Understanding the Demand Side with The Re-Wired Group’s Bob Moesta

Hello and welcome to the Customer Conversations podcast. Today I'm excited to be joined by Bob Master. Bob is the president and CEO of the Rewired Group, pioneer of Jobs to be Done, the author of the Jobs to Be Done handbook, and his latest work, Demand side Sales. Bob, thanks so much for joining me.

Thanks, Suhart, for having me. Excited to be here.

Yeah, I'm really excited to dig into this one. And we're going to talk about the new book. We're going to talk about Jobs to be Done and everything that goes into innovating and helping. Helping people make progress.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So maybe we can start out for those who aren't maybe unfamiliar with the, with the terms. And so the book, what is the demand side? How do you apply it?

So what's really interesting is that, and I didn't realize this until kind of later, but the reality is like, I'm an engineer, and as an engineer, you're taught basically to go build a product, and if you build something, they will come. And so ultimately, for me, it was this notion that, like, I have a business or I have a system that produces a product, and that product has features and benefits, and at some point we look at that product and say, like, who wants to buy this product? And so everything actually revolves around the product or service. And I call that the supply side of the world. And if you think about sales, sales is actually a supply side concept. It's like, where do people sit in the sales funnel? Right, where, you know, if you think about, you know, all of it is about, you know, creating and manufacturing a way in which to, in some cases, to help the company make money, if you will, or to do what they're supposed to, the organization to do what they're supposed to do. But the reality is that when they start to talk about customers and they'll say they're customer focused, but they'll go like, well, we make mattresses, so who wants to buy a mattress? And it's like, well, anybody who sleeps. Well, everybody is actually a prospect for us. And so everybody could actually buy a mattress. And so they define markets by aggregating or correlating a whole bunch of attributes together. And they'll say, we have segments and Personas. But it's like they look over this wall, but they don't really see what's happening. They don't see the real thing that says, like, why in the world did they buy a mattress today? Like, what was it? And so you start to realize that the demand side is very different than the supply side at the same time when you start to realize when as humans we're creatures of habit, so we keep doing the same, if it works, we just keep doing it. And so as we start to think through it though, is that when something doesn't work, that's when we actually innovate as consumers. So we used to call it demand side and supply side innovation because some people would innovate from the supply side and some people would innovate from the customer side. But you start to realize like it's a very different dynamic because in some cases there's similarities. But like without a struggling moment, you're just going to keep doing what you're doing. And that struggling moment happens in a context and it happens with a very specific outcome that you're desiring. And it actually, then when you start to look for things to buy to actually help you make that progress, there's trade offs you have to make. And so the dynamics of how that world works and how the supply side works is actually almost very, very different. But in the same manner, the customer looks over this wall and starts to actually start to look and say, wait a second, what are the brands? What are the products? Who uses this? What is that? They don't know anything. And so my best example of this is you talk about cameras. So as I'm going to here, I'm going to, let me just share my screen here for a second. I'm going to go here, I'm going to go here, I'm going to go here. And so the extreme real disconnect comes from this notion of like, I have four kids, right, and you want to take a picture. And look, I'm a horrible camera picture taker, right? They're blurry, you can't see them. And so what happens is on the supply side, right, Canon is like, okay, let me tell you all these features and benefits. Like, I have no idea what an F stop is. I have no idea what shutter speed is, I don't know what zoom. Like we need a 35 to 70 millimeter lens. Like, what does any of that mean? And then they go, well, let me show you. Compared to the Sony, I'm like, okay, so I need to know Sony too. I was like, well, we can show you how to take great pictures. It's like, okay, so I get pictures on the camera, what do I do then? Oh, then you got to buy Photoshop. All of a sudden everybody's working on features and benefits to literally look over this lens. And so they end up competing with themselves or other people in the industry. But the reality is I still don't know how to take a good picture. And I have to learn so much to take a good picture. Where, you know, think about it. What did Apple do? Apple literally said, like, look, I don't want to make a great camera. I want to make you a great photographer. I'm going to actually give you the lenses, have you push it once. And, oh, by the way, the software is included, right? And so this whole aspect of, if you look over the years, what's happened to Canon is, to be honest, they went totally up market, missing the entire demand side. So part of this really revolves around this aspect of trying to understand basically how the world works. And I put it this way, is that there's these two sides where I've got the business system and the products and the features and, like, how do I sell something? But the reality is the demand side is I got to have a struggling moment. I have to have desired outcomes. I have to have enough energy to change what I do every day. And it's really about how do I buy. And so to me, the book really started with this notion of, like, well, sales and selling is really the supply side view of how do we go to market, but buying is actually how consumption happens and how people actually, the demand side behaves. And so there's this huge disconnect about, and I apologize for the phrase, but I call it like the Church of Finance, who basically says, we got to have cash flow this way and they influence the way we're supposed to sell. So we have a promotion at the end of this month so we can meet quarter numbers that have nothing to do with how people buy, right? And so part of this is to say, well, that's the beginning of this. The other part of this was sitting in Clay's office. So Clay Christensen and I have been friends for over 30 years, and he was kind enough to give me four hours a quarter for that period of time with no agenda, just to think and talk. And one of the things we talked about was like, why are there no sales professors here at Harvard? And he's like, that's a really good question. I'm like, well, why? Why did none of the top school. And this was maybe about 10 years ago, but it's like, why are there. Why, like, having done seven startups, the hardest thing of anything I've ever done is sales. And yet they're like, yeah, it's not that hard. You know, it's like, you need to know finance, you need to know strategy. But like, holy crap, sales is like the hardest of all the things. It was like, well, you know, it's an art. There's no theory behind it. And so part of this was like, as an entrepreneur, like, I desperately sought help to learn how to sell. And all I learned was the supply side version of selling of let me see the features and benefits, Let me figure out what the demo is. Let me figure out, like once they get a demo now you got to close. Like there's this whole mechanized part of it. And soon as I started to look at it from the demand side, I'm realizing like, the way we sell does not match with the way people buy. Let's start with just teaching people how people buy. And so that's what the book's about, is really focusing on what's the demand. So the subtitle is really stop selling and help your customers make progress.

