FORGET THE FUNNEL

Marketing professionals Laudi and Suellentrop provide an intensely customer-centered approach to marketing.

In their nonfiction debut, the authors draw on their extensive experience in the marketing world, particularly in the field of software as a service, in which users subscribe to tools that are hosted online. In this book, Laudi and Suellentrop aim to provide a concerted marketing plan that, they contend, many operations lack: “Many marketing teams operate in a haphazard way, flinging ideas around like spaghetti, trying to see what sticks,” they write. “But scrambling like this is no way to generate long-term growth.” In fact, they stress, such a strategy results in a lack of growth over the long term. The title of their book refers to the traditional notion of the “marketing funnel,” in which a potential customer, searching for a new solution, becomes aware of what a company is offering and, persuaded by marketing, decides to buy it. Laudi and Suellentrop argue that this concept is fundamentally shortsighted, especially for the SaaS field: “If your business runs on recurring revenue,” they warn, “it’s a serious mistake to think about marketing as something that stops when someone signs up.” Instead, they propose an approach that’s more like a curated experience—offering new features as a customer needs them rather than all at once—resulting in an ongoing relationship with the people buying a product. The authors go on to offer several pieces of advice on how a company can improve its customer research to the point where it’s possible to predict a customer’s needs and be ready to address them as they arise. The authors employ numerous real-life examples, and their chapters benefit from clear design with numerous graphics and bullet-pointed insets. However, the book’s main strength lies in the frankness with which Laudi and Suellentrop relay their insights, especially regarding the fluid nature of the SaaS world. They insightfully point out how customers’ needs shift as old problems are solved and new ones emerge. Their resulting emphasis on customer service has a winning tone.

A passionate and convincing case for a long-term marketing strategy.