#31 – Using JTBD to stand out from the competition

I have seen E commerce companies led by marketing, where marketing holds things down and back. And I've seen E commerce companies led by technology. The IT and the dev team is what hold things back. And I've seen it the other way around where really the marketing leads the charge. And they say, you know what? No, we want to deliver results. Let's move on. My name is Khalees Slade, and I love to talk about conversion rate optimization.

I'm Simba, and I love asking questions about conversion optimization.

This is CRO Live hour, a show all about a B testing, experimentation and conversion rate optimization.

Each episode, Khaled amazes me, answering some of the difficult CRO questions, dropping insights like, it's no big deal.

Well, pretty much every episode will take on a new set of conversion rate optimization questions that are not easy. We will talk strategies, we'll talk process, and we will talk tactics. Simba will be bringing all the questions.

Oh, man. I bring tough questions like, do a B testing results fade over time? How do you go from low to high, testing velocity? How do you measure the success of a conversion funnel? And how do you align your CRO program with the growth growth strategy? Yeah, Khalid, these are very, very tough questions.

Yes, they are. But we always answer them here. And if you love conversion optimization like we do, and certainly like Simba does, subscribe to the CRO Live hour podcast today. Wherever you listen to your podcasts. Simba. April 2023. I have to start. Very unusual. Simba, what's the biggest April Fool's Day that you fell for? Or did you fall for anything this year?

I don't think I saw, like, anything. I was aware that today is April fool, so.

Yeah, nothing.

Tell us about it.

I fell for something one of our CRO friends posted about the fact that Google Optimize is actually coming back in GA4. Better. It's going to have so much better. Better this, better that. And I was like, oh, really? They're bringing it back now. Halfway through his posts, he gave it away by saying, oh, like, you know, it's gonna have so much superpowers. And I'm like, google Optimize is not gonna have superpowers. It's not gonna have AI in it. So that's what gave it away. But it's funny, I think that post got almost 500 likes. I'm like, wow, people are sad for losing Google Optimize. So it's just funny. And it's from our friend Ton, basically. Ton Wessling. Is he still at online dialogue? Let me see. Yeah, he is still Online Dialogue founder co owner at Online Dialogue but he added a whole bunch of titles. So here's another week. Can't believe Q1 finished. It's been fascinating. Different than I anticipated. I mean Q1 for us usually is busy but it's been like, you know, just super, super interesting. How was Q1 for you?

It was good considering that announced that they will be shutting down Optimized like sometime in February. So I think it was good for figpi. Yeah.

So Optimize, Google Optimize.

Yeah, I think it was good because we are seeing like a lot of people are still coming in signing in for figpi. And funny part is whenever like I talk to Razer, like I will also do some of the demos for people who come for figpi. Figpy is actually like a go tool but it was under marketed for a long, long time. So some people can't believe like some of the features that are on figpi are free.

Yeah, I mean that is consistently I've done probably 20 demos for FIGPI in the last two weeks, if not even more. And actually one guy emailed me today in the morning and it's fascinating because he's like really? You guys have all these features. Why don't I know about this? And I totally take the blame for this because I just basically did not follow the advice that I give companies. I don't know why but hey, we've started, things are picking up. The number of signups that are happening on daily basis, just absolutely incredible. So we'll see. Like it's just the journey just got a lot more interesting. But by the way Simba, I didn't really ask you even that question. You answered the. When I used to do press conferences they always told me answer the question you want to answer, not the question that you're being asked. So how was your Q1? So you talked to me about FIGPI's Q1 and I talk about INvesp's Q1. How about you?

Yeah, I just had to highlight like the good part of Q1 and I've been working with the FIGPI team for quite a long time now. So especially like during this past Q1 I've never like done so much work for FIGPI as I did in this previous quarter. So I thought it was just like a better way to highlight my Q1 with FigPi. But invest. It's been good. I've been learning a lot and I believe that also the people who are in our marketing team are learning a lot. So it's been great. It's been good. Any highlights for invesp? We are getting a ton of clients for invesp. We're getting like some clients compared to the last previous quarter. So that's also like a good thing.