Right. Which I guess directly.

That was a mouthful.

No, that was great. There's so much there to unpack as well, which I'm sure we will get into.

Please. If you want to do it now, we can do it now or we can do it over time.

Yeah. So I guess the book is a teaching a whole new framework. Right?

It's really not. So what I would say is if you know jobs, it's actually probably a good representation of jobs, but it's geared towards the sales professional. And to be honest, it's written for the people who actually don't want to sell. So I wrote it for like nurses trying to sell. My father in law on rehab after a stroke. Like, how do I actually get them to realize, like, they don't need to sell, but they need to help him make progress. And teachers, like, teachers actually have to sell the lesson or the curriculum, but at the same time, the fact is they actually have to help the student make progress. And so if I reframe it, sales just feels so icky, like the pit of my stomach. I go into a story. One of my first startups was a countertop company in the home products area. And it was like everybody was a prospect and I had to sell all the time and they'd want black. And I go, oh, we can make black. And I go back to the company, go like, we got to make this countertop. And I was literally just putting, putting everything in havoc because selling was all about doing whatever you have to do to close and not knowing where to say no. Right. So this is where I kind of like, I've Lived the other side so long that it's just caused me to. Okay, let's see if I can help. So I wouldn't call it brand new, but more it's a new slant or a different slant on kind of the old topic.

Got it. So I know, as you're describing the demand side versus the supply side you mentioned, that understanding why people buy and sort of the behavior that goes into buying decisions is sort of the first thing, and that the struggling moment is sort of the catalyst for everything. So I guess the next question. Where do you start? Right. If you need to know how people buy, how do you go about identifying that struggling moment?

Yep. So I start with the fact is that one is. So I'm going to share my screen one more time. Here is this whole notion of a job is this aspect of, like, people get to a certain point where they know they can't go any farther, and they know they want to go farther, but they can't. Right. And so there's two sides to this. One is, like, for me, when I go to interview people, I don't interview people about the future because, to be honest, they don't know. And if I actually just increase the sample size, I can literally get a statistically significant answer, but it's still they don't know. And so part of this is to realize that what I do is I talk to people who've recently struggled and tried to do something to make the progress, because in it are all the clues about why and what and where and when and who. All those things are buried in that struggling moment. So to be honest, if you have a product, right, it's one of those things where it's like, I want to talk to the last five people who basically bought it and installed it and use it, and the last five people who left it, who fired it, and to talk to your best users. They actually don't know if you use Tide every week and you've been using it for 20 years, like me, it's like, you have no idea why. You just make it up. Oh, my God, it smells great. It's the smell that makes. But if the fact is, like, I stopped using Tide and I moved to Cheers, like, well, what happened in my life to says it was okay to do that or that I wanted to do that or what wasn't Tide doing or what does Cheer do that like, nothing is random. I feel like the enemy of all of this is what I call the laziness of randomness. Right. We always say that something is an impulse buy, or it's random. It's like, well, all I can do is wait. But when you actually dig deep, you start to realize that nothing is random, everything is caused. Randomness is put up for things we can't actually describe. But what happens is somehow randomness has turned into a thing of like, well, I don't want to explain it, so I'm just going to say it's random. So I got to wait. And it becomes now a numbers game. But what causes somebody to buy a mattress a specific day? I can tell you the three main pathways. It's three main jobs and what has to happen in their lives to literally go shell out $1,000 for a new bed. I can tell you, like, here's the things. And it's not one thing, it's the set of things, right? And so part of this is being able to talk to people who've tried to make this progress. And to be honest, I need to understand the circumstance that they're in, the outcome that they want. I really don't care what they bought. If they tell me about a feature, I'm going to go, why is that feature important? Is that feature because it gives you a new outcome? Or is that feature important because of something that you know about in a circumstance? Because if I try to think of this as a river, how many different ways can I get across that river? There's a thousand ways. I can teach somebody to swim. I can build a tunnel, I can build a bridge. I can actually get a helicopter. I can actually have a boat. I can. It goes infinite. But part of it is to understand how bad is this circumstance? How badly do they want to get across here? How much energy is in the system? And to be honest, in the late 80s, I worked in Japan and they used to talk about this thing of technology, independent requirements. And I kept going like, what does that mean? I don't even know what that means. And what they would constantly tell me is, like, it can't have the solution in it. And it would be like, oh, somebody who's in this situation. I haven't slept well in over a year. I'm literally compensating by taking zeal and drinking scotch and exercising late at night so I can sleep. And the fact is, oh, by the way, I've got a really big meeting coming up, and if I don't actually do this, I think I'm going to fail. It could be that you're not sleeping, but it's this other part over here that finally causes the Domino to think to fall. And the crazy part is they don't talk about it the way that the product people talk about it. Hybrid springs, it's got foam, it's got cooling. Like, what is all that stuff? I don't want to sweat at night. I don't want to wake up because I'm too hot or too cold. They're like, we have hybrid foam that actually has cooling technology that does. How do I know if I need that or not? So part of this is being able to understand it from their side. I call it empathetic perspective, to see what they see, hear what they hear, feel what they feel, and make sure we understand what's the meaningful level of language that people talk about as they look for a new mattress or a new piece of software or picking a new church. It doesn't matter.

