The Science of Success Podcast

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Why People Do What They Do & What It Means For You with Bob Moesta

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In this episode, we discuss how to ask better questions, lessons from solving some of the world’s most interesting challenges, and why you need to think about the job to be done with our guest Bob Moesta. 

Bob Moesta is a founder, maker, innovator, speaker & now a professor. Pioneer of Jobs To Be Done Theory; Innovation & new venture expert on creating, developing & launching of new products & services. The co-founder and president of the ReWired Group, Moesta helps leaders and companies repeatedly innovate and reliably predict and drive lasting success. He is also the co-author of Choosing College: How to Make Better Learning Decisions Throughout Your Life. 

  • How do you go from not being able to read and write to becoming a thought leader and expert?

  • The power of asking questions.. asking the questions that people are afraid to ask

  • Working on bombers, missiles, consumer products, gum, pokemon and much more. 

  • How do you ask better questions? Going back to fundamental principles 

  • Most businesses know everything about their consumers.. except for WHY.. dig WAY past the surface layer

    • Get into social, emotional, and functional reasons of why people behave a certain way

    • See the FULL CONTEXT that people live in

    • Understand the outcomes that they are desiring 

  • Oftentimes irrational behavior becomes rational within the context they are in. 

  • What is value and what do people value?

  • After people buy something they 

  • Based on criminal and intelligence interrogation 

  • Nothing is random, just because someone didn’t plan to do it doesn’t mean it’s not caused. There’s no such thing as an impulse purchase, there was a TON of latent context that led to that purchase.

  • "Context creates value and contrast creates meaning."

  • Context adds as much value to the product as the product does. 

  • Where and when in space and time is often more important than the product itself. 

  • “The struggle is the seed of all innovation."

  • The inability can create a super ability. 

  • You have to listen to what people are saying and also HOW they say it. 

  • Context, Outcomes, Trade Offs

  • Questions create spaces in the brain for solutions to fall into 

  • Supply-side vs demand-side thinking

  • How do you filter signal from noise? How do you determine what causes people to make decisions?

    • Functional energy (saving time, money, etc) 

    • Emotional energy (make me feel less bad, make me feel good)

    • Social energy (what other people perceive about me)

  • What are the energies that driving someone to say “today is the day I need a new mattress” - there are an infinite number of descriptions but a finite number of causes 

  • There are multiple answers to the same question.

  • Consumers don’t know what they want. To ask them what they want in a product isn’t always helpful. They don’t know how to design a mattress, they don’t even know how to buy a mattress. 

  • How do you dig deeper into human behavior and see behind the language that people use 

    • Mirroring 

    • Think of it as a documentary... 

    • Focus on the sequence of events and what happened (not what they say they thought)

    • Passive Looking vs Active Looking

    • First Trial

    • Usage

  • Customer interviews are the method to extract that information. 

  • You have to tie feelings back into ACTIONs taken

  • Talk to people who’ve already made the decision.. not people who say they want to… understand their story and their journey.

  • What is PROGRESS and why is it so important to product design and sales?

    • Why am I doing something and what progress am I hoping for by doing it?

    • What progress are you hoping for when you...

      • Buy a new car

      • Move

      • Go on vacation

      • Buy a new house

      • Buy a mattress

    • Everything is a movie... what causes people to take ACTION?

      • Pulls..things that make you want to go 

      • Anxieties.. things that stop you

      • Habits... 

  • It’s almost never about money, it's about VALUE. 

  • Everything is CAUSED.. everything has a full context. 

    • The story of hammering a nail. 

  • There are 28,000 products in the grocery store... and you might buy 10 of them. 

  • Where does growth come from? Growth comes from where people want to make progress but they can’t. 

    • They don’t have access

    • They can’t figure it out. 

  • Why don’t they teach sales at the world’s top business schools?

  • Companies don’t think about CUSTOMERS when they think about sales.. they optimize for funnel and efficiency.. instead of thinking about how customers want to make progress. 

  • The concept of “Demand Side Sales”

    • First Thought

    • Passive Looking

    • Active Looking

    • Deciding (making trade-offs and setting expectations)

    • First Use (onboarding)

  • Customers and consumers have their own implicit systems for making progress. 

  • First thought...

    • Ask question

    • Give metric

    • Tell story

    • State the obvious 

  • Understand the BUYING PROCESS instead of the SELLING PROCESS. 

  • Homework: Interview a coworker, friend or loved one to get to the root cause of why they bought something. Take 30 minutes and dig into it. turn it into a documentary in your mind.. and see the motivations and factors in context.

Thank you so much for listening!

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than five million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

In this episode, we discuss how to ask better questions, share lessons from solving some of the world's most interesting challenges and share with you why you need to think about the job to be done with our guest, Bob Moesta.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word smarter, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we uncovered the truth about networking, why most people do it wrong, how you can do it right and the key ingredient that's been missing in your networking efforts with our previous guest, Dr. Ivan Misner.

Now for our interview with Bob.

[0:01:34.4] MB: Bob Moesta is a founder, maker, innovator, speaker and now a professor, pioneer of jobs to be done – Sorry. Pioneer of jobs to be done theory, innovation and new venture expert on creating, developing and launching of new products and services, the Co-Founder and President of The ReWired Group, Bob helps leaders and companies repeatedly innovate and reliably predict and drive lasting success.

He's also the co-author of Choosing College: How to Make Better Learning Decisions Throughout Your Life.

