In this article, Ian asks; What practical and emotional jobs does your product do?
Through our work at Velocity B, we’ve been researching a wide range of early-stage B2B technology websites and their messaging, and one question keeps popping up:
“Yes, but what does it actually do?”
I can read that it’s an innovative AI-powered, data-driven doohickey with all the flippers and flappers that solves the on-trend challenge of business people having less time or money, or too much information, or consumers who are goldfish, or maybe all three.
But how does this help?
This isn’t just a challenge for early-stage companies; it has been the curse of B2B tech marketing for decades. We get wrapped up in punching every box on a business-speak bingo card, speaking the language of our peers, not our customers, and enthusiastically evangelizing our features, that we forget what job the buyer is trying to get done.
You might be familiar with the jobs-to-be-done framework (or JTBDF, of course, as we marketers love an acronym), made popular by Professor Clayton Christensen, based on the premise that customers buy products and services to get a job done.
For the purposes of this article, I am simplifying this to “what is your product being hired to do?”. To think of our messaging as a hiring conversation, rather than a one-way monologue thumping the altar to a succession of features, functions, and benefits.
A cold list of features is great if the buyer already knows the category, the competitors, has expertise, and a level of confidence that this kind of product or solution will solve the job to be done.
But, more typically, nobody ‘hires’ your innovative, industry-leading SaaS dashboard with its unique approach because it delivers real-time, AI-powered, data-driven analytics.
They might have convinced themselves that they are hiring it because they need some SaaS reports, that it will make that process quicker, more accurate, sexier, or cheaper, and the features neatly fit into a spreadsheet of their requirements.
The deeper truth is that they actually need to hire a new SaaS dashboard to feel in control during their next conversation with their boss, confident in front of the board, or competent and trusted by their investors.
They don’t hire the dashboard for real-time analytics; they hire it for real-time confidence.
Frequently, this is framed as people don’t want a ¼” drill, they want a ¼” hole, but it’s more than that, they want to hang a shelf, put some nice stuff on it, and get the emotional feels when they stand back and a loved one says; That looks good.
The emotional job plays on the buyers' deeper FOFU (fear of f’in’ up), and the decision to hire your product could come down to:
Would I be f’in’ up more by doing something new or by sticking with what I’m doing today?
Would they take the risk of hiring this product over the spreadsheet (it’s always a spreadsheet) that does the job today?
And to stretch this hiring metaphor even further, would they be prepared to fire the incumbent, the duct tape of a compromised solution, manual processes, and that pesky spreadsheet? Are they up for that change?
Creating awareness of the problem and diving into the job that needs to be done is a start, but the biggest challenge for sales is why now?
If your homepage leads with what your product is rather than what it rescues (the practical and emotional job it is hired to do), there is no call to action, no urgency; it’s a job to be done that can wait for another day.
When defining messaging, a first step is to say something like:
“We help [ICP] do [a thing]”
Which is splendid, assuming the ICP recognizes themselves and the need to do the thing.
A more pointed way to put this, with the buyer persona in mind, would be to replace that with a job story:
“When I [am in this situation], I want to [practical job to be done], so I can [emotional job to be done]”.
To use my earlier example of a fictitious SaaS dashboarding product, that would be something like:
“When I am presenting to the board, I want to have all the data presented professionally so I can feel confident about my job”.
Finally, if the buyer was reviewing your website, could a buyer say:
“I would hire this product today as I need to ____”?
(And spoiler, it won't be that they need to be innovative, industry-leading, AI-powered, data-driven, mealy business words)
If your homepage headline only makes sense to someone who already knows your product category, you’re not explaining the job; you’re listing the tools. And, your buyer isn’t browsing tools; they’re interviewing solutions to the practical and emotional jobs to be done.
Give them a reason to hire your product.