Forget The Funnel vs GTM Playbook: Which SaaS Marketing Training is Right for You?

If you're a B2B SaaS marketer or product marketer researching training options, Forget The Funnel and GTM Playbook will likely both appear on your radar. Both are practitioner-built, both focus on B2B SaaS, and both take a customer-centric approach to marketing strategy. The differences are in scope, audience, and delivery model.

Disclosure: this comparison is published by GTM Playbook. Forget The Funnel has built a genuine reputation in B2B SaaS marketing, the Customer-Led Growth framework is well-regarded and the work their team does is credible. This is an honest look at both options. Always verify current pricing and programme details at forgetthefunnel.com and gtmplaybook.co before purchasing.

The Quick Summary

What Forget The Funnel Does

Forget The Funnel was founded by Georgiana Laudi (Gia) and Claire Suellentrop, two experienced B2B SaaS marketing practitioners. Their framework, Customer-Led Growth (CLG), is built around a central premise: most SaaS companies make growth decisions based on assumptions and best practices rather than a grounded understanding of what makes their best customers successful. CLG is a systematic method for correcting that.

The CLG process involves identifying your best-fit customers, deeply understanding the value they get from your product in their own words, and using those insights to make better decisions across acquisition, activation, retention, and expansion. It's a framework for grounding cross-functional growth strategy in customer reality rather than internal hypotheses.

Forget The Funnel's main delivery vehicles are:

• The book, "Forget The Funnel" (co-authored with Claire Suellentrop), available for purchase. A comprehensive guide to the CLG methodology.
• Growth Sprints, a hands-on consulting engagement where the Forget The Funnel team works directly with a SaaS company's team through the CLG process in four to six weeks. Priced at an engagement level (contact for pricing).
• Free content, a high-quality blog, podcast, and resource library covering CLG concepts in depth.
• Workshops and speaking, facilitated sessions for teams and events.

The target audience for the commercial engagements is typically SaaS founders or Heads of Marketing who want to bring in external experts to run the CLG process with their team. It's a consulting product more than a self-serve training programme.

About GTM Playbook

GTM Playbook (gtmplaybook.co) is a focused course for B2B SaaS product marketers. Built by James Doman-Pipe, who built product marketing at Remote through 12x growth, and Alicia Carney, Head of Marketing at Ravio, it covers the core PMM execution disciplines: ICP definition, positioning methodology, messaging architecture, product launch strategy, and sales enablement.

GTM Playbook is designed for individual PMMs making a personal investment in their skills. The format is self-paced modules plus a live cohort. The Spring 2026 cohort is included in the $299 one-time fee. It's not a consulting engagement, and it's not priced for team procurement. It's a structured course for an individual practitioner who wants to build GTM execution capability.

The Scope Difference: Framework vs Function

The most important distinction between Forget The Funnel and GTM Playbook is scope. Get this wrong and you'll buy the wrong thing.

Forget The Funnel's Customer-Led Growth framework is cross-functional. It's designed to inform how product, marketing, sales, and customer success teams work, using customer insights to make better decisions across all these functions. CLG is an operating philosophy for a SaaS company, not a skill-building programme for an individual function.

GTM Playbook is function-specific. It's a product marketing course. It covers the disciplines a PMM owns: defining the ICP, developing positioning, building a messaging architecture, planning product launches, and enabling the sales team. These are specific execution skills for a specific role.

This isn't a hierarchy. Neither is better. They serve different purposes. CLG helps a SaaS team make growth decisions grounded in customer understanding. GTM Playbook helps a PMM execute the product marketing function with strategic confidence. A PMM who applies CLG principles and has GTM Playbook execution skills is well-equipped for both.

Customer-led insight without execution capability is just well-researched paralysis. Execution capability without customer-led grounding is well-executed guessing. The best PMMs need both layers.

The Audience Difference

Forget The Funnel's Growth Sprints are primarily sold to SaaS companies, typically at the founder, Head of Growth, or Head of Marketing level. These are team-level engagements where external experts run a structured research and strategy process alongside the client team. The book and content are accessible to individual practitioners, but the commercial offer is a company procurement decision, not a personal training investment.

GTM Playbook is built for individual PMMs. The $299 price point is designed for a practitioner making a personal investment in their skills, comparable to the cost of a few books, a conference day pass, or a month of a software subscription. There's no team procurement required, no engagement scoping, and no minimum company size.

