# How to Use Jobs to Be Done to Perfect Your Positioning – Claire Suellentrop – MicroConf Growth 2018 Channel: Rob Walling Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyGYfxpe2FQ Duration: 38 min Language: English Words: 6930 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/MyGYfxpe2FQ --- [0:00] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey everyone I know we're going to the end of the day and people are probably a little wiped out on talks so thank you for still being here so as Rob said I'd like to talk for the next 30 minutes about product positioning essentially how are you describing what your product does in comparison to what else is on the market what the other options are out there so I thought on course talk earlier was really interesting and relevant here because he talked about the fact that you can you can get to a certain point in your business strong-arming and I would say you can [0:52] you can get initial traction and that first 20 30 km are with okay product positioning but you do reach a point at which you've got to be really thoughtful about how you describe your product versus the competition especially if you want to hit those higher growth numbers which is why I'm giving this talk at growth specifically what's really funny is I've done this process with a number of SAS companies normally they already have a decent number of customers I'm currently working on a SAS company I do not have customers yet because we're about to onboard our first couple folks so I can't even do this for my own [1:29] business right now which is really embarrassing because I hate my own positioning but this is really useful if you do have a customer base that you can learn from so I would actually like to start this talk with a question to you over the lifetime of your business have you ever described your product in any of the ways that are shown on this next slide have you ever put this on your homepage maybe on the landing page or on an ad and by the way I think these are all good attributes for a product to have something that will save your customers time or maybe money and I [2:06] myself am working on the product I'm working on is meant to save our users time but has anyone ever used terms like this to describe what our product does okay I'm seeing a couple hands so some of us are in the same boat here and again this isn't a trick I think these are really important things for products to do and lots of us use these phrases but the problem comes in when when these are what you rely on day in and day out to try to differentiate yourself from what else your customers could be using I thought this slide was funny I was going to talk about how [2:44] you're losing money but I kind of did that on the last slide so we can speed through and the thing is I'm sure your customers actually do want to be saving time maybe they do want to be saving money it's and I'm if they're looking for software to solve whatever problem it is that they're dealing with they do want something that is easy to use and also really powerful but I'll show you a little experiment that I ran to kind of show you while you're positioning needs to get more specific than those phrases so while I was preparing this talk I went to kaptara and I searched for [3:20] appointment scheduling software which is really relevant because we just talked about appointment scheduling software so I believe someone else yesterday use a kaptara review as well or a mention of kaptara but if you're not familiar it's a review site right so it a grits products and I as a prospect can decide which one's gonna be best for me so I wanted to see how these different appointment scheduling tools were describing their themselves in this lineup right when someone like me as a prospect is coming to a review site and I'm forced to choose between four five six seven different options it's a lot of information I am I have a very low [4:01] attention span because I'm probably busy I have other stuff to do during the day so these guys are gonna have to work really hard to help me understand why it's worth going to their website signing up for a trial of their product as it turns out a lot of them really weren't working that hard they were all saying the same thing so apart from one or two scheduling tools that did have really strong copy and it seems like they hired a professional copywriter moe to them sold me that on the same things they said that they were a powerful system that had a robust feature set [4:36] that I could take advantage of of course I was going to save time of course it was gonna be easy to use and there are two big problems with this so one as a prospect it's really hard for me to understand what these things will look like in my life they're very abstract phrases so using words like this to describe how your product helps people it'd be kind of like coming up to me in the grocery store and being like hey you need to buy this flower and these eggs and it's milk and it's butter and I'd be like why hey I don't know you bee why are you trying [5:09] to sell me these random grocery items none of these are on my list I don't know where you're going with this but if you came up to me and you said hey you need to buy all these things and then take them home and combine them because when you do you'll get this well now I know how my life is better right because there's a cake in my life so I can picture this right and the first problem again with phrases like robust feature set is that you're kind of focusing on the ingredients or you're not really focusing on the cake you're not focusing on the problem that's being solved so [5:43] the second issue is that when you use phrases like save time and save money solely when describing your product and by the way a number of us raise our hands and said yes okay we've done that myself included you make yourself indistinct right you sound like just your all of your not only do you sound like your competitors you also sound like all kinds of other products that are in entirely different niches so prospects have no way of knowing