I think the marketing and the sales at invesp have picked up and it's just really nice to see the uptick there. It's fascinating because I thought that we had our clientele dialed in really well. But now as we expand and we add more clients, I'm again having to go back to the drawing board to say, you know what, this client is actually an ideal profile for us. This client is actually not a good company that we want to work with. We don't deliver results, or even if we're delivering results, sometimes they're not happy. Just there's a culture mismatch. What not so. It's just fascinating kind of going through.

All of that when it comes to culture mismatch. What exactly are you talking about? Like, because I would like to believe that most of the e commerce companies that have maybe more than 100,000 or million visitors can be suitable candidates or clients for invesp. So when it comes to culture, which one like, is a good match and which one might be like a bad match?

Yeah, it's fascinating. I wish that every e commerce company with a certain size, based on the numbers, will be a good ideal for us. On paper they are. But you will be amazed at the type of companies that we can work and deliver results for them and magic happens. And the companies that we struggle with, we're an experimentation company. That means we have a hypothesis, we've done some research around it and we want to validate the hypothesis and we want to move fast. Some companies are rather slow. Some companies are willing to come and pay us a ton of money and then not allow us to do anything. And it's just the most fascinating thing. I'm like, really? So we spent months and months debating a single experiment to the point where I'm like, can we just move on? They're like, no, no, no. We want to talk about this experiment. Not everybody is willing to step aside from the driver's seat. And when I say step aside from the driver's seat, I'm not telling you that invest should be in the driver's seat. Not at all. Your visitors should be in the driver's seat. But if you're not willing to allow your visitors to be in the driver's seats, then you are stuck in your ways and that's going to slow down your progress, that's going to slow down the results that you see. And it's fascinating. I have seen E commerce companies led by marketing, where marketing holds things down and back. And I've seen E commerce companies led by technology. The IT and the dev team is what hold things back. And I've seen it the other way around where really the marketing leads the charge and they say, you know what? No, we want to deliver results, let's move on, you know, and everybody listens. And I've seen, I mean, we have companies that we're working with where the CTO stepped in and he said, you know what? No, I get experimentation and he actually pushes things. So it's just fascinating that at some point is by title, but really it's not by title. It's about the attitude of the different people that you work with. So that's one thing. And I think like, you know, for us as a company thinking about how do we create a culture of experimentation within our clients, we have a process that works really well. But I'm finding more and more that really the process starts prior to somebody signing the contract. Now we go through lots and lots of education prior to somebody signing an agreement with us. I'm finding out, especially with larger organizations, by the way, with smaller organizations, it's fine. What we have works. But when you're dealing with a company that is 1,000 employees or more, they're just a different creature, different animal, and there's a lot more education. And then they're not going to always move as fast as we'd like to. So figuring out all these different things and really figuring out the companies that you work with and the different buckets that you can put them in. Our motto of move fast, experiment really fast works well with some companies. Some companies, you don't want to move fast. You don't want to. I mean, we'd like to launch anywhere four to six to ten experiments per month. With some companies doing four experiments per month is absolutely the maximum. But instead of launching more experiments, they like to do more analysis on the results. And I love that. Correct. Some companies couldn't care less for the analysis. And we have to tell them like, we really need to analyze what's going on here. We need to understand the impacts, you know, again, different cultures, different ways of looking at things. Beyond that, I think the only other thing that I would say is we struggle with some companies. Just those are not US based companies, if I'm being frank. But kind of the way they Deal with us where we're like, hey, no, no, no. You don't talk to our team this way. And it's just very strange because we haven't had to deal with that in 15, 16 years, you know, and there's a couple of times where people were abusive and I'm like, oh, oh. I'm like, no, no, no, no. Our CROs don't go through that. That's just really not acceptable. And they're like, oh, this is the way our culture is. I'm like, that's fine. You know, that's your culture. That's internal. But if I accept it, then that's how we do business and this is not how we do business. So it was just very clear. Call where this is. Okay, there's a red line where you cannot cross.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. But I guess a follow up to that is having worked with both E commerce teams that are led by tech people and the one that's being led maybe by the marketing team, which one do you think suits investment better? Like in terms of understanding what you're doing?

