Claire Suellentrop: How to Operationalise JTBD

How well do you know your best customers? Why do they choose your solution over all the others? Reality check – most of us guess.

Knowing what to focus on is hard. Knowing who your best customers are, quantifying and measuring how they feel value, gives you a top decile advantage. It enables you to operationalise growth.

Claire shows you how to match your product experience with real customer needs. Your teams will be better equipped and more focused  to unlock product growth and revenue.

You’ll learn:

• Why identifying your best customers unlocks your product growth strategy.
• How to use what customers value to reverse engineer your ideal product experience.
• How to identify your leading indicators of success (which will more effectively influence your lagging KPIs like your free/trial to paid % & MRR growth).
• How to spot success gaps in your customer experience your team can fill.

Slides

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Transcript

Mark Littlewood 

Welcome Claire Suellentrop.

Claire Suellentrop 

Thank you.

All right, so I showed up this week with a talk title that I’ve known for quite a while needs reworking. It’s very long. It’s a lot of jargon, and I think actually, we talked about this on Sunday evening because of the jargon and the last name, it’s the longest item on everyone’s name tag, How to operationalize customer value to maximize product growth. And yesterday, as Bob was doing a Q&A I took out my laptop because there were so many really, really good questions about jobs to be done, and I temporarily just renamed it operationalizing Bob’s improv. And then this morning, I was like, that’s not going to work. And so now the talk title is Operationalizing jobs to be done.

So, because I took so many notes yesterday and reworked these slides accordingly, I have presented this material, but it’s a little out of order, so kind of going to find my way through. But this was a question that Chica asked yesterday, and there were a lot of good questions, but this was my favorite. It was the most all encompassing, “Beyond testimonials on our website. What else should we be doing to leverage the jobs to be done interviews we run? This was my favorite, because that’s at the core what my partner Gia and I do. So I am the co founder of a consulting firm we’re called forget the funnel. That is an ode to both of our shared backgrounds as marketing leaders in B2B SaaS.

Forget the Funnel

We started Forget the Funnel, this is our seventh year. And really at the essence of what we began as we were this is back before we had any of our own positioning figured out. But we were taking jobs to be done, doing the research, identifying the jobs of a set of customers for a company, and then we were applying it to a B2B SaaS company’s marketing strategy, right? So how do you leverage what you’ve learned to better attract and resonate with and convert the right fit customer.

Now, in the seven years we’ve been doing this work, it’s broadened quite a bit, and I would say now really what we’re doing is taking jobs and operationalizing it really, if anyone has a synonym that is shorter just raise your hand, implementing might be a better word. But really, at this point, we help companies go from understanding the why of why people hire their product, and we figure out the ways to help them apply that, both to enable their team to do better work and also to create a better customer experience, far beyond marketing, so also getting into the sales experience, the product sign up, and trial and conversion experience. So really you could say at this point, we’re doing jobs to be done implemented across your go to market, you know, aspects of your team.

This link will take you to the book that we published around this time last year. There is also a low like very low-fi PDF. I can send you if you don’t want to spend the 15 bucks, 15 pounds. So you can just email me and I it’s really not that big of a deal. I will send you the low-fi version as well.

Operationalizing JTBD

So that is why Chica’s quote, really, or chicas question really resonated with me yesterday, because sitting over in the corner, I was like, this is a whole talk in and of itself. So hopefully the material that I go through today will answer this in ways that help you think through, you know, similar situations that you might be facing within your team or for your product.

Three Example Companies

So there are three companies that I’m going to use as our examples, our example stories, as we go through how to implement jobs to be done. Each one of these is a real company. I have given them silly names. Listening.io  is a real company name. In the time that we worked with them, they rebranded just to Listening. But that is the only one of these that is an actual company name, even though all three are real SaaS products.

Finhealth.io

So Finhealth.io, in real life, is an analytics platform that helps a financial institution so a bank or a credit union assess how their customers or their members are doing financially, and track that progress over time. This may or may not be a this may or may not be something very specific to the US. I’m not really sure, but we can get into kind of the nitty gritty of why, if that’s useful later. Suffice it to say analytics for financial institutions.

Landscaping.io

Landscaping.io is business management software for your landscaping company. So these are folks where landscaping.io competes very heavily with more general purpose contract business software in the states that would be things like jobber trying to think of other like general ones. I won’t get into the examples, but that’s the second company that we will use in our examples.

Listening.io

And then Listening.io is the simplest piece of software. They’re just this easy little platform that turns academic papers into audio books. So they focus very specifically, right now, they have plans to expand, but they right now focus on people who are going through graduate programs, people who are in very research heavy professional fields, but don’t have time to sit at a desk and read 10,000 pages every week.

Their Challenges

So I’ve got a couple of slides that will tell us a little bit about the context that each of these companies was in when we started our work together. And these next couple of slides are also kind of cutting to the end and helping you understand, like, what was the outcome of implementing jobs to be done across their org.

So Finhealth.io, when they came to us, this was, I want to say, October of last year. It was the CEO who reached out, and he has a very long history in FinTech products. He’s a product manager by trade, really knows good product knows good product management practice. Unfortunately, was still doing so much of the day to day himself and really struggling to scale the team. So what we’ve been doing with them is a lot of the internal, kind of harder to see, type of team alignment exercises, and really we’re helping the CEO get out of the weeds of the day to day and trust the team to do better work based on customer insight. Again, we’ll get more into the details.

