63. Understanding Demand-Side Sales with Bob Moesta

Hi, this is Clay Christensen and I want to welcome you to a podcast series we call the Disruptive Voice. In this podcast, we explore the theories that are featured in our course here at hbs Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise. In each episode, we'll talk to alumni of our course and others who are trying to put these theories to use in their lives and in their organizations. It's great fun to hear from them and I hope that you find these comments conversations inspiring and useful. If you have an idea about a topic or a speaker that you'd like to hear more about, or if you'd like to comment on our work, please reach out to us here at the.

School hello and welcome to the Disruptive Voice. My name is Katie Zandbergen and I'm the Community Manager at the Forum for Growth and Innovation where our work is inspired by the teachings and life of the late Clayton Christensen. Today, I'm pleased to welcome Bob Mesta back to the podcast. Frequent listeners of the Disruptive Voice will know that Bob and Clayton Christiansen are co architects of the Jobs to Be Done theory, which has earned its place among the frameworks that are taught to our students in the Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise course here at the Harvard Business School. In previous episodes, Bob has touched on a myriad of topics all based around jobs to be done, including how to spot non consumption, conducting jobs interviews, and why we hire religion or education, along with episodes that take a deeper dive into the application and utilization of jobs theory at such companies as Basecamp and American Signature. Bob is currently President and CEO of the Rewired Group, a company he co founded in 2009 that specializes in demand side innovation. The description on his company's website says it best. I think Bob is an entrepreneur at heart and an engineer and designer by training. Furthermore, he is a lecturer in the areas of entrepreneurship and innovation at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. He's a research Fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute, which is a think tank dedicated to improving the world through disruptive innovation. He's given many guest lectures at both Harvard Business School and mit, and he's an honorary member of the team here at the Forum for Growth and Innovation. Bob is also an author and has an ever growing list of books to his name. With Chris Speck, he co authored the Jobs to Be Done handbook and last year he and Michael Horne published Choosing how to Make Better Learning Decisions throughout yout Life. Just last September, Bob and Greg Engel published Demand side sales 101 stop selling and help your customers make Progress. Though the book has only been out for a few weeks, it's already been ranked on Amazon as the number one new release in sales and selling techniques and in the business etiquette categories. I've also heard through the Forum Grapevine that Bob has a number of other books in the pipeline and I look forward to discussing Demand side sales 101 and more in our forthcoming conversation. Bob, welcome to the Disruptive Voice.

Thanks for having me back. Excited to be here.

Now Bob, you've been working with the Jobs To Be Done framework which you co developed with Clayton Christensen since the mid-1990s. Before we jump deeper into jobs theory, I want to first ask you about your friendship with Clay, who we all miss terribly. In the dedication of your new book, you've written to my teacher, mentor, advisor, and most of all, my friend, Professor Clayton Christensen. Rest in peace, my friend. Could you tell us about when you first met Clay, what your first impressions of him were, and about your early collaboration with him?

The first time I met Clay, I was with one of my co founders of my first business called P.D. mesta and Associates. And it was Clay's first year at HBS as a professor and we were doing some work in the realm of strategy and at the same time we were basically doing innovation in the food and beverage industry. And my very first impression of Clay is when we went to see him, obviously his size, but when we went to shake hands, my hand disappeared and it was that notion of him being a giant. And at the same time being a humble giant. He was always listening, always curious, almost to the point of like, I don't understand, help me understand kind of perspective. And it was that soft voice, the humble aspect, but then the gigantic physical body that he had, just being a gentle giant. And so that was kind of my first impression of him. And over time we became friends, I think primarily because he would tell me about his research and then I would go find people who were in the middle of, for example, the Innovator's Dilemma, and we'd bring them to his office and we'd sit down and start talking about their problem, right? Or as he was doing his research, I was trying to actually make sure that we could see people who were in the problem real time as he was actually writing. And so that's basically how we ended up kind of connecting and helping each other. We had four hours a quarter for almost 27 years where we would think about things and the questions that we could come up with.

And in your opinion, what do you think made Clay, such a powerful thinker and teacher, why did his ideas matter?

