What’s the ONE Thing You Can Do to Innovate and Grow?

Some of you may be familiar with the New York Times bestseller, “The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results,” by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan. Gary built Keller Williams Realty International from a single office in Austin, Texas, to the #1 position as the largest real estate company in the United States.

The central premise revolves around the “ONE Thing,” the activity that will make everything else easier or even unnecessary. Identifying and focusing on this crucial task is the secret to magnifying your impact. Instead of spreading yourself thin with a multitude of goals or activities, ask yourself: “What is the one thing that, by doing it, will make everything else easier or irrelevant?”

More specifically, what’s the ONE thing that, by doing it, will make innovation, growth, and all your other customer-facing activities easier and more effective?

The answer is surprisingly simple. Focus on the ONE thing that matters most to your customers: getting their jobs done.

People “hire” products and services to get their jobs done. By “job,” I simply mean a problem to solve or an objective to accomplish. When a problem or objective arises in our lives, we look around for a product or service to “hire” to get the job done.

Most people are surprised to learn that customers can tell us what they want when we ask them what they want to accomplish rather than asking them for product or service specifications. Based on this insight, JTBD enables firms to discover:

• • The functional, emotional, and social jobs target customers are trying to get done
  • The steps they must execute and the criteria they use to measure success when executing each step in a core functional job
  • Where they struggle in the process (their important unsatisfied criteria) given their current product/service solution

Most firms don’t lack creativity or ideas; they lack focus. They lack clarity about where the market is under-served. This forces companies to guess about where to focus and what to do to create unique value which causes high failure rates, wasted time and resources, opportunity costs, and a lot of frustration.

JTBD, on the other hand, gives firms a reliable way to:

• • Identify and rank the important unsatisfied needs in the market, i.e., opportunities for innovation and growth
  • Determine where to focus and what to do to create unique value with precision
  • Evaluate and select those opportunities that are attractive to pursue for new value creation according to the firm’s relative advantage

This not only turns innovation and growth into a repeatable business process, but it also improves all customer-facing, value-creation activities by enabling firms to do the following 15 things better:

1. 1. 1. Identify and rank opportunities for innovation and growth that often remain hidden with other approaches.
      2. Find and capitalize on hidden market segments of opportunity that competitors don’t even know about because most companies are still segmenting their markets on demographics and/or psycho-graphics which rely on correlation. JTBD discovers the reason why customers buy what they do. Hence, jobs-based segmentation reveals the true segments that exist now rather than imposing contrived segmentation schemes onto customers that often don’t reflect their true buying behavior.
      3. Determine the size of target markets/segments based on how many people are trying to get the core job done and how frequently they execute it, independent of products or services.
      4. Eliminate “bad” ideas by only addressing important unsatisfied needs that are attractive to your firm. Any idea that addresses an unimportant or already well-satisfied need will fail.
      5. Unclog the front end of the new product pipeline by killing ideas that don’t address important unsatisfied needs.
      6. Reduce the number of iterations in product development, accelerate learning, and quicken the time to market.
      7. Increase the effectiveness of your marketing, messaging, and positioning.
      8. Conduct a better competitive analysis based on how well you and your competitors satisfy the target customers’ important needs, not based on features.
      9. Improve sales effectiveness by gaining a better understanding of your competitive strengths and weaknesses.
      10. Improve customer service by educating staff about what customers are trying to accomplish and where and why they struggle.
      11. Gain alignment among executive leadership, the Board, and employees about where to focus and what to do based on customer data that comes from a representative group of target customers with statistical validity.
      12. Dramatically reduce the risk of misunderstanding your target customers’ needs and thereby dramatically increase your innovation success rates.
      13. Drive revenue growth and market share.
      14. Inform senior management about “where to play” and “how to win.”
      15. Identify and evaluate opportunities for mergers and acquisitions.

Is JTBD the ONE thing that can make innovation, growth, and all your other customer-facing, value-creating activities easier and more effective?