It doesn't matter. I think both work really well. It really depends on the attitude of the person who's leading the engagement from the client side. I've worked with ctos where you just show them the process and you show them the numbers and just clicks. And I've worked with CMOs where you show them the process and it clicks. The problem that we run into is whether it's an owner, a cto, a cmo, and you show them the process and you show them that, hey, you really loved this idea and you love this visitor flow, but when we tested it, it actually failed and failed miserably and to actually reduce your conversion rate and it actually caused a loss in revenue and they insist on, well, no, this is what we want. And I don't want to look at the test results and I don't want to test this and I don't want to test that. It is not universally applicable to one title or one specific kind of position. It's really about the mindset and I've seen people. I always mention the story of one of the early on a B experiments that we ran where we ran the experiments, 35% lift in conversions. We are super excited because it was on product pages and we saw the revenue lift. Correct. I mean, like right away we saw the revenue lift. And I'm talking to the owner and he's like, I hate the design. My old design. Now, mind you, that Company at some point was doing. They were doing 10 to 12 million dollars in annual revenue at that point in time. And we were small. We're like, hey, okay, sure. Fast forward 1112 years later, he contacted us. He had forgotten completely about the fact that he worked with us. In his message, when he sent us the contact, he said, oh, our sales used to be great. At some point, we're doing like, you know, about a million per month now. Our annual sales are about $700,000. So dwindled from 10 to $12 million annually to about a million. Let's say, let's just round things up. And I knew that this is probably a mix of things. I'm not going to say it's because of us, but it's about the attitude and the mindset. Correct. Of doing things a certain way that you can see the direction that you are heading. Correct. And I think that's where he was heading. And I think that's what we see with some of those companies that struggle to say, you know what, okay, we are willing to test this. And we don't know. It's all, let's see what the market tells us. So it's fascinating.

That makes a lot of sense. So today we're talking about your favorite topic. I think it's your favorite topic.

It is one of my favorite topics. I don't know. It's my favorite topic. I love a B testing. I love customer research. I love a whole bunch of things.

Yeah, of course, I say that because, like, when you go on Spotify and you search for Khalid Saleh, most of your interviews you'll be talking about jobs to be done. You also talk about a B testing, but I think most of them, you kind of like talk about jobs to be done. So I just assume that might be your. Your favorite thing to talk about. And I have this with me.

Oh, okay. Okay. Yes, I like it. I like it. Yes. You have to share the title with people because not everybody can see it very clearly.

So the title is Jobs to be Done, A Roadmap for Customer Centered Innovation. This is one of the books that I read when I joined invesp. Maybe just a few months after I joined invesp. It was just laying there in the office. Everyone had read it, so I just had to go through it too. So it's quite a good book.

Yeah, I love it. Most of the Jobs to be done books are easy read. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're not complicated. They're just kind of taking the information and then just synthesizing it and putting it in a way that we can understand.

Okay, so before we get to the questions that we have today about jobs to be done, can you maybe briefly explain to people what jobs to be done is and how it fits within the optimization process?