Bob, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:08.2] BM: Matt, thanks for having me on, man. I'm excited.

[0:02:10.1] MB: Well, we're really excited to have you on the show today. You have worked on so many different products and industries and it's such a fascinating background. I'd love to hear a little bit about how many different products you've helped build and some of the diverse experiences that you've had.

[0:02:25.7] BM: Yeah. I'm from Detroit and it's one of those things where I think from the womb, I was an engineer. Meaning, I was taking things apart by the time I was three. By the time I was six, I figured out how to put it back together so I didn't get in trouble. I had three closed head brain injuries when I was a little kid and basically, I can't read and I can't write. I had to learn in very different ways. Everything to me was about tactically pulling things apart and putting them together.

What it allowed me to do is actually ask questions and have conversations. I've always been a curious kid. For the most part, I've been asking questions pretty much my whole life. I'm 55 now. I've been able to walk into situations and ask some of the basic questions that most people don't want to ask, or they're afraid to ask. I've always asked. To be honest, I've worked on things like the guidance system for the patriot missile. I've worked on the radar absorbing materials for the B-2 bomber and the Advanced Tactical Fighter. I worked on five gum flavors and I've worked on Pokemon Mac and Cheese and Basecamp. Pretty much, there isn't an industry I haven't worked in at this point in time. The cool part is I get pulled into where it's a very complicated problem and the approach that I bring to it helps clarify and get things back to basics.

[0:03:34.4] MB: I love that. Working on everything from bombers to Pokemon and –

[0:03:38.2] BM: Mac and cheese.

[0:03:39.6] MB: Yeah, that's hilarious. Let's start with even before getting into some of the meat of your work, which is so fascinating, let's start with the power of asking questions, that simple framework of asking the basic questions that people are afraid to ask. What does that really look like and how do we start to assess situations more effectively and ask better questions?

[0:03:58.4] BM: I was that little kid who asked a thousand questions and annoyed everybody. My mom basically had taught me a whole bunch of different tools because she knew that if I was labeled dyslexic in 1972, I would have gone a completely different route. She taught me ways in which to tackle my inability to basically then turn it into a super ability. I have all these little hacks that help me see things from a very different perspective.

It's the notion of asking questions and understanding how things work. What causes somebody to say, “Today's the day I'm going to buy a new mattress,” right? At some point in time, they might know who you are and they might know all the correlative details of how old you are and the average age and all this stuff, but what causes you to say, “Today's the day I'm going to buy a mattress”? Typically, what you'll find is most businesses will know everything about their consumer, except for why.

Part of this is to understand and dig way past what I call the cake layer of the reasons. There's this deeper underlying, what I call social, emotional and functional things that cause you to say, “Today's the day. I got to buy a mattress.” It's not one thing. It's a set of things.

Part of this is being able to actually see people's world, see the context that they live in, understand the outcomes they're desiring and be able to put that together into what I call the job to be done, which is people don't buy products. They hire them to make progress in their life. That's the underlying frame of how I ask all my questions.

What's really interesting is you look at a situation and you'll see somebody do something very irrational. What I found out is that the irrational becomes rational with context, meaning if I actually see something doing something irrational, I probably don't actually understand the situation they're in. Once I understand the situation they're in, I can actually then figure out why they did what they did. Part of this is being able to ask those kinds of questions.

[0:05:54.2] MB: I love the almost beginner's mind that you approach these questions with. This idea of something as simple as why does somebody buy a mattress? What causes them to actually walk into the mattress store? You're right. In today's world, we focus so much on all these data and analytics and consumer demographics and everything and yet, a lot of times these fundamentally, really simple but really in many cases, difficult to answer questions get left by the wayside.

[0:06:19.1] BM: Well, you talk to a lot of people who've been in products for a long time and they have all this data wrapped around it. We tend to measure what's easy to measure, but not what's meaningful to measure. This actually started with a quest to understand what is value and what do people value. You start to realize that after the purchase, people tell lies to themselves of why they bought something. When you actually interrogate them, so the method that I built is really based on criminal and intelligence interrogation and it really pieces together the dominos that have to fall in somebody's life to say, “Today's the day I want a new mattress, or today's the day I'm going to buy a house.”

It's this aspect that nothing is random. Just because somebody didn't plan to do it doesn't mean it's not caused, right? They'll say, “Oh, it's an impulse purchase.” I don't believe in impulse purchase. I believe that you didn't think you were going to buy something and you bought it, but you've been looking – My favorite is I interviewed somebody on a mattress and they're like, “Yeah, we were in Costco on a Saturday. I had no intention to buying a mattress. Next thing I know, I'm running outside, I got two kids with me and doing it.”

My next question was, “How long haven't you been able to sleep?” It's like, “Well, that's been about three years.” If you unpack the entire story, it's about literally, a very stressful job, not sleeping well, have some big things coming up, all of a sudden it's – and happens to be with his spouse basically going like, “We really should think about a mattress.” Finally, they say, “You know what? That's fine. Why don't we get a new mattress?” They were waiting for that one last domino of the spouse basically agreeing that they needed a new mattress.

The whole reasons why they did it is it was the fact that they – they hadn't been sleeping, that I had a lot of stuff going on. All that's part of their context that says, “Today's the day I'm going to buy a new mattress.” Most people try to put back to well, what's the single most important that – well, it was comfortable, right? It's not it at all.

