Bob Moesta talks about how he overcame a disability to be a hugely successful businessman, marketer and educator. Bob is one of the authors of the Jobs-to-be-Done theory, which posits that consumers hire products or services to do jobs in their lives. According to Jobs-to-be-Done, companies need to better understand how their products and services fit into people’s lives.
Bob talks about how to apply the theory to brand-building and reminds marketers that they need to be in lockstep with those creating the product. Bob insists that marketers tend to over-emphasize the who and ignore the when, where and why of consumption.
Bob and Eric could have easily filled three podcasts – so if you want to hear more, send us your questions for Bob at media@wearerival.com and we’ll have a special Q&A episode of Scratch with Bob.
To hear more from Bob, check out his most recent book, Demand-Side Sales, look out for his upcoming Learning to Build, and check out his new podcast The Circuit Breaker. You can reach out to Bob on LinkedIn.
If you prefer to watch this episode, visit (and subscribe!) to Rival’s YouTube channel.
To listen to this conversation on your preferred streaming platform, click here.
Transcript
Bob: The thing is most people try to go talk to customers about what they want. They don't have a clue what they want. They know the outcomes they want, they know the context they're in. Value is described by the process of actually making progress and from where they are to where they want to go. That's the definition of value. How we do it is up to us as the producers of product or of services because they don't, customers don't even know it's possible.
Eric: I'm Eric Fulwiler and this is Scratch Bringing You marketing lessons from the leading brands and brains rewriting the rule book from scratch for the world of today.
Hey everyone, I am still buzzing from this conversation with Bob Moesta. For those of you who have not come across Bob before, Bob is one of the principal architects of the Jobs to Be Done theory that first came out in the mid 1990s, but as Bob talks about is a concept that has kind of been around before, but jobs to be done. The work that he did with Clayton Christensen and a few others really helped to frame it up in a way that more businesses could apply to product innovation. But as you'll hear us talk about also marketing innovation, Bob has started and sold several startups. He's helped to bring 3,500 innovations to market. He's a guest lecturer at the Kellogg School at Northwestern. His current company specializes in demand side innovation, changing buying and consumption behavior to help companies grow. He's the author of a few books including Demand Side Sales, which two people in the last two weeks have recommended to me and I didn't even know it was his book, and so we started talking, which was pretty funny. And as the note here in our show note says he has lots of work experience in lots of stuff, which is very, very true. As Bob describes himself, he's an engineer who likes to fix and build things. Our conversation touches on many different things. The time just flew in this one, so I really hope you enjoy it. We talk about how to bring new products to market, jobs to be done, both the theory and the application, how to start with something new, the questions to ask. And I love how Bob really makes it applicable to people listening. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Bob Maesta. Hey Bob, how you doing? Thanks so much for joining us.
Bob: Great, thanks Eric. Thanks for having me on. Excited to be here.
Eric: So how is Detroit these days? I've only been a couple times, but when I was in the agency world in the States, I had Shinola as a client. Oh, for a while. That's a good, so did trip over with them and they were, it's a great brand and they were I believe, at least from what I saw, and they told me kind of part of this reinvigoration of Detroit. So I'd love to hear how things are going on there.
Bob: Yeah, so Detroit is the thing a lot of people don't understand. Detroit was one of the most wealthy cities from 1952 to 1962 and it almost got to the point where it was too wealthy and it didn't know what to do and it actually started to hoard its cash and eventually it just kind of imploded. And so is on a honest rebirth. I think 2008, 2009 was kind of its true demise and then it is coming back and it's lots full of startups and lots of great restaurants and I mean it's turning into a weekend, a place to come for the weekend, not in the middle of winter of course, but <laugh> really doing well. And to be honest, for 10 years I worked on an urban urban farm. We got 200 acres inside the city and converted it and helped people coming out of rehab and incarceration and literally helped them go back to learning I'll say basic work practices and then eventually building what we called a food truck you, which is helping people get to a career that's something a little different. So it's been very, very interesting. I'll say we innovate in Detroit because we have to, that's my short line.