If you're a PMM at a SaaS company and your CEO is interested in a CLG engagement for the team, the conversation for Forget The Funnel happens at a different level and with different budget expectations than the conversation for GTM Playbook. Both might be relevant to your company at different points. But they're not the same decision.

The best SaaS marketers understand their customers deeply and can turn that understanding into positioning, messaging, and launch plans that move pipeline. That's where CLG research meets GTM execution.

What Each One Teaches

If you read the Forget The Funnel book or work through their free content, you'll learn how to identify your best-fit customers, how to conduct customer research interviews, how to analyse and synthesise customer insight, how to use those insights to inform growth priorities, and how to align cross-functional teams around a customer-grounded strategy. It's genuinely useful for any SaaS practitioner, including PMMs.

GTM Playbook teaches: how to define and prioritise an ICP, how to run a positioning exercise, how to build a message hierarchy, how to design and execute a B2B SaaS product launch, and how to build a sales enablement programme that changes rep behaviour. These are execution skills. The ones a PMM needs to own the GTM function with confidence.

There's meaningful overlap in the ICP and customer research layer. Both programmes emphasise understanding your best customers as the foundation of good marketing. The difference is what comes next. CLG uses those insights to inform a broader growth strategy across the company. GTM Playbook uses those insights to build the specific PMM outputs that drive GTM execution: positioning, messaging, launch plans, enablement materials.

Price and Access

The Forget The Funnel book is approximately $25–$30. The Growth Sprints are consulting engagements. Pricing is by engagement and not publicly listed. Expect fees in the range of professional consulting for a four-to-six week facilitated programme with a specialist team. Appropriate for a company-level investment, not a personal training spend.

GTM Playbook is $299 one-time. Individual enrolment, immediate access to self-paced modules, Spring 2026 live cohort included.

For a PMM researching their own development options, these aren't really competing on price. They're different categories of investment. The book is accessible as background reading for any practitioner. The Growth Sprints are a company procurement. GTM Playbook is an individual course.

Who Should Choose Forget The Funnel?

Forget The Funnel's approach is the right choice if:

• You're a founder, Head of Marketing, or senior SaaS leader who wants to bring CLG into your organisation
• Your team needs a structured engagement to work through customer research and turn it into a growth strategy
• You want to read a foundational book on customer-led growth methodology
• Your company has the budget and appetite for a team-level consulting engagement
• The core problem is cross-functional alignment around customer insight, not individual PMM skill development

Who Should Choose GTM Playbook?

GTM Playbook is the right choice if:

• You're an individual PMM who wants to build or sharpen your B2B SaaS GTM execution skills
• You want to go from execution-focused PMM work to operating at a strategic level
• Your immediate need is skill development in positioning, messaging, product launches, and sales enablement
• You're making a personal investment and want a one-time course fee under $300
• You want live cohort access to experienced B2B SaaS PMMs alongside structured self-paced learning
• You need frameworks you can apply immediately in your current role

Can They Work Together?

Yes, and for some practitioners they genuinely complement each other. The CLG methodology from Forget The Funnel is an excellent grounding for the customer research and ICP work that feeds into positioning and messaging development. Read the Forget The Funnel book and then take GTM Playbook and you've got a strong foundation in customer-led research methods and practical execution frameworks for what to do with that research.

The book is around $30. GTM Playbook is $299. Together, that's under $330 for a strong foundation in both customer insight methodology and GTM execution capability. A reasonable investment for a PMM who wants to operate strategically.

The Honest Assessment

Forget The Funnel has built a genuine body of work around Customer-Led Growth. The framework is credible, the book is well-written, and Gia Laudi and Claire Suellentrop have real operating experience. If your company is running on assumptions about its best customers and needs a structured process to fix that, CLG is worth engaging with.

GTM Playbook is a different tool for a different problem. It's not a customer research methodology. It's a product marketing execution course. If you're a PMM who wants to build GTM capability, specifically in the disciplines that a PMM owns in a B2B SaaS company, GTM Playbook is the more direct path at a lower personal investment.

Both are worth knowing about. Which one you invest in first depends on where your gap is: company-level customer understanding, or individual PMM execution capability. Get clear on that and the choice is obvious.