[0:08:06.7] MB: It's so interesting and a vital point to underscore and I'd like to explore a little bit more is this idea that as you put up, there's no such thing as an impulse purchase because of the context; this one decision, this one data point. If you're a company, or business, or you're selling a product, you might only look at the world through that tiny little peephole, that tiny little sliver of data and yet, there's an entire life with all these social and emotional and behavioral influences all stacking into that one decision point. A lot of times, the full context is missing, or hidden, or not really understood.

[0:08:40.8] BM: Well, what's interesting is that somehow we got to where we want to actually understand the value of our product and we want to know it in absolute terms, your relative context. The thing is I always say, context creates value and contrast creates meaning. The way I always talk about it is like, “Do you like steak or do you like pizza?” Most people say, “I like both.” “Well, tell me about the last time you had pizza.” “Well, we were running late and the kids were hungry and we need to get home and we needed to get them into bed, so we went and got pizza.”

It’s like, “Great. Now if I put steak in that context, how good is a steak?” Not very good. I would say about the last time you have steak? “It's usually we're celebrating something, we have a big meal together, we're having wine, we’re having this –” How good would pizza fit in that? Not so good. You start to realize that context adds as much value to your product as the product does. Finding out where and when in space and time is actually as important, if not more important than just designing the best product.

[0:09:35.1] MB: Such a great insight. The example of steak versus pizza really crystallizes that, because it shows you how powerful context can be in each of those examples.

[0:09:45.0] BM: Yeah. One of the products I've worked on was Snickers. If you start to realize, people would think that Snickers and Milky Way compete with each other. They're both candy bars, they're both made with the same ingredients, one’s got peanuts, one doesn't. The reality is when you think about the last time you had a Snickers is typically you missed the last meal, your stomach is growling, you've got to do a bunch of work, you're trying to get back to yourself because that you're getting hungry and you're not performing the way you need to.

It competes with a coffee and a Red Bull and a sandwich, but nobody thinks of a Milky Way when they're in that situation. When you think of a Milky Way, it actually competes with ice cream and brownies and the glass of wine and a run of all things. You start to realize, as much as they're the same product, they actually don't compete with each other at all ever.

[0:10:25.9] MB: That's so true. I mean, on the surface they're almost the exact same thing and yet, they do have very different contextual lives.

[0:10:32.4] BM: Right. Snickers is one skew it. They have some others, they're always trying to grow it, but the reality is it's one skew and it's about three and a half billion dollars in sales.

[0:10:41.2] MB: That's incredible.

[0:10:42.6] BM: I don't really think of it as a candy bar. It's actually a food bar disguised as a candy bar.

[0:10:47.4] MB: That's amazing. Zooming out a little bit, how did you come to this realization that the context is so important and contributes, in some cases, more value than the product, or service and is such a rich piece of the tapestry?

[0:11:03.3] BM: When I was 18-years-old, I sat down next to – I thought it was somebody's grandfather. It happened to be a guy by the name of Dr. Deming, who was the gentleman who went to Japan in 1948 and helped rebuild Japan and then built the Toyota Production system. If you know Lean, you know Six Sigma, you know TQM, he's the father of all that.

He was 85 and I was 18 and I sat down next to him and I asked him 40 questions in 20 minutes and he went like, “Boy, you're a curious kid. How'd you like to be my intern?” I interned for him for three summers and I went to Japan and learned all these different methods around engineering and developing new products and the way that Toyota was doing it and then I worked for Ford Motor Company out of college.

To me, it's all really pushed me in terms of being able to realize that when I would ask people what they wanted and I built it, they’d go like, “Mm. No, that's not what I wanted.” I would be like, “Oh, my gosh. How do I figure this out?” Marketing would tell me all this information. Because I was actually dyslexic, I couldn't read any of the reports. I had to figure out my own version of a hack to go like, how would I do this?

I went and figured out how to go interview people about what they really wanted and why they wanted it and why they did what they did. I would actually come back with way more details around the trade-offs that people were willing to make, as opposed to, “Boy, I wanted to have great gas mileage and I wanted to be very fast and I wanted to be this and I wanted to be that.” Consumers make trade-offs all the time, and so I was able to figure that stuff out.

The way I was talking about this, marketing usually does a lot of research to help buy media. To describe something as fun and to advertise something is fun is very different than to engineer fun. I have to cause fun on a regular basis. How does that happen? That's very different than just knowing like, “Hey, we got to say fun in the advertising.”

I think of traditional market research as like gasoline going in a regular engine, but I need actually rocket fuel to go into the engine for innovation. That's where all of it the started was realizing that I needed different information at the right place, at the right time.

[0:13:05.5] MB: That's a great insight and it's amazing how your dyslexia created this prism of looking at it from a completely different angle that ultimately led to such an innovative approach to consumer behavior.

[0:13:17.6] BM: Yeah. I believe the struggling moment is the seed for all innovation. My struggling and most people would again, I think of dyslexia is one of the greatest gifts I ever got, because with that, I'll say inability, it actually created a super ability. The way my mom taught me to read was when I look at a paragraph, or I look at a page, the first thing I see is all the spaces between the words. She'd say, “All right, where is the longest space?” I'd see. She’s like, “Okay. Well, here's the big words. Now if you can see the big words, analyze just the five largest words in the paragraph and guess what you think the paragraph is about.” That's the way I learned to read.

