How to Make the Competition Irrelevant
Most leaders agree that obtaining competitive information is essential for developing an effective strategy. Gaining competitive intelligence is often viewed as similar to gaining military intelligence.
The big difference is that in capitalism we are fighting to earn the business of customers. In war, there are no customers, and we are fighting to destroy the enemy. Perhaps this explains why many companies are overly focused on the competition rather than understanding customers’ needs. Big mistake.
Companies don’t earn their customers’ business by beating the competition; they beat the competition by earning the customers’ business, and that is done by delivering unique value to customers. This is why conducting a solid customer analysis is much more important than a competitive analysis.
Companies that focus on beating the competition often find themselves outflanked because, in reality, the customer is in control of the game, not the competition. Taking an inventory of your competitors’ features and capabilities is unlikely to inform you about where the demand lies. What leaders really need is a way to reveal their target customers’ unmet needs in an actionable format, so they know where to focus and what to do to create unique value in a repeatable manner.
The jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) innovation does this by revealing customers’ unmet needs in virtually any target market with precision and confidence. (See Rethinking Innovation: How the Jobs-to-be-Done Approach Delivers Dramatically Better Results). One of the breakthroughs of JTBD is how it conceptualizes customer “needs” as “the functional, emotional, and social jobs customers want to get done and the criteria they use to measure success.” If your purpose is innovation, this is all you need. It gives you a holistic view of what customers want to accomplish, feel, and experience.
You may remember that Stephen R. Covey taught us that the second habit of highly effective people is to “keep the end in mind.” This is true for highly effective innovators as well except, in this case, we want to discover and then keep in mind the target customers’ jobs and criteria (their ends in mind).
For example, CFOs don’t want to buy accounting services; they want to get their financial and accounting-related jobs done, such as:
- Close the books
- Determine the profitability of a store/product/service
- Plan for succession
- And dozens of other financial and accounting-related jobs
You can see even from this shortlist that this approach reveals opportunities for new value creation and revenue generation well beyond the hypercompetitive tax and assurance work. This is a great strategy for any company that wants to generate new revenue streams.
Once a comprehensive set of the target customers’ jobs and criteria have been obtained, they are put into an online survey and deployed to a representative sample. Target customers are asked to rate each job and criterion for how important it is to get the job/criterion done and how satisfied they are getting it done given their current solution resource. Those jobs and criteria that are important and unsatisfied are opportunities for innovation and growth. The more important and less satisfied a job/criterion (need) is, the bigger the opportunity for innovation and growth it presents.
This approach enables companies to identify and rank the biggest opportunities in their markets with statistical validity. Having this information before going into ideation ensures that the team knows where to focus and what to do to create new value. Could that change the game for you? It has for hundreds of the Fortune 1000.
Not only does this process deliver 2-5 times higher new product success rates but it also improves the effectiveness of all other downstream processes like pipeline review, Design Thinking, Lean Startup, messaging and positioning, competitive analysis, and sales. This is how leading companies are using the jobs-to-be-done approach to consistently make offerings customers want. You can do it, too.
Reveal needs. Create value. Drive growth.
Learn how our clients are turning innovation and growth into a repeatable business process, clients such as Becton Dickenson, BRP (Can-Am), Cintas, Franklin University, General Motors, GBQ Partners, Herman Miller, Ingersoll Rand, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, NetJets, the National Fire Protection Association, Reynolds and Reynolds, J.R. Simplot, and many others.
Contact me to see how we can help you achieve your growth goals.