So in terms of application, it's safe to say that there are many applications of demand side.

Yeah. So the crazy part is, like, I would say is when I started doing this, it was just. This was my. I'm dyslexic. And so one of the things is, this was my hack because I couldn't read all the research reports. It's like, okay, I'm going to go talk to a few. And as I honed and refined the method and tools, Clay really took it and said, we can turn this into a theory. And I'm like, I don't really know what that means, but I love you, and sure, we'll turn it into a theory. And so what he was able to do is figure out how to actually make it more a generalized way of thinking about it and using it so it can be applied to all these different things. So, like, this week, I did interviews on why people switch churches, religions, how parents basically pick schools and switch schools. What causes somebody to write a donation check. I did laundry. Laundry detergent. Struggling moments around that I've done like, it's. The jobs framework is applicable in all of those, but it also is equally applicable in the sales part of all of those. And so right now I have five kind of beta companies that I'm working on to help them with this. And I have three software companies, one product company, and one service company. And it's just. It's amazing how much they don't know about their customer and what causes them. They know everything about the customer. They almost like they know the who to an absurd level. They don't know the when and the where and the why. And you're like, so what causes somebody to Say today's the day. Like we'll say, I can tell you, everybody, they have to have this kind of house, they have to buy new windows. I'm like, so what causes them to buy windows? Like, I don't know that. Just like, okay, let's start there.

Yeah. And I guess the why is the bit that's. And the when too is that's the bit that's sort of next to impossible to get from quantitative data or just sort of the existing data that you might have about somebody without actually having that interview conversation.

So yeah, I think part of it is that we keep thinking it's like because marketing is taught to define the market by who, because we actually advertise to who. Like, how old are you? What's your age, what's your income, where do you go, what car do you drive? All this stuff, we triangulate and correlate everything. Right. But it doesn't cause people to do it. And so we've confused correlation with causation. Right. So I had a mentor, Dr. Taguchi always say is like, never confuse correlation and causation. Like they're very, very different things. And that just because two correlate doesn't mean that they're causal.

Right. Yeah. I think that's a great reminder that should probably be on, you know, every marketing person's person's desk. Right.

So I'm lucky enough. Sorry, I just want to share. I'm lucky enough in my room, in my office here that you can't see the whole thing. But I have my four big mentors, which is Deming, Clay Taguchi and Dr. Willie Hobbs Moore. They're like, this is my room where like I come. Like, I feel like they're with me. They've all passed. And so part of my journey is to pass on their knowledge. And so again, when you say it's new, anything's new, I'm like, no, I just borrowed it from one of them or mashed it together and said like, here's. I'm just responsible to kind of move the thinking forward.

Everything's a remix in some sense.

I do believe that that's how to Fly a Horse is a book that kind of reinforces all that. If you haven't read it, it's great.

Yeah, I'm gonna have to go pick that one up. So let's get tactical for a moment here. The if the real sort of key to unlocking demand side sales and being able to sort of shift to this way of thinking about why the market buys, what are Sort of the steps that you go through with a new client, a new company, a new team to start understanding this stuff.