I can see patterns and stuff. I not only listen to what people say, but how they say it. For example, “Boy, that was really good.” When they go down at the end, that means there's an exception to it, so the follow up question is like, “So what didn't you like?” Versus, “Boy, that was really good.” If they go up at the end, that usually means that they were satisfied. “Well, what did you love the most?” You start to realize you have to listen to not only what people say, but how they say it.

[0:14:15.9] MB: I want to come back to something you said a minute ago and then I want to dig deeper into how we peer into the context of people's lives. You made a point a minute ago and you resurfaced it as well, which is this idea that consumers often don't even understand their own motivations, their own behavior, their own reasoning. If you asked them in a lot of contexts, they may not even tell you and they may not even consciously realize the real reason behind why they did something.

[0:14:44.0] BM: Oh, yeah. A couple things around that; one is this notion that we go through our lives, like points in time. We don't actually think about how long it took us to figure out how to buy a mattress. We're just literally thinking about it and then it goes out of our head and then all of a sudden, we're somewhere else, or we didn't sleep well. It’s like, “God, we should do that mattress.” It's just stuff keeps popping into our head. We actually never connect the dots, because the rest of life gets in the way.

When you actually slow somebody down and figure out how did you actually buy a new mattress? They start to realize like, it was actually really complicated. It was not easy. I had to make a lot of trade-offs. It took me four years to get there. You start to realize that people just don't connect those dots. When you ask somebody in a survey after they bought the mattress, why did you buy the mattress? “Oh, it was because of the sale.”

Okay, but that's not the real reason why they did it. It's part of the reason maybe, but the reality is that there's underlying causal factors that they don't even remember or don't even understand. The domino is a great analogy, because a domino half its size can topple a domino that's twice its size. If I have 10 dominos in a line, I can have something that’s 1 inch that knocks over something that's 10 feet.

[0:15:59.9] MB: That shows you the power of maybe they're ascribing the change to that one little domino, but really it was all of these factors that have been stacking up in the broader context of their lives.

[0:16:08.7] BM: Exactly. The way we look about it is if I have to take one of those dominos out of the set, will this not happen? You start to realize there's not a hundred dominos, there's usually five, six, seven different dominos and it's literally they're pieced together on the combination of the context they're in and the outcome that they seek and the trade-offs they're willing to make. If you ask somebody about how they bought something or what they struggle with, you can actually start to understand how they make progress in their lives.

Framing the progress now actually gives us – the way Clay Christensen says it, is questions create spaces in the brain for solutions to fall into. That drove me to really get to what question does a consumer ask themselves to say like, “I need a new mattress”? Because it's not that. They don't start with the mattress. They start with something else in their lives. By the way, the greatest competitor to a new mattress is a bottle of scotch, exercise and Zequel.

[0:17:05.6] MB: That's really interesting. You start to see once you flip this framework on its head and start to see the bigger context of people's lives, those types of conclusions emerge, right? That you see the competitor is not the other mattress firm, or having more springs in your mattress or whatever, it's all of these comparable substitutes, or things that are really solving the bigger contextual problem in their lives.

[0:17:25.4] BM: One of the other things I wrap around this is what I call supply side and demand side thinking. Supply side is the mattress company's going, “We're a hybrid mattress with this density of foam and three different layers and we've got coils in.” Again, from the consumer side it's like, “What the hell does any of that mean?” The demand side is like, “We can help you sleep. If it doesn't work, return it.” That's the stuff they understand.

The best example is the cameras, where if you look at where Nikon and Canon and [inaudible 0:17:50.9], all the big cameras, they talk about F-stop and sensor size and lenses. Literally, as a parent of four, it was like, I just want to get a picture of my kid playing hockey. What camera is going to do that for me? I don't want to educate the crap out of myself. I just want to take some good pictures of my kid playing hockey. You start to realize there's this notion where we don't even speak the right language to consumers and we try to get them to learn our language.

[0:18:15.1] MB: Yeah, that's really interesting. When we're trying to translate, that language start to speak to the consumers, when you're starting to form that vocabulary, how do you think about creating order from chaos in the sense of if you have somebody's entire life stacking all of these hundreds of dominos and factors into place, how do you start to filter the signal from the noise and really figure out what are the key items that actually matter and which one should you pay attention to and which one shouldn't you?

[0:18:41.6] BM: One of my other mentors, his name was Dr. Genichi Taguchi. He basically taught me how to build a signal-to-noise ratio for anything. One of the things that was so interesting is that aspect of where's the intent behind it? We look at where is the energy that's driving somebody to actually make progress? There's three types; there's functional energy, which is more about saving time, saving money, making it easier, not having to think. There's all the mechanics of it, right?

There's the emotional energy, which is basically make me feel less bad, make me feel good, have me less anxious, help me relax. There's all those kinds of things about internal. Then there's the social energy of what other people perceive me, or how I want other people to think about me.

When you start to pull it back to what are the energies that are driving somebody to say, “Today's the day I need a new mattress,” there's a finite number of causes. There's an infinite number of descriptions. There's an infinite number of ways to characterize what happens, but the reality is there are only finite causes and it's not a hundred. Part of it is by going and talking to people and then what I say is abstracting it up to the intent behind it. You start to realize it’s like, when I'm very busy and I'm not sleeping well and I have a lot of stuff coming in the future that I need to perform on, that's part of that context that makes people say, “Today's the day I'm going to get a mattress.”

