How Would You Beat Lead Scoring Using Jobs-to-be-Done?

Jay Haynes: 0:00

Welcome back to How would you beat where we discuss how you can use jobs to be done innovation methods to beat your competition. In this episode, we'll look at how you can beat lead scoring. lead scoring is a process that companies and sales teams use to assess their customer leads, we will explain why lead scoring is something product teams should understand as well, and how you can enhance lead scoring based on your product strategy and your marketing messages. The goal of enhanced lead scoring is to help your company accelerate your growth. With the innovations, your product team builds and launches into the market. So Jared, what is lead scoring?

Jared Ranere: 0:44

Yeah, great question. So simply put, it's a mathematical method for prioritizing which leads are most likely to buy. And so then by by understanding which leads are most likely to buy, you can prioritize where who you spend time with. So if a lead has a high score, you spend more time with them, trying to sell them. And as you have more time you go to lead with lower scores. And there's a great article on HubSpot. HubSpot has a treasure trove of interesting information about how to do marketing and sales, where they break down simple ways to develop lead scores. And what they suggest is essentially assign a number value to different characteristics of your leads. And there's two general buckets. There's the characteristics of the lead. And there are the behaviors of the lead. So when they talk about characteristics they're talking about, you know, if it's a b2c company, you're in, you're talking to consumers, what are their demographic characteristics? Are they parents? Do they? Are they a certain age, a certain household income, all of those kinds of things? If you're a b2b company, it's company information or firma graphics, you know, what industry? Are they in? What size? Are they in? What type of company? Are they? What role did the does the lead have in their company? And then of course, looking with looking at activities. So how engaged? Are they on your website? Are they downloading content, you can assess point values to each activity, and the more activities and the more characteristics that the lead matches, the higher their value is, and the more you should prioritize them. So then the question becomes, yeah, that is that good. Right? What is that model productive? And is there anything you could do to better prioritize which leads you go after?

Jay Haynes: 2:37

Yeah, and it's interesting, it's, it's not bad. Of course, lead scoring, doing lead scoring is better than not doing lead scoring. But what's interesting is, we we see this same issue with customer segmentation, that product teams and you know, executives are very familiar with, that the traditional way to do segmentation is based on some sort of characteristic. That is actually outside of what the customer is actually struggling with, the way we would put it, it has nothing to do with their unmet needs, it actually has to do with some sort of characteristics that you can define about a customer, like you said, demographics, or firma graphics, or, you know, purchase behavior or activity on your website, you know, stuff like that, you're, what you're trying to do is say, Okay, those numbers, those metrics are a proxy, are a way to assess the probability that that customer actually has unmet needs that we can satisfy. And that happens in segmentation. Where, you know, you might identify the wrong segment, or at least you haven't uncovered all of the customers who would be the underserved customers that you would, you would absolutely want to target. And that's the same thing with lead scoring is, the way to enhance it, of course, is to understand if a lead actually has unmet needs, that you can satisfy with either your current product, which is the best or with something you're developing in your product roadmap, and that's where as, as we say, all the time, what we're trying to do with jobs to be done is to really coordinate product marketing and sales around the customer. And what does that mean? Well, companies today of course, want to be customer focused, everybody's figured out. We need to be customer focused because the your mission in life is to credit customers. You know, Peter Drucker famously said, So customer focus is the right approach, but then what do you focus on? And that's where the idea behind jobs he done which I think people listening to this if they know anything about jobs, he done it It's fairly straightforward. It's the customers are not buying your product, they're hiring it to get a job done. So you want to focus on what that job is. And you can see this in lots of markets, you know, for example, no one wants an iPod, they want to create a mood with music. As Theodore Levitt famously said, no one wants a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole. And and this is why products and services and technologies change all the time. But the customer's job is the same, it never changes.