I think, you know, I always describe Clay as like a curious kid at heart. And the notion that he could acknowledge he didn't know and that he wanted to know and that he wanted to know at such a depth that basically he turned things that. Like jobs. He turned jobs from being a method or a tool into a theory. Cause he would just hone and refine and polish. And it's one of those things where I thought of it as my hack to be able to help me understand the demand side of the world. But at the same time, he would say, well, no, you can use this as a generalized principle and a generalized theory around many things besides the things you're just thinking about. And so I think the aspect of him being humble and always wanting to learn and being curious, and then the fact that he always wanted to get down to truth or first principles, and he's got so many theories because he had to always peel back the onion until it got to the very end. And very few people have the patience that he had to do that.

You just mentioned looking at things from the demand side. I'd now like to turn the conversation to your newly published book, Demand Side Sales 101. I gather that this isn't your typical how to manual or book about sales. Can you tell our listeners why you decided to write the book and also who you consider your intended audience to be?

Yeah. So it all starts back to Clay. I think around 2010, we had one of our sessions, and by that time I'd done, I think, five or six startups. And having studied and been to business school and seen different things, and it's like, why don't they teach sales at business school? Why are there no sales professors? It's one of those things that has some basic principles, but for the most part, people see it as teaching people the product and teaching people the customer. And it's almost like a mishmash of marketing and engineering and finance. And so it's trade that kind of integrates everything. And that kind of hit me over time. And to be honest, has been in the back of my mind for a long time because now that I'm helping entrepreneurs, they teach you basically, you know, about product, they teach you how to raise money, they teach you all these different things, but they don't actually, actually teach you sales. And when you work with startups, that's the thing they struggle with the most. And so what I did is I took the jobs theory and I flipped It. I flipped it into sales, saying, like, we talk about sales as the way in which we talk about our product and who's going to buy our product. But the real question is, is why do they buy the product? You know, when do they buy the product? Where do they buy the product? And that can we actually make the foundation of sales really, you know, the job that people are trying to get done or the demand side of the world? And so that's what this book is about, is really flipping that lens from basically pushing my product to literally saying, how do I help somebody make progress in their life? And you start to look at that through what we call the demand side and the supply side. Supply side is where I make product, and I have a business that makes that product that has margins. And though we talk about being consumed, we're focused on the supply side. It's like, if I make mattresses, it's like, who needs a mattress? And so it's still all through that kernel of a product or a service. But if you study people who buy mattresses, right, there's a whole bunch of other things that are going on in their lives. And it's not just a mattress, but it's like the competitive set is different. Like, some of the things that compete with a bad mattress or a new mattress is sleeping in the Barca lounger or taking zquil or working out late or staying up late, you know, and so you start to realize, like, the reasons and the things that cause people to say, today's the day to buy a mattress has nothing to do with the number of springs or the coils or the foam or that you can ship at home. Like, there's a whole bunch of other things going on. And so part of it is, is it's like we've missed the basics. And so this book, the Basics of why do people buy things? What are they trying to do? And then using that to help you shape the way you sell.

And in a nutshell, the jobs to be done theory essentially says that people don't buy products or services. They hire them to make progress in their lives. And crucially, people hire a product or service to make progress in a struggling circumstance. Can you talk a little bit more about the struggle and the role that it plays?

Yeah. So there's two types of buying that we talk about. There's the refill. I run out of Tide, and I go to the store and I buy Tide. That's just a repeat purchase. We're talking about where people buy something new, because whatever they had in the past didn't work. So it's like I used to buy Tide, but now I'm going to buy Cheer. And so part of this is understanding what causes people to switch and what causes people to say what I'm doing now isn't good enough. And so at the very cornerstone of all that is a struggling moment. And if people don't struggle, they actually don't create the space in the brain for a solution to fall into. And so you can talk to them all day, but they can't hear it. And so part of this is taking that time to understand what are those struggling moments? When do they come up? How do they build over time? And ultimately how do people say today's the day I need a new mattress or I need a new CRM or I need a new house. And so you can start to see the world through this notion of where are the struggling moments that happen in people's lives and ultimately how do we actually help them buy our product to help them make that progress?

