If you’re finding it hard to drive revenue growth, maybe you’re playing too small?

One strategy for driving growth out of the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) playbook is to:

1. Identify the main job that your customers “hire” your product or service to get done.
2. Discover the larger job that your customers are trying to accomplish in which you address just one step among many.
3. Help target customers get the larger job done better by addressing more steps or all the steps on one platform.

JTBD innovation approach is a systematic process for revealing the target customers’ unmet needs, creating unique value by addressing those unmet needs, and thereby driving revenue growth in a repeatable manner. It’s based on the insight that people “hire” products and services to get their jobs done. As the late great Harvard Business School professor, Theodore Levitt, said, “People don’t want to buy a ¼” drill; they want a ¼ hole!”

Notice that the true customer need (“make a ¼” hole”) is a job to be done that is separate and distinct from the product solution (a drill). This distinction is true for every product and service:

• People don’t want to buy vitamins; they want to improve their health.
• Doctors don’t want to buy stethoscopes; they want to listen to their patients’ heart and lungs.
• Businesses don’t want to hire commercial printers to produce HR manuals; they want to train their employees.
• And people don’t want to buy your products and services or mine; they want to get their jobs done.

Initially, that may sound like a distinction without a difference but, in fact, it’s a profound mindset shift from looking at the world through our own perspective based on what we make or do to looking at the world from the customers’ perspective based on what they’re trying to get done. Hence, the key to success with innovation and growth is to shift your focus away from what you do (and generating ideas) to helping your target customers get their jobs done better.

Many products and services are designed to help a group of people (i.e., target customers) get a main job done as in the examples above. The reason that virtually every market-leading product and service is winning is because the offering helps target customers get their job(s) done better than other options. It’s not uncommon, however, for the customers’ main job to be just one step in a larger job.

For example, Dancor Solutions out of Columbus Ohio, was initially founded in 1998 as a commercial printer. They focused on printing and assembling job training and operational binders for retail companies, and then shipping them to the stores. Updates had to be shipped to every store and manually entered into the binders. Production was slow and costly, and customers wanted their materials faster.

In 2013, as new printing and production technologies were emerging that could provide materials faster and conduct on-boarding and training more effectively, Dancor Solutions realized it was time to supplement its printing services with technology and created a dedicated technology team. They developed online offerings based on their customers’ requirements, but one service proved pivotal: their gift card delivery services.

Developing their online gift card business led to an “aha” moment when the team recognized that they could help their customers get a larger more important job done better: engage employees. This helped Dancor Solutions conceptualize an employee engagement SaaS platform (called Ignite) that has grown 40% over the past four years.