Sure. So one of the big things that any optimization program has, one of the big things that every marketing program has, is a pillar, which is focusing the pillar of customer research. You must do customer research. I always tell marketers as I talk to them, you can give me lectures, you can spend hours talking to me about the importance of customer research. Yet when we survey VPs of marketing and CMOs and we ask them, how satisfied are you with the customer research that your team does? We consistently get that anywhere between 80 to 85% of them are not happy with the customer research that their teams conduct. Because most marketers will tell you how important customer research is. Most marketers don't do enough customer research. Now, people don't do customer research for several reasons. They don't do customer research because they don't know how to. They don't do customer research because it's intimidating. And this was, by the way, the case with INVESP for many years where we said, hey, it's important to focus on customer research. And when we first started doing customer research, we focused on a very simplified version of customer research and that is sending out surveys to people who can place an order or using on site polling to ask people who are about to exit the website or people who came to the website to ask them questions. That is more a mix between customer research, but done in a very quantitative, measurable way. The Jobs to be done framework is the very first framework that I found and saw and discovered that really helped us synthesize our thoughts around customer research and understand why people buy. So to me, if you are doing any type of online marketing, customer research falls into two big areas. One area is what I call the customer journey. What are the different things that people go through before they go ahead and make that purchase decision correct? And what happens after the purchase decision? And then there's the post purchase decision. Somebody saying, I've made the decision, now I'm going to go on the website and I need to go find the right item, place an order. Jobs to be done focuses primarily, and I would say like 70 to 80% of jobs to be done framework is about that initial stage of the customer journey. But there is about 30% of the jobs to be done framework that is focused on post the decision to buy. Okay, so what is Jobs to be done? It's like, okay, you've talked all of this stuff. What is Jobs to be done? The name is very strange. We have to agree on that. The Jobs to be Done framework we must first was created by Professor Clayton Christiansen, the late Professor Clayton Christiansen, who passed away a couple of years ago. And it is based on the work of the rewired group, our friend Bob Mista out of Detroit. What is fascinating, if you can get past, at least for the first couple of minutes, if you can get past the naming of jobs to be done. Basically, the premise of the Jobs to be done framework is that people hire products or services to accomplish a job in their life. Now, we are all used to the concept of hiring another person, right? I hire you to do this, you hire me to do that. That's very typical. We don't think of hiring products or services to accomplish a job. But if you want to think about your life, you always want to make progress. You are at point A in your life. You need to make progress so you can get to point B. Now, this progress or job has different ways of looking at it. We can look at it from different ways. There is the functional side. Correct. Of making that progress. I buy a car because I want to move from point A to point B. That is the functional side. In that sense, all of car makes. Some models compete. Correct. Because they all offer you the same thing. We all offer the functionality of moving people from point A to point B. Now, there's two other sides to every job. There's the emotional side. How a particular tool or service or product make me feel. How a Rolls Royce makes me feel is tremendously different for most people than how a Corolla makes you feel. Correct. If two different things. How would a Rolls Royce make you feel? Simba?

Expensive.

Expensive. I get anxious, really, Just the thought of owning a Rolls Royce, I'm like, oh, man, I'm gonna go broke. Okay, no, this is maybe a little too anxious. But it sounds luxurious. Correct. And it's like, oh, man, I've accomplished this. I don't know if I would ever, by the way, buy a Rolls Royce even if I have the money. I don't have the money to buy a Rolls Royce. But would I ever buy. No, no. I see a ton of people watching us. Would you buy a Rolls Royce if you had the money? Or I guess different people have different hobbies and for some people who love cars, might say, you know what? Yeah, I would buy a Rolls Royce. So it's just fascinating. But there's this emotional side of how a product or service make you feel, and then there's the social side of how a particular product or service make you feel within your circle. You might not want to buy a Rolls Royce because you couldn't care less about cars, but guess what? You might want to buy a Rolls Royce because of how people look at you. Correct. When you go to a specific place. So it's about that social circle of friends and colleagues and how a product makes you feel. The Jobs to be Done framework is very powerful in helping us dig through customer insights, find out why, what motivates people to make a purchase decision, and then the journey they go through as they make that purchase decision. From the moment they said, you know what? I recognize I have a need, I have pain point over here, I need to resolve it. Who do they consult? What triggers them to make the final decision? So it really focuses on that. But done correctly, also, jobs to be done help you also understand the challenges in the purchase process. I've made the decision, now I want to buy. What stops people from buying? So that's in a nutshell, is the Jobs to be done framework. Was that a nutshell or was that just too much talk?

No, that was good. That was good. Like for someone who's hearing that for the first time, I think that was so helpful. So, getting to our questions that we have, the first question is how can companies effectively prioritize which jobs focus on when there are many potential customer needs and limited resources available to address them? That's a long question, but I think you understood it.