Can you elaborate a bit on the process of uncovering customers jobs to be done? I know from working with you on past projects that jobs research doesn't look to analyze huge data sets to uncover information about purchasing behavior and it steers clear of focusing on customers demographic data. For instance, even if I knew nothing else about you, Bob, from your Twitter profile I can see that you're a middle aged father of four from Detroit. You've been married for over three decades. You're an entrepreneur, a builder, a company founder, an innovator, an artist, a teacher and an author. But as you point out in the book, these characteristics don't cause you to purchase product A, B or C. Rather, your decision to hire a product or service is more about a specific circumstance that you find yourself in. Can you tell us about a recent purchase of your own? And then use that example to think about how one can uncover the secrets of events that caused you to say, today is the day that I'm going to hire this product or service.

Yeah, wonderful. So yeah, I'm looking at one right now. It's called an Atem Mini Pro from blackmagic Designs. It actually helps me cope with the fact fact that I can't be with people anymore and I can't just write on my screen and the fact that I can't read, it's very, very challenging. And so the struggling moment was like I can use my camera on my MacBook Pro, but at the same time they can't see me. Right? And they can't see me right on a board and I can't stand up and, you know, move around and there's all this other aspect to it. And so the real thing that I was struggling with is how do I actually think by sitting down, because I have to be in front of the camera. And so part of it was then searching for a series of different things and different solutions of, you know, do I get a smart board? Do I look at all these different things so I can draw and people can see me and I can talk, both from a teaching perspective, but also from a consulting perspective. And ultimately I narrowed it down to being able to say I need several different cameras and I want to switch back and forth. And what was happening was I spending more time trying to get the technology to work on software that ultimately the struggling moment of realizing I can push a button. And so this is a place where I can push a button, it'll change camera angles. And for example, I don't even have to push share my screen, it just shares my screen as my camera.

Was there an event that happened that made you shift from passive looking to active looking?

Yeah. So the big struggling moment for that one was where I was in the middle of giving a presentation and when I went to share my screen, the whole system locked up and then it locked me out. And it was literally, you know, five minutes of silence to an audience I was talking to. And so I said like, okay, that will never happen again, so there has to be better technology. And I'm a technologist at heart. And so it's one of those things like, all right, we're going to crack this problem. And so part of it started with looking at different software solutions, but I ended up getting a hardware solution because of the processing power of what we call the 4K cameras that we have connected to it. And that's been pretty much three months of innovation on my part, just trying different things and centering down to this, you know, ATM mini pro, where now I have four of them, one in each of my offices, wherever I go. I'm. I'm actually in Wisconsin right now and I can basically have a portable version that I can take. And I have a document camera, I have a heads up camera, I have a side view camera, and then I have a view of my screen. And so it's all being managed outside of my computer. That saves my computer from overheating and basically locking up.

So it sounds like you went through the whole job to be done. Timeline of first thought. Passive looking, active looking Deciding onboarding. And now, of course, ongoing use.

And now I have new struggling moments. Right. To be honest, I use the framework all the time, but now it's like I have a microphone, but the microphone doesn't pick up when I move. So now I have a wireless mic. I have basically a rode podcaster for when I'm podcasting. So now there's a sound problem that you have. Now that I have the ability to move, but now I can't actually, you know, I can't move as fast or people then can't hear me when I move as fast. So every new innovation causes basically a new struggling moment to have you innovate again.

Yeah. So there's opportunity there.

Always. Always. That's the fun part about it. It's never ending for me.

In the book, you talk about this jobs to be done, timeline and using it to unfold the steps into a set of systems to make progress from the customer side. Can you speak a bit more about how you use the timeline in your book?