Yeah. I think the first thing is that, again, we don't talk to people who. So if it's a brand new to the world product or service, the way we end up attacking it is saying, like, well, who are people not going to buy because you're going to be there? So one of the fundamental premises I have is that there is no new consumption. There is no more time in the world. We only have 24 hours. People, like, they're going to have to find either time or money and to literally stop doing something if your product is to be successful. So when Facebook came about, it's kind of like, well, what are people going to do less of when Facebook becomes popular? And it's like, well, you know, that Sunday night call is literally one tenth of what it used to be, at least. Again, I'm showing my age, I'm 55, where every Sunday you just call home and check in. But now I actually know everything without having to call home at all. I call home for different reasons. It feels right. And so part of this is to understand what people are, what progress are people making by hiring those things. But the key is to actually. And again, I'm going to share the screen, which is I've taken something called the jobs to be done timeline, and I've unpacked it into systems. And what I did is I basically said, like, we as a company on the supply side don't help. We don't. They don't. We don't make the progress for them. They have to make the progress. Like, you can't convince anybody to buy anything. They convince themselves. And so this is literally like, what do they actually have to do in order to get there? So what we do is, as we interview, we start with somebody who's already at the other end and we say, how did you get here? And we literally piece together the story and understand when did the first thought come into play? The first thought is this notion of making space in the brain. Right. So Clay would say, questions create spaces in the brain for solutions to fall into. And so if they don't make a space, if somehow there's no space made, they can't even see that you actually exist. There's no knowledge. So part of it is, how do you make space? So when you start to investigate, you realize there's only four ways to make space for people. One is you got to ask them a question. And, oh, by the way not answer it. How long have you not been sleeping? Right. As opposed to, hey, do you need a new mattress? Right, Right. You got to give them a new metric. How good is your sleep, boy? By the oura ring, It'll tell you how good your sleep is because you don't feel like you're sleeping well. But are you right? You tell them a story about how somebody went through something similar, or you basically state the obvious. But as you interview, right? And from a research perspective, we literally go through and understand this to painstaking detail. And when they'll say like, well, you know, I just couldn't sleep. Well, how long hadn't you slept? Give me your best guess of how long you haven't slept. And they'll say, five months. I'm like, wow, five months is a long time. So what have you tried along the way? It's slowing this down. And so most people would say, well, you can talk about their, quote, Journey in 10 minutes. These interviews are anywhere from 45 minutes to 90 minutes long. And they're literally, in some cases, they feel like they're very tangential. But what we're trying to do is understand their life and how did this thing fit into people's lives as opposed to just tell me all about the product. Most customer research feels like it's about the product and not about the person and the situation and the where and the when and the why. And so ultimately, we want to be able to untap all the first thought, the passive looking, how did they do it? What did they do? What did they say? When they're in passive looking, what did they do? What did they say? When they were inactive looking, what did they do, what did they say and what inputs do did they need in order to get to make progress in each one of those phases? So ultimately, I've taken the timeline and said, like, well, this should be how people sell. We should actually understand what inputs do we need to provide to help people make progress. And so all of a sudden you realize like, well, everybody's like, we got to get to the demo. Well, the demo is down here, but there's a demo up here too, because the demo up here is about giving me the language to learn how to talk about it. And so when you have one demo that actually has to cover three different parts of the time, and you realize it doesn't work. And so this is where I've helped companies, like, redesign the demo process, where instead of having one perfect demo that does everything, they actually have three different demos. And when they have enough energy to actually move it to active looking, it's like, here's the requirements. Because if you don't get everybody together and you don't give us 90 minutes, it probably isn't a big enough problem for you to actually do anything with. And I just wasted my time. And so part of this is. And by breaking it apart and seeing it from the customer or consumer's eyes, they've been able to almost double sales and half the selling time. Crazy. Crazy.

That's. That's a really interesting point. That there's. There's activation and energy or qualification. You probably have much better words than I. But move between every stage, not just that final stage.

That's right. So here's an example. When you start to hear the story. And again, we usually record them. And then afterwards we spent. So we do an hour to 90 minutes or 45 minutes to 90 minutes interview, and then we spend another 45 minutes to an hour literally, like, arguing about what we heard. Like, what did we actually hear. And sometimes, like, we got to play the tape. What did the tape say? And what you find, like, in passive looking. Passive looking is where people use the word I a lot. I need to know about this. I want to learn about this. I don't know this. I want to see this. And it's like, well, why do they say when they're in active looking? They say, well, we need to do that. Like, wait a second, how did we go from I to we? And it's like, oh, because they learned enough to actually bring other people in. Oh, that's what passive looking is about. And so if I try to do a demo, like, you got to have everybody there to do a demo. Like, I don't even know how to ask people to come to a demo. I was like, well, I can send you a prototype. It's like, yeah, but they don't feel comfortable enough to actually ask a bunch of people to the demo. That's not that they don't know how. And so part of it is realizing what does it feel like and look like? And what is passive looking really about as opposed to active looking? And active looking is so it's so crazy when you dive into these. Active looking is about seeing everything as almost independent. And Ryan would say orthogonal pieces. It's like, oh, I want this feature. Oh, that's great. Oh, I want that feature. That would be great. But the reality is they're never putting it together and they're never actually trying to understand the consequences of anything it's almost like playtime is active looking. In some cases they're trying to actually figure out, are you in, are you out? But it's this amorphous space. Deciding is actually about like, well, if you want that, that's going to take three months longer. If you want this, we can do it actually faster, but we can do like, it's about actually framing scenarios. So the demo here is about possibilities, but the demo here is actually about showing kind of alternatives to help them make the decision. And the trade offs. Because every decision requires trade offs, every sale has trade offs, everyone. And most people don't articulate it. Sorry, I'm rambling again. But no, this is, I get so passionate about it. It's one of those places when you ask an entrepreneur, like, where do you struggle the most? Almost all of them say sales. I'm like, okay, it doesn't have to be this way.