How do you prioritize the jobs when there are just ton of customer needs and priorities? And you can probably service all of those. So there are four things that you must do in order for you to prioritize the jobs and really position your company for success. Using the Jobs to be Done framework, let's jump into those. Number one, you need to understand the different jobs that your service or your product performs and offers without understanding the actual job. And by that I mean not only the functional, but the emotional and the social side of the job, you're not going to be able to prioritize. So one of the very first things that we like to do whenever we are taking on a project and thinking about the Jobs to be Done framework is we start by interviewing customers and collecting as much data as we can. Now, that might mean that we will conduct anywhere between 5, 7, 10, 20 different interviews and looking for patterns to Understand all the possible jobs that our service or our product satisfies. That's number one. Number two, you need to do a process of analysis for number two, you need to analyze two things. You need to analyze the different jobs that you've collected from the customers that you've interviewed. And also you need to look at the marketplace and you need to survey of these different jobs that we've collected, which jobs are being serviced really well by my competitors and which jobs are important for my customers. What you will find is that there are many instances where other jobs that all of your competitors are satisfying but customers don't really pay a whole lot of attention to. So lots of people compete on some of those jobs. But for the actual consumer, those jobs don't matter. What you are looking for is jobs that are not satisfied by your competitors. And at the same time, your consumers, the end consumer, the person who's going to hire your product or your service, is actually eager to get those jobs fulfilled. Those are the jobs that you want to prioritize. Those are the jobs that you have really good potential to fulfill. Now, something else that is extremely important as well as part of this process is you need to understand, do we have the ability to fulfill that job? Correct. So understanding, kind of your internal limitation, because you might find that consumers all say that they want feature A. My marketplace and all of my competitors are not offering feature A. They're offering it in very limited capacity. Well, what is the reason for that? Can we actually offer feature A? Can we offer it in a financially feasible manner? Because you might come back and say, you know what, there is a reason why none of our competitors are offering feature A. Because maybe it's too expensive, maybe it's going to take a long time to develop. Is it financially feasible to offer feature A? So those are kind of an internal discussion that you have to implement. Now, there's two other things that you need to do in terms of prioritization. And some people say they are not part of prioritization, but I like to include them. And you can also debate the order of those come. But I'll tell you how most companies do it. Number three is develop the messaging around this new feature that you're going to focus on that you have prioritization for. Where you said, this is actually the feature that we are going to compete on. You develop your messaging around that. Where you say, this is the feature that we want you to know us by. This is the feature how we stand from the rest of the market. This is the Feature where the rest of the market does not offer it. Come to us. And number four, you want to now catch up your internal resources, all of your product, everything to that feature. Because you've already developed the messaging, you're already telling people that you have this feature. So you might as well move really, really fast to fulfill that messaging that you've centered your product around with that. That's a full prioritization framework on how to use the jobs to be done framework to offer particular services, offer particular products in a way that you can. A marketplace.

That's a good one. Do you have like examples where you can give maybe our listeners where you had to tweak a messaging of a certain website after having conducted like a jobs to be done. I'm not sure if this makes sense, but at some point I remember a post which was made by Ayat. She conducted some jobs to be done interview for a previous client of maybe for a current client who was selling dance videos. Then they had to interview a pastor. Then a pastor was telling them that, oh, those videos are like therapy session, something like that. I'm not sure you can tell the story better.