Jared Ranere: 5:27

Right? And so going back a little bit to lead scoring, being used to assess the the probability that a customer will buy your product. I think that, you know, if you're I know, you know about this J, but there's the opening of competing against luck work, Clay Christensen says, I'm 610. I'm about 73 years old. I'm Mormon, I have I think he's got five or six kids. A lot of kids.

Jay Haynes: 5:54

And like seven, yeah, to just yeah, he's really tall. He lives in

Jared Ranere: 5:59

New England. And I forget the last tidbit of information about himself. And he said, None of these are the reason I bought the New York Times this morning. And and the the message is, marketers use demographics to try to profile people all the time, determine are they likely to buy their product? Who should they target with their messaging. And Clay's point is that all of these demographics have nothing to do with why he purchases a product, as you just said, he purchases the product to get a job done, he has some struggle. And so that's what the traditional lead scoring could mess like, sure. You know, maybe maybe the activity in the website indicates that you're interested in the solution for some reason. But what is that reason? And should I downgrade you because you're interested in the solution, and you're from a company that I didn't realize had the problem? Because I didn't, I didn't realize that, you know, mid market companies or, or enterprise companies in a certain industry had that problem. So I downgraded your lead score, or should I emphasize the problems you have as being the most important part of why you're buying and that's what jobs to be done is saying the struggle with the job causes the purchase. So if you can understand the struggle, then you understand why they're purchasing, and you know, if you're a good fit for that purchase,

Jay Haynes: 7:21

yeah, and this is where lead scoring is actually really, it's the same process, or I should say, lead scoring can be enhanced with the same process, to use in Joshy. Done to identify unmet customer needs and underserved customer segments. And that's really the power of it just to, to cut right to the chase the process is when you understand the customer's jobs, and we know jobs are very, very complex, they have you know, 1520 different job steps and you know, 100 different customer needs. So if you get customer effort scores on those steps, then you can tell where customers struggle, because they'll tell you, yeah, that job step is very difficult. I'm very frustrated with that. So for example, in our in our get to a destination on time example that we use all the time, you could figure out that people who are using Apple and Google Maps, there's a segment of people who struggle to plan their stops, because they've got to determine the optimal sequence, they've got to determine the routes, they got to figure out the traffic patterns, I got busy days, you know, whatever. So what that means is in that job step that has a lot of struggle for a segment. And those customers, even though they're using Apple and Google Maps today would likely pay for a new solution, because they this is a very high unmet need for them, they have a willingness to pay. So that's a really good customer, target. Now, if you were looking at leads coming in who are interested in your your new app to get this job done, what you would do Trisha is you say, Oh, well, there are men, and met rural men who are over 60 Are, are a good segment for us. But it turns out, the people who struggle with this job, it has nothing to do with whether or not they're male or female, whether they're rural or urban, rather high income, low income, what their ages, the problem they have is because they struggle to get to destinations on time. So the way that you would score the lead, instead of saying, oh, there's a, you know, 60 year old male came in, that's a high score, which may or may not be accurate. Sure. But what the additional enhancement to that information you want to have is, is that customer struggling with the job step that we know defines the segment of underserved customers that we're targeting with our product strategy. And that's really the key is those customer effort scores help you define the product strategy because they say this is a big segment, that's a big enough target. It's they're willing to pay enough in aggregate, that that segment size, we only need 15% share of that segment and our revenue growth will explode. And that's where we work with product teams to get them to record They need to calculate that number two they need even though they're not the sales team, they need to know the revenue in the market that's available. And that is the willingness to pay to get the job done, not the current price of the product, which is a, you know, key foundational idea. So once you have that product strategy, that's where that product strategy actually enhances your lead scoring. Because the product strategy is the market opportunity. And and you you cannot be the market. That is just fundamental. I mean, you can try and convince people, they have a problem that they don't think. But it's much easier if you've identified what their problem is, and you're solving it for them. Which is the whole point of jumping on and customer effort scores.

