Jobs to be Done and your Sales Team: Better Together
Are Jobs to be Done Theory and the Challenger Sales Model related?
Can understanding a customers’ Job to be Done really help with sales?
Why is your specific solution the least interesting part of sales conversations?
A few weeks ago I told a story where Jobs to be Done was compared to Solutions Selling. JTBD Advocate and Sales Leader Dale Halvorson shot me a quick response to tell me that Jobs To Be Done is the antithesis of Solution Selling. Curious, I asked if he’d have time for a deeper discussion on it. We sat down earlier this week, and here’s some of what I gleaned from the conversation.
Jobs to be Done looks beyond solutions to concentrate on the outcomes that customers are trying to achieve. A product only gets hired if it appears that it will helps the customer achieve his outcomes significantly better than other alternatives.
Often, the product a salesperson is selling is one tiny piece that contributes to getting the overall Job Done.
Most sales teams operate at the level of the specific Solution, because that’s the piece they can impact. You need to communicate with your remote team? This is the product we’ve designed to help with that. We become myopic, only focusing on the specific problem we can solve. Indeed, we often describe the business we are in in terms of the solutions we provide. This is the very problem that Theodore Levitt called out almost sixty years ago: if you use the same noun to describe the product and the market you serve, this should be a huge red flag.
Ignoring the higher level Job is also where we get into trouble. Over time, customers will hire different products and services to get the Job done. We may have steadily improved our product, but we can be replaced entirely by a solution that may eliminate the problem we are focused on solving.
As Guy Kawasaki points out in his TEDx Talk “The Art of Innovation”, even the best ice-harvesting companies in the world went out of business when refrigeration allowed ice to be produced in all climates and ice-harvesting was not the best way to get the Job Done. The next generation of ice factories also became obsolete when in-home refrigeration exploded. Too often companies define themselves by what they do rather than what they provide.
Solutions Come and Go
This isn’t unusual for single-product companies. We fall in love with our product and want to improve it. But optimizing a solution is not the same as optimizing a Job.
A few years ago, I worked in web conferencing. We worked tirelessly to improve our audio quality, our security, our application sharing. Improving how people did web conferencing was our focus.
Then we started talking to customers about the Job they were hiring us to get Done. We wanted to learn more about how they worked with their colleagues and the biggest challenges they had.
Because we were focused on our product, we expected to hear product weaknesses. “I never remember PIN codes” “I want to be able to upload more slides”.
They didn’t tell us about our product. They told us about their Job, and where they struggled. “My co-workers come to meetings unprepared”. “I never know what I’m responsible for after a meeting”.
Using software to connect with colleagues was one part of the Job, but it wasn’t all of it. We were optimizing our product, but we were leaving ourselves blind to different ways customers could get the Job done (better, faster, cheaper, more conveniently).
Sales as a Valuable Feedback Loop
We often see sales as the end of a process. We design things, we build them, we create demand for them, and then sales closes the deal.
But the information gathered from a closed-lost deal can be tremendously important to a company. The problem is that too often we’re still down in that solutions space. “We lost the deal because we only offer 4 video feeds. Our competitor offers 6”.
That’s Solution optimization feedback. Not entirely useless, but not as impactful as Job-related feedback, and potentially misleading.
Think about startups. Everyone on the team is answering customer inquiries. The entire team coalesces around understanding the customer’s Job to be Done and where he’s struggling. That Exploration is the basis of your company and your product.
But at some point, we think we’ve grown up enough, and we slow the funnel of feedback. We hire salespeople, arm them with sales scripts, and tell them to close deals. We think we know enough. It’s Exploitation time.
Except... You don’t know everything. The Jobs that customers are trying to get Done are stable, but the circumstances around them are not. The competitive set is not.. Customers entering and exiting our target customer segment are not.
When our salespeople have a keen understanding of the Job customers are trying to get Done, and the different ways they’re getting it done, they can identify critical Customer Value Signals and feed them back into the business.
As a solution moves along the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, new customers need different information and support to move them to trial. Even Job Executors with the same Job to be Done can be segmented and appealed to differently based on specific circumstances and proclivities.
Not all Customer Value Signals are internal, though. Market and technological conditions can also change the basis of competition, and salespeople on the front line can feed that back to the business.
This is why the discussion of your specific solution is the least interesting part of a sales conversation. At the point of closing the deal, you’re optimizing for a single sale. But if you spend the bulk of the conversation learning about her higher-level Job, you are potentially gathering information that can change your entire business trajectory (through innovation: creating or capturing new value for entire markets).
We often think of Jobs to be Done Theory as the domain of innovators and marketers. But the entire company needs to adopt an understanding of what business you’re in: helping customers get a Job Done. Solutions can be easily copied, improved upon or driven towards commoditization. Improving how customers get Jobs Done is a long-term strategic path to success.
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Andrea Hill is the principal consultant at Frameplay. Frameplay is an innovation consultancy that helps companies become more customer-focused and thrive in a rapidly changing world. Learn more at frameplay.co