Yeah, yeah, no, definitely. I remember that because it was dance lessons and we thought we're selling dance lessons, correct? Or like ways for like couples to connect with each other. But then we interviewed this pastor and it's funny because the pastor, the customer understood the product better than the company that was selling it better than us at that point where he said, oh, you're not selling dance lessons, you're selling marriage therapy lessons. And I'm like, marriage therapy? He's like, as a matter of fact, my last sermon last Sunday was talking about your product because it helps you connect with your spouse. Correct. And we're like, oh, that's different positioning. And now you take those words and then you start digging through the jobs to be done interviews and you see that your messaging around the website for couples is very powerful. It goes from purely selling you dance lessons into rekindling the love. And you can use just very beautiful copy around and this is really how people start using the dance lessons. But you don't stop there. Correct. Because that company offered also live dance lessons. So guess what? If you had purchased the online training for the dance lessons and you're willing to record a video showing you and your wife doing the dance and upload it to the site and then you might get tickets to the free dance lessons in different cities. Guess what? You have a ton of of user generated content. Correct. That started just with an idea, a word that the pastor said in a job. Speed on interview into changing the copy on the website, changing the copy in the Facebook ads, into user generated content, into lots of social proof. It's kind of the machine that feeds off of itself. I'll give you another example from figpy and it's just fascinating to me a few years ago. I mean FIGPI is a conversion rate optimization platform, AB testing, heat maps, session recording and onsite polling. Very simple functionality. That's it. And if we're going to compete on functionality instead of competition because there are a ton of tools out there that offer that. Now one of the things that we focused on was saying, you know what, it's a struggle that we saw with every company that invest worked with or every company that signed up with figpy. They all care about performance. They don't want AB testing software that slows down their website. They couldn't simply, they don't want that. It's great that you're bringing me like an AB testing tool and I can run AB experiments but don't slow down my website. I absolutely hate that. Well, why do you hate that? Because, okay, as somebody running experimentation program, guess what? The SEO team is going to complain and the IT or dev team or the CTO is going to complain. And then guess what? My job becomes harder, my life becomes harder. I don't want that. Correct. I want a B testing software that makes my life easier so I'm able to do the job of improving conversion rates without the pain of other, other teams complaining. Well look, this is interesting. There is something there because that is a feature that most AB testing software does not focus on. Although we all recognize this is really important for the end users. It's very important. And it's a feature that is not serviced by the competitors of figpi. So what did we focus on? We said, you know what, we are going to focus on speed. We are going to be the fastest AB testing software out there. Where we allow AB testing software like where fake buy loads up before anything else. And we made that claim and we continued working on it. We spent the whole year of all of our dev team working on that last year where it's just like if somebody had told me, oh, you're not releasing any new features. I'm like, no, we're not releasing any new features, but we are going to be the lightest AV testing software out there. And many of our competitors, I talked to a couple of them laughed and they said, you guys are too small to Focus on something like that. There's a ton of other features that you should focus on. But again what we said is we don't want to focus on those other features because they're already satisfied by the marketplace. All of our competitors offer them and we don't want to be just another company that says yeah, we'll offer you this or we'll offer you that. We focus on the performance. And we got to the point where first time visitors coming to a site that has figpi figpy takes about 150 milliseconds to load. If they're returning visitors, ficpi takes about 30 milliseconds to load. That's actually absolutely incredible. That's the claim. That's where we put the stake in the ground and we said, you know what, here's what we're going to be known for in the demos. That's the question that I get all the time. How fast? Very fast. That's kind of an example of how jobs have been done. Framework two different products helped us really shape the marketing strategy and the messaging and the value prop.

Yeah, listening to you like explaining that makes a lot of sense in effect. But suppose like I'm a marketer for an e commerce company that sells about 500 products. When doing jobs to be done, should I just like focus on one product or pick the best seller or what? What can I do? Like if I have like many products and I want to do jobs to be done.

So if you're on e commerce website you have to distinguish between two different things. There's the jobs to be done for your site and then there's the jobs to be done for the particular product that you're selling. I'm an e commerce website. Think about jobs to be done for an ebay where they sell at any point in time, millions of products. Correct. On the there is a job to be done for ebay as ebay the company and then there is the jobs to be done for the products. And sometimes people confuse the two. But you should not. You first and foremost need to figure out the jobs to be done for the company. Why would I choose? Especially if you're an e commerce company, why would I choose to buy from you as opposed to Amazon as opposed to another customer? Now you might say I have very unique product, no one else offers it. There are very few companies in that realm. Correct. Most of the time there are other competitors and sometimes if you're not lucky, the products are offered and sold by many different competitors. So figure out the positioning for your company, that's number one. Now after you have that figured out why you should buy from us, why we are different from our competitors and I hope that it's not about price. Again, we'll focus on the three aspects of the jobs to be done. Then you can focus on the jobs to be done for the particular products that you are selling. Now would I do jobs to be done analysis if I'm just a reseller for different products? Tough one. It is a tough one because that's quite an investment. Now you can be partners with that kind of the manufacturer and see if you can work together on coming up with the jobs to be done for different products. And I would definitely focus on my top selling products to see exactly what I can focus in terms of messaging on those. And I would limit the jobs to be done work over the years. People ask me when you run AB tests on product pages, do you run it for a single product or on all across product pages? And I told them 99.99% of the companies that we worked with, whenever we do ab testing, we run it across all the product pages or sometimes we split the product pages into two, three different groups based on layouts and whatnot and we'll run AB testing on those. There is always an exception, of course. We worked once with a company. Not sure if I can mention, I can mention probably 99% of the names of the companies we worked with in this case because especially I remember them. And we insist now in our agreements that hey, we at least we can mention that we work together this company. I'm not sure if I can mention them or not, but the top seller was doing Almost like anyway, two and a half million, $3.5 million per month for a single product. And in that case for that product, we said, you know what, we're going to just optimize that one product. And if I'm running marketing now, this is again back 15, 16 years ago, if I'm running marketing, I would have done jobs to be done for that one product. So yeah, it varies. But start with your company. Make sure by the way, lots of times we talked about the importance of good messaging. We've recorded I think some YouTube videos about messaging that we've released some of them and we're releasing others. But make sure that that messaging appears for both on the product pages, by the way, for your company appears on your top landing pages, on your homepage, on the product pages, on the collection pages. Always have to remind people about why they should do Business with you.