Landscaping.io came to us with a much more tangible cash flow problem. So landscaping is a very seasonal business. They don’t do a lot of work in December, January, February, when it’s raining and snowing, that is the one time of the year that it’s really easy to hit all of your sales goals if you run a landscaping software business, because that’s when your target customer is stuck at home and not making money and is itching to do other things to improve the business. Unfortunately, what that also means is that while that’s their best time of year in terms of sales, it’s also their worst time of year in terms of churn. If the past year, the clients that they sold didn’t get on board with the product. And so in q3 of last year, the CEO of landscaping came to us and said, and there’s, I have actual, like, Voice of Customer written out in my notes from my call with him. But he was like, last year was a blood bath. January 2023, we lost so many of our customers, and we’re really scared of that happening again. They’re a self funded company. They really don’t have a lot in terms of cash reserves, and so the the CEO had seen me give a presentation on how to use jobs to be done, and was hoping we could leverage some of the practices to reduce churn in this in this current quarter.

Thankfully, this image is something he sent to me over Slack a couple of days ago. It’s been a really good quarter because of what we’ve been able to implement and how we’ve been able to improve their sales and their renewal experience, and they saw half the churn they did last year, which was a really, really big deal, emotionally and also in terms of money.

And then listening or Listening.io the challenges they came to us with were really more traditional kind of practical marketing problems. So very tiny company, they had recently taken their first round of modest funding, so they were past a million. And they’re like, it’s, and I say they’re like, it’s, it was two guys, one who has a long background in paid marketing, so he can run the shit out of some ads very intelligently, and then a head of product. And they had both broken off from their their in house roles. They had launched this little product. They had some early traction, and they were like, Great, how do we turn this into a real business?

So in our work with them, we started with helping them understand, you know, not how to run ads. They already had that expertise locked down, but how do they better describe the value that they pose that other competing solutions do not, so that their ads can be more effective, their marketing content can be more effective, and they can bring in more subscribers. So these two stats are from also a Slack message. We communicate with our clients a lot in Slack, I guess, but there were two different things that they did as a direct result of our work with them to uncover their customers jobs to be done.

First, there was a key feature that they realized was quite competitive, and other competing solutions had really not nailed down, and so they brought that feature right to the very top of their home page. So it was one of the first things that a visitor would interact with when they when they reached the home page. Doing that created an 11% conversion rate increase to new trial sign ups. And then, with that really significant, they called it little but with that win under their belts, they then move forward with an overall reworking of the home page. So instead of just this little point solution or this point improvement, they actually tore down the page, redid the like the sections of content according to what we learned mattered to their customers. We leveraged customer language that came from the interviews, and that actually increased the home page conversion rate by another 30%.

Leveraging Customers JTBD

So there are internal and there are external ways that you can think about leveraging your customers jobs to be done. In terms of internal there’s, of course, immense value, both for you as a leader, but also for your team in understanding why people choose your product versus any other solution, and that’s different than your team understanding the ICP that you serve. We serve banks is very different than banks choose us for their analytics for these reasons, and they fire other solutions for those reasons. Really, really different level of understanding that your team can have, and the more that they understand that, the more impactful they can be without you having to be there to remind them.

One of my favorites is, once you understand your customers jobs to be done, you can make much more strategic decisions about which ones to prioritize your work on.

And there’s plenty of content that I can I can share in the coming slides that will demonstrate what does that mean to prioritize one job over another job. Making value, so so customers with a particular job to be done, making what they think of as valuable a quantified and unambiguous thing is really the it was the reason for the shitty version of the title, quantifying what value means to your customer is is truly one of the most powerful, powerful things we’ve found that you can do with jobs. And again, we’ll go further into that. Ultimately, if you can do these three, these first three things, then you can tie your team’s success and how you measure their success to your customers actually getting success or finding value within your product, and that team alignment with customer alignment makes everything move more quickly and more smoothly. I’m going to skip way ahead and pardon me, as you see, like all of the slides, but I also want to talk about the externals before we dig in. So on the external side, these are really where you start to see, you know, pretty churn reduction or pretty homepage conversion rate increases. So one of one of the most instant weight, not instant, one of the most immediate steps we usually take with a company after we’ve understood their customers jobs to be done and help them prioritize one over others, is get to work removing friction between whatever the call to action on their website is. So sign up for a trial, sign up for a demo, and their customer reaching a moment of first realizing value. It’s kind of hard to see how much friction you might be putting between your customer taking that first action and getting to value until you understand what value means to them, and then it becomes a lot easier to take out all the waste and really, really reduce the time frame there.

Reworking your messaging strategy to highlight features and attributes that drive value is another very, very standard thing we take companies through. So when I say messaging strategy, really, what I mean by that is the quantified order of things your customers said was was most important about your solution, and taking that order of things that were most important and applying that order to the content on your website or In your sales pitch, in your demo process, etc. Again, we’ll go into some examples here, and then finally rewriting actual lines of copy, or, you know, again, sales demo script, anything that is a self serve piece of content designed to help your user move from one stage to the next using. Actual voice of customer and not internal assumed language. These are some of the most obvious ways to leverage jobs to be done externally, in addition to things like producing really great testimonials, case studies and so on. All right, so now I’m going to go backwards and talk a bit more about those internal things, which are what allow teams to then apply the external ways to leverage jobs.