Yeah. So what's so interesting is that there's this one principle we talk about is that you can't convince anybody of anything. They convince themselves. And so the notion here is that the timeline is theirs, not ours. And so where in their timeline of buying something. And that when you start to look at it the way we describe it as first thought. And first thought is really about this notion of creating the space in the brain. Place at it best is questions create spaces in the brain for solutions to fall into. And so the reality is, is like first thought is like, how do people really create space in their brain? What are the things that we provide them that actually enable them to create the space? It's space in their brain, not space in our brain. Or we can't do it, they have to do it. And so the whole aspect is flipping the timeline from where we would look at it from a product perspective to understand the dominoes that have to fall. We now actually use it to look forward and predict how people actually are going to behave. And from it, we can actually see there's a first thought. Then there's passive looking, where people learn, and then there's active looking, where people look at possibilities. But as they look at those possibilities, they don't connect the dots. It's almost like magic wanding. Oh, do you have this feature? Oh, could you do this? Oh, what about that? And so it's more or less making sure that they understand the space, and then they go to deciding. And deciding is about making trade Offs. You know, very interesting that in sales they talk about the close, but they don't talk about the aspect of how people have to make trade offs in order to make progress. And so to me, it's reframing that closing thing that in sales we close. But in the consumer world of the timeline, they basically make trade offs in order to commit. And so what are those things that they have to give up in order to get? And so you start to realize that nothing is perfect. And then from there that's where value is defined. And then you have first use and then you have ongoing use in habit building. And so part of it is to realize, like marketing and sales and customer success in the sales funnel are actually almost like different parts of it and there's handoffs between it. But when you think about the customer or the consumer and how they're actually deciding to make progress, we need all three's help. We need marketing, sales, and customer success all the way along the process to help them make the progress they need. And so it's one of those things where my belief is they should be one team, not three different teams.

In jobs to be done lingo, you talk about uncovering the forces of progress, which are the pushes, the pulls, the anxieties, and the habits of the present. How can you uncover these forces and get a greater feel for what the timeline is?

Yeah, so the forces actually come in three different forms. There's what we call functional forms, emotional forms, and social forms. And so you start to look for these pushes and pulls. Think of it this way, nothing's random about how people buy. And so if there's nothing random, then there has to be energy that's put towards that system or towards that person to basically either push them or pull them towards that new thing that they want. And again, nobody wants anything new. Like we have to actually put energy towards figuring it out. And so when we do these interviews, we unpack the language of well, you know, I was really frustrated. Well, what were you frustrated about and why were you frustrated? And give me an example of being frustrated. And you can see whether it's, it's like, well, it's moving too slow. So people think that I'm not doing enough, which basically makes me look bad. Right. Or is it, it's too slow because I'm trying to do 10 other things and this thing shouldn't take that long. And so part of is to understand what are those forces that are really saying you need a better solution. And they play out over time because it's those forces that build up that inevitably enable you to decide on picking something new.

A minute ago you were talking about sales and marketing. I wanted to ask you a bit more about that. In Clayton Christensen and Michael Rayner's book the Innovator Solution, it's written that predictable marketing requires an understanding of the circumstances in which customers buy or use things. This is the case for predictable sales as well, of course, where the critical unit of analysis should be the circumstance and not the customer. In other words, there's definitely overlap between sales and marketing in your book. However, you also touch on important differences between sales and marketing, where sales is more at the micro level and likely to involve one on one interactions with a real customer, while marketing is more at the macro level, thinking about an ideal customer and reaching out to wider audiences. Can you elaborate on this a bit? And also how the opportunity to interact with a customer on a more personal level lends itself well to the jobs to be done framework.

Yeah. So I think of it as part of markings. Job is to help the customer create that first thought. Right. And so if you study how people's first thought comes about, right now I only know of four ways. One is you ask them a question, but you don't answer it. Like not sleeping well tonight. Don't say, oh, and you need a new mattress. You just say, not sleeping well. It has to be a question that literally almost hits them in the gut or hits them in their brain that basically says, that's a great question, like I have to answer that question. And so part of this is being able to understand how to actually help move customers through that timeline. And at the same time, salespeople might come across somebody the very first time and it's the same technique. They might not be actually ready to buy. They might not even know that they need anything. And so part of this is how do you ask them a question that actually starts to see a struggle that they didn't see before you got there? And so it's everybody's responsibility to kind of create that first thought. But the reality is, is that at some point, marketing's job is to actually see if we can generate it without actually interaction. And sales's job is to actually be at that micro level and actually help shepherd people through that process. And so in some cases you can actually create, you know, I'll say like a basecamp. They don't have any salespeople. They've created marketing and enough pull all the way through and push, to be honest, all the way through to enable People to buy without actually having to have sal salespeople. But other industries, you know, salesforce, they actually need a sales organization to help shepherd people to make that progress. And so part of this is to realize, like, it's not one or the other, but it's basically really dependent on the circumstance and the context that people are in and how well and how big the struggle is and the progress that they want to make.