Yeah, yeah. What are some of the jobs to be done questions that you think that. Oh, these are a must ask question. Let's just say I bought this mic like last week and doing jobs to be done for the company that sold me this mic. What are some of the questions that you'd ask me?

My favorite question is how I start the interview. I'm like, Simba. So, hey, what was going on in your life that day when you decided to buy this mic? Yeah, so what was going on in your life?

I thought my audio wasn't good, so I wanted something for the podcast that would sound better.

Tell me a little bit about the podcast. What is it about?

It's a CRO Live hour podcast where we talk about conversion optimization and a B testing. We talk about all things marketing, but most of the times we focus on conversion optimization and a B testing. And we do it every week, every Thursdays for just one hour.

Okay, okay. So you bought the mic for the podcast. You gotta tell me more because obviously the podcast is important enough for you to decide to buy a mic that is an investment. When did you start the CRO Live hour?

I think we started just during the lockdown. That was around 2020 or 2021. I'm not sure about the exact date. We've been consistently doing it every Thursday since then. I also use the mic during our internal marketing meetings so that I would sound clear.

So I'm going to talk about the marketing meetings, but let's go back. So You've started late 2021. You waited for a while, I guess. Why all of a sudden just kind of decide to buy the mic now? What were you doing before and why Decide like, oh, I need to invest in a mic.

I had another mic that I was using, but it wasn't so audible all the time. When I would listen to my voice soon after doing like a recording comparing to my boss who also uses like a better mic. So I thought, like, he was sounding very, very much clearer than mine. So I thought, maybe I need a better mic. So that's when, like, I started looking and then I saw this mic on YouTube. Then I went for it.

Okay, by the way, we can continue with this for another hour and then that becomes kind of a CR Live jobs to be done.

I also want you to explain, like, maybe why were you asking those questions? What were you looking for in some of my answers?

Yeah. So notice how I started digging and we didn't even get there correct. But notice how as you answered those questions, there are two tracks that became very clear. One is about the audio not being very clear. So that's the functional side. But then there's the CRO Live hour. Now we've dug a lot more because you're doing it with your boss. The audio, the importance of CRO Live Hour career. So that's kind of digging deeper into the social and the emotional side of making the decision. So that's how you build this whole framework. If it's just a mic, there are a ton of mics that are going to compete for that job. Correct. It's almost like, hey, I have an opening, come and apply for the job. But there is more. It's not only about the functional side of sounding really good. If we dug a little bit, probably if we spend another 5, 10, 15 more minutes, it's about, well, becoming an authority, becoming well known in the space. There's just so many other benefits that come out of it. That's what I was digging for in the interview. But also, by the way, there's another trap in the marketing meeting, making sure that you're understandable and whatnot. And again, there's a lot of digging around that. Correct. About leading the marketing team. How does that make you feel? That's what you want to dig. Kind of the emotional side. Because remember, people buy on emotion, they justify with logic. This is just fascinating to me. It's funny because we got like, what, three questions? Yeah. And here we are just like another first question. Nearly scratched the surface.

Yeah. I just wanted us maybe to give an idea to some people who are hearing about jobs to be done maybe for the first time or maybe who haven't done them. Like, what exactly will you be talking about? But actually we have like a video Right. On YouTube where you do like a customer jobs to be done interview there. I'll put on the link somewhere. Yeah, in the comments.