how you are any better than any solution that they could be trying to stand out from the crowd and really capture people when they're in that shopping mindset you've [6:20] got to get a lot more specific and you have to speak to this this pain that they're feeling in the better life that they envision for themselves once they have a solution in place by the way this is ten times more important if you're in a crowded market right if if your product was on kaptara and you have twenty competitors that someone could pick from this gets even more important and it's also very important if your your prospects cost of switching to you is really high and I mean that in terms of the time involved the data migration involved and we look at an example a [6:51] real software example to kind of bring this to life and by the way for the rest of the talk what this is going to look like what you can expect is concept example concept example and then I'm gonna get super tactical at the end but don't worry about trying to take notes and keep up I've got everything including the slide deck and a checklist and all kind of stuff all kind of all those kinds of things available at the end so you can sit back and just watch and not stress out so my husband Steven and I use a software called YNAB or you need a [7:24] budget to manage our personal finances and I also use YNAB to manage my business finances we've been using it for about three years and by now I'm a I'm a pretty hardcore user I there's a lot I really love about YNAB by the way I know a lot of folks here have been to many micro comps because anyone here the Year Jesse the founder of wine ad spoke okay great it was a good talk I enjoyed it I think the the story behind how the product came to be is wonderful and the reason that we started using wine AB is that previously we had been using a [8:00] spreadsheet to manage our budget and I'm like I'm an okay spreadsheet user but I'm not a power user and we were manually we would set up our budget in our spreadsheet and so we'd have okay here's the amount of money that we're going to be able to live on next month and all the different categories that we spend in and then we would manually look at all of our spending from our bank accounts and our credit cards and we would have to figure out okay how much money do I have left in every category if you if you have ever done this then you would know how much room for human [8:36] error there is in that process it's horrible and what's great about YNAB is that I can do that same process in my spread that I was doing in a spreadsheet where I've got all my categories but it automatically imports all of my bank and my credit card transactions and it removes that room for human error so I used to really stress out about whether we were accidentally stealing from ourselves in the future whether we were accidentally spending more money than we had without realizing it and why not eliminated that stress for us and that was great until it wasn't and this is where we get really deep into the weeds on my boring [9:13] finance details so the old version of YNAB used to manage let you manage your debt or your overspend in two ways and I've made a little example here and you can see that this random category let's say I set aside a hundred bucks to buy new shoes and I spend a hundred twenty-five so why not would let you cover that in two ways you could either pull surplus from another category to cover your spending and get yourself back into the black or you could push that debt into the following month and you could budget twenty five bucks in the following month to get yourself into the black now we need a disability [9:54] because my husband whose full-time salaried actually also in software he makes a lot of work purchases on his credit card and then at the end of the quarter he submits an expense report and we get reimbursed a couple thousand dollars this is especially true when he takes trips to see clients and trips to conferences so it's really important for us to be able to look at his work spending differently from all of our other spending because it's it's not really our money that we're spending in that case it's his companies we just get it back later so why not changed this and what that looks like now is let's [10:30] say Stephen goes to a conference and he spends a hundred bucks on a hotel room for the night we need to be able to see that separately from all of our other money but now why now doesn't let us do that why not actually subtract that hundred bucks from the amount of money we're allowed to live on next month so let's say we had ten thousand dollars next month and this month Stephen goes on a trip and spends a hundred bucks YNAB would say well too bad for you guys now you only have 99 hundred bucks to live on next month and that debt would go back to zero so this just [11:05] doesn't work for us one I no longer have a well the both of us no longer have a clear picture of how much he needs to be reimbursed so dealing with the expense report is a huge pain number two if we do want to keep using YNAB and having any kind of faith in our budget numbers versus how much money we really have all of our confidence is totally shattered because we have to come up with all kinds of weird workarounds to separate his work spending we have to change the dates that things were spent it's like we introduced all this room for human error that we had previously gotten rid [11:40] of when we when we switched to wine up and I know this is probably not the most fascinating topic unless anyone here as a CFO for their company or really enjoys managing their own books but I don't know a lot of people who love that part but the point of me going into these deep details is to emphasize that this is really stressful for us every month we're looking at our bank account and we're like can we spend all the money in here or we how long are we sort of this is actually available versus how much are you going to get back from from your [12:11] company and it's awful and stress is a really powerful emotion and it's an emotion