Improving Your Sales Strategy With Jobs-To-Be-Done
If you are a salesperson, the hardest part of your job is probably not closing deals. It is creating the deals in the first place. That’s because you have to figure out what people really want. As Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. Ford could make this statement with confidence because he was selling cars instead of selling carriages.
The reason that finding a prospect’s true needs is so difficult is that most sales teams focus on a specific solution (Solution Selling). This type of selling is based on finding customers and selling them a solution to a problem that they might have (e.g. having problems with x? We can solve that with y.). While this form of sales can be somewhat effective, it has one fatal flaw: this approach does not account for the actual needs of the prospect, only a solution to a problem. What needs to be considered is the job that your prospect needs to be done.
The Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework
The jobs-to-be-done theory is a product design framework was created by a business consultant named Clayton M. Christensen and put into action by Tony Ulwick and his company, Strategyn. The main idea behind the framework is that every purchase or decision that a person makes is not based on what they think they want, but on what they expect to get from the product. In short, people hire products and services to get jobs done.
How Jobs-To-Be-Done Works
The framework consists of five steps:
1) Identify a meaningful job that a person is trying to get done.
2) Understand the critical features that enable a person to accomplish this job.
3) Identify the point in time when the job occurs and what prevents people from being able to complete it.
4) Design around these points of friction.
5) Improve your understanding of the product by analyzing its sales data.
The best way to describe this is with an example (this one is from Uber). Let’s say that you are traveling for work and have a dinner meeting in New York City at 8 PM. The problem that you need to hire your solution for is allowing you to make it to dinner on time while minimizing the financial (e.g. ride fare) and social costs (e.g. appearing rude to your dinner partners). The features that you need are reliability, speed, comfort, and cost-savings. Uber’s end goal is to create a product and service that solves each of these problems every step of the way while making it profitable and convenient for its drivers.
Applying Jobs-To-Be-Done to Sales
Oftentimes, companies treat sales as the last stage in the product development process rather than the first. This is proven to be a mistake when closed-lost deals prove themselves valuable to the company. When this occurs, it is usually because the sales team was not able to identify the customer’s true job that they were hiring the product for and were merely selling a solution.
This happens so often because Solution Selling is a methodology that focuses on what the customer wants instead of what they need. What salespeople need is not a script; they need a framework that will allow them to identify the customer’s true needs. The Jobs-To-Be-Done theory is that framework. When salespeople are able to fully understand a product and apply this theory, they can identify essential customer value signals and succeed at considerably higher rates.
Jobs-to-be-done is typically thought of as a theory for marketers, innovators, and product teams. But, salespeople are the main point of contact between a company and its product and the prospect. They are the ones who are tasked with consulting prospects on how and whether or not their product can get the job done effectively. Because jobs-to-be-done focuses on the entire journey of the customer, it is critical that sales teams have a clear interpretation of it in their pitches.
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