Yeah. And not only that, by the way, in our CRO training, the CRO Mastery course, I think we are uploading two, three views Jobs to be done interviews where people can listen to those interviews and how we actually. Actual customer interviews so we can kind of conduct them. I think I picked a few interviews. We had to bleep out just the name of the brands. But it's just fascinating to see how you start with somebody buying a service. Anything is just very straightforward. And when you dig deeper, it's like, wow, this is really fascinating. They're buying a lot more than just merely the quick service or the quick product that you think that they bought.

Suppose you have done like the jobs to be done interviews. Right. And how many customers do you usually interview?

It's fascinating because sometimes people tell me you need to look at the different Personas and interview with the different Personas. And I think fundamentally when you think down that way, you're doing it all wrong. Because the jobs to be done framework tells you that people don't buy because of their Persona. People buy because of their need. That's why people buy a specific product or need. So you need to understand kind of the different categories of needs that people have. One product could satisfy different needs based on different customer segments. So you need to understand those. And then what I like to interview is anywhere between four to seven different people within that particular need. Let's give an example. Skincare products for women. Very straightforward. Helps you fight. Okay, that's very straightforward. Now let's start thinking about the needs that people have. Well, you have somebody who might be younger. Correct. A teenager who is struggling with knee breakouts regularly. Correct. So that is one type of customer who is struggling with a real problem. And that problem again, you can see the kind of the functional. Correct. Removing that me to the emotional side of feeling good, to the social side. That's one group. You might find that there's another group which is expectant mother. Correct. Sometimes they have a breakout. Also people don't think about that. But pregnant women struggle with that. Completely different group. Correct. Now you're talking about an older lady, but kind of have specific set of circumstances, the needs and like, you know, yes, functionally it's the same, but a lot more consideration. Correct. The teenager versus the expectant mother. And then you might have a third group. The maybe somebody who is the all vegetarian, who does not want to have anything chemical, but they still have issues with the acne. Different groups at the very surface have one problem, acne problem, but different ways and considerations, emotional, social that they deal with. So I would interview anywhere between three to five, sometimes up to seven customers. Sometimes after five interviews, we say, you know what? We found everything there is to find. There is no need to interview more people. Sometimes we conduct those two, three additional interviews just to validate and make sure that the information that we found in the initial interviews are sound and that we've collected all the insights that we need to collect.

Okay, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Do you just choose customers to interview at random or you have like a certain criteria that you use to the customers?

No. Recruiting for jobs to be done interviews is one of the hardest parts of doing Jobs to be done, Interviews. You need to find people who have bought from you for the first time in the last 30 to 90 days. More than 90 days is okay. But really, most of the time people have forgotten the process, the journey that they've gone through to make a purchase. So that's number one. First time customers. I don't want people who have bought from you before because they're aware of the brand, aware of the pain and whatnot. And I want them to have actually made the purchase decision themselves. I don't want somebody who had gotten a gift certificate from somebody and then they said, you know what, yeah, I'll go ahead and just use that to buy. So I want somebody who had gone through that and in addition to that, after that, that helps me determine the initial pool of people. So usually we send them an email. We say, hey, we're doing customer research. Would you like to join? We will get a ton of people to respond. We have them fill out a questionnaire and that questionnaire will qualify them or disqualify them correct based on specific criteria for the business. If they qualify. That's when we say, you know what, now we have the initial pool and then we start conducting those interviews. So it's rather. The recruiting process is a rather lengthy process, but it ensures that you are getting the right insights.

That makes a lot of sense. I know the answer to that question, but I just had to ask you just for the benefit of someone who doesn't really know or who's just hearing about jobs to be done for the first time. So now that our time, do we have room for one more question?

I don't think we have room for one more question. So we'll continue with jobs to be done next week. We have to continue with the jobs to be done next week.

Oh, cool. Yeah, sure.

Hey, you know, we hope that we at least intrigued you enough to talk about jobs to be done. So we'll continue that conversation next week. Until next time. Thank you, everyone.

Okay, sure, bye.