So in terms of understanding why people choose your product versus any other, or what jobs lead them to hire your product versus another, understanding these nuances has to be at the base of everything. So for our analytics platform for banks and credit unions, we ended up finding three different jobs to be done that that financial institutions hired this product for. Very interestingly, this first one happened to correlate with their biggest, most enterprise leads and customers coming through the front door. And then there are two more that I’ll share on the next slide that were much more strongly correlated with mid market leads and customers coming through the front door.

Understanding why people use your product

So in terms of this first job to be done, we defined them as measurers. These were big national institutions that knew that they needed to start caring about how financially stable and healthy their customers were, but they had no nowhere to start from. They hadn’t been collecting this data in a meaningful way. Massive organization. This was going to be, you know, a nine month to 12 month to 24 month change, and they wanted some kind of third party to do it for them. They were, they were considering either bringing on a third party platform or building analytics internally, which would be even more of a pain. So those were our measurers.

Then they were our initiative builders. And this is where I wonder if this might be too American of an example or not, anyone can let me know you’re totally welcome to.

Within the financial institution realm in the States, there is becoming a greater and greater expectation in some circles that for credit unions, particularly, it’s important to be able to assess how financially healthy your customers are, and also be able to prove that your organization, your institution, is helping them become more financially stable over time. So in the mid market, in the States, there are some organizations, some credit unions, that are coming to this product and saying, Hey, we’re getting this top down mandate that we need to start measuring this, and it’s going to be a huge, huge burden on my time. And I’m, I’m the person in charge of not only figuring out how to implement whatever is is part of this mandate, I also need to get everybody else on board. So I have a lot of I am one person who has a lot of org change work ahead of me to build this initiative internally.

And then third there are, what we found was that people were also coming to this platform because what they cared about was really making more of an effective marketing experience for bank and credit union customers. So does anyone know one of, one of the people we spoke with on an interview, mentioned Stitch Fix, this also might be a regional thing. So Stitch Fix get sent mails you personalized, you know, wardrobe items, and you pick what you like, and you send the rest back, and then, based on what you choose, every month they they tailor and tailor and tailor to you.

So these are folks who work within financial institutions who want to essentially create Stitch Fix, but for financial offerings. So these were folks who already had a pretty robust amount of customer or member data, and now what they needed was a platform to help them take that data and say, Hey, customer of our bank, given your financial state, here are three different products that will be really valuable to you. Different reason for coming to an analytics platform, different things they’re going to care about within the product.

All three of these, measurers, initiative builders, personalizers, all three of these represent really great customer opportunities, but they also represent three very different things, sets of criteria people had when they came to make the purchase, three very different sets of features that mattered, three different even terms of, what’s the word I’m looking for, even three different levels of price tolerance.

I’m going to skip landscaping. I’ll come back to that. But once we know those different jobs to be done, then we can sit down with the team and say, OK, everyone which of these within the next six to nine months? Which of these represents the most valuable set of people for us to focus on? Who do we want to clone? 100 more of this is a rubric my partner and I came up with it a long time ago to try to take what we knew in our head and make it a system, and we still use it to this day. It’s also in a workbook that goes along with our book. So yes, please take pictures, but also email me. I can give you a bunch more resources like this. Once you know the jobs that people are hiring your product for, you can start to figure out which one do you want to set your team loose on, on bringing in and serving and retaining.

So for our finhealth product, there were a couple of there were a couple of rows that we just didn’t have enough information for. Like the product is too new to the market for us to really be able to answer, did one or another have a greater willingness to pay? We’re really not sure. Are there things that we know some of these, you know, some of the customers in these job segments have that others do not. So for the initiative builders and the personalizers, again, these happened to correlate with the more mid market customers coming through the front door. They also because they were they were less mature and faster moving organizations, the level of urgency was greater, so they were more likely to close within six months versus 24 months. Unlike our measures, who were primarily enterprise customers, all of these three had high retention potential. Only two really represented any kind of upsell potential, which we found interesting.

And then at the bottom, this criteria specific to your organization, this is always going to be kind of an internal discussion around what level of expertise do you have in the market that your competitors don’t or what skills do you have on your team that might set you apart in being able to really well meet like the different jobs to be done and the initiative builders and the personalizers for finhealth actually happened to meet some criteria the team had internally. And what I mean by that was the team is at finhealth.io is still small enough that they are best set up to serve the mid market buying cycle. They will have to hire like an entire separate sales team if they really want to go after the enterprise and win. So the measures did not get an x in that final row, the CEO is very clear with the team that we actually want to go after the enterprise. We want the measurers. We’re just not ready yet. So in the short term, everyone, as we’re focusing on how to spend our day to day, optimize for the initiative builders, optimize for the personalizers. 2025 is going to be about enterprise. But right now, we want as many mid market folks coming through the door as we can. Let’s not get confused here.

Again I’m going to come back to landscaping.

But once you know which job or jobs to be done you want to prioritize. And for finhealth, it was our mid market, our mid market initiative Builders and personalizers, then we can start to and again, this is probably one of my favorite parts. We can start to quantify what value really means to those people.

