Have you tried tagging prospects to a Jobs-to-be-Done persona?

Here's what I'm thinking, let me know if you agree

Tagging prospects to a segment is simple, right? You just click on a field and select “Middle-aged Mike, or Happy Housewife.” Automating it with data enriched in a CDP is even simpler because we know that Jane is likely married and obviously, she is home taking care of things. 🤣🤣🤣 This is generally how marketing segmentation looks - I’m serious - because marketers need to use cheap, easy, and available pathways to groups of people that have common attributes.

But they also make it so hard on themselves. The machinations that teams go through to come up with these segments is comical to watch. They are never a logical disaggregation of the market participants. Finding mutually exclusive attributes for a single persona is a frustrating exercise, and even more frustrating to consume and use effectively.

In fact, they are useless…which is why they are always redoing them.

Again, we do this because it is very easy to find pathways to personas that use the type of data that is readily available: age, gender, location, income, etc. Maybe too easy. What we don’t know from this data are the needs of the market participants, we’re just assuming we do. Does every middle-aged Mike have the same needs as me? Absolutely not. Everyone knows this, yet they keep hitting the easy button - because it’s easy to sell.

Having worked decades in the CRM technology and strategy space, one of the first things I asked myself when being introduced to Jobs-to-be-Done was how we could identify prospects that aligned to a specific segment. As you may recall, JTBD uses needs-based segmentation derived from a qualitative model of the market. This model is not based on consumption (solution space), it’s based on common objectives of a group of people. As a result, we can’t simply look at behaviors tied closely to current solutions in order to study market participants. In fact, a solution may not even exist yet (depending on the type of research you are doing).

The topic of modeling, quantifying and segmenting markets is gone over in a fair amount of detail elsewhere, so I won’t go into that here. I will assume that because you’re reading this you have a fundamental grasp of Jobs Theory and how to put it into action successfully. I use a variant of Outcome-Driven Innovation and don’t focus on watching the behaviors of milkshake buyers. To each their own.

This leads me to the point of this post. Suppose you and I develop this great new solution that helps people get more of their job done, and get it done better and more simply. It’s a game changer that will sell itself if we can get it in front of the right prospects. And suppose we segmented our view of the market based on performance metrics that are proxies for customer needs, so we know exactly what the size of our opportunity is, and their needs-based characteristics. How can we identify that Middle-aged Mike is in that segment if he happens to interact with us? How can we find him if we want to initiate an interaction? Will his age help us? How about his buying behavior of a solution that we intend to disrupt? No, we cannot. People try, but we’re a different sort and we know this has always failed. And will continue to fail.

We also need to keep in mind, prospects could be on multiple journeys that interact with our brands, and each journey could place a prospect into a different needs-based segment. Each prospect could be on multiple purchase journeys (for different jobs-to-be-done) or they could be on multiple journeys related to a single job-to-be-done, such as learning to use and trying to solve a problem with the product. It’s critical to understand this and while there are now platform players that can identify the journeys and orchestrate the journeys based on behavior, they still do not know the needs of the prospect/customer. While they are 80% better than the old way of doing things, they are probably only tapping 10% of the personalization power they could have if they knew why someone was on the journey.

They know the What, Where, When, and How - but they don’t know the why.

The why is what we need to know in order to tag a prospect to the correct segment for product interest, and the correct journey to help them with consumption activities. We need to know both, not just one (but that latter point is another topic on journey analysis and orchestration which has recently been negated by the all-powerful CDP!!!! 🤣).

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Anyone familiar with the output of from a real JTBD study understands that there could be 14 or 15 performance metrics that are commonly underserved in a segment of potential customers. It would be ludicrous to assume that you could get an anonymous online prospect to answer 15 related questions to determine if they are in that segment. Nor could in-store staff be expected to interrogate everyone who comes in the door with a bunch of non-sensical questions. It’s a ridiculous expectation.

• What are the top 3 underserved metrics that apply to the largest portion of the market, or in a sizable, underserved segment?

• What are the characteristics of these end users that describe the segment?

• What stories did you capture that bring some emotion to the equation?

We do need to understand how we might quickly, or over the course of a number of interactions, identify - with a high probability of being accurate - if a prospect falls into the underserved target audience we seek. We might even want to know if someone is currently overserved. How can we possibly do that in an age where messaging is becoming more and more targeted and personalized (the manipulative kind of personalization for short term gain) and the attention span of consumers is diminishing?

I suggested in an earlier post that methods like Outcome-Driven Innovation could be adapted to gain an emotional connection to consumers in order to better tell stories. I initially targeted this at internal senior leadership because they love compelling stories that they can share. A bunch of data points on a plot? Well, they don’t love that as much.

I suggested that a sample of survey respondents that fall into actionable segments be interviewed as a follow up to the survey (h/t to Geoff Bell). The purpose behind this is to better understand why they responded the way they did by getting verbatims. These are really the only way you can develop a persona. Yes, it’s a data driven persona, but it will be enhanced by compelling stories (verbatims). It’s often impossible to understand a segment without this type of information and pulling these from your qualitative interviews simply won’t work…because you don’t know what segment that person would fall in to (since they didn’t take the survey).

Instead of a made-up persona, you will have a real, tangible persona that is tied back to real tangible data that supports it. At this point you can develop and ask one or two questions to triage prospects as they interact with your brand.

Make sense? Now go do it!