What Can Jobs-to-Be-Done Do that My Salespeople Can’t? (Part 1)
Maybe you’ve asked that question, too? A senior executive in the audience posed that question to a panel of my clients at an executive breakfast I hosted a number of years ago. One of my clients answered, “I don’t know, but he found opportunities (for growth) that we couldn’t.”
This exchange came up recently because I’m now doing some work for the very same executive who asked that question. And I’m sure there’re many other people wondering, “What can Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) do that my salespeople can’t?” So, let’s explore that together.
First, however, let me acknowledge that some organizations will get only limited value from hiring a JTBD consultant although every leadership would benefit from understanding the key concepts of JTBD. If your organization already has a strong competitive advantage, and you’re confident about how to recreate your next competitive advantage over the next horizons of growth (See McKinsey’s “Three Horizons of Growth”), congratulations! Keep doing what you’re doing. Some businesses have great clarity about what they’re customers want and are delivering it in a unique and valuable way.
Many other companies, however, find it challenging to differentiate, innovate, and grow. That’s often because they don’t know which of their target customers’ needs are going unmet by their own offerings and their competitor’s offerings. Not having that information forces companies into guessing what customers want and launching minimally viable products/services to test and see if their hypotheses are accurate. This leads to unnecessary iterations and failures. Perhaps there are some circumstances when this is wise but, for most companies, the best way to establish product/market fit quickly is to determine:
•Who is your target customer
•What jobs are they trying to get done with your offering or that you could address
•The criteria they use to measure success when navigating through each step in executing the job
•Which are important to get done but not getting done to their satisfaction given their current product/service solution(s)
This is potentially game-changing information for any organization. Every organization can benefit from simply understanding “jobs thinking” even when the customers’ needs are simple and well-understood.
That’s because jobs thinking provides a more accurate and actionable way of understanding and executing innovation. For starters, every leadership team would benefit from gaining mutual agreement about the meaning of some common but ambiguous words such as “innovation, market, jobs-based market segmentation, customer need, unmet need, opportunity, and creativity.”
While we have sufficient agreement about what these words mean for most conversations, when it comes to turning innovation into a repeatable business process, we must establish more accurate and precise definitions. These words are our tools and it’s hard to make something new if we’re all using these tools differently. (Kudos to Tony Ulwick who introduced us to most of the JTBD taxonomy for innovation).
Some key JTBD definitions:
Innovation = The process of discovering the target customers unmet needs and then developing solutions to address them.
Market = A group of target customers plus the job(s) they’re trying to get done. Notice there is no mention of product, service, or technology. Products, services, and technologies are created to address market needs, i.e., the jobs and criteria customers are trying to get done.
Jobs-based market segmentation = the process of segmenting the target market based on how segments naturally are formed according to the subgroups’ shared jobs and/or criteria.
Customer need = At a high level, the functional, emotional, and social job(s) target customers are trying to get done. Below that, for functional jobs, the criteria customers use to measure success when navigating through the steps of executing a functional job. Notice there is no mention of any product, service, technology, or features.
Unmet need = An important unsatisfied need. The more important and less satisfied a need is, the more unmet it is.
Opportunity = An unmet need
Creativity = the mental process of making connections and reconfigurations by which ideas are generated
Simply understanding these key concepts and how to apply them to your situation make people better strategists because it helps them make well-reasoned decisions about “where to play” and “how to win.”
And then there are potentially game-changing benefits that JTBD delivers beyond what salespeople can do – coming up next time!
(TO BE CONTINUED)