Eric: Amazing. So Bob, I think a lot of people listening will have heard of you or will have been exposed in some way to your work. Like I said, before we press record, I've had two people in the last two weeks recommend your book to me. So you're clearly out there, but for people who maybe haven't come across you and your work before, can you just give a quick background the type of stuff you've done over your career, what you're working on now? Just a little bit of an introduction would be great.
Bob: So my mom would say I was an engineer out of the womb. I was breaking things by the time I was at least two, if not three, but by the time I got to be five, I started to fix things, learn how to fix things, and ultimately I just been wanting to build things. And so as a kid we'd go around we didn't come from a means background and so we'd drive around and we'd pick up old big garbage. So I'd pick up old hi-fi sets and stuff. And so I collected speakers and by the time I was 12 I was making speakers and selling them and things like that. And when I was 18 years old, I was lucky enough to meet number four over there. Who's Dr. Deming? He's the gentleman who went to Japan and helped him rebuild the infrastructure and is the father of the Toyota production system.
And I happened to work for Ford at the time and I helped, basically I was one of the people on the front lines helping to go from 72 months of development time to 36 to months of development time. And so I learned all these methods and tools along the way and work for Ford for about seven years and then work for the Department of Defense. But for the most part, the thing that I've been doing and most fascinating is building product, but out of it, I couldn't make sense of a lot of the marketing research that was done because it was very what I call attribute based and it would tell me who I was trying to get to but not why they wanted my product. And so I partnered with a guy by the name of Clayton Christen, who happens to be mentor number, I think three up there.
And I came up with a concept or basically a theory or a framework called Jobs to Be Done, which is people don't buy products, they hire them to make progress in their life. And from that it's the whole notion that people struggle. And by aiming innovations on where people struggle, it's how I've been able to work on over 3,500 different innovations and a very short lifetime. And to be honest, I'm now at the point where I want to be able to share my experiences and help the world kind of innovate because I just feel like we're not geared to do that. I would say the other part that people should know is I'm dyslexic. So I had three close head brain injuries before I was seven years old, so I can't read and I can't write, and I was told I should be a baggage handler at the airport and those four people pour their knowledge into me to enable me to become what I would consider a successful innovator. And that's kind of where I'm now where I want to pass that forward.
Eric: Wow, that's fascinating.
Bob: That's fast enough. But <laugh>
Every day, this is my seventh startup, it's called the Rewired Group. We're very small, we're five people and we help do about 25 projects a year. And we help people basically do two things. One, bring new products to market, but the second thing we do is we teach them all the skills and capabilities that we have. And so it's a combination of we don't have a curtain behind the curtain, we do stuff. It's like everything we do, we do out in the open. And my passion is about teaching and helping people figure this out.
Eric: We probably a little bit of a shared philosophy here at Rival, we've got a first principle of how we do anything, which is we're trying to work ourself out of a job as quickly as possible. So it really, what that means is it's a focus on the people, it's a focus on the culture, it's a focus on the capabilities. It's trying to get as much of our experience and expertise out of our collective brains and into the brains of the clients we're working with because fundamentally that's what they're there for. They're not there for the decks and the media. That's exactly right. And all the stuff that goes around it by the way,
Bob: For people. The other part of that though is the fact is most people say, well, you don't want to work yourself out of a job. It's like, no, really what I want to do is I want to stop saying the same thing over and over again and start saying new things. And so to do that, I got to get you to say the things that I have to say and so I can go do some different things. And I've been lucky enough to have a team that's been able to do that. And so the stuff I'm working on is just kind of crazy stuff I even don't really have any expertise in. But as you dive into it and use this framework in it, it's like you get night vision goggles that are kind of amazing.
Eric: I think it also comes down to short-term thinking. If we're trying to work ourself out of a job, maybe some of our engagements end shorter than they would otherwise, but I really believe in the long term it it's about value really. It's about, and of course we're going to get into this jobs to be done. Oh yeah. If we can deliver on that need on that job, if we can be the solution, it's going to do good things for our business in the long term. It's also just a more fun way to go about doing things in life
Bob: I think that's that by the way, a lot of people miss that. You want work to the notion of work being fun. Everybody always used to laugh at me. I'm like, I always ask, Hey, you having fun at work? And they're like, yeah, I'm well, how do you know? And my thing is when time distorts, either it's goes really fast or it goes really slow. Typically people are in the flow. And when they do that, the thing is is they're actually doing the work they should be doing. And so to me, that's one of my passion projects right now is I've, we just in the middle of signing a book deal around this, around basically understanding what causes people to leave one company to go to another company and that employees hire companies more than companies, higher employees. And so can we understand the progress that employees are trying to make? It's very, very, it's using jobs in the HR space. It's so interesting.
