If you are a founder with a background in product you are likely familiar with the concept of Jobs To Be Done.

But if you are a non-technical founder, or you hold a pure revenue leadership role you might not have come across the phrase.

I’ve worked in sales related roles for 25 years and despite Jobs To Be Done having been popularised by Clayton Christensen in 2003 in The Innovator’s Solution (a follow up to his popular The Innovator’s Dilemma), I’ve not heard the phrase used in the context of building Go To Market systems in any of the companies I’ve worked.

In this first of two posts I’ll help you understand the key elements of the Jobs To Be Done framework, and in the second I’ll show you how you can apply it to accelerate your revenue engine.

Moving forward, I’ll sometimes refer to Jobs To Be Done as JTBD.

Defining Jobs To Be Done.

When you buy a product or service you are not buying that thing, you are hiring it to perform some kind of job for you.

I recently bought a bike rack for the back of my car.

I didn’t want a bike rack - I needed to take my kid’s bikes on holiday, and so I ‘hired’ the bike rack to get them there.

When you buy a CRM system you don’t want a CRM system, but you hire it so that you have some predictability and repeatability around your sales process and forecasting.

This concept of looking at your customer and considering the jobs they need to do to be successful in their role and in their personal lives is at the heart of JTBD.

We don’t create new products for the sake of it, we create them to help our customers perform their jobs.

Three types of jobs to be done

So what is a job?

The main job

Let’s go back to my bike rack - OK I needed to take my kid’s bikes on holiday - that is the main job.

But there are some nuances here. I needed to take three bikes. I needed to be able to fit the rack on a VW Transporter. I needed to be able to fit it myself. I needed it to be able to lock the bikes on so that they wouldn’t get stolen at night or parked at the services.

The emotional job

Beyond the main job, we hire products or services to make us feel differently.

I’d been thinking about this bike rack for a long time, but now we were going on a camping holiday and I thought about the kids having a great time, and having the freedom to roam while we there.

They didn’t need to have their bikes on holiday, but I wanted them to. Happy kids means happy mum and dad, means dad can have a cheeky drink in the afternoon.

The bike rack enables that.

The social job

Our VW Transporter is used for the school run. It is a popular car where we live as families use them to head off to the beach at the weekend, and plenty of them have bike racks on the back - apart from ours.

The bike rack says something. It says you’re active. It says you like to get away. It says you do stuff as a family.

The bike rack we would choose (the formal VW one or an aftermarket brand) tells others about our frugalness or desire to spend.

With something as simple as a bike rack you start to see that we hire products and services for many reasons beyond the simple features.

The four forces of change

Next up is understanding the forces that define our process of changing from one solution to another, or from the status quo to a new way.

When you hire a new product or service you are affected by four forces:

Push - the initiation of anything is being dissatisfied in some way with the way things are today. In my case I was dissatisfied with my ability to move my kids’ bikes around.

There has to be some kind of push, because if you don’t have an issue with the status quo then as we’ll see the other forces will prevail.

Pull - the second force starts to pull you towards the new way. You started to look at possible solutions, you took the test drive, you signed up for the free trial, and now you are starting to think about the new world and it feels good.

I was searching for bike racks, I saw some videos online, the kids found there was a pump track at the campsite we were headed to - lots of pull towards the new world.

But whilst the push and pull draw you towards the new world, there are two very powerful forces that counteract and lure you back to the status quo.

Habit - humans are creatures of habit. We like the way we do things today. I always drive the same way to work. After a break I’ll head back to the same seat in a conference.

Habit is a strong force. I’ve been thinking about getting a bike rack for 18 months. Until now the kids’ bikes fitted in the back of the car, and whilst not ideal I was able to take them where we needed locally. I know they fit. I know how to get them in. Maybe I’ll just keep doing that - and I did for more than a year.

Anxiety - When we start to think about the new way our stress levels start to increase. This might be cost related, buyer’s remorse in advance - “Should I spend this money?” but often it relates to priorities and taking a team off one project to another.

In business we think the customer is focused on our features, but they are also focused on the need for their team to learn something new, to implement and integrate and the risk of it not working. Do we need to do this right now?

With my bike rack, the branded VW bike rack was over £600. I just couldn’t get my head around how a bike rack could cost that much - and what else I could do with that amount of money.

Despite me having a solid push and pull for 18 months, the habit and anxiety were stronger and I didn’t make the purchase.

Probably sounds a lot like all those “Closed - No Decision” opps in your CRM right?

The Switch Interview

The third element to understand is the switch interview - a method popularised by Bob Moesta, co-architect of the JTBD framework with Clayton Christensen.

