunnel.com/workbook