So there was another note that I took yesterday from Bob’s Q&A. Bob, I think you said something like, picture a chair. And like, everybody in this room is going to picture a different chair. So quantifying what it means to drive value is an exercise in making sure everybody is picturing the same chair. Does anybody here not want to deliver value to their customers? It’s common sense. But what that actually means, and how we quantify whether we’re doing it is, actually, is very hard, and jobs, understanding jobs, to prioritizing a job, to quantifying what value means to someone with that job, is probably one of my favorite ways of leveraging the framework.

So what I’m showing on this screen is our team’s version of a customer experience map template. And there are lots of these out there. I’m sure everyone here has done some version of customer journey mapping or UX map, like user experience mapping, buyer’s journey mapping.

The way that ours is built. First of all, there are three high level phases up at the top, struggle, evaluation and growth. Those are meant to represent the kind of emotional state that your customer is in as they first in jobs language, you know, as they become open to the fact that they have a problem that needs solved, and then they begin seeking solutions. So those milestones, those first columns, the blue and the green down below, represent them realizing they have a struggle, and then starting to seek solutions and becoming interested in what you offer as one of their solutions. So then there’s the evaluation phase, which, in our world, or in the way that we build out this map is going to typically involve them, you know, taking the first call, you know, go. Forward the first call to action on your website again. Book a demo, trial sign up, product pign up, through to feeling a moment, feeling that, you know, aha, moment, whatever we want to call it, that makes them realize this is probably the right solution for them. Through to and we tend to pull apart first value with value realization, because trying to think of a good example here, we think of first value as, like, the hook that this is probably the right solution for me, and then value realization as the moment that they’re like, Okay, yes, and it meets all these other specs, and my boss is going to say yes to the price. And, like, we’re actually going forward with this thing.

And there is a pretty big difference between first value where, like you think you’ve got the right thing, and value realization, where you know and you’re really ready to put down the credit card.

So that’s how we thinking about going from struggle to evaluation and then to the growth phase, which we think of not as you know, into the funnel growth so much as growth of getting, getting, getting continued value from a product, or actually increasing the value we get from a product through either expanding onto the next pricing Tier or using advanced features. There’s a lot of thing we won’t really in this conversation get into, you know, the right half of this visual, but this is how we think of breaking down the kind of phases that someone goes through when they’re accomplishing a job to be done. So it’s, I’d say it’s like our modified version of the timeline that Bob had up on the screen yesterday.

What we do with ours when we’re working with a company is we set a KPI that represents the customer taking an action that implies they got enough value to move to the next stage. So struggle and interest are typically very straightforward. Struggle is, you know, our advertising, our marketing, did a good enough job to get them to our website that one’s usually the same across most products, unless we’re talking about mobile versus web, interest, is usually us providing enough value on the website to convince someone that it is worth their time to book that demo with your sales team, or sign up for your trial and start digging around your product. First value and value realization are where things get really specific to the job to be done that we are prioritizing the product that we are offering and the and the company we’re working with. So let’s see, okay, so let’s talk through this with our fin health customer. So what we learned, what we learned about what mattered to their customers? Excuse me one second. I it.

So we learned a couple of things about what mattered to our finhealth, our finhealth.io customers who were looking to build and basically a member health measurement initiative within their org, or become the Stitch Fix of you know, finance offer, financial products that are really custom and tailored to the person on the other end.

One we we learned that typically, what they were comparing this product to was manually building out some kind of super clunky survey that they would have to figure out the questions for. They’d have to figure out how to ask politely, like, what’s your financial health? Like, how you doing? How’s money feeling lately? Like, have to come up with this very complicated, very sensitive survey on their own in house. They’d have to figure out a way to distribute that survey to their members. So by email, I guess I’m speaking as a one of the people on a on an interview, they’d have to find a way to email this out to everyone, or serve it within, you know, the bank login or something of that nature. Then they’d have to have somebody within their team collect all of the responses, figure out the trends and the responses, make sense of the data, bring that data to a PowerPoint, present that PowerPoint to the leadership team and then to the board. Trying to do this manually was just going to be a massive, massive pain.

And so one of the things we learned was most valuable, in terms of first seeing like, oh shit, this could be a really big deal for us, was for finhealth.io, implementing the survey was about a five minute process. So within the product, you as a customer, you sign up, you’re in your account, and as you’re thinking about what questions you want to ask your customers or your financial institutions, members, finhealth.io actually spins up a pre written survey for you and says, Hey, generally, these are some appropriate questions, we recommend asking if you want to customize them, cool, if not like copy paste and then serving that, excuse me, serving that. That survey, I guess to members, was as simple as a I’m going to be very overly simplistic about it, but essentially sending the survey in an iframe and. Putting it on a particular page of the site. So we’re talking about what someone has come to this, what someone is trying to achieve their their compared version is a month, months long process to get the data they’re looking for and then getting into finhealth.io they’re looking at that same process with sign off and with everyone to get everyone getting bought in within about a week.