Yeah, this idea that there's a cost to everything is it shows up all over the place, right? That it's the idea that, you know, everybody's switching from something they have to the switching. Like there's the cost of actually switching over the time it takes to move over. There's also the time it takes to get, you know, all your other decision makers involved. Like there's, there's a whole lot of energy that has to sort of get built up to.

So here's, so here's the thing is like, and if you've heard this, you have to tell me, but to me this is like, this is the, this is the mic drop moment where you say, like, most people think about money as the only resource that people have. And the reality is they have three resources, money, time and knowledge. And they trade it off all the time. And so switching a church has nothing to do with, in some cases, money. It has more to do with basically knowledge and time and what you're trying to get out of it. It's an emotional thing. And so most people say, well, people don't, like, what's the job religion does? Or what's the job a church does? And they're like, well and again, the church has its own view of what they do. But when you ask people, they actually say really different things than what the church says. And so it's a very interesting kind of analogy. But the time is now where you start to resource to say, like, well, why aren't you going? Why are you going to drive an hour more to go to church in a different place? And they're like, well, I can tell you. And again, they're willing to make trade offs to do that. And so part of this is to realize like when you're talking to somebody about software or you're talking to somebody about like a service is like time, money and knowledge are those things that we actually play. And like if, when I don't have time, I'm willing to spend money and when I don't have knowledge, I'm actually willing to either spend money and, or time to learn. And so part of this is to realize like, how do I actually use time and money and knowledge as the resources to help me make progress through this whether I'm buying a new mattress or whether I'm buying a new car or whether I'm trying to find a church or a school.

Yeah, it's. Yeah. So many thoughts. It's, it says it's so different than how sort of the traditional model of looking at it from a, just sort of from a thought model perspective, right? Which is once you sort of really get deep into this, it all becomes very like, well, of course it works this way, right?

But so here's the, here's the crazy part, right? So you do these interviews and you get, you find out that, and you see patterns in these, in these, in the interviews, right? And you find that there's similar causal mechanisms that say like they're either going to go left or they're going to go center or they're going to go right. And like here's what causes them to pick this pathway and the way they're going. And like you can. And it's not one thing, it's a set of things. And they're not, they're not orthogonal or independent. They're like, sometimes these two jobs are about time and this job is really about actually impact or fear. And you start to look at them and see them in different ways. But the crazy part is when you take it and it's looking backwards, but now you actually flip it to look forward and you say like, okay, we talked to 10 people and this is how they made progress. And Now I have 100 leads or 100 people coming through. It's like, all right, where are they and what are they trying to do? And so what we end up doing is changing the sales funnel into something that looks like this. Am I still sharing? I am sorry here, right? The lead comes in who, when and where, and then you figure out which job they're in. And then we actually talk about where they are in their timeline based on the job. And so now the salespeople can go like, oh, here's what I need to do next with them to help them figure out what. So they can move from passive looking to active looking. And so part of this is actually understanding where they are, where they go, and how do I move them through the timeline to actually become a customer. And so it's just taking jobs and flipping it in the forward price. And because it's grounded in causal mechanisms as opposed to correlations, the reality is it's way more reproducible and it's way more predictable.

Yeah, that was going to be my comment there. It seems like this, this has to be more predictable. Right. Because you can see what the triggers are for each, like getting people over the next. The next step through the next gateway.

Yeah. My favorite is when they went. When you looked at it here it was all of a sudden they'll say they got to deciding and then all of a sudden something happened and they went from deciding back to passive looking. And Kyle, who's who I was working with at a set autobox, he goes, you know what, you can never go backwards in a funnel. I'm like, yeah, it's physically impossible to go up a funnel. Liquid always goes down the funnel. And so my thing is, that's why this makes more sense. Because people at some point something changes and they might have to go back to look at possibilities, they might get to deciding. And you actually go all the way back to first thought because something else got prioritized. Like when a lead dries up, they go, oh yeah, they just didn't buy or they bought something else. We actually don't know what they did half the time. So it's such a fun space. And from an innovator's perspective, it's like, oh my gosh, you start to think about new metrics, right? So now when they have sales calls, like the sales update, it's not like, where do people sit in the funnel? It's like, all right, where are they in the timeline and what are the three things you're going to do? Because they might be impassive looking for a long time. And it's like, alright, well what's the thing that will make them go active? And it was like. And they'll say like, well, there's five things that made other people go active before. Here's what we're waiting for. So I'll send an email to say, hey, has this happened yet? Because we know when these three things happen, they'll actually move to active looking, right?

Yeah, One thing that I think is interesting here, which this may or may not be true, but I'm going to ask it anyway.

Yeah, that's the only way we learn, man.

