Optimizing Your Existing Funnel (w/ Adam Goyette, Curdis)

Adam Goyette (Founder, Curdis) shares the framework he uses and recommends to identify growth and optimization opportunities from your existing marketing and sales funnel.

How They Move The Needle

One of the best ways to drive predictable growth is to find opportunities for improvement in your existing marketing funnel. Adam has done this as a marketing leader at prominent companies like Help Scout and G2, and now helps early-stage SaaS companies do it as a consultant.

Here’s the framework he recommends to get the most performance out of your existing funnel and as a result, identify quick wins, prioritize growth opportunities, and have a better understanding of your company’s health.

Step 1: Measure & monitor

The first step is to build out a centralized funnel to visualize your company’s performance at each stage of the customer journey. In Adam’s experience, this basic data set is something a surprising number of companies lack. Many find data for various stages of the customer journey inside individual tools (e.g. Google Analytics for traffic reports, and HubSpot for sales reports). It’s crucial to have a central place where your team can view each step of the marketing and sales journey, to identify where there might be room for improvement.

Adam recommends two views: 

• A macro view: a high-level showing broad phases of the customer journey
• A micro view: a detailed look at each individual step a user takes when interacting with your company

The macro view is best for sharing with boards or the entire team when you just need to give an overview of your company’s performance. But you’ll want the micro view to actually be able to dig down and find smaller opportunities for growth, and to get a better understanding of how the company actually grows.

This includes things like:

• Your traffic, and where it comes from
• What they do when they’re on the site
• Where they leave the site
• The conversion rate at each CTA
• What happens after they sign up or convert
• How many actually show up to a demo, turn into opportunities, and close
• Etc.

After you have a macro funnel and micro funnel set up, Adam recommends monitoring it and meeting to review it on a monthly basis. In this meeting, individual team members who are responsible for various stages of the numbers can update that month’s performance. And the entire team can discuss what changes took place, why the changes happened, and the biggest areas for improvement.

Step 2: Identify the best and worst-performing stages

After you have a visualization of your funnel, the next step is to find the best and worst areas of performance. For example, your homepage conversion rate or demo-to-close rates might be well above average, while traffic to the site might be lower than average. 

How can you know what “good” or “bad” performance is? Adam says for most marketing leaders, it’s a combination of experience, industry research, and benchmarks. Most experienced leaders will have a good sense of what performance they should be seeing at each stage. Adam will often ask the team about historical performance, poll other marketing leaders for their take, or look at benchmarks to get an idea of what average performance looks like.

Step 3: Double down on the best-performing areas, and improve the worst-performing ones

Once you’ve identified the area that’s performing the best, look for opportunities to improve it. In many cases, you can double your efforts, spend, or resources and get some quick wins. Adam finds this is especially important to utilize in early-stage SaaS companies that have aggressive growth goals, as it provides the marketing leader with an opportunity for a quick win.

At the same time, you should work to improve the worst-performing area of the funnel. By doubling down on what’s working best, and improving the worst area of performance, you’ll be able to drive immediate growth.

Step 4: Continue optimizing your funnel, while simultaneously testing new programs

At this point, you’ve maxed out the best-performing areas of your funnel and improved the worst. So moving forward, Adam recommends focusing on two things:

First, test new channels for growth. Depending on your company this might look like running a handful of growth experiments, or building out an entirely new marketing channel (e.g. social, podcast, YouTube, SEO, paid ads, etc.). 

Then at the same time, continue looking for areas to improve your funnel. This will be a never-ending opportunity, because naturally whenever you add new marketing channels or run different growth experiments, the numbers in the funnel will change. For example, you might find that you’re able to double traffic by investing in SEO, but then see your conversion rates cut in half. 

Since most companies don’t have the luxury of waiting to identify growth opportunities, this ensures you continue improving the health of your company holistically, while also identifying the best opportunities for growth.

If you’re wondering where to start, Adam recommends this simple approach:

• List all new channels or growth experiments
• Figure the potential positive impact of each 
• Determine the amount of work required for each
• Then start with the opportunities that have the potential for the highest impact, and require the lowest amount of work