Demo Call Solution

So in our learning, we are talking about a pretty complex product. This is not a self serve situation. So we did, we did agree that someone would have to be on a demo call as like, the first kind of moment of value. But what we learned about, what they cared about, totally changed the demo script. So as many founder, you know, as many founder led sales orgs happen to experience the CEO at this organization knew that intuitively. He knew to talk about speed of setup. He knew to talk about, you know, the ins and outs of using an iframe, you know, for a not super technical market. He knew what to talk about, but he had no idea how to take what counted as value, put it on paper and say, okay, team, when you get on the demo, you’re gonna talk about this, this and this. Because of this, the rest of the team, while very well intentioned, was running these super generic, like product walkthrough demos, which has anyone ever been on one of those? It’s really painful and embarrassing, and you just want to be like, You know what? I’ll talk to you later. So ultimately, this work, one of the first things that it did was change what happens in the demo, so that we, the finhealth.io team began, no matter whether it was the CEO or it was someone else on the team, they would start their demo with All right, so usually when someone comes to us, they’re considering us versus setting up one of these surveys to their customers all by themselves. Like those are usually the context somebody’s in. What are you thinking about? And what we’re learning is that immediately launches the lead or the prospect into, yeah, we’re thinking about doing it ourselves, and here’s all the reasons that’s going to be really hard, and we, the team, has done a really great job of taking this information and creating an experience on the demo that essentially addresses each of the anxieties that that a potential customer has, and points to where in the product those anxieties are are handled.

So for finhealth demo, call complete is what we’ve defined as their their moment of first value. But it’s not just a generic demo. It’s actually a very, very intentional script that leads people through specific features based on what they care care about which we learn from our jobs research. If we want to ask questions about this, we absolutely can. I know this is very like, kind of jargony content, and then what we learned counted for them is value realization. So value realization, again, is when, like, your spec list is all complete and you’re like, I’m going to get buy in for this, I’m going to get the budget for this. It does all these other things I need for the customers with the jobs we identified as priority. What we learned was setting up their first survey, like their questions in their environment, and seeing real responses come through, even if they were a test response. You know, if I’m the person who’s in charge of this internally at the bank, and I send in, you know, my own Claire plus test at forget the funnel, just seeing that first survey come through and the data be available to me within minutes. That was the moment they were like, take our money. We’re good.

So with this, we were able to map this, these moments of value out, and this is now how the team is setting up their CRM in terms of stages, so that they can track how well they’re doing at moving people from value moment to value moment. They’re setting up segments within their email marketing. That’s an upcoming project. They don’t have email marketing yet, but this is how we will set up segments in their email marketing. It’s how they’re starting to set their internal goals for what they want to accomplish quarter to quarter. Ultimately, what it’s doing, the mapping itself, is only so valuable. Getting things down on paper and creating that clarity is great, but ultimately, what it’s doing is allowing this team to tie what they do to these quantifiable, unambiguous moments where they know their customers are going to get value. That is probably the most in depth, maybe jargony way of answering the question, how else do you leverage jobs? So to some of the you know, probably prettier or easier, easier to to like, grasp ways to leverage jobs. Let’s switch over to the leveraging jobs externally, side of the house.

So I’m actually going to go back to finhealth. This, this tactic we use for both landscaping and finhealth, but in the interest of time, I’ll just stick with one brand.

There, when we started working together, their demo form was both very long and very pointless. And that’s not an insult to the people who built it. It’s not an insult to the team. But they were asking a lot of questions, like, how did you hear about us? Trying to figure out what marketing channels had been working, lots and lots of demographic information that was would have been very easy to just ask in a sales conversation, just a lot of fluff and a lot of friction between me being interested in this product to booking the goddamn meeting.

So what we did was work with the team to drastically pair down anything that wasn’t critical to their operations from that demo form, and then we added a field which you’re seeing is that big wordy drop down, where each of those or each of those answers to which best describes you is a rewritten phrase that encapsulates one of those three jobs to be done.

So if someone answers, we don’t have enough data, and I don’t have a way to measure it, there’s a good indication they’re probably that enterprise customer that we want, but we can’t serve super well. So let’s make sure to route that demo straight to the CEO.

If they’re a number two, you know, there’s this initiative coming down from the top, and I have to lead it. We have a pretty good idea that they’re going to be there’s that second initiative builder job type. And then, you know, we’re working on segmenting our members. We want to build more personalized experiences. Those are our Stitch Fix people. So we want to make sure that on those demos we talk a lot more about once you have this data, here’s all the cool ways you can personalize their experience. So this removes friction between, again, shortening the demo form had nothing to do with understanding jobs to be done. It was that was really more user experience best practices, but teeing up what someone’s job might be and having them share that information in this process allows us to do two different things. I mentioned that the different ways it helps the demo be tailored by the team, but also something that we’re building right now is this really fun, very on brand for that this, this team has a very like welcoming, friendly brand, and the CEO himself is recording a quick just loom walk through very low-fi in which he’s like, Hey, I’m Andy. I’m the CEO. Typically credit unions like you come to us to solve one of these three problems, and here’s five minutes on how we solve problem one, two and three. So once Andy has recorded that loom, we’re going to we’re going to embed that in a confirmation email letting someone know their demo has been booked, and they’re actually going to be pre educated on how the product solves their specific problems, so that when they get to the demo, we can go deeper in the conversation. We can ask more advanced questions, and they’re that much further along in their educational journey.