Typically, you know, when you think about the sales funnel, the, you know, the marketing funnel, however companies define it today, it's all about their sales funnel, right? It's their current prospects. Whereas this timeline is product agnostic. Right? Like this is just how they're talking about achieve, achieving progress. Right?

It's right.

Doesn't care about your product.

That's right. That's right. So the way that I kind of, again, sorry to keep screen sharing, but it's like, oh, this is great, hopefully it's useful. But the thing is the way I actually talk about it here is the fact is that, you know, the sales funnel is actually a supply side concept. Where do we have awareness, where's interest and we can measure the shit out of it. It's one of these things where I got metrics all the way through it. But like Dr. Deming would always say, don't ever confuse activity with productivity. Right. And the reality is like, well, what's the counterpart to the sales funnel? It's really the timeline and that. So I'm not trying to say you should get rid of the sales funnel, but first of all, you should actually understand the different pathways. Like, here's the thing is what they're going to. First thing people say is like, well, everybody buys differently. They do at one level, but when you abstract it up another level and you understand the causal mechanisms, there's not a thousand ways that people are buying. There's not a thousand causes. It's literally like three, four, five different pathways that are fundamentally different and different what we would call value codes. And then based on that, we should actually then have that mirror in the sales process. But for the some part, we actually let the church of finance tell us how we should be selling and we let marketers who are salespeople who can't close tell us basically how to close. Oh, if we just add one more feature, if everybody just, if we add this feature, we can, we should be able to close it. It's like that's just not how people make decisions. Sorry, I went on a little bit of a rant there.

No, this is, this is really great. Let's, let's, let's go deeper on that.

I don't want to get myself in trouble, but that's all right. I'm generalizing and I shouldn't be. So I should actually be Very specific. So I apologize if I'm offending anybody.

But certainly not, certainly not me. So for a company that is the buys this, that there is this new way to think about or this reframing of how they think about sales, they've spent some time, they've identified some journeys.

Or some timelines, some jobs and pathways that it could be journeys. The key though is it's not like I want to just contrast it with like the ideal customer journey. It's just crap. It's just to me it's just like because everybody has to make trade offs and there has to be bumps in the like, if you actually make it too easy, people don't value it. There's certain parts where, when it's hard that are going like, oh, that this is why it's so good. And you're like, wait a second, what? And everybody's like, well no, make it easier. Easier doesn't always mean better. That's what you have to be careful of is that like we have like one dimensional thinking. Make it easier, make it cheaper, make it faster. It's like I built a program that installed so fast that people installed it eight times. I literally had to buy a mechanism to literally say like, okay, it installed in like you know, 2.7 milliseconds. But the reality is like I had to run a little video that said we're installing that literally did it for like two seconds. At least let them see something on the screen to know it installed.

Right? Yeah, I saw some, there's a couple of interesting examples I want to may or may not be familiar with. But like some saw something the other day, superhuman, obviously a, you know, pretty successful forces you to go through an onboarding call, right? Because they want you to go through the like not pain, but they want you to make that investment in learning enough to be, for the tool to be powerful.

So here's the thing. The reason why that's brilliant is the fact is they're using time as the currency. And if you don't actually have enough time to do this, it can't be that big of a problem to you. And if you actually have enough energy to go like, oh my God, I hate email and it's just dry. Like, like at least are you willing to invest this to actually have something better on the other side and people who are willing to do it, like they're able to be successful. So make it like. So one of the things I did when I built houses, I actually made it harder to actually set an appointment with Us and the people who actually, like, tell me why you need to move. Like, what's going on in your life. This is it. And people who would fill that thing out, I can actually help them find a house and help them sell their old house and help them buy a new house very, very easily. But people who are willing to answer the questions, I couldn't do anything for them. And so part of this is sometimes struggling moments create energy that enable people to make progress.

Yeah, I see. Similar thing with Roam. Research is a notion, for example, like products that Roam has a. Like recommends that you go and take a $250 course to learn how to use the tool, because unless you make that investment, it's just not that valuable. Right. And same, I guess, similar thing there, right? Like you.

Oh, yeah. Very, very early on, I worked with somebody who wrote a whole bunch of classes, let's say 2012ish. And we did a little experiment where we took the content to learn Photoshop and we took the exact same content and we did $25, $250 and $995. And we said, like, same content. Here's what's going on here. You don't get anything really more. But this is this way, this is this way. We broke it up a little bit different. And they had a different feel for each one of them. And they sold a ton of $25 ones, but they had 2% completion. So let's say they said 1,000 of those. They made $25,000 selling $25, but they sold like 100 at 995, which is literally $100,000 of revenue. And he had 98% completion rate. And when you interviewed him, it's like, well, I needed the pressure on myself because if I paid that much, I had to put the time in to do it. And if I didn't put that much time and I didn't take it that seriously. And you're like, oh, my gosh, I'm focusing on the wrong end. Right. And so this is where I think there's that kind of learning that you get when you start to interview these people. Because sometimes people will say talk about money, but they actually don't mean money meaning, like, I talked to somebody the other day about a vacation, and they're like, well, you know, we went in October because it was the cheapest time of the year to go. Okay, that's interesting. How much cheaper?