Now it's not just one, but there might be three or four different pathways. There's a guy named Todd Rose who wrote a book The End of Average. He's the one who talked about that there's not actually one answer, there's multiple answers to the same question. Part of it is to be able to understand what are the different pathways that people take, not to average everything. To me, that influenced me a lot as well. That notion of the signal-to-noise ratio, what are the underlying signals that are really causing people to make progress and that there isn't one answer, but there's actually sets of answers. How many different sets do we have?

[0:20:35.9] MB: It's a great insight. I like the categorizations of functional, emotional, social, those are the three big buckets that you start to filter these infinite answers into and really get behind what is the motivation, what's driving these decisions.

[0:20:50.6] BM: I think the other thing is to realize is that consumers don't know what they want. To ask consumers what they want in their product, like Deming would always say it's the producers responsibility to design the product. They might know the outcome they want. They don't know how to design a mattress. They actually don't even know how to buy a mattress. Part of this is to realize the reason why Casper is a billion dollar business at this point is because they've at least made it simplified to say like, “Tell me about what's going on. Tell me about the context and who is this mattress for? Or how do you sleep?” It's not the fact that are you hot or cold? It's do you stick your leg out at night?

It's these subtle little things that help you understand like, “Yeah, this is going to be the right mattress, because they know me because I stick my leg out at night. Am I hot? Sometimes I'm hot. Not always, you know what I mean?” Learning the questions and learning the intimacies of what the consumers really say and mean behind it. A lot of times they'll say, “Well, I was sweating.” “Oh, I know what that is.” It's like, “How do you know?” It's the part of this is you have to dig way deeper than what their language is.

[0:21:51.2] MB: How do you start to dig deeper?

[0:21:54.3] BM: There's a great book. I had started a book on the interview technique and there's some aspects around it that I still have, but there's a great book by Chris Voss. It's called Never Split the Difference. He is an FBI a negotiator. He literally walks through every single technique that I use in the method. One of them is mirroring. When somebody starts to tell me a story for example, I always say, “Well, let's think about as a documentary.” It's like, tell me about – “Well, my kid was doing this.” “Well what's your kid's first name?” “Jack.” “Okay. What did Jack think?” The moment that I actually move and put Jack in the story, it now becomes more vivid. They actually become more comfortable. They're actually going to tell you more details. What did Jack think about that? How did you respond to it?

I don't really care what they say they did. I want to know the sequence of events and what happened. Like any good crime, there's a timeline to this thing and there's a sequence of things and we talk about there's a first thought. There's something called passive-looking, there's something called active-looking and then there's basically deciding and making trade-offs where you lock in expectations. Then there's first trial and then usage. That's the whole aspect of matching basically, what their expectations were and delivering and doing the job.

The interview itself is the method by which we extract this information, but then by finding those dominos and where they sit and the forces in terms of pushes and goals and anxieties and habits and then the energies of functional, social and emotional, you can then start to actually codify these qualitative interviews to help you see patterns that you could not see before. That's how I always say by dyslexia, it was the greatest gift I ever had, because if I could read, I probably would have never come up with this.

[0:23:38.4] MB: It's so interesting. Chris Voss is a previous guest on the show, so we'll make sure to include that episode in the show notes.

[0:23:43.9] BM: Oh, yeah. He’s great. He's great. He's phenomenal.

[0:23:47.0] MB: Yeah, that was a fantastic conversation. He's a great guy. I loved the idea of thinking about it like a documentary and focusing on the sequence of events. You said something I want to make sure that I understand, which is focus on what actually happened, not what they say they thought about or not what they say they were feeling. Explain that a little bit more.

[0:24:05.6] BM: A lot of times people will say, “Well, I was angry.” Like, “Well, why were you angry? Give me an example of what did you do because you were angry.” If they were angry and they didn't do anything about it, then it really isn't probably relevant to the story, right? If it's frustrated and they did something, where in the timeline does the action fit that you did? Because ultimately, we have to actually see the actions that people take to get there. Part of this is there's a lot of times people will talk about how they feel, but it actually doesn't motivate them to make progress. The other thing is I don't talk to people who want to buy a house, for example, or who want to buy a mattress.

I only talk to people who bought a mattress, to understand the journey they had to go on and the trade-offs they had to make and the energy that caused them to do it. Because for every one person who made it, my belief is there's another hundred or a thousand or a million behind them that haven't figured it out yet. As you listen to these stories though, you get the design requirements of finding out where you over-engineer something and where you actually don't pay attention and where averages kill you. You actually figure out how to build products that are actually what I would say, it's a kick-ass half, not a half-ass whole.

[0:25:16.2] MB: Yeah, that's really interesting. This whole idea of only talking to people who've already made the decision, in interviewing people who have already gone through that journey, whatever the full context of that story is, as opposed to talking to people who say they're interested in buying a house, or buying a mattress or whatever. That's a really interesting insight.

[0:25:36.0] BM: The other part is if I talk to a wide range of people who have already bought, I actually can find the causes and then I can actually use it to help me design the sales process to help people sell. I can help you make progress on buying a new mattress. One of my favorites is a lot of times, people will create this question, create the space in the brain for the solution to fall into, but then they answer it. When you answer it, you actually fill the hole in where you should say is like, “So why can't you sleep at night?” Just leave it at that. Just let it go. Because that's the thing that's going to eat at them and go like, “God, why can't I sleep at night?” If you say, “Oh, you can't sleep at night, because it's your mattress.” It's like, “No, I don't need a mattress.”

