Escape the CRM Feature Trap: A JTBD Framework for Vendors

It's a familiar story in the CRM world: endless feature lists, competitive price wars, and yet, many customers still struggle. They wrestle with clunky interfaces, low team adoption, and a nagging feeling that the expensive software they bought isn't really moving the needle on what matters most. Why? Because many Customer Relationship Management systems are built around how tasks are done today, not the fundamental Jobs customers are trying to get done.

Competing on features alone is a race to the bottom, leading to commoditization. There's a better way. By applying the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework, CRM vendors can shift their focus from incremental feature improvements to understanding and solving the core progress customers are trying to make. This isn't just about CRM; it's about enabling customer success. It involves looking beyond the current toolchain and understanding how to potentially elevate the level of abstraction – simplifying the customer's world by getting a higher-context job done more effectively.

This post will explore how CRM vendors can use JTBD to:

• Understand the real 'Jobs' customers hire CRM for.

• Identify critical unmet needs and desired outcomes.

• Discover innovation opportunities by elevating the level of abstraction.

• Develop strategies that create real differentiation and value.

What 'Job' Are Customers Really Hiring a CRM Platform For?

Jobs-to-be-Done theory fundamentally reframes how we view customer motivation. Instead of focusing on demographics or product attributes, JTBD focuses on how customers in needs-based segments measure success in specific situations. They 'hire' a product or service to help them achieve this progress – to get a 'Job' done.

For CRM vendors, this means looking beyond the functional tasks facilitated by their software – like logging calls, managing contacts, or tracking pipeline stages. These are activities, not the underlying Job. We need to ask why the customer is performing these activities. What is the actual progress they seek?

Consider these potential Core Jobs customers might hire CRM for:

• Grow predictable revenue: This is often a high-level executive Job, focused on outcomes like forecast accuracy and consistent growth.

• Build lasting, profitable customer relationships: This job focuses on retention, loyalty, and maximizing lifetime value.

• Acquire high-value customers consistently: This job centers on the efficiency and effectiveness of sales and marketing efforts in attracting the right kind of clients.

• Enable sales teams to close complex deals faster: This job is about improving sales velocity and effectiveness, particularly in B2B environments.

• Minimize the risk of qualified leads falling through the cracks: This speaks to the struggle of managing follow-ups and ensuring opportunities aren't lost.

It's also important to consider functional, emotional, and social dimensions of the Job, even in B2B. A salesperson might functionally need to track communication, but emotionally need to feel confident and in control of their pipeline, and socially need to look competent to their manager. A robust JTBD analysis considers all these facets.

What core job do your best customers hire your CRM for? Thinking about this is the first step.

Uncovering Unmet Needs with JTBD & Desired Outcomes

Once you have a clear hypothesis about the core Job, the next step is to understand how customers measure success when performing that Job. In JTBD (and particularly its application via Outcome-Driven Innovation - ODI), these metrics are called Desired Outcomes. They are the quantifiable, technology-agnostic results customers want to achieve.

Desired outcomes are typically framed using a specific structure: Direction + Metric + Object of Control + Contextual Clarifier. For example, for the job "Enable sales teams to close complex deals faster," some desired outcomes might be:

• Minimize the time it takes to find relevant collateral when preparing for a client meeting.

• Increase the accuracy of sales forecasts for the current quarter.

• Minimize the number of steps required to collaborate with internal technical experts during the sales process.

• Increase the percentage of follow-up tasks that are completed on schedule.

Critically, JTBD research doesn't just identify these outcomes; it seeks to find out which outcomes are important to customers but poorly satisfied by current solutions. These represent the unmet needs – the areas ripe for innovation. A CRM vendor might find, for instance, that while their tool is great at logging calls (an activity), it does little to help minimize the time it takes to onboard new sales reps (an important but underserved outcome related to team enablement).

The key is context. The Job and the critical unmet needs will vary significantly depending on the customer segment (SMB vs. Enterprise), industry (SaaS vs. Manufacturing), user role (Sales Rep vs. Manager vs. Marketing Ops), and the specific situation they face. Deep customer interviews (surveys are highly recommended), focused on understanding their struggles to achieve success, are essential for uncovering these insights.

Elevating the Level of Abstraction: The Future CRM

Think about how many tools a sales team often uses around their CRM today: email platforms, calendars, sales intelligence tools, proposal software, document signing tools, internal chat, maybe even project management apps. Getting the job "close a complex deal" done often involves manually stitching together information and processes across this fragmented toolchain. This complexity is the struggle.

Here lies a massive opportunity revealed by JTBD: elevating the level of abstraction. Instead of just improving one tool in the chain, can vendors create solutions that get a higher-context job done in a fundamentally simpler, more integrated way? Can we obfuscate the underlying complexity of today's multi-tool reality?