I don't know.

Like, well, how did you know? Well, somebody told me. I'm like, well, how Much did you save? I don't know. How much did you spend? I spent $8,000 on the vacation. So wait a second, like, what does cheap have to do with any of this? Nothing. And so the people we're talking to were like, oh, they're a value customer because they said they wanted to go at the cheapest time of the year. And when you unpack it, it actually meant nothing. It was literally like a. Like I'm just gonna add. It's almost like I'm gonna put that in there to fool you. I'm like, what is that? And so this is where you have to interrogate people on what they say because they just say the craziest things.

Yeah, and I guess this is the same like doing this research and going this deep to, you know, go through that sort of interrogation process, if you will, is the investment in demand side sales. So once you've done that, how do you like, you end up with a ton of data. Right. You mentioned that you do, you know, 90 minute interviews then spend sort of similar amount of time.

I consider it a terabyte of information. Like you end up like with so much like both language. And so I always talk about. Transcripts are, for me, they're very difficult because I always talk about not only what people say, but how they say it. And what I mean is like. So somebody goes, yeah, that was really. It was good, right? Versus oh my God, that was good. It's like the transcript reads exactly the same, but one is like the next question to me on the first one is like, so what didn't you like about it? Because at some point there was a pause and there was literally a down intonation and it was like. And you start to realize like what people say, what they mean, not the same thing. Right. And so this is where you have to like take the time to unpack it. The first thing we do is we keep all the interviews together so we don't disaggregate the data. So Todd Rose, very good friend, and he talks about it in the end of average, is that we analyze and then we aggregate. We don't aggregate and then analyze. And so what we're doing is we're seeing the patterns, we hold the stories true, and then we say what stories go together based on kind of pushes and pulls and the progress they're trying to make. But once you get the patterns and you see these four or five interviews together, you actually start to see new variables you couldn't see before. And you start to see the timeline in a very much more vivid way than one at a time. And you start to see like, boy, this timeline is really different than this other three stories that are very different from that, the first two. And so to be honest, we iterate. And once you have that information, it feeds everything from product and customer support and marketing and strategy and acquisition to pricing. I mean, it goes everywhere. And so it's like to me, I always think of it as like it's the fundamental research you should have done when you started the business, but you didn't know you did, you did. And most people say, like, they never have the time to go back and do it. And so to me, that's really what Jobs is. It's got tentacles into everything. And what I've learned is trying to actually push it to other places. Like if I try to go talk to marketing about this, they spent so much money on their segmentation and they don't think there's a problem with it, that I figured, you know what, I'm going to go to sales and show sales how this works and let sales work with it and then see how that goes from there. Because innovation gets it and I think sales will get it. But I think marketing is like, there's still. They're so caught up in correlations and kind of attributes in search of benefits.

Got it. So that's interesting that there's a. The acceptance of this model is sort of different across the orgs. How do you go about sharing the learning from this? You've done all this work, you now have all this understanding and this new knowledge. How do you sort of operationalize that?

Yeah, yeah. So there's a couple ways. One is, first of all, I don't recommend PowerPoint. Everybody, like, well, now what do you do? Right. So the first thing is to be honest when you're doing this, you actually have people listen to some of the interviews you did. You then talk about kind of the similarities through it. You then ask the salespeople, for example, to go like, all right, think of the last ten closes you had. Which one of them? Where were they in this thing? And it's like you start to realize it's not people based, it's situation based. And so part of this is actually workshopping it so they can actually see and play with the data and play with the insights from it. It's not about boiling it down to bullet points and summaries of what it is. It's almost like they take the life out of it. And what we need to do is Keep the life in it. My favorite is at Intercom. What they did is they actually turned interviewing into the onboarding practice for new hires. So they would do interviews. And like every new hire had to actually go through a set of interviews to hear how customers struggled and used and bought and came on board with Intercom. And it was like that whole thing is. And it wasn't about the ideal journey of somebody standing up in front of you and talking to them about it. It was literally learning it live in the room. Like, oh my God, what's going on? There's something about a live interview that helps people realize how authentic it is, as opposed to just a recording or a summary or a transcript of it. And so part of this is that we, for us, we spend a lot of time like, so, for example, when we work with clients, we actually don't write the report. We make them write the report. I like that strategy because when they ask us to write a report, it's like 110 pages that literally sits nowhere, that they pull 10 of them anyways. And they. And my thing is like, I'm going to give you the basis of the information and then we're going to help edit whatever you have to do. And to be honest, they make it 20 pages. They make it very concise. And by the way, now it's their research, not our research. And so for the most part, we don't actually do research. We teach and coach and work side by side with people to help them innovate. And so this is just one of like 25 different tools we help people do. But this is the popular one of the day right now, right?

Yeah. That's interesting. Like this. And actually Ryan mentioned this a couple of weeks ago when we talked that this idea that you can sort of share research without actually sharing the experience of the research itself, which is totally contrarian to research reports and like, how basically everybody else is doing it. Right?

