Services
Learn what no one else
knows so you can do
what no one else can do
How We Engage with Clients
Consulting Services
To differentiate and grow, find and address your target customers’ unmet needs. This means shifting your focus away from generating ideas to discovering how you can help target customers get their jobs done.
Driving Growth Through Innovation: A Training for Senior Leadership and Innovation Teams
In just a few hours of education, facilitated conversation, and a team exercise, learn what every management team should know about the Jobs-to-Be-Done approach. Experience the paradigm shift that is turning innovation into a repeatable business process.
- Establish a shared innovation vocabulary and conceptual framework to lay the foundation for success.
- Build a “customer-centered innovation job-map” to gain unique insights without any customer interviews. (This is different from a “customer journey map” that documents how customers interact with your firm and current offerings. A job map documents what customers are trying to get done independent of any solution).
- Identify opportunities for new value creation.
Filled with examples, case studies, and exercises. Guaranteed to increase your IQ (Innovation Quotient).
3-6 Interviews and a Job Map
We’ll interview a few customers to develop a job map that defines the job, steps, and criteria customers use to measure the value of your offering. This alone can reveal valuable insights. It will also give you a basic understanding about how JTBD discovers opportunities for innovation and growth that often remain hidden to other approaches.
5 and 5 (5 interviews with current customers and 5 interviews with prospective customers)
This is an excellent way to get essential information to accelerate growth. We’ll conduct 5 interviews with current customers and 5 interviews with prospective customers to create a job map, identify your competitive strengths and weaknesses, opportunities, and facilitate a working session with you to turn the findings into action.
Needs and Leads
Accelerate growth by discovering opportunities (unmet needs) and generating leads. We’ll conduct 8-12 interviews with customers and 8-12 interviews with non-customers, analyze the findings, and facilitate a working session to help you formulate a growth strategy.
Full JTBD Projects
This combination of qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys will give you unprecedented clarity about where to focus and what to do to drive growth. We’ll conduct the interviews, develop and deploy a survey, analyze the findings, and facilitate working sessions to enable you to create unique value and competitive advantage.
Jobs-Based Segmentation
This is a powerful way to drive growth in mature markets by finding hidden segments of opportunity that competitors are unlikely to know about. Unlike traditional segmentation that is based on customer attributes such as demographics, product type, price point, etc., jobs-based segmentation identifies groups of people in your market who share the same opportunities (important unsatisfied needs). This delivers a new level of effectiveness to market segmentation strategy and revenue growth.
Co-creation Working Sessions
Interview customers and generate solutions, fast.
(Contact Urko for more details: [email protected]; 614-309-1231; Scheduler)
Speaking and Facilitation
Urko is available for speaking, leadership retreats, and strategic planning. Some topics include:
- Half-day Innovation and Growth Strategy Workshop for Leadership Teams
- JTBD as Strategy: What Every CEO Should Know
- How to Consistently Generate Great Ideas
(Contact Urko for more details: [email protected]; 614-309-1231; Scheduler)
Advisory Services
Urko offers confidential advisory services to give leaders a sounding board, objectivity, and input about innovation and growth strategy.
(Contact Urko for more details: [email protected]; 614-309-1231; Scheduler)
Who We Serve
Organizations that Want to Differentiate and Grow Through Innovation
- Increase market share in a core market
- Find and capture new markets/segments
- Master the customers’ experience
FAQ
Three Reasons Why the Customer Need Statements We Capture are Different and Better
First, most people confuse customer needs with solutions. Virtually every other innovation front end process – Voice of the Customer (VoC), Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Agile, and ethnographic research – was developed with the misbelief that “customers cannot tell us what they want.” This is simply false if we ask customers what they want to accomplish rather than asking them for product or service requirements. It is often true that customers cannot tell us what product or service solution they want, but they can tell us what they want to accomplish, feel, experience, and how they want to be perceived if you know what type of inputs to obtain and how to get them.
A good way to illustrate the difference between customer needs and solutions is with a famous quote by the late great Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt who said that “People don’t want to buy a ¼ inch drill; they want a ¼ inch hole!” The job of “making a hole” is the true customer need; the drill is just a solution. People “hire” products and services to get their jobs done. By “job,” we simply mean any objective, goal, or task to be accomplished or a problem to resolve or prevent. When people have a job to be done, they look around for a product or service to “hire” to help them do it. For innovation purposes, customer needs are best defined as the jobs customers are trying to get done and the criteria they use to measure success.
If we can keep this distinction in mind – i.e., that customer needs are separate and distinct from solutions – we can turn innovation into a repeatable business process that consistently delivers results by obtaining a comprehensive set of customer needs (independent of any solution) and then determine which are important and unsatisfied. Needs that are important and unsatisfied are opportunities for innovation and growth. The more important and less satisfied a need is the greater the opportunity for innovation and growth it presents. This is a breakthrough for innovation management.
Second, job and criteria need statements we capture are ideal for driving innovation and growth because they explain why people buy, which makes them predictive of what customers will buy. This gives leaders great confidence about where to focus and what to do to differentiate, innovation and grow because they know in advance what customers will value and buy. Just as physicians conduct a patient diagnosis to inform them about how to develop a treatment plan that they know patients will respond to favorably, we conduct a customer diagnosis to inform our clients about how to differentiate, innovate and grow in a manner that they know customers will respond to favorably as well.
Third, to avoid misunderstanding customers, VoC has historically emphasized capturing customer needs in the exact language that customers state them verbatim. But because customers inevitably use vague, ambiguous, and inaccurate words to express themselves (as we all do at times), this codifies inaccurate need statements end ensures high failure rates.
The objective of customer interviews should be to discover the jobs customers are trying to get done and the criteria they use to measure success in the domain where your company can play.
We know what customer inputs to obtain and how to get them. That’s why our clients achieve innovation success rates 2-5X the average to over 80%.
We work with a wide variety of B2B companies. The reason we can be effective across different a wide swath of B2B industries is because we’re experts at innovation and growth strategy, not any product or service solution. We’ll find your customers’ important unsatisfied needs and then help you bring your domain expertise to bear on them.
All of our clients want to differentiate, innovate, and grow. Clients typically have one or more of the following circumstances:
- They want to differentiate (strengthen competitive advantage) to drive growth.
- They want to create new or improve offerings to drive growth.
- Competition and/or disruptive technologies have eroded their competitive advantage so they’re competing on price more and more.
- Efforts to drive growth through sales and marketing have had limited success.
- It’s not clear where to focus or what to do to drive innovation and growth in a reliable manner.
Call us to explore how we can help you.