A Job Map of the market of Marketing using Jobs-to-be-Done

A fresh look at the market of Marketing - Part 4 of 5

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When it comes to marketing, every business has a story. I have watched my clients struggle to develop effective marketing processes, and I have watched companies I worked for fail to generate a single lead that a quota-carrying salesperson could close; without a great deal of additional nurturing. 

Guess what? Good Closers are usually horrible at nurturing. And they are never incentivized to do it because nurturing takes place over multiple periods and they need to hit their quota this period 

How many of you have experienced the following?

• Decreasing open rates on emails

• Increasing Opt-outs from emails

• Closers spending more time prospecting instead of activities that help them meet current period quotas

• A decline in the quality of leads (low conversion)

• Closers not following up on leads

How many of you see the following activities in your organization?

• Sending an email to a single list of names with no idea what their jobs / objectives are (their market)

• Sending an email to a list of names with no idea what their needs are (their segment)

• Sending an email to a list of names when you do not know whether they fit into your ideal customer profile (authority, purchase-readiness, etc.) - worse, you have never developed an ideal customer profile

I have never worked for an organization that could rattle off the core needs of their desired customers, or even describe the market without referencing products, concepts, methods, or technologies. 

My working theory is that these organizations developed, and offered, products based on ideas that did not align with the broader objectives of the market - or they did not understand them. In cases like these, it is unrealistic to assume that marketing activities, regardless of their rigor, will overcome a deficit of true understanding. It explains a lot. 

Allow me the attempt to explain the market of Marketing a bit differently.

Marketers Trying to Develop a Qualified Lead  

Markets should not explain how customers are doing something, they should describe what a customer is trying to accomplish. In the case of a marketer, their singular objective is to create a qualified lead. Any activity that does not demonstrably support this objective adds no value, and is possibly damaging the brand.  

While individual marketers may not perform each activity themselves, there is always someone who has an overall responsibility for the ultimate objective. Their internal customers will judge them on the quality of their output.

There are many thought leaders that will tell you how to do it, and some of them are quite proficient at achieving the desired result. While they are executing their various methods, however, they are also cobbling together other tools and technologies to help them execute their methods better. It should be clear that the tools are not the method and only support certain steps along the way. 

I am not going to share a marketing method with you. However, I hope to eventually share the type of data that will tell us where marketers are struggling so we can develop better solutions/methods in the future. 

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I hope to propose a standard by which we can all evaluate this market in a consistent manner over time. This will require me to get into performance metrics and some background on them, which would overwhelm you at this point. This simple map, however, can help scope our initial discussion, and analysis. 

In effect, mapping current solutions to the steps in this process will establish the first layer of market analysis. Every step is addressed today - one way or another. However, it’s usually a combination of methods and tools to address all of these steps. The fact that no single technology address this entire spectrum means there are innovation opportunities (although we will not yet know to what degree). End user segments who juggle multiple solutions across steps are also opportunities. 

This sort of analysis is impossible to do when comparing disparate features across an array of alternative solutions. Most solutions only address a single sub-objective, or incompletely address a sub-objective, or they address a set of non-adjacent sub-objectives. Our ultimate goal should be a road map that eventually leads us to a solution / platform that addresses the entire market as described below.

The map above is a depiction of marketers who are trying to develop a qualified lead. Unlike the processes that we execute in our daily lives, this is solution-agnostic. Therefore, some of the steps up-front are planning objectives that may only be addressed once. Other steps are more clearly iterative since multiple interactions will occur with prospects across the available touch points, and this will occur with multiple prospects as well.

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Note: There is a Step 0. You will often see such steps on the front end of marketing processes, or similar types of steps on the front-end of "Design" processes. In a perfect world, Design and Marketing functions should be consumers of information delivered by a distinctly separate competency. The search for market opportunities should be left to professionals who focus solely on finding hidden demand and developing related strategies to tap into it. Step 0 represents a discrete market with its own set of steps. In my opinion and experience, there are no shortcuts to this knowledge, e.g., through ideation, etc. 

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