Well, I'm not trying to be contrarian. I'm just like, the thing is, especially as a startup one, is I don't have the money to do that. I don't have the time to do that. And the reality is that if you ask anybody who's done a lot of research is like, yeah, we can start to see patterns in eight to 10 interviews. Like, we don't need a hundred interviews. And if you're looking at the right level in the causality, I can always go and do like the, like, when we did the work at basecamp, one of my most favorite moments Is when we saw the jobs and then we asked about what behaviors. But somebody who's in this job, how would they set up a project? And they're like, oh, well, they start a project, they put a whole bunch of tasks in it. They would never assign any of the tasks. And then they'd invite a bunch of people and then it'd be a bunch of editing. It's like, okay, let's go see. And you can literally go and go like, holy shit. Like, you can see the job live in it. And like, all of a sudden the analytics were like, you could just all of a sudden see behavioral stuff in it to go like, oh, so when they're doing this and this and this, they're in the actually cover my ass job versus when they're in this and this and this is like, help me think it through job. And like, oh, my gosh. And oh, by the way, same people might be using two projects for different things. It's not like people dependent. Very cool. Yeah, sorry, that was. I don't know if I answered the question.

Yeah, absolutely. No. To sort of start to wrap things up in sort of a risk of being repetitive. But. But I want to make sure that we get this in and sort of make this tactical and I can come.

Back and we can talk more. We can go to deep things and other things as well.

Yeah, yeah. There's definitely so many questions that I have for you, and even just out of hearing and talking about all of this stuff, I have a whole, whole slew of new questions. But for somebody who is now has listened to this and is saying, okay, you've got me, I'm really into to this. What do I go do tomorrow? Right. Like, I need to.

Yeah, I think. I think the first. So there's like two again. The book, the demand side sales book, is written to basically help. It goes through not only what supply side, demand side is, walks through the forces. It actually talks you through the interviewing process. It gives you some examples of how to dig. And then it starts to talk about unpacking the timeline and where do you actually find the nuggets to say, like, oh, we don't need one demo, we actually need three demos. And so it's giving you the tools to kind of figure it out. I don't give a. There's no prescription here. But it's more about the thinking tools to get there. I think there's just a lot of resources from podcasts. Ryan Singer is, I would say, a very heavy user of this and shape up and his process of shape up and jobs go hand in hand. I think there's something called the disruptive voice at the Harvard Business School where we've done quite a bit of podcasts. We have an oldie, but a goodie called Jobs. We done radio on itunes. And so I think part of it is once you actually get a feel for it, it's like, talk to your customers like they're humans. Here's the best part is I want you to actually have an interview and I want you to have no questions. I want you to literally say, I want to say hi. I just want to know how in the world you end up getting to our product and let the conversation go. It's this notion of freeform conversation that enables you to actually get to the underlying causal mechanisms. And I think people just having a conversation as opposed to, like, I think about Jobs as hypothesis building research. Most people are doing research to prove hypotheses. And what I would say is I'm just not smart enough to know what caused somebody to say today's the day they hired a school or they basically installed the software. Like, just, it's not random and I don't know. And so to me, out of it, I can build a lot of hypothesis, but to me, I want to actually let the data help me form the hypothesis.

Gotcha. Well, that's two things right there. Right. Go out and get the book, which we will certainly provide links to and everything like that. And just have human conversations, which sounds so straightforward. Right. But is often not the way it works.

Try to have a conversation and let the forces of progress and the timeline guide the conversation so you can understand their story and the energy that motivated them through it. So let the forces guide you, the force be with you.

Perfect. Well, like I say, we'll link up everything, everything in the show notes. But this has been really great. Personally, I've learned a ton. Certainly going to go dive deeper on everything that we've talked about here.

Yeah. So my thing is. And if you guys get questions, maybe I'll cut. Like, I've been doing these things where people like Fireside Chat, where it's like, come on and you either collect a bunch of questions or we do something live and we can have people kind of ask and chime in and all that kind of stuff. There is a. There is a. We just started a YouTube channel and we're interviewing people on like. Like that are like, I just bought a peloton, but I have no idea why I bought it. And so we literally have a 90 minute, like, YouTube video of Amrita buying a. Buying a peloton. And it was Ryan, me and my business partner Greg Eng, and we just had a blast with it. So you can see how the interview is done. You can see kind of how we go through the analysis, how we look at the forces, how we talk about the timeline. It's all up there on the YouTube channel.

Amazing. We'll link that up as well. But thanks so much for doing this. This has been really great.

No problem, my honor. And sorry we went a little longer than usual, but you can cut or edit anything out you want and go from there.

Hey, it's Stuart. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Customer Conversations podcast. If you liked the show, liked our guest, and especially if you learned something new you think will help grow your business, I want you to go to Learny Co Join. That's one place to get all of the content we're putting out, including the podcast guides and courses with experts in SaaS and D2C, and all of the content from our blog once a week. Go check it out. Learnwide Co Join.