The Job to be Done

In the previous article, I mentioned how I’ve witnessed or worked with SaaS companies with good brand positioning and a good product but failed with their offer.

How is that possible?

Well, you likely have more than one offer. So, you may have a successful offer that the business has grown on the back of, but you launch another that fails, and failed offers hurt! If you build the wrong offer, you end up testing channel after channel, spending a lot of money and getting no traction.

It’s like driving a car with square wheels.

Typically, you take the offer into different segments, personas, industries, or geographies. Or, you’re creating new products and new tiers of products.

So, let’s say you’re selling enterprise and have decided to pursue product-led growth simultaneously. Now you’re trying to go mass market.

You introduce a lot of complexities or intricacies when you start diversifying your features and product tiers or when developing entirely different products to sell to an existing audience.

When SaaS who have an existing successful offer get subsequent offers wrong, they typically…

Don’t understand the Job To Be Done

Instead of interviewing customers to understand their needs, they make what they think the market wants. They go to market and test how the market responds to their opinion rather than developing an offer based on existing problems they understand.

One of my clients is doing approximately £10 million in annual revenue selling employee benefit planning to mid-sized tech companies in the UK. They’ve scaled their business rapidly in recent years.

They just ran an NPS survey regarding the new website (they’d just gone through a rebrand). But they also introduced four more products into the mix for the employees.

They sent this survey to the employers’ HR department, and the NPS score on the brand was positive–a 45. Above 50 is excellent, above 70 is world-class.

Interestingly, they then had an NPS survey on the new products they’d released, which scored a -26. Not good! So you wonder, did they actually understand their customer’s Jobs to be Done? Possibly not, because if they did, they wouldn’t have sold and launched a new product that now reflects poorly on the brand.

I read through the comments in the NPS, and it included feedback like:

• Hard sell
• Too pushy
• No data
• Detracting from other programmes we have in place

In an attempt to drive more revenue, they've tried to cross-sell without conferring with the customer

Did they get lucky with the first offer, which was successful? I don’t think so.

I think they understood the original problem they were solving. They were probably more meticulous and focused on cracking it. And now that they’ve cracked it, they’re trying to introduce more products, but perhaps not in such a methodical, meticulous way as they did when launching the first offer.

So you need to speak with customers to understand the job fully. But here’s the other challenge…

Sometimes, customers tell you a job that isn’t a job

Another client of mine released a new dashboard feature that provides fresh user analytics on their MarTech tool. Their customers were asking for this dashboard.

But after months of building the thing, they released it, and uptake was poor. They’re asking themselves, why? Customers requested this.

The problem here is that their customers were answering questions from the perspective of their ideal selves.

If you ask someone, do you want to be fitter and healthier, they’ll say yes. Of course they will. But then, how many people are eating a healthy diet and working out regularly? Certainly a minority given obesity rates in the US are 40% and 26% in the UK.

And that’s what happened with this dashboard. Customers answered, yes, we’d like that dashboard, but they weren’t actually monitoring those additional metrics now. There was no space in their day-to-day to do that. So yes, they’d like to monitor performance in this fancy new dashboard. It’s not a top-priority job for them.

Which is why you need to ask them…

How are they currently trying to solve the problem?

How are they solving this problem and carrying out this job right now? How much are they investing in it? How severe is it?

Those are the questions you need to answer. This unsuccessful feature launch could indicate that my client didn’t have absolute clarity on their customer’s job to be done.

But they have built a successful offer. So, how does this discrepancy happen?

Sometimes, you build a good product, and people use it, but you have lots of different segments using it. You’re not sure which segment values the product the most. Some could benefit greatly from it, while others might not benefit quite as much. But you’re not sure, it’s lost in average.

And those jobs between segments vary slightly.

Another reason may be that, although you’ve understood the customer’s jobs to be done on a superficial level, you haven’t gone deep enough.

Let’s say you’ve built a social media scheduling tool. You designed it to save me time through automation. But it could be that there’s a more meaningful problem beneath the surface that you’re missing.

Maybe, in the ideal user’s job, they travel a lot. Time zones change, and publishing gets messed up. So the job here isn’t just posting automation, it’s scheduling for travelling marketers, and there are all sorts of other jobs related to that specific circumstance you could build towards.

Looping back to that question I asked at the start of the article: how can companies with a strong product and brand still fail with their offer?

The answer lies in the details. The fundamental requirement of any successful offer is an in-depth understanding of the customer’s needs. Their jobs to be done. Every time you target a new segment, move to a new territory, build out new features, you need to revisit this job to be done, because there’s a good chance it’s slightly different for different groups of customers. Understanding those differences is make or break in launching an offer that attracts prospects, converts them, and delights them.

In the next article, we’ll take a closer look at another core pillar in the formation of an offer: pricing.

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