Revenue Growth Unleashed: When to Apply the JTBD Advantage (Part 2)

For today’s blog, I had intended to continue answering the question that a senior executive posed to a panel of my clients at an executive breakfast a number of years ago: “What can Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) do for me that my salespeople can’t?” What a great question! It’s an important question worthy of a thoughtful answer.

In my last newsletter, the 1^st of 3-part response to that question, I made the point that establishing a common language for innovation is a huge step forward if you want to make innovation and growth a repeatable business process (see that here). “Words” are our conceptual tools and it’s hard to make something new together if we don’t agree on how to use them. Gaining this common language not only helps turn innovation into a repeatable business process; it makes the entire executive leadership team better innovators, marketers, strategists, and leaders: it’s inevitable. That’s because “Jobs Thinking” brings clear thinking to these responsibilities. Obviously, your salespeople can’t do this.

But, before I continue my response to that executive’s excellent question, I want to take a step back and answer a couple of perhaps more pressing questions: “When is JTBD a good strategy for driving revenue growth? Under what circumstances?” Then, once these two questions have been answered, I think the rest of my response will make more sense.

So, “When is JTBD a good strategy for driving revenue growth? Under what circumstances?” To answer this, think of your organization as a series of interconnected processes with various inputs and outputs. If you want to increase your revenue, you must increase your output. To increase your output, you must identify the key constraints that are blocking your throughput. How do you do that?

One way to think about this is to separate the universe of constraints into one of these two buckets:

1. 1. Constraints related to understanding of your customers’ needs and wants
   2. Constraints related to how your organization addresses those needs and wants

For many organizations, the chief constraints impeding growth are not customer-related at all; they’re internal challenges such as:

1. 1. Operational inefficiencies
   2. Supply chain constraints
   3. Talent shortages (skill gaps)
   4. Financial constraints
   5. Technological obsolescence
   6. Etc.

For other companies, however, the chief constraint on growth is a lack of clarity about the target customers’ needs. How do you know what is the most important constraint to address? To make an accurate diagnosis, you must know the symptoms of the disease.

If your chief constraint to growth is a lack of clarity about your target customers’ needs, it will manifest in some of the following symptoms:

1. 1. Declining market share
   2. Stagnant growth
   3. High customer complaints/Low customer satisfaction
   4. High customer churn
   5. Lack of differentiation (commoditization)
   6. Increasing price sensitivity
   7. Declining profit margins
   8. Ineffective marketing
   9. New product/service failures
   10. Misallocation of resources, i.e., key investments don’t move the needle

The existence of these symptoms is a pretty good sign that a lack of clarity about your target customers’ needs is impeding your growth. Once you know this is a problem, you’ll need a way to fix it. That’s where JTBD comes in.

JTBD provides a reliable process for gaining a solid understanding about your target customers’ needs, a better understanding than your competitors will have (unless they have already implemented JTBD). And, with that better understanding of customer needs, you will be able to drive revenue growth in ways that your competitors cannot because they won’t have the customer information that’s necessary to do what you can now do.

By gaining a solid understanding of your target customers’ functional, emotional, and social needs, and then determining which are opportunities for growth (i.e., important unsatisfied needs), JTBD makes it possible to:

1. 1. Find hidden opportunities for growth at the broad market level
   2. Find unknown high-opportunity market segments
   3. Determine which opportunities are most attractive for you to pursue for new value creation given your organization’s relative strengths
   4. Determine the best way to address the most attractive opportunities, i.e., with new or improved offerings, better marketing and positioning, M&A, partnering, or operations alignment
   5. Conduct “focused brainstorming” where the team comes together knowing exactly which opportunities are to be addressed and what the organization must do to be successful
   6. Increase new product success rate 3-5 times over industry averages (not surprisingly, knowing where to focus your creativity makes a huge difference)

JTBD enables firms to align their products and services, marketing, and all customer-facing value-creation functions with the target customers’ important jobs to be done and criteria for success. This ensures that the organization is focused on delivering what truly matters to customers. Your salespeople can’t do that, either.

Do you see when JTBD is a good strategy for driving revenue growth, the circumstances under which it makes sense?

Is your organization experiencing the symptoms of “a lack of clarity about your target customers’ needs?”

People often ask me, “Who is your ideal customer?” I often say “Middle-market B2B companies” because they’re often removed from their customers and their customers often have complex needs.

But, really, we can help any organization that wants a deep understanding about its customers’ needs to drive innovation and growth. This is a central challenge for all kinds of organizations. What they all have in common is that the serve customers who have complex needs.

We’re experts at revealing our client’s customers’ unmet needs so that our clients can focus their industry expertise on what matters most.

Schedule a call with me here to explore your situation and see if my firm can help you accomplish your objectives. Or contact me directly at [email protected] or 614-309-1231.

Next time, I’ll offer some final remarks in response to that executive’s original question.

(TO BE CONTINUED)