Why do people use your product or your competitor’s product? In essence, they are trying to get a job done. But what is a job? Let’s take a look at, for good reason, the most used example: the drill vs. the hole.
Do I need a hole or do I need a drill bit?
As Harvard’s Marketing Prof. Theodore Levitt famously said:
“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”
Mind blowing, isn’t it?
Nobody buys a product or service for their features, they buy it for their benefits or for the job they wanted solved. This reasoning was what helped me to grow from an average salesperson at Staples to one of the best performing…while I was in high school! I remember when I first started at Staples, I used to sell printers based on their features, often telling customers that Printer A could print 22ppm (pages per minute), but Printer B could print at 30ppm, but they didn’t care and chose Printer A because of its price. Once I learned that I should instead talk about how Printer B could get you back to your life sooner, then people started to cared. Nobody wanted to sit there and watch the printer print paper, they wanted their print job to be finished quickly so they could staple/bind it, and move on to the next thing.
This reasoning was what helped me to grow from an average salesperson at Staples to one of the best performing…while I was in high school! I remember when I first started at Staples, I used to sell printers based on their features. I used to tell potential customers that Printer A could print 22ppm (pages per minute), but Printer B could print at 30ppm, but they didn’t care about ppms, just the cost. Once I learned that I should instead talk about how Printer B could get you back to your life sooner, then people started caring. Nobody wanted to sit there and watch the printer print, they wanted their print job to be done asap so they could staple/bind it, and move on to the next thing in their lives.
Sadly, I forgot this key learning while in university, but luckily got reminded about it and learned more about it through a framework calledJobs to be Done (JTBD) at, coincidently, the New York Jobs To Be Done Meetup. They more I learned about it, the more I felt it was undervalued in the world of marketing, and most importantly, in the world of product development.
Let’s look at how Jobs to be Done can help your product be the best for its customers.