Eric: So I've jotted down six things, <laugh>, Jeff, that I want to talk about just from your two minute intro. So yeah, we're going to start needing to do a longer podcast, but well,
Bob: I can always cut. I always like to do a q and a where after people hear it, if they have questions, like let's come back and do a likes, do a fireside chat.
Eric: Oh, I love that. Maybe. Well, you know what, I'm going completely spontaneous here, but if you're up for it, Bob, we can cut, but we can do
Bob: As a podcast, we can cut this out. And my thing is if it's still there, it's still there.
Eric: <laugh>. Alright, if it's still there, it's still there. Maybe what we could do is we can say it here and we can also include it in the show notes and I'll include it in when we push the podcast out. If people have questions for Bob, maybe we can do a bit of a follow up. Maybe it can be another podcast episode, maybe we can do it virtually. So all right, whatever.
Bob: We can work that out.
Eric: If you're listening and you have a question for Bob, please email mediawearerival.com or get in touch. Most of you probably know how to get in touch with me. We'll collect those and we'll find some way to get Bob to answer them. Amazing. So I like the spontaneity of this so far. It's great. I, let's see why don't we start with, so for people listening, just a quick note. Bob has a great multiple camera angle setup, so if you want to click over to YouTube, you can see a bit of that. And he mentioned his mentors and he has them pictures on the wall that he's showing as he's talking through them. But why don't we start there? Are there any kind of stories that you can share about working with some of these giants of the business game that really helped to shape who you are as a professional, probably as a person as well?
Bob: So many, I think first of all is the way that I was able to connect with Deming is I happened to be around Christmas time and I happened to go to somebody's house and I was waiting for them to get there, and I sat down next to what I thought was their grandfather. And so I just started asking questions and it turns out it was Dr. Deming and it wasn't their grandfather. He happened to be a visitor at this person's house. And I asked him 52 questions in 22 minutes, and he just turned to me and looked, and he goes, he was 85 at this time. And he looked at me, he goes, God, you are a curious kid, aren't you? And I'm like, oh, yeah. And he goes, the questions and the speed at which you are thinking is something I would be very interested if you would like to work for me for the summer.
This was literally in December, and he's literally thinking about something for the summer. And I'm literally sure, I didn't realize it involved me going to Japan and figuring out how to get there as a 19 year old at the time by that time. And it was just one of those things where my mom would always, people around me would say, oh, you're, you're so lucky to have done that. And my thing is, my mom would always tell me it's not luck. The fact is you knew how to ask those questions and you are curious. And it was in her mind, it was destiny that we were supposed to kind of meet. And so my thing is that I have this underlying philosophy that we don't randomly meet. There's no way that you and I have randomly come together. And so part of this is to always take the moment to say, what is the universe trying to tell me?
And again, do I know, not really, but at the same time I choose to frame it around a very motivational thing that enables me to then make the most of it. And so it's those kinds of little stories where Dr. Willie Moore, who's I'll say number one up there, and she taught me how to think a molecule. And as we'd have problems on the car or different technical problems we look at, it's like, how do you actually manifest yourself and think about it from a physics perspective? And so they all taught me these really, really interesting ways in which to think and to do things. And it complimented who I was. But working with Clay Christensen for 27 years, I had four hours a quarter for 27 years with no agenda. And we literally would show up and kind of go, here's what I'm working on, here's the questions I have for myself, and here's the question, what can I do to help you? And we literally just helped each other for 27 years, which is kind of amazing.
Eric: Yeah. Well, there's a couple things that I want to draw out of that. First of all, so we do this podcast, we also have a newsletter that's all about challenger marketing mindsets and models. And typically what's in there is what challenger brands are doing, observations on the space, et cetera. But I actually just finished writing next week's this morning, and I did it a little bit differently because I've done probably, I don't know, 20 ish of these recordings so far. And then also at my last job, I had a CMO podcast as well, but it was focused on the financial services space. And I couldn't ignore the fact that almost every single conversation I have with CMOs, thought leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, almost every single one brings up the concept of curiosity and how important it's been in their personal and professional development and what they've accomplished in their careers. And so I wrote up being a really long perspective on just, I just think it's so interesting. That is the thing that seems to be a bit of a red thread with everyone that's been successful.
