Every single one of us is a consumer of something. We are faced with an overwhelming amount of data and decisions every single day - from what to make for dinner or what’s the quickest route to work this morning, to which shampoo should you buy? And frankly, advertisers and marketers don’t make it easy for us, they just think they do. They overwhelm us with underwhelming information and often do so at the most inconvenient times.

Welcome back to my blog. Today’s post is going to take you back through the concepts I laid down last year about the solution stack and the struggle stack for a Job-to-be-Done. However, this time I’m not going to use the “Listen to Music” job (I do refer to it). Instead, I will focus on the job I mapped out for you about “Developing a Qualified Lead.” That’s right, it’s the job where I defined a marketer as someone who nurtures prospects (could be B2C or B2B) over a period of time (it could be minutes or months) until they are ready to make a purchase or be removed from consideration.

I will begin by demonstrating just how difficult the Martech vendors make it for you (they are simply a proxy for all product categories). As a business who is hiring marketing technology, you’re probably doing so to help produce revenue more efficiently and effectively, right? While product planning does play a principal role in this, that’s another topic that I cover elsewhere, so I’m going to focus on helping you understand what you should expect from your vendors when selecting technology to enable the marketing of products and services. Hopefully, this will lead to better conversations around the areas where you need help, and what you’re willing to pay for (or not pay for) based on that understanding

Have you ever compared feature lists or matrices from two different brands in the same solution category? I decided to make a half-hearted attempt to reconcile the offerings from Salesforce and Adobe. It wasn’t pretty, but since I had to see it, now you have to see it. Let’s take a look at the marketing solution categories for Salesforce and Adobe respectively:

Salesforce

Adobe

If these vendors are trying to help companies accomplish the same things, why don’t they have the same solution categories? Why don’t they use the same language?

Simple: they are trying to differentiate themselves.

The problem is that they are not helping you to understand how best to accomplish your business goals. They immediately make it more difficult for you in your decision-journeys. Now let’s do product lists!

Salesforce

Thankfully, they overwhelm us with the sub-brand in each product name! Except for loyalty, hmm 🤔

Note: There is no technology that will “win customers for life” but I’ve addressed that elsewhere

Adobe

I had to add a column because they have their products broken down by area! Even more helpful!

Are you seeing a pattern yet? Me neither. Well, not a meaningful one, anyway.

For each brand there is a unique solution stack. Each brand makes the job of developing a qualified lead difficult in different ways, and you’ll find this in the struggle stack depiction below. If you want a deeper read on that you can check out the post I did on ZDNet last year:

A New Science for Customer Experience

They force you to invest in expertise to operate this portfolio of technology. The more people you involve, the further away they are from understanding the underlying value drivers for your business. In fact, they may not know what drives success at all. They’re just really, really good at configuring campaigns as instructed, or getting digital assets into a DAM.

People value solutions that get more of the job done, in an automated fashion, on a single platform…with fewer features 👈

Which would you prefer: a component stereo system or Spotify? What makes this so difficult to answer is that many of you never had to live with a component stereo system. What changed? First, the miniaturization of electronics was a start. Then moving much of the computational horsepower to an unseen place - delivered over this magical thing called the Internet - was next.

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We now live in a digital world, so the expectation I have is that we don’t just assume that everything is Okay because the solution lives in the cloud. We should always remember how this played out with music.

We no longer need record stores
We no longer need consumables like cleaning fluid for vinyl, or head cleaners for cassette decks
We no longer need an array of hardware devices
We no longer need solutions for different contexts (at-home, at-beach, on-the-go) or worry about bothering others

So, if we live in a digital world, why do we have so many solutions to get the simple job of developing a qualified lead done, especially from brands that claim to be a platform? I’m glad you asked! It’s money…your money. So, what are you going to do about it? Let me refresh your memory a little bit before I move on.

I wrote an entire series on marketing, but the post below maps the job out.

Practical Jobs-to-be-Done

Jobs-to-be-Done: How to Analyze the Market of Marketing

Domain: Revenue Development Core Job: Marketers trying to Develop a Qualified Lead Mode: Acquire New Customers Note: Jobs-to-be-Done value models and the ultimate data sets that are created are not designed to provide feature specifications. They are designed to target areas in a market where customer objectives are not well satisfied and/or…

a year ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Mike Boysen

When you put jobs theory to work things become so much simpler, more stable, and much less biased. Can you map all of the Martech products you’ve hired to their respective steps in the map below? How difficult is it to cobble them all together to accomplish your marketing goal(s)? Do you observe and gaps?

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe8817d76-c6cd-4b42-b804-fb214795f58d_1224x662.png

I challenge you to reconcile this simple job map to the struggle stack below. Keep in mind, since the vendors can’t seem to categorize their products consistently (see above), you need to consider a struggle stack for each brand. I could be nice and do it for them, but my goal is to eliminate the struggle stack, not perpetuate it.

This example is taken from the Adobe product catalog I outlined above, and is incomplete due to space limitations on the page

Why is “Commerce” in the marketing portfolio? Let me know in the comments below. 👇

We should be seeking a lens on innovation that forces the current ecosystem to consolidate into a new business model just like the industries supporting “Listening to Music” did. The goal is to eliminate the columns (and rows) through integration and automation. Don’t obsess over this depiction. Heat mapping it will not really help you because there’s a big problem…

This struggle stack doesn’t even address the entire job of Developing a Qualified Lead

The struggle stack I shared for Listening to Music only addresses one step in the 8 steps of the job. One! The reason? An obsessive focus on the solution space and…theater. It prevents us from seeing the bigger, more stable picture. As I pointed in this piece…

Practical Jobs-to-be-Done

How does the Martech Stack, Stack Up?

Listen now (71 min) | The theater of marketing It’s easy to get consumed with whatever your boss tells you to do, right? We need chatbots because XYZ company has chatbots! We need AI! We need to send another email to our mailing list! We need to run more ads because we have a Google Ads account…

3 years ago · 1 like · Mike Boysen

…there are major gaps in the marketing solution-space because they are so acutely focused on theater and buzzwords, as opposed to helping us get the entire job done quickly, accurately, and in a repeatable, scalable fashion. To understand what that is you need to put a different lens to the problem. Is the problem that I don’t have a Customer Data Platform? Or is the problem that your planning process is error-prone and does not integrate well with the tools used for execution?

Remember when Pandora made turntables? Neither do I

As a consumer of marketing solutions does it make sense for you to slog through the process of comparing brands, products, categories and features against each other? It’s almost impossible! And it assumes that they address everything you need in order to accomplish your ultimate objective of developing a qualified lead (something you can convert to revenue in the current period).

Don’t let the vendors dictate the rules of the game. Try changing it up on them. I’ve written about this a few times, here’s one you might enjoy…

Practical Jobs-to-be-Done

Evaluate your performance against an objective, not competitors using JTBD

Here’s something you should know if you want to successfully interpret what I write about digital transformation. I do not compare the current state against competitors, features, trends, buzzwords, economies, or ideas. The reason is simple, those things are fleeting and chaotic, and no one has control over them; let alone the ability to assign meaningf…

3 years ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Mike Boysen

Practical Jobs-to-be-Done

The Struggles of Marketing: Explained