[0:26:15.7] MB: Very interesting.

[0:26:16.5] BM: What I've done is I've actually taken this framework and I've said like, “Why do we not teach sales and why is sales seen as such a bad thing?” The one bad apple has spoiled the entire thing. If you talk about people who really helped you make progress and you say, “Oh, how was your salesperson?” They're like, “Oh, well they're not my salesperson. They're my concierge. Or no, they're my advisor.” You start to realize really good salespeople really just help people make progress.

If we can actually teach the sales organization and the marketing organization and the customer success organization to align against what's the progress we're trying to help people make and how do we work together, as opposed to compete against each other, you start to realize it's a completely different way in which to manage sales.

[0:27:01.2] MB: Before we dig into sales, tell me about the concept of progress. Because I know that's a critical component of the jobs to be done framework and you've mentioned a number of times, but I want to explain in richer detail what that means.

[0:27:13.1] BM: Progress to me is we are creatures of habit and we will continue to do what we did if it works for us. The moment that we decide that this isn't good enough, we then all of a sudden realize that why am I actually going to change something and what am I hoping for when I do it? That's why it's not jobs. It's jobs to be done. This notion is what progress are you hoping for when you buy a new car, when you actually move, when you go to college, when you go on vacation?

You start to realize at some point in time, it's a movement. Most people think about it as a snapshot. In my mind, everything is a movie. Part of it is to understand what's the progress I'm willing to make? In progress, there are pushes that make you say, “Today's the day.” There's polls, which are the things that you are aspiring for, or the outcomes that you seek. There's anxieties that go against it, which are things you're worried about. There's habits which are there things you love about the current way you're doing it.

Progress is being able to understand how do you see you making progress as a system and understanding the trade-offs you have to make in order to do that. I don't know if I made that much sense with that, but I tried.

[0:28:26.4] MB: Yeah. No, that's a great explanation. This whole idea of viewing it as a system of and this comes back almost – Yeah, the idea of the full context of their lives, right? There's all these forces. They’re getting pulled in some ways. They're scared of taking action in other ways. They've got their habits that are sticking them in certain types of behavior patterns. All of these things are interacting in different currents and energies. Then ultimately, they end up buying a new house, or buying a car, whatever that might be as a result of some shift, or some change, or some domino impacting the behavior of the entire system. It's not because the mattress had extra padding and new springs that are liquid cooled or whatever.

[0:29:05.9] BM: That's right. Well, then it becomes hiring and firing criteria. What was the hiring criteria? What were the things you were most worried about? What was that priority on it? Again, you didn't want to pay that much, but you're willing to pay that much because you thought this would get you what? When people say, “Oh, I don't have the money,” typically it's never about money. It's about their notion of value. They don't value what that is. Or you put so many features in it and I only need three of the 10 features. When I say, “Boy, it's just too expensive.” It's usually too expensive, because you actually put too much in it, not because they don't have the money.

[0:29:37.5] MB: That's great. Really interesting insight. It's almost never about the money.

[0:29:41.4] BM: The other thing I would say is that everything is cost. You don't randomly just pull something new into your life. In the grocery store, there's 28,000 new products a year in the grocery store and you might see 10 of them. I'm saying, you might buy 10 of them. You might see a few more. If you know what you're having for lunch you know and what lunch is going to be and you've always bought turkey, you're going to buy turkey, right? Why change it if it works?

The reality is when you say, “Well, I got mesquite this time. I wanted to mix it up.” Well, what was your intent? Did you want people to show that you cared? Because mixing it up is showing that I'm paying attention and then that I care. There's a causality there. It's not just random that somebody picks a mesquite this time and picks something else another time.

[0:30:19.8] MB: Yeah. This whole idea, everything has a cause. One of my favorite parables or stories is this idea of you look at a nail being hammered into a board. In order for that to happen, the entire universe has to exist, the chain of events from all the planets and everything, all the way to that person's parents and grandparents. That nail being hammered into that board, there's so much context behind that that it's essentially everything, right? It's pretty amazing when you really take any single instance of anything, there's so much richness behind it that you can potentially unpack.

[0:30:51.7] BM: Well, the bigger thing to me is where does growth come from? What you start to realize is growth comes from where people want to make progress, but they can't. They either can't figure it out, or they don't have access to it, or it's not to the quality level you want. I've worked with SNHU and Palo Blanc and basically as we started to look at this, it was like, how many people want to go back to school but can't?

He built a whole separate division of an online school and he went from 500 online students in basically 2010 to he has a 130,000 online students. He went from a 100 million to a billion as a not-for-profit school. He literally have the price of education by actually thinking about it and saying like, “How many people want to go back to school, but can't? Now, I'm going to actually make it easier for people.” He had to change all these different processes, like the application process. The typical application process for an 18-year-old is literally nine months. They do it in literally less than a week.

[0:31:50.8] MB: That's amazing.

[0:31:51.9] BM: Right? That's the whole aspect here of growth really comes from what we call the low-end of the market, the disruptors who basically walk in and say, how many people want to go to college but can't? Or want to go back to college and can't?

[0:32:04.0] MB: I want to bring this back to something you touched on a minute ago, which is this idea of sales and how you mentioned earlier and we talked about on the pre-show, sales is probably one of if not the most important business skills and yet, it's essentially not taught in school at all. If you look at the most famous business schools, there's no sales training going on there. In many ways, some people look down on it, or it's a dirty word, or whatever. I want to hear your thoughts about that.