Messaging Strategy

On the messaging or the marketing side, I want to talk again about messaging strategy that highlights features that deliver value. So for listening.io, what we learned was the key difference maker. Well, first of all, very, very niche market conversion of and conversion of academic content to audio books. There are a lot of generic solutions that are available for this, but it’s actually a product category that the target market doesn’t really know about. So they have to do a lot of advertising to even help people understand that this is a thing that exists. So there was really, there’s really, now that I think about it, there were three competing solutions. There’s just reading like, there’s doing nothing. In other words, in action, some people here and there were trying to use a sort of like native text to speech app, so the built in text to speech tool on your device, which sounds horribly robotic and very hard to comprehend. And then there is one single direct competitor we were able to find, called Speechify, that generally does what listening does, but without the academic focus. And so it’s just not as sophisticated.

Listening has been very serious about creating voices that sound very human and are easy to comprehend. And then there’s a couple of other features that are competitive as well, but we learned that that first value moment for their customers was hearing an audio clip and being like, holy shit, this sounds like a real narrator. Like, this doesn’t sound robotic. And so they took these two audio clips right here and put those, those did not used to exist on the website, they popped those right underneath the hero section, and just bringing people to that that feature that drove customers to first value, is what led to that 11% increase in trial sign ups on this homepage.

And then, similarly, when it came time to rewrite the rest of their homepage based on voice of customer, again, matching what people say in jobs interviews to the copy that you use. Part of working with us involved having us write out a messaging guide for them, where we take those interview transcripts and based on the priority job to be done, we basically give you your homepages content.

So these are some sections of the messaging guide that we put together, what what themes or what people say is valuable, and then what we call key advantages, or like the actual things, the attributes of the product that drive that value. We also handed them a glossary of phrases that were really fun. I it might be covered, but one of my favorite phrases in their glossary is I don’t have time to read 10,000 papers a week, like that in itself is a very easy like slap it on the hero section h1. And then we also put together a testimonial repository from the interviews, where there’s a handful that you can see say, you know, they’re just kind of a general testimonial, but typically, we try to take testimonials that support the value that customers with this job care about. So when you’re creating content about these features, you can pair them with a relevant testimonial that proves that.

I believe yes, unless we want to get into other the landscaping business, which we absolutely can this was really meant to be a here’s some ways to leverage jobs beyond just case studies or testimonials. So I’m also happy to go over to Q and A to talk about this in any more detail. If that would be more helpful, go ahead and jump to questions. All right, later. I that’s a bit, yeah, I will say, because I redid this content in a way that was more about like, hey, here are some examples. There’s not like, a big, pretty ending. I will go back to this slide because it feels like a good one to hang out on. But I am also very happy to move on to more practical like, how do you do X, or how do you implement y, types of questions.

Q&A

Mark Littlewood 

Just saying, we’re very English, we’re very polite. We like to do things properly over here.

Audience Member 

Thank you. Sorry I got excited before we clapped. All good. Thank you for your talk. I am very interested in operationalizing or implementing, and have found it really useful for marketing and copy, and a bit trickier for actually deciding what we build and how we build it, and kind of in theory, we should be able to, like, uncover those. But I’ve often found that the jobs keep things very high level, or a bit too high level.

Claire Suellentrop 

They don’t go they’re like, solution agnostic, so they don’t go deep enough on sometimes, sometimes.

Audience Member 

But even in theory, you’ve uncovered, like, what your customers really care about. I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts on how to actually use jobs to be done, to decide what to build and how to build that user experience.

Claire Suellentrop 

So I think the easiest, or like the most succinct way that I can answer that is to give another example, and it’s only one example, so I recognize it won’t cover the gamut, but there’s a company I work with, and Bob, you’re going to know this one. Obviously you introduced me to Chris, but there is a back to the financial like the FinTech world, there is a kind of invoicing and payments platform that I worked with many years ago. Bob introduced me to their head of product, and when I came in to help them implement jobs, they’d already done the research, and they were in the midst of, how do we implement and so I was brought on for a lot more of the go to market content, like a lot of what was shared on here. But it was, it was interesting getting to work alongside the product team and see how they were doing that. And this was a product, and if you end up reading the book, it’s the, it’s the it’s the chapter on auto books, so there’s, there’s more in there, but auto books was this kind of all in one finance management tool. So you could send invoices, which we learned was one of the one of the key features when we did jobs research, but you could also do a lot more. You could do billing, and you could get a loan, and you could just lots and lots and lots of finance management functionality. What we learned was that moment of value for their customers was the moment that they sent an invoice and got a payment, all without using cash or check or having to go through another service, like PayPal. It was, it was that I sent an invoice and got paid and I didn’t have to, like, mess with anything else. Moment which. From messaging standpoint, was relatively straightforward. We needed to pare down, and we needed to not be all in one, finance management. We needed to be invoice for customers and get paid directly. So what that led them to do on the product side was to actually evaluate, well, how do we need to rework? They operated in phases. Of course, first it was, how do we need to rework the kind of empty state experience so that when people get into the product, finding where to send the invoice is super obvious.