Jared Ranere: 10:44

Yeah. And I think some people might consider that to be a novel concept. You can ask people what their problem is. And that that's something that jobs to be done. practitioners have believed to be true for a long time. And the nuance there is that you're not asking them, do they need a certain product? People don't really know that right? Do I? Yeah, the the Henry Ford quote, which everybody said a million times, but I'll say it again, is if you ask customers, if they wanted a car, they would say, No, I want a faster horse. What's a car? I never heard of a car?

Jay Haynes: 11:19

Yeah, I think technically, he said, If I asked customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster

Jared Ranere: 11:25

horse. Right? And the fallacy there is that he's asking them what product do they want? Right? If you can ask them, what problem do they want to solve? They know their problems, they know they're, they know, their horses are too slow. They know their horses have to take breaks. They know their horses, you know, you get tired, yeah, and you got to stop for a long time. They get their horses poop, and you get to clean coal. And all of that makes it harder to get to your destination on time. So they're struggling to get the job done, because they take this vehicle that has to pause all the time. And it makes it slow to get to their destination on time that they can explain to you, then it's up to the product practitioners in the innovators to figure out what is the new technological solution that will help them do that faster. So you can ask customers what their problems are. And they can tell you and that's the, the insight here is that if you have a group of leads, you can ask them what their problem is, as long as you don't mention, you don't try to get them to say this is what I'm looking for in a solution. Just ask them what their problem is. And if they have a problem that you can solve with your product, then you have a good lead, you have a lead that you should prioritize over other leads, because they have the problem you're trying to solve.

Jay Haynes: 12:43

Yeah, and asking them about what problem they solve is really the the critical part of getting this right. Because they may have what we always, you know, know as consumption problems, like they can't install your your app, they can't interface with it, you know, they don't want to learn to use, it's very complicated. All those things are legitimate problems with using your product. But what we're talking about here in the lead scoring problem is where do they struggle in the job, the functional job, that is their goal. So for example, getting to destination on time, or a parent trying to get a baby to sleep through the night, you know, a CFO trying to optimize cash flow, a doctor trying to diagnose an infectious disease, those are all jobs or goals they're trying to get done that are very, very functional. And that that really, that defines your market. So just asking customers what problems they have, it can lead you astray. If you don't know what you're looking for. And that is just to talk about our app a little bit. That is what we built the quantitative tools to do. So it can keep you on focus and enable you to identify those segments. And then and then quickly, the process that when we work with companies we help them do is to to then use those questions around those job steps that we know are the underserved ones in the in the target segment. And then if you just have you can you can do it manually, you can have your sales rep just, you know, there's a new lead and reach out to lead and say, Hey, how difficult Do you think it is I get these three jobs I've done then that is an incredibly powerful way to enhance a lead score. Because what it says is that customer and and I think we should back up and make sure people understand how we get the market data, which is we run the big quantitative survey, and then do the quantitative analysis to segment those customers who struggled so we have a prioritization of the job steps. And then when you get a new lead, what you're trying to do is just do a basically one person survey. You just want to know that specific lead. Do they have those struggles that are very high probability indicator that they're looking for a new product. Because there could be a lot of reasons that they're visiting your site, for example, they could just be learning about stuff, they could be, you know, just curious, you know, they, they might be trying to explain something to their colleagues, you know, for whatever reason, and they're, they're, you know, a long way from switching to a new product. And, of course, that's true in our demographic example, just because they're male, or female, or a big company, or small company, or in this industry, not might not at all define if they're struggling. So, but you can get that explicit data by just asking about those job steps. And then that gives you a very high lead score. Yeah,