[0:32:27.9] BM: One of the things that came out as I was developing products, the thing that I found and I've done seven startups. As I've done the startups, I realized the hardest thing for me to really learn was how to sell. When I went and tried to learn it through the traditional channels, it was like, hey, this makes no sense. I got to come up with features and benefits. I got a standard presentation. I got to come up with a demo and the demo is well, it's contextual. Like, “No, no, no. You just create one demo and show everybody everything and you just push it through the funnel.” There's this notion of the funnel.

The crazy part is you realize if they're teaching sales, it's like somebody from the law school comes over and teaches negotiation, somebody else from HR teaches structured, the Salesforce, but sales is glossed over. You start to realize selling, Daniel Pink said as, to sell is human. This is one of those things where people want to make progress. They got to actually help us understand what they want to do. To me after doing that, actually became an adjunct at Northwestern, in the Kellogg School. They have one sales professor. His name is Craig Wortmann and he's amazing. He actually runs the Kellogg Sales Institute. The reality is he had got in there when I started doing a lot of this research, but there was no sales professors.

You start to realize why is that? It turns out that there's no real theory behind sales. It's a bunch of techniques. It's seen as art. It's very hard to teach. It's almost like you're teaching theater class. Business school is more about spreadsheets and strict analysis of those kinds of sorts. You start to realize nobody wants to be teaching sales. It's very hard to learn. Most students actually have a hard time learning it. Typically, it's been left to companies to come up with a way to sell.

They actually don't think about it from the customer side. They think about it from their side. I call it the church of finance. We'll say like, “Well, how many leads do we need and what's the conversion rates and what's the funnel and how's the early funnel and the late funnel?” To trying to optimize it for efficiency when they actually don't actually understand how people are trying to make progress. I flipped it.

The next book I'm working on, I have a first draft of it in, we're in the midst of hopefully getting it out by beginning of Q3, but it's called demand side sales. Stop selling and help your customers make progress. The crazy part is as I built the frameworks out for the sales side of it, I started to work with five or six different companies. The first thing they realized is they've been trying to get everybody to a demo. The salespeople would be like, “If I can get people to a demo.” For every call to a demo, they get that conversion. For every demo to a close is really important.

We start to analyze how people buy. You start to realize they actually need three different demos. A demo in passive looking, which is tell me a story, versus a demo and active looking, which is tell me the possibilities, versus a demo in deciding which is show me, it won't break. You start to realize, they actually needs three different demos. They've been trying to optimize it for two years. They finally broke it apart and had three of them ask the customers where they were in the sales process and they've been able to actually have the selling time.

[0:35:23.8] MB: That's so interesting. I'd love to explore a little bit more some of the biggest behavioral shifts, or organizational changes that you advocate on companies that shift from the funnel, or financial approach to sales, to this customer-driven or demand-focused approach to sales.

[0:35:39.4] BM: Yeah. I think the first part is to think about it as the customer or consumers. They have their own implicit systems for making progress. The first thought. The first thought is actually only made four ways. You ask somebody a question, you tell somebody a story, you give them a new metric, or you state the obvious. That's how people get spaces in the brain. The thing is as marketers are so worried about being clever and funny and all these other things, but the reality is there's nothing funny about progress.

They're measuring for example, how well awareness is on the product. You start to realize when you do these stories, very few people actually shop anymore. They're asking people for help. They're literally doing their own research. They're doing their own things, and so trying to actually have a recall at the wrong moment, it doesn't actually give you anything. Part of this is making sure that people understand the buying process that people go through, not the selling process.

Then the second is what are the metrics? The one we're building right now is set some metrics around to know that people are in passive looking. It’s like, they've requested to hear your e-mail and the thing is is if I actually know that they've passed it on to five or more people, they're probably getting ready to go be an active looking. If they're just getting it and they’re not reading it and they're not looking at it, that's what we call passive looking and that's okay. It's their terms, not our terms. They're buying for their reasons, not our reasons.

We keep trying to actually push everybody to sell faster and more and we end up devaluing our product, so we can actually close earlier and I think we actually hurt everybody. It's a very different perspective for sure.

[0:37:13.9] MB: That's so interesting. You put customers essentially in those three buckets; passive-looking, active-looking and deciding?

[0:37:20.8] BM: Yup. I say that there's a first thought and then there's passive-looking, active-looking, deciding. Deciding is about trade-offs. Then there's first use. First use is about onboarding, it's about actually doing the job, where the aspect of deciding is about making the trade-offs to set up the expectations. Then once you've bought it, now do you actually deliver on those expectations. The other part to me is that every new innovation causes a new struggling moment for the next innovation.

Think of the iPhone, right? The iPhone went from it's a phone, you don't have to carry the music and then all of a sudden, the camera came up. Then all of a sudden, right now people don't buy it, because it's a phone. They're buying it because it's a camera and that happens to be a phone.

[0:38:03.3] MB: Yeah. Explain that to me a little bit more. I'm curious to unpack that concept.

[0:38:06.5] BM: Here's the thing is that what you realize is that when you actually solve one problem, like we want to actually integrate this thing, the first set of new problems we had was the battery life and the reception. You start to realize, people would end up – two things they do is they carry around batteries and cords and want to charge everywhere, in their minds is acceptable, until somebody came up with better battery and actually more efficient.

