What Can Jobs-to-Be-Done Do that My Salespeople Can’t? (Part 3)
While JTBD consultants and salespeople both seek to drive revenue growth, they do so in very different ways.
1) Their Objectives and Incentives Are Different
The primary objective of salespeople is to sell more of the supplier’s current products and services, and they are incentivized accordingly.
The primary objective of the JTBD consultant is to help clients find and capture opportunities to create unique value (competitive advantage) through innovation. Most salespeople (and their managers) would consider it irresponsible to spend time exploring opportunities for innovation instead of selling current products/services.
2) Their Required Skills Are Different
Successful salespeople must ask great questions, listen well, establish trust, identify new opportunities for the company, and more.
A JTBD consultant must do all of those things well, too, as well as know what type of customer inputs to obtain that are ideal for innovation, how to get them, and how to use them. Most researchers don’t know this let alone salespeople.
3) Their Time Horizons Are Different
Salespeople are focused on selling current products and services now or in the near future.
JTBD consultants are focused on helping clients find and capture opportunities for innovation and growth across all 3 Horizons of Growth:
Horizon 1: generate ideas for continuous innovation in the short-term.
Horizon 2: generate ideas for managing emerging opportunities or extending capabilities to new customers, markets, or targets.
Horizon 3: managing ideas for profitable growth down the road
“If your organization is not managing these three horizons in a concurrent way, you’re not preparing for the future.”
– Steve Coley, Director Emeritus, McKinsey
4) The Level of Interviewee Candor is Different
Customers are often less candid with salespeople because they don’t want any information to be used against them.
Customers are open and candid with JTBD consultants because the consultant is not selling anything and customers don’t have to protect the relationship.
5) The Results Delivered are Different
Salespeople generate revenue by selling the supplier’s current products and services.
JTBD consultants generate revenue by helping clients find hidden opportunities for growth that can be captured in a variety of ways including M&A, partnering, messaging and positioning, operational alignment, and/or new and improved offerings.
16 Ways JTBD Helps Companies Drive Revenue Growth Different from Salespeople
- Identify and rank the unmet needs in your market with statistical validity, i.e., prioritize the opportunities for innovation and growth.
- Determine which opportunities are attractive to pursue given your firm’s relative strengths.
- Determine the best way to address an attractive opportunity, e.g., new or improved offering, M&A, messaging and positioning, etc.
- Generate only good ideas for new and improved offerings. (“Good ideas” are ideas that 1) address a validate important unsatisfied customer need, and 2) that the firm has selected to pursue for new value creation).
- Find high-opportunity market segments that are unknown to the competition.
- Establish competitive advantage with differentiated offerings.
- Deliver exceptional customer experiences.
- Create brand messaging and positioning that connects.
- Increase sales effectiveness by knowing competitive strengths and weaknesses.
- Improve R&D effectiveness by tying it directly to what customers want to accomplish.
- Align internal operations with the jobs customers are trying to get done.
- Engage employees in the noble purpose of your business: to help your customers get their aspirational, functional, emotional, and social jobs done.
- Create a culture of innovation.
- Establish product/market fit faster by eliminating iterations.
- Quicken time to market.
- Increase new product success rates 3-5 times higher than industry averages.
Note: The “JTBD consultant” profiled above represents what we do at Reveal Growth Consultants. While all JTBD consultants leverage the core insight that “people buy products and services to get their jobs done,” how they do that can differ quite a lot.
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