Jared Ranere: 15:46

and because this is a podcast, and we have time to talk, we can get into a little bit of a nuance around this, which is that, you know, imagine you're in an existing company, right? So you have the market opportunities, what are people out there in the market who are trying to get the job done struggling with, and then the product team can figure out what that is, and align their roadmap to build something that solves those problems, but they already have a product in market, and the marketing team has to try to sell what they already have, which may or may not align with the biggest problems in the market. Hopefully it does, because then you're gonna get accelerated growth. But in the meantime, let's say you, you don't have something that solves the biggest problems in the market. Does that mean that this method is useless to you? And I would, I would argue, no, in the least you can figure out what job steps do we lead on today? So sure that the there's a big chunk of the market that struggles with say, jobs, step eight. I'm making up jobs step numbers now. But we have a product that is that today is really good a job step six. We want to solve job step eight, because we believe there's a big opportunity there, but we're not there yet. And marketing has to figure out how to sell sell this thing that's that solves jobs. Step six. So ask the leads, do they have a problem with job step six. And then if they do, they're more likely to buy your product that solves that problem. And then marketing can demonstrate why it's so good at solving the job step six problem. And then over time, once product launches, the solutions to solve job step eight, marketing can then prioritize the leads that have a problem with job step eight, a lot of vagaries there. So I think let's talk about a specific example.

Jay Haynes: 17:33

Yeah, well, let me just say one thing is that we also know that this really does work for the marketing step, and for the sales step. So in the marketing staff, we have incredible data that shows that if you are messaging to those jobs, steps that are underserved, your conversions on your marketing are much higher. I mean, we have data of 5x increases and conversions, even up to 10x. And then, you know, much lower cost per lead. So on the lead gen side, it's definitely because it because it resonates right. I mean, the example we always use is AI and machine learning, right? Because especially for b2b companies, they love talking about AI and machine learning, your customers do not care about AI or machine learning at all, I can tell you that's 100% true, because that's a solution. To the extent that machine learning can help you get the job done. That's a good message, right. But you also your messages should be about getting the job done faster and more accurately, of course. So in in the lead generation, it can really help. And then in lead scoring, because you have a much higher likelihood to close a new deal with a lead, that self identifies as a person in the market who has a problem that you solve. The it's just it's so much more efficient. And that's, that's the role of all all of jobs to be done is to increase the probability of success and lower the probability of failure starting at the very front end of the innovation, like are you in the right market? Right, right. This is this is the Zune example that we love using, you know, Microsoft thought they were in the iPod market, it turns out, there is no such thing as an iPod market, because it's not a job, it's a solution. But then it flows all the way into closing the deal. And this is where, you know, we love the the coordinating product marketing and sales teams. That's when you get really, really just humming as an organization because you really are customer focused, and you really are satisfying those needs for customers. And Jared, you're saying it's totally, you're totally right. Like if your first thing is just what does our product do today? is done. Which leads to have that problem, right? Yeah. And then and then the roadmapping question. This is why lead scoring is important for product team stuff. understand as well as sales team, because if you're scoring those leads based on the product strategy that is driving your roadmap, you want to know that because and we've seen this be very, very powerful for companies, that when the product team launches that new feature, the sales team knows exactly what that feature actually does to create customer value. So the sales team can sell not to, we have a new feature, but the sales team can sell to the customer that they're going to create value by getting the job done faster and more accurately. And that is that's the whole cycle. That's what yeah, really high efficiency.

Jared Ranere: 20:43

And we talked about aligning product marketing and sales. And if you think of customer success as a wing of sales or customer service, however you think of customer success, it plays a role there too. Because if you understand, let's imagine you ask your customers, which job steps do you struggle with now that you're using our product, if they say certain job steps are easy, that's a that's a feather in your cap, that means your product is helping them get the job done. So you want to ask them, okay, so what are we doing, that's helping you satisfy those needs, and those job steps that you think are easy now. And what that explanation they give you becomes a terrific testimonial. You know, they're essentially saying I solve my problem with this product by doing X, Y, and Z, my life is much easier now. So get that testimonial and put it out there in your market how how your customers are solving their particular problems. The job steps, they say are still difficult, become churn risks for your competitor threats. Because if there are solutions in the market that satisfy needs, and those steps that your customers find difficult, they might start looking for those. And if you want to retain them, you might you direct your roadmap towards solving those job steps. And hopefully, that maps really nicely to where the market struggles. So then you get customer retention, and and growth switching customers switching to you at the same time.

