How 'Jobs To Be Done' theory improves targeting
Creating Buyer Personas only gives you part of the picture without understanding Jobs To Be Done.
We’ve probably all gone through the process: created an ICP document and then within that the various Buyer Personas. Maybe added a stock photo of ‘Julie, aged 36 who works in marketing and likes going to the gym’ and then sat back, happy in the knowledge that now everybody in our business has a clear idea of who their customers are.
But the reality is, the application of this process is limited. What, for example, is someone writing content for a B2B SaaS company supposed to do with the information that Julie has a cat and got a Humanities degree? And how does it impact the product roadmap?
The answer lies in Jobs-To-Be -Done. The idea is that Julie will either hire us to do a job (or fire us if we aren’t doing it) and that job might not be immediately obvious. It may be that she is using multiple products to achieve one job.
The classic example you might hear is McDonalds trying to work out how to sell more milkshakes. They kept running focus groups changing the flavour, texture etc of their drinks and finding that any changes they made had virtually no impact on sales. So they started to analyse how people bought their milkshakes. Turned out that 50% of milkshakes were bought by solo customers before 8am. What?? So they asked them why they were choosing a milkshake first thing in the morning. In other words what job were they ‘hiring’ the milkshake to do for them?
It turned out people were buying milkshakes for their commute to work in their cars. The milkshake had 3 main benefits: firstly it was less messy than trying to eat a Sausage McMuffin with one hand; secondly it lasted 20 minutes or so and relieved some of the boredom of driving; and thirdly, it filled them up until lunchtime. This of course meant that instead of competing with other drinks, the milkshake (for this persona) was competing with donuts, croissants, hash browns, cereal bars etc - basically the other things that consumers hired to do the job of providing them with a breakfast. The JTBD isn’t ‘stop me from being thirsty’, it’s ‘give me something to consume first thing when I’m on my way to work’. Totally different job, totally different opportunity to sell.
JTBD isn’t just for B2C though. When you start to think about B2B buyer needs through the prism of the JTBD framework, you can see how it might switch the way you sell your product or service, too.
As an example, right now I’m working with a SaaS company to help them get a revenue management platform in place. It’s something I’ve driven because I was asked by the board to create a dashboard of key metrics and all their data was being manually entered into spreadsheets. However, the key features of the platform I’m implementing would include:
- Having all of your subscribers’ details in one place
- Automation of invoices, renewals etc
- Revenue Recognition
- Credit card payment processing and dunning
- Integrating with Hubspot and Xero
- Reporting
The platform is going to save the company admin time and money not having to manually send out invoices. It’s also going to help with renewals where someone’s credit card has expired. But the job I’m hiring it to do is make me not look like an idiot in front of the board because I don’t have a handle on the numbers in real time.
But if I didn’t know anything about the revenue management platform or what it did and I saw something that said “save 10 hours a month of admin time by automating your invoicing”, I wouldn’t care. I mean, yeah save someone in the company’s time is all good and that, but I’ve got bigger problems to deal with. Right now I can’t get live numbers to present to the board.
By contrast, if I’m a different persona within the same company - ie the person responsible for manually sending out all of the invoices, then absolutely I’m going to care about that - and more so than the ability to create live reports.
And that there is a simple example of JTBD. You may think that automation of invoices (which has taken you most of your dev time to perfect) is the killer feature. But if you don’t understand the JTBD by persona, you won’t connect with them by waxing lyrical about something that isn’t their JTBD.
How do you work out what the JTBD are? Unfortunately, you can’t guess it. You have to talk to people and see what common themes emerge. If the CEO of a prospective company is obsessed with maximising revenue per customer and your main value proposition is about driving footfall, then chances are, whoever you speak to in the company won’t care.
For a deeper dive into JTBD Theory, this article from the Harvard Business Review might be a good start.