that pushes people to go shopping for a new product so I am in shopping mode for a new budgeting software right now and Jessie by the way if you end up watching this video I don't think you're here I haven't run into you I love your company and I don't say this to trash YNAB as it as a product but this certain feature change is really bringing me down and so I'm shopping right I'm looking for something that is different than the solution I have right now and here's why naps home [12:48] page you can see it says gain total control of your money which is not inherently a bad headline it's a little bit generic but again I'm looking for something different right here's what I get when I start googling are you ready to take control of your finances well no I actually I have pretty good control of my finances the problem is that the software I'm using it's forcing me into a system that doesn't work for my so is this gonna be any different I don't really know I can't tell from reading this page okay so I'm gonna keep googling and keep looking around take control of your finances [13:27] what the hell remember I'm looking for a solution that is going to solve a pain that I'm feeling with a different solution and nothing out there is proving that it's not just another zebra all of these sound the same and this is probably happening to you if you do a Google search for your competitors and you see what's what's on your website and you see what's on theirs and you're like oh we could probably swap these and no one would notice that's what could absolutely happen here now the good news is that you can figure out what those deep nitty gritty pain points are you can find out all of those [14:06] details of how they're using your product just like I went to the details of how I'm using YNAB and I'll show you that but before I can do that we need to talk really quickly about a behavioral theory that I love and use a lot in my work called jobs to be done so jobs to be done started as a product development theory and I'm curious who here is already familiar with this okay great actually lots of people which is really exciting so if you are new to the theory I'll kind of break this down a little bit jobs to be done the theory goes basically that people buy and use your [14:42] product because they want to make their own life better right not because they care about your product they probably don't care about your features but we'll unpack that a little bit and I realize now I haven't credited the original person who said this alan clement wrote a book called one coffee and kale compete it's a major deep dive on jobs to be done it's a great book but we'll look at this in a little bit more of a visual detail so let's pretend I'm your prospect right I'm just going along and my life is normal and I'm not really shopping for anything but then something happens there's an event occur occurring [15:21] or I find myself in a situation and that triggers a struggle and for me that was why NAB's update that was the situation that was the so I eventually feel that so much pain associated with that struggle that I start to seek new solutions and in a perfect world I find your product and the struggle is resolved right everything is better and I can move on and my life has improved because that struggle is no longer a part of it so there's a handy little framework called a job story to better define your users struggles and and what they're looking for and the job story goes like this [16:02] when blank is happening that's that whatever that event is that's causing them a struggle help me do something that that middle part is how your product helps people so I can blink and the last part is so I can is how they envision their life being better with your product in it so if we want to bring it back to those little stick figures this is this kind of how that would play out so again with why naps feature update a very specific struggle was introduced into my life and so here's how I would write my own job story as a user of some other finance [16:40] app at some point when my partner and this is very specific if you do customer research you'll start to find lots of specific ones but you'll find overall themes so they don't have to get this deep but mine is because it's my own when my partner has made work-related purchases I mean I need to track those separately from our other spending give me the flexibility I want flexibility right I want I want this to work for me to separate those purchases from the rest of our spending so I can plan next month's budget without all of this stress that I'm screwing up our numbers right I need some confidence that when I [17:22] look at our budget I really do know okay god good we have a ton of money left we're and we're in the black that's really not reflected on any competing software home pages in how they position their product versus anything else and I guess a little bit of a caveat would be that people tend to keep their homepages general and there's good reason for that and I'm happy to talk about the difference between your homepage copy versus copying on a targeted landing page but the point is that these all sound like what I'm already using and so we're I to go to a capped era or what I did which is Google [18:00] best financed apps 2018 and get a bunch of listicle posts and click on 85 links and and try to figure out ok which of these is gonna be best for me and are these all going to be the same this is what I'm seeing right so I'm not any closer to trying out your product because it doesn't sound any different than what's out there and by the way I also understand that I'm I may be using the product incorrectly maybe I'm an edge case right maybe YNAB has made a very calculated decision to serve customers who can use the software in a way that I just can't [18:36] I understand that right I know that's just a part of future development but I don't really think I'm an edge case because when I search for YNAB alternatives what comes up first is no one's ad word campaign what comes what comes up first is no organic result of a