Jay Haynes: 22:09

Yeah, and I think that's super important, too, is that the concept of the competitive analysis and the churn risk, because and, you know, this happens all the time companies sign up customers, and they close the deal. And they get them sort of using the product, and they like it for a while, and then they just stop using it. And that's usually because the product isn't getting enough of the job done. And it can be that a new solution came into the market, you know, obviously, you know, in a consumer market nest is a great example of that, right? Everybody hated their old thermostats. And that's that's just solved the problem by turning the dial it figured out your schedule, and your efficiency and all that. So a new competitor can come in and take share. That's what happened with a new entrant like nest. But oftentimes, it's that big company, your customer will get frustrated with your company's offering, because you might be missing some table stakes stuff that you need to do. So in our get to destination on time example, if you had a great algorithm that can plan your stops and optimize your sequence of stops. And yet you couldn't figure out the address, right? Figuring out the address is like table stakes. So you need to you need to still do that. But this type of what what what's kind of inverse lead scoring, it's customer scoring. You it's the same process, because what you're trying to do is say, Are there customers right now who are frustrated with job steps that we're not addressing, for whatever reason. And that's a churn risk. And that's competitive risk. And we, we, we always encourage companies to do more competitive analysis than they do. Let's just put it that way. And and to do it in a different way. In all honesty, this is one of the reasons I came to jossi job because when I worked as a product manager at Microsoft 150 years ago, when I was you know, sold, it literally seems like so long ago, 25 years ago, but the state of the art at the time of competitive analysis was to look at your competitors products and create list of features. And if they had more features, you know, they were better and you got to catch up and add more features and that's still very common today. But the competitive analysis team should be doing should be looking at any solution that helps a customer get the job step done. And then saying, okay, that find the best one in the market because that's the baseline. That's what you have to do better than and In, in a lot of examples, the solution to do it is very manual. But if there is an actual competitor, who's getting that job done, that's a risk. That is a churn risk, because you're going to let that customer who's frustrated with that job step, linger on your platform, doing the job steps slowly and inaccurately, why the competitor can do it better. And they'll start thinking, hey, that new solution is a better way to do it, we're gonna switch.

Jared Ranere: 25:28

Yeah, and the trick there is to not just go straight to copying whatever your competitor has, because then you're playing a game of feature catch up, which is hard to win. Because if you're, if they're they already have that feature in market, you're already starting from behind. So you have to think about what exactly is the problem there? What is what need, does that feature satisfy? And what job step? And how might we do it better? Is there a new technology we can adopt to leapfrog our competitors solution? Can we tweak the way they've approached it? How can we think differently about solving this problem so that we do it faster and more accurately, and we leapfrog instead of play catch up, that's, that's the key. So you know, so I've heard a lot of people talk about, we don't want to pay too much attention to our competitors, because then they infect our thinking. And, and that, to me is kind of an excuse. It's, it's like, you can be stronger than that they don't have to infect your thinking, you can look at what they do. Think about how well they satisfy needs. And then that sets your benchmark for you to do it better and differently. And if you don't know how they do it, then you're just as likely to create a, you know, you're again, you're throwing darts at a at a target blindfolded, right? You don't you don't know that you're actually creating a solution, that's better, you have to make sure the problem is worth solving and that your solution is good enough. And you don't know, if you don't know what the existing solutions are, you don't actually know that your solution is good enough.

