The Underlying Engine for Scaling Sales and Attracting Investment
The information required to find a repeatable sales model and de-risk investment can’t be obtained from sales calls, presentations, conferences, industry reports, C-level summit meetings, surveys, focus groups, or A/B testing – because the necessary insights are buried inside individual customer experiences in the context of their actual Jobs-to-be-Done.
At IOI Partners, we unearth this unique insight by employing a proprietary ethnological market research platform that includes Voice-of-Customer (VOC) and Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) methodologies.
- Identify landscape of core Jobs-to-be-Done by customers
- Segment customers along lines of job-defined markets to pinpoint actual target market and competition
- Extract a complete set of partially or wholly unmet customer needs for a given job to be done (expressed in the customer’s own language)
- Cluster and prioritize customer needs (in terms of their effect on outcome of the job to be done)
- Focus your sales positioning and messaging on functional, emotional and social dimensions of the specific job that customers need to get done, which constitute the circumstances in which they buy
- Specify which existing products/services need to be “fired” in order to “hire” your product/service
- Help customers think differently about your company by providing insights into helping them to think differently about their company.
This platform provides a quantifiable basis for segmentation, targeting, and messaging as illustrated below.
Focusing on a core job-to-be-done … you avoid solving a “nice-to-have-fixed” problem, where people use your product/service – but never pay for it. Collectively this demonstrates to investors and strategic partners that you’re able to solve a real-world problem that can translate into repeatable sales beyond just early adopters.
Consciously or not … the vast majority of companies adopt a product-centric, ideas-first approach to defining markets, understanding needs, and segmenting target markets. But introducing a product idea to customers too early in the market/opportunity validation process is analogous to providing an answer (solution) before asking a question (problem). Taken to an extreme, market validation devolves into a full-blown “solution in search of a problem” exercise. In such cases, problems are “conjured up” for the express purpose of being perfectly solved by the solution at hand.
Case Study
Companies often fall into the trap … of defining markets and segments by the core technologies underlying their solutions (e.g., liquid biopsies, health analytics, single cell NGS, etc.) – instead of a core job that customers are trying to accomplish.
For example, a virtual screening company defined their market along the lines of their computationally based drug-protein docking and scoring technology. But biopharma customers engaged in early drug discovery viewed their core job-to-be-done as finding novel compounds that could be turned into lead compounds. Viewed from that perspective, the competition and partnership opportunities for this virtual screening company included a wide variety of technologies such as:
- Experimental high throughput screening (HTS)
- Cell-based phenotypic screening
- Natural language processing algorithms farming the scientific literature
- Machine learning scoring based on similarity to known drug-target interactions
While the virtual screening company was preoccupied with endless iterations of feature-by-feature contests with other virtual screening companies, they missed the opportunity to participate in a market that was 100 times larger in revenue potential.
If you have any questions, please complete the form below or call (317) 973-4294 (extension 5000) to get more information.