Switch interviews are a form of customer session that help you understand the decision making process that a customer goes through when hiring a product or service to perform one of their jobs to be done.

If you asked me why I bought a bike rack my first answer would have been that I needed to take the kids’ bikes on holiday.

You might assume that my desire to buy a bike rack started just a week or so before when we booked the camping trip.

But you would be wrong - my initial desire to buy a bike rack started nearly two years before, and understanding that journey is key to figuring out how to help more customers buy more bike racks more quickly.

The switch interview is a casual conversation with no right or wrong answers, its about helping the customer to tell their story, and to uncover decisions and emotions that they might not have connected to the purchase.

Buying

You start off by having the customer talk about the time they actually made the purchase of the product (yours, or a competitor’s if you don’t have a product yet)

Were you at work or at home?
How long did you shop/click around before you made the purchase
Who were you with when you made the purchase?
Were you on our site or a partner’s?

Passive looking

Then you take your customer back to the start

So how did this all come about?
What were you using before you bought the bike rack
Do you remember the first time you thought about buying a bike rack?
What led up to that moment?
How did you handle moving the bikes before you bought a bike rack?
Why didn’t you carry on moving the bikes like that?

These open ended questions start the customer talking about their world and the thought process right at the top of the diagram - passive looking.

I’m not looking for a bike rack at this moment, but I’m starting to realise I have things I cannot achieve without one.

Active looking

Now we can start asking the customer about their process for starting to look for a solution to their job to be done:

How did you start looking for bike racks?
Who else was involved in the search?
How many different bike racks did you look at?
Why did you decide to look at the bike rack you chose?
How did you find that bike rack?
Which other bike racks did you look at/trial?

Buying (again)

We’ve now brought the customer back to the point of making a purchase, but now they are thinking more clearly about the real reasons they have got to this point:

How did you get to the point of deciding to buy this bike rack?
Did you have specific features or objectives for this bike rack?
Were there specific features or use cases that you wanted to trial?
Who else was going to be involved in the decision?
Describe the process of making the purchase?
What was your plan immediately after making the purchase?

For me two things had changed - I had an increased ‘push’ and ‘pull’ because we wanted the bikes on holiday, and a decreased ‘anxiety’ because I found an aftermarket brand that sold a bike rack for half the price of the VW one.

The four forces had shifted in favour of a switch from the status quo.

Consuming

Now we want to learn about the customer’s experience after the purchase:

How quickly did you install the bike rack?
Who else helped you with installing the bike rack?
How comfortable did you feel installing the bike rack?
How did you try and test out the bike rack once you installed it?
How many times did you test it before its first proper use?
What help did you get from the supplier to install the bike rack?
At what point did you decide you were happy to use the bike rack?
Was it one thing or a combination of factors?

Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction

Finally, we can start to ask the customer about their happiness or otherwise with their new way of working:

Once you decided not to use the bike rack what did you do then?
Did you go back to your original solution or choose another?
What did you do with the bike rack you had purchased?
What was the process of returning it to the supplier like?
How did you share your satisfaction/dissatisfaction with others?

How many people to interview?

Bob Moesta suggests that as long as you target the right customers, once you’ve interviewed 7-10 people you’ll have learned enough.

That might be 7-10 people for a particular customer industry, a particular role, or a particular country.

The point here is that this is not a complex project with large overhead.

As I’ll cover in part two of this post, this is a framework you can launch quickly.

Applying JTBD to your Go To Market team

JTBD done is a familiar framework in product design and in the hunt for product market fit for startups.

But as I’ll show you in the second post, the way customers buy from you is part of your product.

In B2B you are selling to a wide range of personas who all have their own Jobs To Be Done - including not just the main job, but their emotional and social jobs.

The CFO, economic buyer, the admin, the user, the SI implementing, the technical support team - they all have their own Jobs To Be Done and they are all different from each other.

We’ll look at how JTBD can help improve your initial sales, but just as important we’ll look at cross-sell, upsell and churn mitigation to help your Gross and Net Revenue Retention metrics. I’ll also look at launching a second product and expanding into a new geography.

Take me to Part 2!

Get started

Whenever you are ready, there are three ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue.

Buyer Experience Audit - I’ll impersonate a buyer researching your segment and company and let you know what I find. Ideal for planning your Revenue Operations strategy.
Business Model Design Workshops - I’ll work with you and your team to design or refine a business model for a new or existing product.
RevOps Impact Playbooks - I’ll help you implement one or more tactical processes across your revenue teams - content, referrals, testimonials, adoption and more.

Using Jobs To Be Done to find Go To Market fit (Part 1)

Defining Jobs To Be Done.