In Demand Side Sales 101, you also talk about three myths to dispel and three principles for success. We've already touched on a few of these. But can you take a deeper dive into these myths and principles, what they are and why they're so important to keep in mind when thinking about demand side sales?

Yeah, and these are more from my experience. And what I would say is one of the myths that I know is the way I was taught as an engineer is build it and they will come. Right. And so supply creates demand. And what I realized is that's just not. And people can say they like it and they can say they, oh, God, this is amazing. But when you really put it out there and you figure it out, like there's so many other things so complicated around actually, you know, people adopting your new product that at some point it's a very simplistic view. And so the principle that goes with that is that people buy for their own reasons. Right. And so part of it is to understand those struggling moments they have and to target it towards struggling moments. Right. The second kind of myth is that the way I was taught sales is it's almost like it's. They're random. And that there's an equation I have to build of like, well, If I make 100 calls and leave 75 messages and I get, you know, 15 callbacks, which gets me four appointments, that gets me one close. So they treat it as a random thing or they treat it as like it's just playing the numbers. And the reality is things are caused. And so to me, the principle here is that nothing is random and everything is caused. And we can't use randomness as a means to say, well, people just randomly buy a new mattress. Like, in my opinion, that's a lazy way to think about it. And if we can understand the underlying causal mechanisms, the underlying dominoes that have to fall, it allows us to be way more specific and way more predictive in how we actually run both sales and marketing. And the last one is really the myth of like, sales is about convincing people. We're supposed to find people's pain. And then we're gonna distort the product to make sure it fits through the pain and that we can connect that pain to our product. And my aspect is like, does it work? And they'll say, well, we don't know. But the reality is like, we just wanna make sure that if we don't uncover pain, we know they can't buy anything. And so to me, the reality is like, their struggle is at the core of it. And what we wanna make sure is that we can actually help them make progress overcoming that struggle. It's not about just selling something, somebody, so we can distort the product to fit to their struggle. And so knowing how people struggle and knowing the pathway that people make is really the thing that it is, you know, people buy for their own reasons, nothing's random, and that the struggle creates demand are the really underlying principles for demand side sales.

Before we turn the conversation to your forthcoming projects, do you have any final thoughts about demand side sales 101 that you'd like to share with our listeners?

This book was written for three reasons. And, you know, one of them was to try to get sales back into the university level or at least to teach it some more. The other two reasons are there's a lot of people who sell, but they actually don't know they sell. And when you flip the lens of saying you have to sell something to go help somebody make progress, it makes it actually enjoyable and a way in which you can start to help the world more. And so, for example, we talked about this aspect of like, how do we help a caregiver, a nurse or a doctor sell a rehab method to a patient? And nobody would say that, right? But at the end of the day, the patient has to make the progress. And the nurse or the physiologist or whoever's there, they have to be able to help convince them to make progress or in terms of like, enabling them. And so part of this is to figure out what are the forces of progress there. And so it's trying to actually help people who are not in sales but really are in sales. So my other example is teachers, right? Teachers sell a lesson to a student, but the student has to make the progress. And so how do we actually use this lens to kind of help us see that part of the world? The other thing is that this is not meant to replace the sales funnel, but more to complement the sales funnel, to make sure that when we design the way we sell, that we actually design it with the intent of how people buy or how they want to buy and to match up to the struggling moment. So the aspect to me is really helping you see it from other people's perspective, that empathetic side of the world. And so anybody who's read it to date, the one thing that they are all saying is like, boy, this can help me here or help me there. But they're like, I'm just a way better consumer today than I was before I read the book. I think through the forces, I think through the timeline, I think through, you know, why do I actually need this new pair of shoes, or what can I do that I can't do without it kind of thing. And so that's really the crux of it, is to get people to think about it. And I have multiple books coming. Like I have one called demand side sales 201, which is now the practitioner's guide. And it's going to have a bunch of tools and techniques and things that follow through that timeline to help do it. But this one is more about just the framework and the language and the overview. It's why it's called the man side Sales one.