Consider these possibilities:

• From Data Logger to Proactive Guide: Instead of merely storing contact information and call logs, could a future CRM analyze communication patterns, deal characteristics, and historical data to proactively suggest the next best action for a salesperson to take? Could it identify deals at risk based on subtle cues the salesperson might miss? This moves from passive data storage to active deal orchestration.

• From Internal Tool to Customer Journey Orchestrator: Instead of focusing solely on the seller's activities, could a CRM integrate more deeply with the buyer's journey? Could it help automate personalized follow-ups based on buyer engagement signals, or seamlessly integrate scheduling and content sharing directly into the workflow? This addresses the job of "making it easy for the customer to buy."

• Changing the Job Performer: If a CRM platform becomes significantly smarter and more automated, could certain tasks previously done by experienced salespeople now be handled by more junior team members or even automated systems, freeing up senior talent for higher-value activities? Elevating abstraction might change who performs the job.

JTBD helps identify these opportunities by focusing on the customer's ultimate goal and the struggles inherent in today's solutions. The aim is to make achieving the desired outcome radically easier, potentially by creating a single solution that elegantly handles a job previously requiring multiple complex steps and tools.

Strategic Implications for CRM Vendors

Adopting a JTBD lens has profound implications across the business:

1. Product Development: Shift the roadmap focus from competitor feature parity to addressing high-importance, low-satisfaction desired outcomes. Prioritize innovations that demonstrably reduce customer struggle in getting their core job done. Use outcome data to make trade-off decisions.

2. Marketing & Sales: Reframe value propositions around the Job-to-be-Done and the specific outcomes your solution delivers better than alternatives. Speak directly to customer struggles in your messaging. Instead of "Our CRM platform has feature X," say "Our CRM platform helps you minimize the time it takes to follow up on hot leads, so you can increase your close rate."

3. Segmentation: Move beyond traditional firmographic or demographic segmentation. Group customers based on the specific Job they are trying to get done and their unique set of unmet needs. This allows for more targeted product development and marketing.

4. Partnerships & M&A: Strategically identify and integrate with other tools that help customers accomplish the entire job seamlessly. Use JTBD insights to pinpoint the biggest gaps in the current customer workflow that partnerships could fill.

Conclusion: From Tool Provider to Job Enabler

The CRM market is crowded, but the opportunity for meaningful innovation remains vast. By shifting from a feature-centric mindset to a Jobs-to-be-Done focus, vendors can uncover deep insights into what customers are truly trying to achieve. Understanding the core Job, identifying unmet desired outcomes, and exploring ways to elevate the level of abstraction offer pathways to significant differentiation and value creation.

This isn't just about building better software; it's about fundamentally changing the relationship with customers – moving from being a mere tool provider to becoming an indispensable partner in enabling their success.

Your first step? Talk to a customer. Not a typical sales call, but a dedicated JTBD interview focused on understanding their struggles and desired progress related to the job you think your CRM helps them with. You might be surprised by what you learn.

What's the biggest unmet need you see CRM users struggling with today? What part of their core job remains difficult despite the available tools? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

If you’d like to take action, I would love to help. Here’s are some steps you can take to make that a reality for us:

1. Join my community and get access to more content and tools

2. Apply for coaching so we can do projects together and build a new business-as-usual with someone who will share the knowledge, and hold you accountable. (I have limited seats so hurry!)

3. I do project work as well. Use the coaching link and we can discuss.

Why Me?

I’ve been trained by the best in Outcome-Driven Innovation. Part of that training involved how to understand what the future should look like. As a result, I’ve taken what I’ve learned and begun innovating so I can get you to the outcomes you’re seeking faster, better, and even more predictably. Anyone preaching innovation should be doing the same; regardless of how disruptive it’ll be.

How am I doing this?

• I’ve developed a complete toolset that accelerates qualitative research to mere hours instead of weeks or months it used to take. It’s been fine-tuned over the past 2+ years and it’s second-to-none (including to humans). That means we can have far more certainty that we’ve properly framed your research before you invest in a basket of road apples. They don’t taste good, even with whipped cream on top.

• I’m also working on a completely new concept for prioritizing market dynamics that predict customer needs (and success) without requiring time-consuming and costly surveys with low quality participants. This is far more powerful and cost effective than point-in-time surveys that I know you don’t want to do!

I believe that an innovation consultant should eat their own dog food. Therefore, we must always strive to:

• Get more of the job done for our clients

• Get the job done better for our clients

• Get the job done faster for our clients

• Get the job done with with fewer features for our clients

• Get the job done in a completely different and novel way for our clients

• Get the job done in a less costly manner for our clients

You could be an early tester of the latest developments, but at a minimum take advantage of an approach that is light years ahead of incumbent firms that are still pitching a 30 year old growth strategy process but haven’t grown themselves. 👈🏻It's worth thinking about.

All the links you need are a few paragraphs up. Or set up some time to talk … that link is down below. 👇🏻

Mike Boysen - www.pjtbd.com
Why fail fast when you can succeed the first time?

📆 Book an appointment: https://pjtbd.com/book-mike