Jay Haynes: 26:56

Yeah. And what I would say that's a legitimate concern that if you're looking too much your competitors, you're gonna think like them that that. I know, that is a real concern, and it exists. But I think it exists because product teams ironically, of course, are focused on their products. And, and same thing with sales team sales teams are trying to sell you the product, like hey, I got this widget isn't it look good in blue, don't you want to Blue widget, and they're not explaining how they help the customer get the job done faster, more accurately. So that is, that's a legitimate concern, the way to overcome it, is by putting the customer's job in focus, it makes it so much easier to overcome that potential to just copy your competitors. When you have two things. One is, you know, the customers job, and jobs are very, very complex. So if you know the whole view your your customers whole job, you're already five steps ahead of your competitor just by understanding the the complete picture of the market, which is the customer's job. And the second thing is having a mindset, and this is incredibly important that your role as a company is to get the job done as fast and accurately as possible. The ultimate solution is your customer actually has to do nothing. Like they just your end companies, it's hard to emotionally accept that that's true, right? Because one product teams, we're humans like to build stuff. So we want to build features and want to have people use the features we build. But remember, your customers don't want the features they want to get the job done. And this is you know, the Pandora and streaming example we use all the time, you know, right when the Zune launched they were like, Look, you got all these features on the Zoom isn't really great and even has a podcast feature on the Zune, which I always loved. And, and right when the Zune launched, of course, a new company called Pandora was signing up 90,000 people a day, because all you had to do to create a mood with music with Pandora was just type in a song and click play. Right? That was it. With literally two steps. You did nothing. There were no options on Pandora.

Jared Ranere: 29:13

Yeah. And I think I think like a funny or an interesting example, that to help prove this point is LifeLock. Right? So yeah, so LifeLock helps you get a privacy and security job done that nobody really wants to think about every single day. You don't want to do anything about it. And like life locks, not setting the world on fire because people are using it and going oh my god, this is amazing. I can't believe I've used this, but they're steadily generating a bunch of cash from people who don't actually use their product, because they just get the job done in the background. And then when the crisis hits, then LifeLock kicks into gear and resolves that. That security breach quite quickly a personal security breach for a consumer and meanwhile you pay them the whole time. without ever touching the product, and that's a great business, it delivers customer value generates cash, and it's just gets the job done. It's nice.

Jay Haynes: 30:10

Yeah, and this is true, you can see this in not just consumer markets, but b2b markets, you know, just there, obviously, businesses have a huge number of accounting jobs and compliance jobs, you know, operational jobs. And the the best solutions are the ones that enable them, for example, in accounting to close their books as fast as possible. Like, the idea of closing the books actually comes because the job was done. So manually, there should be there, there are companies, you know, that attempt to do this, I think Cisco famously was like, we don't close books, it's always, you know, we just always have accurate books. Right? So yeah, you can see that and, and obviously, you can see that in, in, in medical markets, right? You have a goal of optimizing your health or dealing with the health condition, you want to have it be automatically, you know, taking care of as much as possible. And that's, so that's important. And that's how you, you stay out of this me to competition. And as you as you called it nicely, Jared, to leapfrog. Because of your team is constantly thinking about this. That's what goes into your roadmap. And that's where your lead scoring will actually help as well. Because if you find this segment of customers that represents the opportunity, you know, that the customer value for that segment is going to be getting the job done as fast and accurate as possible. So your lead scoring not only tells you Yes, this new lead is, is should we should have to prioritize this lead because he or she is obviously struggling with the job and in a way that we're we're solving it and, and they're going to be incredibly happy when your sales team calls them up and says, Oh, that job's done, we just automatically take care of it. Nothing you need to do is you know, right push a button, and it's done. Or even better, you don't even push a button it's just on our platform and that that is taken care of for you.

Jared Ranere: 32:15

Yeah, that's a great place to wrap you know, the the key is, know your customer struggle, know your lead struggles and know the market struggles and then align your product, your marketing and your sales with those struggles and you're going to have better lead scores, you're going to close faster and you're going to deliver more value.

Jay Haynes: 32:35

Yeah, that's great. So thanks for listening. Remember to like and subscribe to our podcast and channel and anybody wants more information reach us at Thrive.

Unknown: 32:48

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