And I love the notion that sales is about helping people to make progress in a struggling circumstance, rather than as some kind of icky thing that leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

Yep, nobody wants to be sold.

Ever. Now, as I mentioned in introducing you today, and as you yourself just mentioned, you have a myriad of projects in the pipeline at the moment, including a number of forthcoming books. Last year, I was lucky enough to hear your guest lecture at HBS entitled the Five Skills of an Innovator. And I was pleased to learn that one of the books you're currently working on is based on that talk. The book's tentative title is Learning to the Five Skills of an Innovator. And I'm sure our listeners would love to hear a bit more about this project. Could you give us a bit of context for the talk you gave and the book that you're currently working on? Like, what was the genesis of the Five Skills of an Innovator project?

Yeah, so I'm a dyslexic, illiterate kid from Detroit, and I've worked on over 3,500 different products, and I've done a lot of things that I never imagined I could ever do. And part of it was, was this reflection of, like, how did I learn all these things? Like, if I'm the vessel, where did it all come from? And so it was a reflection on kind of my mentors and my colleagues that I've worked with, and what are the things that really have enabled me to make a difference? And doing that, I basically came back and realized there are, like five skills that are very rarely talked about around innovation and entrepreneurship. And so it was that premise of. Of one, paying a little bit of homage to my mentors, and two, being able to talk about skills that are almost below the surface or that come with being seasoned or repetition of being an entrepreneur or an innovator that if we could make explicit, we might be able to teach a little bit better.

Generally speaking, what do you think are some of the key traits of great innovators, and are these characteristics that can be learned? Like, are innovators born or can people learn the skills needed to be successful innovators?

I'm a big fan of Kevin Ashton and How to Fly a Horse. And, you know, great universes are not born, they're made. And so my belief is anybody can innovate. And it's about discipline and learning skills and being humble. You know, we all go back to Clay's humbleness. Right? But I think the fact is the book is not really about the traits of an innovator. It's like, I think there's a lot of people who've written about it, but, like, being curious, being humble, this is all about learning. It's learning as fast as you can and being able to be as wide angled view as possible. And the other thing is, there's this notion of progress versus goals. Some people would say they're goal oriented. And what you find is that it's really that they want to make progress. They want to feel like they're moving forward in some way. Everybody keeps talking about, well, if you're an entrepreneur or you're an innovator, you know, you need to fail early and fail fast. And I feel like that's from the patrons of the zoo, the people who study innovators and study entrepreneurs, but aren't entrepreneurs themselves. And so they look at at people like me and say, God, you failed at this and you failed at that. And the thing is, is if you ask me what I failed at, I can't probably tell you one area that I failed at, but I can tell you a million places I've learned and that perseverance to move past it. And so this whole aspect of, like, failing, it's not failing to fail, it's failing so I can learn. And I'd rather actually do something and make progress and learn from it than wait and try to get the Perfect thing out. And so that's the spirit of this book, is, you know, these basic principles. But, like, what are some of those skills that you really need to actually hone fine in order to be a really good innovator or entrepreneur?

And can you walk us through the five skills? And also, are the five skills something that people should go through as a process, like starting with skill number one, then moving on to skill number two and the rest, or are they more general?