competing customers website what comes up is a reddit thread about wine of alternatives so YNAB has a very engaged community of users on reddit there's actually a whole subreddit dedicated to wine add usage and what people are saying on this subreddit is really interesting so look at this there are 295 up votes on this post about wine I [19:20] have alternatives now I understand that you know the original poster wasn't saying I'm mad and I'm leaving but look how many people were struggling and and looking for something different and got value from this poster who shared alternatives 300 people and those are just the ones who use reddit and were able to sign in an upvote how many more people are getting value out of this like me people who are getting there and I'm not going to take the time to up vote but this is really valuable to me next person does indicate that they are trying to make a switch and look at the language they use to describe this right [19:55] my finances have been a mess because I can't grasp this new software when they did the update the new version didn't work for them anymore this person is also looking for alternatives I like that they titled theirs rant that's fair when I get mad about software I go on rants - now the first complaint they have I disagree with they're mad that they had to switch from a one time purchase to a SAS model and I think we all here understand the benefit of that from the business perspective but I think the vocabulary of the next complaint is really interesting the new features sometimes interfere with my [20:31] usage of the product that's what's happening to me - right so there's people out there who are struggling with this and if you're a wine app competitor you should be reading this stuff so this poster is my favorite because they listed the exact reasons that wine abs not working for them anymore and my favorite is their they feel like they're accidentally stealing from their future right which is what was happening to us as well if Stephen spent $100 on a hotel room for a work conference and we need to keep that separate why not would say no no that is now coming out of your future budget sorry so if you were a [21:08] wine up competitor right and you noticed you did some research and you're like oh people or people are not happy with this order I wonder if we could leverage this in some way I think how effective it would be if you could just take these words and use these to describe the pain that people might be feeling on a targeted landing page maybe on your home page how effective would that be a colleague and good friend of mine actually worked with a wine out competitor last year to test new positioning on their homepage they started with something that was really similar to all those examples we just [21:47] looked at right so this is once again we're talking about taking control of finances which is true this that is what this thing does but it once again just sounds like every other option so this is what they this is what they tested and they did this after running some customer research and I'll show you that process in a minute but they looked at the customer research they they looked at what this competitor's best customers said about the product and customers are saying this is so great I can customize it so it works for me it's flexible and they used that in their in their new positioning and that resulted [22:25] in a 200% increase from people who visited the homepage and instead of bouncing went through to the pricing page now the conversation of conversions from this homepage all the way through to trial signup I don't think it's fair for me to get into because I'm not telling my own client story so I'm gonna I'm going to keep this focused only on conversions from this page to another page but the point is that this is really powerful stuff right 200% increase in people who stay on your on your website to learn more about your product and see if it might be a good fit I think how many more people could [23:03] be on your website and staying and looking at your pricing page if they could understand a little bit more about how your product is different from the other ones that are out there which brings us back to the customer research topic so this is not the first time today that everyone has been told that they need to be talking to their customers I'm sure a lot of us do talk to our customers whether it's on demos or in support whatever it may be but I want to talk about finding the job again that your your product is doing for your people I recommend that you do that using [23:37] customer surveys and customer interviews and the reason for that is customer surveys are great for getting a high volume of qualitative data so you can identify a bunch of your your most high-value customers send a survey and get dozens and dozens of responses and those are great but they don't give a lot of detail because people are busy and they're not going to write paragraphs and paragraphs about their story and their usage and that's where the customer interviews come in if you can get a handful of your customers on the phone and kind of learn about what was going on that them to seek your product out and how [24:13] they're using it now those customer interviews will color in a lot of a lot of the gaps that are left by the surveys they'll give you a ton of really interesting context so I'm going to show you again bring it tactical right now and I'm going to show you kind of what this looks like when I do it but you can also use all of the tools that I use user list is the product I'm working on and at this link you can download pretty much everything it'd be a checklist of the process the survey and interview templates copy of the slides and pretty much anything related to this talk will [24:47] be at this link so what as I mentioned earlier this is most effective when you have a decent customer base that you can pull from and that's why I would say it's okay in the early days of your of your company if your product positioning is kind of vague its kind of met you just don't