I was talking to someone yesterday, starting to someone yesterday about the horrible feeling of logging into Photoshop for the first time and being like, there are like, 1000 buttons in here. Where do I? Where do I start? And that was kind of the, I mean, I’m exaggerating, but that’s kind of the experience that a lot of us feel when we log into an empty state product, and there hasn’t been this understanding of where the customer needs to start internally. So auto books, their first phase was to, I’m going to say hide, just for lack of a better term was to kind of minimize or hide the functionality that didn’t support getting an invoice out and receiving payment. That was the very first thing. Was just reworking the what, what the user experience looked like, to bring invoicing and payment front and center. From there, though, what they realized was the next step was going to be divorcing invoicing and getting paid and making the Get Paid part its own very, very simple feature. Reason being, they learned that a lot of the customers that we spoke with their ideal customers with this job, they were invoicing because they had to invoice, but the invoice itself was not really the thing. It was just the mechanism to get the payment. And so where that led them was great.

How do we go from being an invoicing and payment product to just like a PayPal or, you know, whatever other tool, just giving people a custom link that they can text, that they can, you know, email over that, there were a number of even non profits using this product, and they would, they would just put their payment link, like, in their monthly newsletter. So, and at this point, like, I almost want to give you the mic Bob and be like you were way more on the product side. Like, I’ll let you answer that one, but you that’s one tiny example of taking that kind of abstract I want it to get paid faster learning from the jobs and both in the short term, figuring out how to declutter the product, the existing product experience, to get people to value but then how to actually pull apart a less important feature from the desired functionality, and turn that into its own feature entirely, which ended up becoming, like the core, what’s the word? It really became the focal point for not only the messaging on the on the marketing side, but also like auto books is, I mean, if you go to auto books.com, or CO think right now it’s like, get paid online, and that is really that like, that is really the crown feature. All of the other stuff is fine, but it’s kind of fallen by the wayside as upsell opportunity. I don’t know if that’s that’s detailed enough, but.

Bob Moesta 

Can I just add just a little to it?

Bob Moesta 

Which is one of the anxieties they had was the very first invoice. So the thing that they realized is that, like a landscaper would get this and say, I’m the senator or a painter. These are, these are very contractor type people, right? And the whole thing was, is, like the first thing they would do is they would send themselves an invoice and they would pay themselves. And so they just made that things like, pay yourself 10 bucks, and they because then they’d get the text, they see where it went. They’d literally see they had their logo on it. They’d see that it went to the link, and they see that they got the money. And so the whole thing was just making that first moment of value of like, not only can I see how to do it, like, I just sent myself 10 bucks, that’s like, Okay, I got this. And so it was that, that little part of friction that they were able to cut down because the anxiety of, like, what’s it look like? You know, where do I put my logo? What are like? All these other things.

Claire Suellentrop 

What’s my customer even gonna see? Are you gonna know what to do with it?

Bob Moesta 

So they wanted to mimic the customer. And it was that notion of, once they cracked that nut, it was like, Oh, we’re just gonna make this part of the demo of, in the middle of the demo, it’s like, let’s send yourself an invoice, and that’s that just took them right then and there.

Mark Littlewood 

This is a fascinating thing. It’s almost as if imagine a conference that put something like that on and got the head of product, the head of engineering and the head of sales and the head of marketing from that company together and kind of go deep into all the things they did.

Bob Moesta 

There’s a bunch of recordings online. We did it last year at Raleigh.

Mark Littlewood 

Who is registered to attend this conference? It’s not a trick question. Unless everybody puts their hand up. Well, there’s a crasher here.

Claire Suellentrop 

Well, it does sound like a trick question, though, to attend this, yeah.

Mark Littlewood 

It wasn’t a trick. As you’ve all registered, you will have received at least five links to the case study, the Autobooks case studies in the because they were from the US conference last year, and it’s pretty amazing how they pulled a bunch of stuff that they, I mean, they worked with you guys, and they referenced you guys, but the whole product, engineering, sales, marketing piece together. It’s fascinating.

Claire Suellentrop 

It was helpful having the head of product be a jobs guy and be like, All right, this is what we’re using. This is how we’re like, this is the way that we all stay aligned, which really goes back to like, picture a chair. Everybody pictures a different chair versus this is the system we’re using. We’re all using the same system. We’re all picturing the same thing.

Mark Littlewood 

Other questions.

Audience Member 

Hi, Claire, so I 100% agree with you with the removing friction part. But the problem is, I used to be a project manager, and I had to do the demo, and I did, like, exactly what you said, like, put in the email before the demo and then tell them what we’re gonna learn. But the thing is, I learned that the customers, they don’t read the emails like they don’t care what you put in the email. They just want to jump in, jump right in and listen to what you told them. And I’ve also talked to a bunch of really great people the past few days. They also told me, We don’t like to read the stuff. We just want to come to the conference and listen. So do you have any other ideas on like this part, like removing the friction? Except for, you know.

Claire Suellentrop 

It’s a lot of assumptions, first of all, and that’s not at you in any way, but what I what I heard was, generally, people don’t like to read the content. And to an extent, you’re absolutely right.

