JTBD · Jobs to Be Done
Jobs to be Done
What is JTBD?
- Customers don’t buy products. They hire them to do a 'job'
- Define customers by situation and job, not demographics
- Look at functional, emotional, and social jobs together
The first thing that changes when you adopt JTBD is your list of competitors. Whatever the customer uses today to get the job done, whether an Excel ledger, an outside consultant, or even 'just putting up with the inconvenience,' all of it counts as competition. The rival B2B proposals lose to most often isn't a like-for-like competitor but the status quo that pushes the decision to next year. The axis for splitting the market also shifts, from attributes like industry, job title, and revenue size to which event makes people move.
Jobs are usually split into three layers: functional (produce the evidence before the deadline), emotional (avoid being blamed for a failed rollout), and social (look like someone who does good work within the team). If the forces pushing a customer are 'dissatisfaction with the current way' and 'the appeal of a new solution,' the forces holding them back are 'the inertia of the current way' and 'anxiety about the new.' A proposal missing sentences that ease those last two forces won’t reach internal approval no matter how many features it lists. The line between JTBD and needs or use cases is timing: a need is an always-on state, while a job is a situation with a triggering event.
Switch interviews, which uncover the job, come with a few conditions. Memory gets flattering once a decision is more than 6 months old, so recruit customers from the last 3–6 months. And don't talk only to those who signed: include those who stalled during evaluation, since that is where the pull of the status quo shows. Instead of asking 'What did you need?', pin down the day they first thought they should switch and trace events in time order from there. After 8–10 interviews per segment, the triggering events start to cluster into three or four types, and those overlaps are where your messaging should be rewritten.
Teams most often go wrong in how specifically they write the job. Keep it vague, like 'we want to streamline our work,' and the proposal won't differ by a single word from your existing ones. Narrow it to 'we want ERP and API integration,' and it is no longer a job but a product spec the customer wrote for you. Another common mistake is to aim only at the organization's cost savings and ignore the job of the individual contact. What the person in the approval chain really wants to avoid is not spending but a repeat of last year's failed rollout. A proposal that doesn't address that worry usually gets a polite no: 'Great solution, but the budget is tight this year.'
John KimInstructor John Kim, author of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Euijung KimBrand strategist with 30 years in advertising, formerly a division head at Daehong CommunicationsDeveloped by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen through his research on disruptive innovation, and set out in full in his book Competing Against Luck (2016). His milkshake case study is the best-known example.
Consider a hypothetical case: Company A, a corporate-training SaaS firm with 48 employees and KRW 7 billion (≈ US$5,237,200) in annual revenue. Ads and webinars brought in 180 leads a month, but its paid conversion rate had been stuck at 3.8% for a year, and every proposal opened with '3,000 pieces of content, LMS integration.' The marketing team set aside six weeks to start over with customer interviews.
- Park, the marketing lead, personally phoned 9 clients who had signed in the last 4 months and 6 who had stalled during evaluation, and scheduled 15 sixty-minute interviews over 3 weeks.
- Asked 'When did you first decide you needed to look into this?', a manager on a pharmaceutical company’s HR team answered, 'The day headquarters’ audit last November flagged that our training completion records were missing.'
- When they tallied the results, 11 of the 15 cases had been driven by an external deadline such as an audit, an ISO assessment, or a change in the law. Not one said it was because 'we wanted to do training better.'
- At 4 of the 6 companies that stalled, the training deputy manager confessed, 'Nobody used the platform we bought the year before last, and I took all the blame for it.' The team separated this from the organization’s job and recorded it as the manager’s personal job.
- She changed the landing page's first line from '3,000 pieces of content' to 'Start three weeks before the audit and your completion records will still be ready', and added one line beneath it: 'Full refund if unused for 3 months.'
- Twelve weeks later, the lead-to-paid conversion rate had risen from 3.8% to 7.1%, and the time from sending a proposal to signing had dropped from an average of 41 days to 26.