How Bitly CMO Tara Robertson Fast-Tracks Execution with Customer-Led Growth

On this episode of the Forget the Funnel Podcast, Gia and Claire dive deep into Bitly’s journey from a point-solution to a $100m ARR multi-product platform with CMO Tara Robertson. Tara shares how her team leverages customer research to supercharge the SaaS company’s product-led growth.

Discussed:

• Using Jobs-to-be-Done research at a SaaS that serves nearly limitless use-cases for customers ranging from B2C and micro-business to a Fortune 100 enterprise. 
• The differences between your customer’s “Jobs”, ICP (ideal customer profile), personas, and target audience - and how Bitly develops a nuanced view of its different customer journies to guide its strategy.
• Building internal alignment at a leadership level through active listening, communication, and setting shared goals. 
• The story behind Tara’s cross-functional collaboration with Product to get both teams aligned in their understanding of customers and speaking the same customer-centric language.

Key Moments: 

[3:10] Bit.ly’s growth story is evolving beyond the virality of link shortening into the world’s leading connections platform, doing over 100 million in ARR.

[5:00] Moving from a traditional sales model to building a product-led business and how Tara’s marketing team works cross-functionally with Product, Sales, and Customer Success.

[7:00] The CEO tells Tara it’s time to rethink the way they do marketing. They needed a highly strategic team working in partnership with the Product team to create positioning and shared language, and that required a lot of research.

[11:00] Marketing is using personas, Sales are leveraging ICPs, and the Product team is doing user research—how do you get everyone aligned to make the most significant impact across the organization, and what does it mean for the bottom line?

[16:00] Finding alignment in the differences between Jobs-to-be-Done and ICP around goals for different teams.

[19:26] You don’t have to be pro-jobs and anti-persona or vice versa. Tara shares how the partnership between her and the Chief Product Officer was critical to ensuring the teams understood each other to avoid missing out on some “distinguished but niche audiences.

[23:00] Tara shares an example of a small customer base that equates to significant revenue, how to find those niche use cases, and the need to create different journeys for different customer jobs.

[25:46] The value of being a good communicator, collaborator, and listener as a CMO and how to do that work.

[28:30] Tara talks about leveraging the language from the Jobs-to-be-Done research for use on their product pages (and the SEO value). 

—

• Check out Bit.ly
• Connect with Tara Robertson on LinkedIn

As always, you can learn more about Forget The Funnel here:

• Read the Forget The Funnel Book
• The AI book companion that comes free with the book 
• Check out Forget the Funnel’s website