There’s a lot of thought that has to go into if we’re going to create content between, one moment to another. How do we craft it so that it’s something useful and not just like junk that I’m going to delete? And you’re absolutely right in that, yeah, probably at least half, if not more, of the emails that I get after I booked a demo I just hit delete on. So it’s a really good point. But this is where there’s a bit of a there’s a there’s a bit of a marrying of like copy best practices with the jobs content comes into play. So an example that I’ve I’ve had success with in the past in other industries, and we’re going to try for this, this fan health product is triggering an email after someone has booked with a subject line that says, demos booked next steps inside. And you know what? A lot of people probably will delete that email still, but for people who take next steps inside to mean, oh, I need to do something, then we’re, we’re going to in that email present copy that is along the lines of, hey, looking forward to meeting with you. Here’s your date and time, here’s your calendar. Invite, you know, Add to Calendar if you want to speed up the process. Watch this loom on 2x and we’ll make that much more time or that much we’ll get that much more out of our time together when we speak next week.

So the presenting of what you’re of what you’re showing them as you’re going to be able to use this or it’s going to make your life easier, is a major part of that. It’s really common for people to use the default, you know, Calendly booking confirmation email. That’s totally pointless beyond Add to Calendar. So you’re right that we are we are trained to an extent.

There’s two things I guess I need to pull apart on one, one of those is to an extent. We are trained to delete junk like confirmation emails, because we assume there’s nothing in them of use to us, and that’s often correct. Two there probably will be a percentage of people who never read that email. And so we, we wouldn’t use that email as like a critical, you know, a critical piece of content, where, if they miss it, something, something you know, is going to go poorly or they’re gonna they’re gonna miss important context for later, we wouldn’t want to be so reliant on it. But for those who do take the time to open it, if we craft it well, and if we do craft it as, hey, spend five minutes on this video, you’re going to save half an hour when we meet, then it can be really, really impactful. So when you’re experimenting with adding content like that, there’s a there is some copywriting expertise, or, you need to work with someone who’s thinking about how to how to pitch it appropriately, and you can’t assume you’re right that every single person is going to read it. So you really want to optimize for getting as many people to open it and leverage it as possible. I don’t know if that quite answered, and you could also totally challenge if you. If you want to.

Bob Moesta 

Add on top of that, just first because I think the thing is, one of the things we did at auto books was in, in scheduling the demo, we actually gave them the three jobs and said, Help me understand, or help me understand which job you’re in, also what where you are in the timeline, because that, that alone, just helped us understand where it was. Because instead of trying to show it and yeah, make it forward, we set then way better expectation by knowing, hey, they’re in job one, and they’re literally an active looking perfect. Okay, then I know the demo to do it so but, but it was about what kind of we have many different demos help us understand which demo you want. Yeah, and that that did two things. One is it built the confidence that we knew what we were talking about, because it was customized to them, and they could resonate with one of those two things, but it almost quadrupled the show up on the demo.

Claire Suellentrop 

Because they’re that much more invested. They’re like, Oh.

Bob Moesta

Invested because they because we customized it to them. And so instead of trying to cuss through email, we actually did it on the setup.

Claire Suellentrop 

That’s reminding me of I skipped forward on the landscaping business, just to save time. But the jobs to be done that we uncovered for the landscaping business were more timeline oriented. So for the landscaping business, they had three different types of people come to them, people who were just totally clueless about their business numbers like really great landscaper. I don’t do unit economics like, I don’t I don’t want to do my accounting. So those people would show up to the demo, and historically, the sales team would be like, so you know, Mrs. Jones is asking you for an estimate, how do you price that? And they’d be like, I’d go to Facebook, and I would ask my friends, like, what would you price this job at? That’s one way of starting.

Another further into the the jobs timeline, there were people who were coming to this product, and they had, like, a really fancy spreadsheet that they had built over years, or they were using a very, very legacy type of, you know, type of tool to help them arrive at their their metrics. Those people were like, well, I mean, I’ve got some systems in place. The problem is more that it takes me an hour to build an estimate because my spreadsheet is so annoying and I don’t trust the numbers have to verify it. And then the third group of people coming to this product generally had their, you know, their job costing their estimating. They had that part figured out, but the rest of their back office was a mess. So, you know, they were having their staff track time on paper. I need to get off the stage. Let me know they were, they were the most sophisticated. They were the the best at having like use tech to operationalize their business. And so, as you were describing, if we would, if we ask them in the sign up form, hey, which of these best describes how you’re doing job costing then the sales team can show up and either talk about the pains of not having any system, which you would never want to waste time on for the most you know, sophisticated business owner, or the pains of using a spreadsheet or a competitor versus us, those people are going to be like, yeah, here’s my old system, here’s my numbers. Show me what it looks like in your tool, and then yes, the third so I guess that’s a it’s another version, or it’s another example of the same concept applied right, helping them give you the context so that they get a more valuable demo and they’re not shown just like a generic one. Generic walk through.

Mark Littlewood 

Thank you. Claire, jobs operationalized.

Claire Suellentrop

co-Founder & COO, Forget the Funnel

Claire has spent 10 years helping SaaS companies go from startup to scale-up by turning customer insights to fuel revenue-generating marketing & growth programs. 

She’s worked with bootstrapped founders, VC and PE backed teams and global corporate teams including Wistia, MeetEdgar, Death to the Stock Photo and many other fun SaaS companies. She’s passionate about demonstrating the impact of adopting a customer-led approach to business growth.

Before co-founding Forget the Funnel, Claire was Director of Marketing and #2 employee at Calendly.

Check out other talks by Claire here.

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