have enough customer data to learn from yet and that's the phase that I'm at with user list I just don't have the data and so it's going to be a process of learning from people as they come on board so if your company is young and you don't have enough people [25:22] to pull data from let you get a pass it's fine so given that we're at growth I'm going to assume over the next couple slides that you do have enough people to work with and this is how I would suggest you go about doing this so for customer surveys pick a survey platform I really like type form specifically because I find they make it super easy to include a hidden field where if someone takes the survey I can track their email as well and then I can go look them up in my marketing automation tool or my CRM and I can learn more about who they were so I like [25:56] type form but you can use Google Forms or jot form or whatever you like you're gonna keep that survey very short the one that I have at that link is only five questions long because people are busy and the more questions you pile into a survey the less likely they're going to take time to give you high quality answers so keep them super short identify one to two hundred of your highest value customers and high value customers of course are going to look different in every business right when I'm working with clients on this what I what I like to look for is the people who are most engaged [26:29] whatever engagement means for your product and who are also on some of the highest tiered plans so you're gonna email these people with a link to the survey it's gonna be super friendly it's gonna be very short and it's I would if at all possible try to send it from a real person and not from a marketing automation platform that looks like it was sent by a marketing automation platform because I found people are more likely to answer this email when it looks like it came from my own Gmail and then let the results roll in you want to aim for at least 25 to 50 results or [27:04] replies minimum just so you have enough data to work with and you can kind of look for trends you do want to hold back about 40 of these customers because you're gonna reach out to those folks for interviews and you don't want to exhaust people with multiple asks in a short amount of time so while your survey results are rolling in you're gonna email those remaining 40 customers and say hey I'd love to learn more about you and and how you started using the product and what's working well and if it's not could we get on a short call just 30 minutes no tricks it's it's not [27:36] it's it's not high pressure I just will learn from you people are surprisingly willing to do this a number of founders I've spoken to are like I don't want to annoy my customers but people love talking about themselves I'm not kidding people love getting on this call I usually see and it's it's varied of course but on an average a 20 to 25 percent yes rate to people saying you know a book a time and of course people don't always show up because they get busy or they forget that the meeting was scheduled whatever but if you can get 10 customer interviews out of this project [28:11] then I would say you have enough customer data to work with so in those interviews when you're running the calls you don't want to be looking for feedback on your product you don't want to be asking what do you think of this or hey we were thinking in this feature would you ever use that people are very bad at answering those questions because they'll put their opinions in there but you're not looking for opinions right now really what you're looking for is this story line of how they made decisions in the past so the questions once again they're all downloadable so you don't have to worry about coming up with a [28:46] bunch of questions but the questions are very what focused it's much more about hey so what did your life look like before our product right what were you using what what what did that what would like paint me a picture what did your life look like and then what happened that led you to start seeking something like our product and what did you do to start finding solutions and and once you found us what happened that made you sign up for a trial and so on and so forth a lot of what all the way through that journey that they took is what you're looking for here you would [29:20] definitely want to record these calls don't try to take notes because having the raw customer in the raw language straight from your customers mouth is amazing for copy and developing stronger positioning because eventually what you're gonna be able to do is mirror your customer's language back to them on within your marketing so be sure to record these calls and then upload them I'm a walking billboard for rev.com upload them to Rev which will transcribe all of your all of your audio it usually takes 24 hours or less sometimes it happens within like two hours and it's only I think they do like a dollar a minute so it's so so worth it so what [30:04] you're gonna end up with is a ton of qualitative data you will have a lot of words that you're looking at both in a spreadsheet where all of your survey results rolled in and in all these transcripts which will be pages and pages long so the next step is to start finding the trends and figuring out what were those merce most common previous lives what do they look like right what are what are our highest value customers doing before they ever feel a struggle and then what causes that struggle right because you if you can speak to whatever's causing that struggle and what that struggle is they're gonna be [30:40] like oh these people get me these people are actually going to solve the problem I'm having and so on and so forth and I'm not going to lead you through the stick person journey but literally the quest that I use are designed to answer that when blank help me blank so I can blank job story framework so as survey results roll in you'll be able to see column by column what the most common situations were and again your interviews are gonna provide a lot