For many years, marketers have tried to match the products they sell with data to indicate product and market success. In my early days as a marketing automation person, I connected online data from specific search terms to purchases. It works very well. As my client base shifted from smaller to larger customers that operated stores, call centers and e-commerce, the complexity of valuing the results grew.
The complexity of sophisticated segmenting, targeting and positioning approaches often outstrips the organization’s ability to manage them. Compound this with the cost of the media and you have a great system working against itself.
Jobs to be done theory prioritizes different sets of data that deemphasizes complex systems and costly media.
A job to be done (JTBD) is a revolutionary concept that guides you toward innovation and helps you move beyond the norm of only improving current solutions. A JTBD is not a product, service, or a specific solution; it’s the higher purpose for which customers buy products, services, and solutions.
By changing the model from customer to job, we create hyper efficiencies, removing many things that just don’t matter.
In our research the criteria must include the traits of the person as a critical factor. By having a predictive theory of traits, connected to real-world CRM data, you find the traits that drive profit and why personality traits hire products. A handful of traits are why we buy.
For example, a person who is risk averse is more likely to hire no deductible auto insurance or an auto warranty policy to lower their anxiety about the unknown. A person who desires to lower anxiety has alternative product choices that can replace insurance and warranties to accomplish this goal. They can hire Uber instead of buying a car. If you embrace the real reason why they might hire insurance, you can solve their problem better than Uber can.
The reason we may generate a job to do is related to our personality traits and the criteria by which we hire a product is also related to the same traits. The way of doing a job is guided by our traits. When you connect the theory of a person with the causal reason they decide to hire something and attach revenue and profit to make it practical, you have a simple system that connects traits to profits.
You can create the ‘why’ much better and faster, informing and driving nearly every department in the organization. You can also create the look-a-like CRM in a matter of hours.
As Thomas Levitt once said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” Customers don’t want products, they want solutions that are created by hiring products they can trust will do the job. Trait theory, turned into a predictive, Jobs to be Done software application, connected and proven by your CRM, removes complexity and aligned teams to yield far better results.