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Customers Win When Companies Focus

Customers Win when Companies Focus
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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.

  1. Identify landscape of core Jobs-to-be-Done by customers
  2. Segment customers along lines of job-defined markets to pinpoint actual target market and competition
  3. 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)
  4. Cluster and prioritize customer needs (in terms of their effect on outcome of the job to be done)
  5. 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
  6. Specify which existing products/services need to be “fired” in order to “hire” your product/service
  7. 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.

Importance of Desired Outcome
Struggle to Achieve Outcome

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:

  1. Experimental high throughput screening (HTS)
  2. Cell-based phenotypic screening
  3. Natural language processing algorithms farming the scientific literature
  4. 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.

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