of really deep context and I'm I'll try to hurry this up because I know we're like very very in the weeds here but these are the activities that [31:17] will get you closer to that really specific positioning now at this point as I mentioned you'll have a ton of data and you'll be like what do I do with all these words there's a there's a document that I use that I call a voice of customer document every good copywriter if you ever work with a copywriter they'll talk about voice of customer I know the copywriters in this room use this term but I like to I like using this document to kind of categorize the patterns that I'm seeing and make it really easy to refer back to the stickiest things that my my customers say when I'm on the phone with them so [31:54] all of this is in that download link that I shared but what's great about having this voice of customer doc where you've assembled and organized all your data is that you don't have to makeup positioning off the top of your head right you can look at what do people really love about us what if they said they love about us versus whatever else is out there that's what we'll use we'll just use our customers words that's what led to that 200% increase in views to the pricing page right so I'm gonna wrap this up because I want to save time for questions and looking at the timer I've [32:27] gone a little bit over but once again if you would like to access all of those resources you can do so at this link and I'm gonna be around not only today but also tomorrow so I love talking about this stuff and I'm happy to chat further so thank you very much we can go to questions [Applause] all right we have time for questions [33:00] so to your example about the the YNAB I feel like the to change the messaging to focus on you specifically it's like a like a super vertical right there totally you know I think from my company I do have one of those more generic wording there because I'm trying to capture over like 90 different verticals so would you recommend just choosing a couple high-value verticals or creating tons of different landing pages because I feel like moving away from generic oh we'll start making you know isolating some of the people that are coming to my company's website that's a really valid concern and it's the reason that a lot [33:34] of people stay fairly generic on their homepage I like to think of your homepage as an airport or like there's a million people come in there and they've all got different places they need to go right some of them want to look at your pricing some of them want to look at your jobs some of them want to figure out where the contact info is because they're already using your product and they're mad and they want contact support so I get the the concern of being too specific on your homepage in a scenario like that where you have a lot of different types of users leveraging [34:06] different landing pages for those users it's a great move so whether you're running ads to those in your you've got a number of different marketing campaigns going or whether on your homepage you have an option for people to immediately kind of segment themselves the best example I can think of that is buffer so I don't know what their their website looks like right now I haven't gone there in a while but I talked with their director of marketing about a year ago and he was he was saying you know we're really struggling to speak to both agencies and individuals on our homepage what do we do and they eventually made the decision [34:44] to have a little like a they almost they they made their homepage look like here's that here's the value proposition here's a little subhead and then below that it looked like two browser tabs next to each other and you selected I'm an agency owner or I'm a business owner and then everything below that spoke specifically to you so if you can come up with a way to kind of have people self-select on their homepage what they might be then you can speak to those people much more strongly and if you've got a ton of people a lot of companies like to do this using a like a customer's tab or [35:21] I'm sorry a customer's like option in the header and then using some kind of drop-down and you can choose I'm in sales or I am an HR person or whatever your verticals may be so really I think your best bet if in that scenario would be to get people off of your homepage and to somewhere more specific to them as quickly as you can yeah hi Claire thanks to the thanks to the talk if you go in a little more detail about choosing those 200 or so high-value customers do you recommend that you let them settle into your product a little bit or you know in my [36:01] value a customer signs up for a trial that you try and hit them whatever 15 days or right after they've sort of just converted that's a very very good question I personal preference I like to go with people who've who've been in the product for a while and in the product for a while is obviously going to be different depending on how long it took them to onboard and activate and and become a good user for the most part as I've done this work I've largely worked with companies who have it they have a transactional price point all the way up to a very enterprise price point oh did [36:39] I mess something up okay okay sorry it's Greenlee different anyway so I would I would aim for the people who've been in the product for a while my like rule of thumb is six months but that could of course be different depending on what what getting on board looks like for your customers but they're going to have the best information on how life is better now because they'll then they'll now be just kind of living with your product there's really good research to be conducted with those newer people but to just keep things easy on yourself I'd aim for the ones who've been in there for a while any other questions [37:20] looks good much clearer yeah all right thanks everyone [Applause] --- About this transcript Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com). 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