I'm not sure that anybody possesses all five. I have a business partner, his name's Greg Engel. He was co author with me on the sales book. But we've been working together for 17 years. And it's one of those things where he's better at some of these skills than I am. But it's these set of skills that enable us to create, invent, commercialize products and services all over the place. And so to me, it's these kinds of things that, again, aren't typically taught at business school or engineering school. The five skills are. One is called empathetic perspective, which is this way that entrepreneurs and innovators see the world from many different perspectives. And they're not judgmental about the perspective. They can see it for what it is and then connect dots from basically seeing it from five or six different perspectives. And so they can see it from the consumer's perspective, they can see it from the engineer's perspective, they can see it from the investor's perspective. They can see it from the bank's perspective, which is different than the investor. And they can start to see the misalignment, the gaps. They have this ability to kind of move through space and time. And people would say they're very creative. But the fact is, is most seasoned entrepreneurs and innovators have been beaten up so much that they have to go like, okay, wait, I gotta stop. I gotta think. Because last time I did this, I got, you know, smacked. And so it's one of these things where over time you do it. But the interesting part is there's a gentleman down at Atrium Health, Jay Gayhart, and he talks about going to learn improv and how improv has helped him improve his empathetic perspective and being able to see things from different perspectives. And, you know, in a case where he would probably say no, he has to say and something else. And it's a very interesting way in which to get these skills of being able to see things from a different perspective. And so really good entrepreneurs and innovators can see things from different perspectives. And connect dots. Skill two is causal structures. They can see things in cause and effect. They don't see things as just categories, but they see how things work, and they're really interested to see how things work. Skill three is really uncovering demand. It's this notion of seeing that struggling moment, whether. Whether they use jobs or not, they intuitively understand where to build something and the value that people are going to actually put on it and what they truly compete with. And they can see that demand side more clearly than sometimes the supply side.

I've heard you Talk about Paul LeBlanc at Southern New Hampshire University in the context of uncovering demand. Could you tell our listeners a bit about the example?

Yeah, Paul's a master, so I think it was in 2010 he heard Clay and I talk about jobs to be done, and it just resonated with him. He's like, I have these online students who, like, they're hungry, they want to learn, they really don't want to come to campus. Like, I feel like they have a different job. And so it just intuitively, it resonated with him. And it's that quintessential of, like, once he heard about the method, it's like, oh, finally a way in which to see something that I intuitively feel. And once we saw it, it was like we were able to kind of see what the jobs were. We were able to help him understand how to frame, if you will, the opportunity and frame the business. And now he runs one of the largest universities in the world with over, you know, 150,000 online college students. I'm sure it's more than that now. And he's been able to reduce tuition almost 30, 40% by doing that. And it's all in a not for profit way. But he's an innovator who basically could clearly see an uncovered demand in a very different way.

Yeah, it's an interesting example of catering to jobs to be done for different people.

Yep. The other two, one is about prototyping to learn. It's so interesting is that when you talk to people wanting to prototype, most people prototype to verify or prototype to actually prove a hypothesis. And I was basically taught by one of my mentors, Genichi Taguchi, that at some point you're never smart enough to know how everything works and that you need to prototype to learn and prototype for things to fail. I would use something called orthogonal arrays to actually build sets of prototypes that could actually help me understand how things work or in some cases, how things don't work or where the gap is, in my knowledge, you find that people who are really good innovators and really good entrepreneurs, they prototype to learn, and they learn in very, very different ways. And at the same time, the fact is, is they're not trying to build the biggest and the best. They're trying to learn so they can make progress. And so you start to realize they have skills and methods and tools on how they prototype. And again, I look at, like, my camera exercises. It's all about making progress. It's all about, like, I need to learn different angles, I need to learn about lighting. I got to learn a whole bunch of things. Is it good? Well, it's better than it was just being my FaceTime camera. But at the same time, it's like we're just gonna keep making progress and I'm gonna prototype to learn, trying different angles, different lighting angles, different mics, all that stuff, until either I run out of time or now something else is more important for me to work on. The last one is making trade offs. This is a big one, is that you find that a lot of times people feel like they need to build the ideal thing or have perfection. And you start to realize that real good entrepreneurs and innovators, they really have this ability to see where the trade offs need to be made and understand how to map time and money with basically the performance that you need. One of my colleagues, Ryan Singer, said it yesterday. He's great. He's like, nobody wants to make any trade offs until we run out of time and money, right? And my thing is most entrepreneurs can actually see those trade offs well before the fact this is you run out of time and money.