Then what happened is they had a small little camera and you start to use pictures and then you had the birth of Facebook and Instagram. Think of how many people wanted to take a picture, but couldn't? The razor was good enough. By the third, fourth generation, the camera, you can see and predict where the next generation of innovation has to become because of how it’s actually designed in the product and how they use it.

[0:38:51.0] MB: Yeah, that's really interesting. The example of how it shifted from one to the other, to battery life, to phones, I mean, it's pretty fascinating. I guess to try to summarize what you're saying, it's the idea that one innovation creates almost a butterfly effect, or a cascade of new both opportunities and challenges from a product development perspective.

[0:39:10.3] BM: That's exactly right. That's why there will always be more products. The question, are they meaningful enough? Think about it, when the iPhone first came out, the iPhone 3, iPhone 4, people were switching almost every year. It got to the point when they get to the 7 in the 8, it was like, people were like, “It’s good enough. I'm not struggling enough and it's not worth a $1,000. It's good enough for where I am.” There were people who were buying it, but they were buying it for different reasons than the people who didn't buy it. Finally, the people who are 6 going to the 10 or the 11 are really they're like, “Yeah, my old phone doesn't work anymore.”

[0:39:41.6] MB: Yeah. I mean, I pretty much only switch phones when my battery gets so degraded that I need to upgrade.

[0:39:47.0] BM: Let me tell you something else though. When you get a new phone, you usually have either a long weekend, or you have some time to actually set it up that you will actually have in your mind, like you do it right before a vacation, or you do it during a vacation, or you do it for a long weekend, a Memorial Day.

[0:40:01.4] MB: It's so weird that you say that, because the last time I bought a phone, I was on vacation, without ever thinking about that.

[0:40:07.7] BM: That's what I'm saying is you can see the pattern. The pattern is that you need time to set it up. If your phone breaks, then it’s an emergency. When you actually don't have to replace it, it's like, “All right. When should I do it?” You get to choose. It's like, “Yeah, I'm going to do this when I'm on vacation. It's more a weekend, or it's I'm doing a long weekend.”

The other thing is most people have a very hard time turning in their old phone. For example, when you switch from Android to Apple, or Apple to Android, it doesn't matter, you don't want to actually turn your old phone in, because you're afraid that you're not sure you're going to like the new phone. If you go from an Apple 7 to a 10, you're fine with it, because you know it's the basic same thing. Because there's always this anxiety or fear of like, “But what if I don't like it? What's going to happen to my data?”

[0:40:49.7] MB: Yeah. I'm a packrat with data, so I'm always worried. It's like, “Well, what if there's something I didn't get off the phone that I need later?” Anyway, so this has been a fascinating conversation. I'm curious, for listeners who want to start implementing this framework in some way, what would be one action step or first step that they could start to take to implement it?

[0:41:06.5] BM: There's a couple of things. One is a bunch of resources on iTunes, so we have jobs to be done radio, where it's about 40 episodes of people that we've used it with and interviews we've done and basic methods. There's a place called jobstobedone.org. We have some online training that basically covers the method and the tools. Then for the most part, there's a book called Competing Against Luck, that Clay Christensen in the Harvard Business School and I collaborated on. He basically wrote about me and my clients, which is phenomenal and that's out there.

Then I have a few other books. One is called Choosing College. Having four kids and try to get him through college, it was very difficult. I wrote a book about what causes people to say, “Today is a day I'm going to go to school,” and what progress are they really seeking to do, as opposed to what school they should pick. Not where to go, but why to go. Then I have the sales book come out. I'm trying to be everywhere on every topic.

[0:41:56.4] MB: Great. We will make sure, we'll include all that stuff in the show notes as well for listeners to be able to check out. I'm curious, in terms of a way to concretely take step one, instead of just passively consuming that stuff, somebody says, “I'm sold on it. I want to try this out.” What would be the first step you would tell them to do?

[0:42:13.3] BM: My suggestion is to interview somebody to get to the root causes, the underlying dominos of why somebody bought something, whether it's your kid, whether it's a co-worker. It's like, “Oh, yeah. I bought a new briefcase.” My belief is you can say, “Oh, the old one was wearing out.” Okay, let's dive into it. My thing is take 30 minutes and literally dig into and shoot the documentary of why they bought a new bag, right? It's not random. There's underlying causes there that literally will help you understand what happened and why they needed a new bag. It would be social, emotional and functional.

[0:42:44.6] MB: Great. Yeah, I love this starting with a friend or co-worker or something like that is a great way to get your feet wet.

[0:42:49.4] BM: I do discourage to interview your spouse about anything, only because you start to ask questions that you usually don't ask, it gets very uncomfortable fast. Start with a friend or a co-worker. It usually works a lot better.

[0:43:02.3] MB: Great. Excellent advice. Bob, we’ll throw all those resources in the show notes that you mentioned before. One more time, where can listeners find you and your work online?

[0:43:09.9] BM: I'm at therewiredgroup.com. We’re basically a small boutique consulting firm. Then I teach at Northwestern, so you can find me in the Kellogg School. Then Twitter, I'm @BMoesta. I'm on LinkedIn. If there's anything I can help you with, I'm driven to basically help put these things out into the world and hopefully have other people using them before I pass.

[0:43:32.8] MB: Well Bob, this has been a fascinating conversation. So many great insights. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of your wisdom.

[0:43:39.3] BM: Oh, thank you.

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