I love the notion that these skills that people can learn and improve and become better innovators.

And the purpose of the book is to one, articulate what they are and then give some suggestions on how to approach prototype to learn or how do you actually see and manage trade offs? So I would always say that Clay was the theorist, I was like the pragmatist. I'm the one who's like, on the front lines trying to apply everything all the time. And so this is trying to take a lot of these principles or these skills and kind of say, like, how do you learn them and how do you get better at them and how do you assess where you're at in them? And that's really kind of the quest of that book.

Speaking of being practical, you recently joined the Forum for Growth and Innovation for a virtual event that was entitled Leading New ventures through the COVID 19 pandemic can you take a few minutes to reflect on how jobs theory and the five skills of an innovator can be especially useful tools to employ during these challenging times?

Yeah, so this is one of those things where it's a horrible time. There's just so much things that are going on. But from my vantage point of where I sit, if the struggling moment is the seed for all innovation, we're all struggling. How do we actually start to think about new ways to do things? And so I joined a school board this year and one of the things I did is that they were kind of leaning back to kind of go like, well, you know, we'll just wait for this to be over. I'm like, no, we need to lean in because this is going to be the new way to teach. Like a lot of things will emerge from this year or these two years or however long this lasts that we'll start to see travel change, we're going to see school change, we're going to see retailing change and all these things. And so part of it is that jobs theory to me is it's not that there are new jobs, it's that people are in new context where now they're going to have to a job they didn't know they had before. Right. So for example, I take Target Drive Up. It's been around for two years and it was primarily for people who didn't want to come into the the store and that weren't at home to actually take the delivery of something. And so it was like, well, I could just swing by and pick it up. And to be honest, it was in the midst of growing. But the moment you couldn't go into the store, all of a sudden, you know, Target Drive up is through the roof. And so you start to realize like there are other people who could never fathom not going into the store now that they can't go into the store. Target Drive up is amazing, right? And at the same time it gets them out of the house. There's a whole bunch of different things. And so you start to realize like, they just didn't have that job before. Though the job existed in time and space for some people, it's now there for probably 10 times more people than there were two years ago. And so I don't believe that the jobs change. But I think that the fact is the context that Covid has put on us has now caused us to rethink and make new trade offs and realize we might be in a different job. Than we were 12 months ago.

And what are some resources that you can recommend to those listening who would like to learn more about some of the topics that we've touched on today, including the Job Jobs to Be Done framework and its vast applicability to innovation.

The Disruptive Voice has just a wealth of a lot of the Jobs to Be Done framework and some of the other things I've spoken at both industry and the industry product conference and Business of software on most of these topics. And so they have a video out there. I did start a YouTube channel where I'm interviewing people. I did my first one the other day where we did somebody who bought a peloton and they weren't sure why they bought the peloton, so we had a 45 minute interview and a 90 minute arguing debrief that we got live on YouTube, which is pretty good. And then I would say some of the books, which is the Jobs Be Done handbook Competing against Luck, which is amazing. And then the demand side sales has got a good foundational piece of jobs as well.

Great. And as a final question, do you have any advice, thoughts or comments to share with our listeners that we haven't yet touched on or that you'd like to emphasize?

I think for me, the thing I always try to articulate is that context creates value and contrast creates meaning. And that these two principles are kind of the foundation by which I run not only my life, but my practice of innovating and being an entrepreneur and trying to make sure that I use contrast to learn, but to understand that the universal context of something doesn't really exist. And so understanding the specific circumstance and the struggling moments helped me understand where to innovate, where to put my attention, where to help people make progress. And you know, again, using Clay's wisdom from how you measure your life, how do you help the most people? It's literally using context to create value and contrast to create meaning.

Well, thank you so much for your insights and time today, Bob. As always, I've really enjoyed our conversation.

Thank you so much for having me on. It's always fun to be here.

Thank you for listening to us at Disruptive Voice. If you like our show and and want to learn more, please visit us at our website or leave us a review on itunes. Until next time. Good luck everybody.