Bob: So some of the work I'm doing now, and again, this might be too detailed, but what's so interesting, curiosity is a thing that I always say. It's what the academics observe on the experts doing it. But when you're the expert doing it, you don't say, oh boy, I wish I was more curious. And so part of this is to realize that curiosity is an effect. It's not a cause. So this is one of my foundational pieces is everything is grounded in cause effect. So what makes me curious, part of it is being humble enough to say, I don't know. And what you have to realize is that what I call a mentality of the kids who all got, a's in school, they already knew everything. And the reason why they're less curious is because they know the answers and they've never had to frame the questions. But the gift I got by being dyslexic is I always started with a D, maybe even an E, but I would at least get a D. And then it would be like, all right, what do I got to do to get better? I know what am I missing out of this thing? And you start to realize that it's the fact of the humbleness of, I don't know, is actually at the root of being curious. And most people don't know what they don't know. Yeah,
Eric: It's interesting. I just had a thought because I worked with Gary Vaynerchuk for a long time, and I don't know, I don't think he's dyslexic, but he was always a bad student and he's talked a lot about that. And I actually, I can't remember him saying this specifically, but I'm sure that it probably had a similar effect for him for how he's always so curious and willing to dive in to learn something that he doesn't know. But the one thing that I want to touch on, and I think we agree with each other, but my main point in the newsletter was one, it's fascinating to me that almost every single person has said this in somewhat of a different way, but two, I really believe what you talked about with humility. Yes. And I actually think that curiosity is a skill that people can develop if they focus on it. And so yes, it's kind of like survivor bias or whatever. It's like, yes, all these great CMOs and leaders have curiosity, but what about for people who maybe don't have it as naturally? And so I do think that what gets prioritized gets done. And so if curiosity really is this engine of growth, of challenger mentality, of disrupting things to find new opportunities, I think it is something that you can practice and build into a routine to be able to be better at it.
Bob: So one of the things we talk about when we're innovating around something or creating something new, most people want to talk about what to do. And what I want to start with is what don't we know? And when you start to actually frame what you don't know, it actually changes the whole shape of the project. And most people only budget for what they know. And then they have, and I call that imagine tasks. They imagine what they should be doing and then they get into it and they discover a whole set of stuff they didn't remember or know or whatever. And they have no capacity now to do that. And so part of this is when you're innovating, you have to, one, be curious, but you also have to be understanding of how to manage capacity and how to actually figure out things. And so the reality is like it's this humbleness to say, so Dr. Taguchi, who is number two up there, he would always say There is way more unknown than there is known. And don't ever forget it. <laugh>, right? That's the crazy part to me.
Bob: And also I really like that and it's already given me something that I'm going to apply and do differently because tomorrow we have a session to look at our offering and our roadmap both for services and some of the products that we eventually want to build. And I am definitely starting with, well, what do we do? But I love that question of what don't we know? Because in my mind, that actually leads you in a better direction towards let's say product market fit towards focusing on how can you better understand the market that you're trying to serve and the audience you're trying to reach. So I really like that. So this is where, and to be honest, this is, and not to kind of throw a wrench into your situation, but one of the things I do is before I even start a what do we do, I have to start with what are the struggling moments that we're trying to address? Because if we don't start with that, I can build something that can do a whole bunch of things that nobody wants <laugh>, and just because I can do it doesn't mean they want it. And so my underlying equation has flipped from, Hey, what can I build? What I call the supply side of the world to the demand side is what are the struggling moments out there that I want to go address? The thing is most people try to go talk to customers about what they want. They don't have a clue what they want. They know the outcomes they want, they know the context they're in.
Value is described by the process of actually making progress and from where they are to where they want to go, that's the definition of value. How we do it is up to us as the producers of product or of services, because don't, customers don't even know it's possible. And so to me, I'm trying to bound their world first because then to be honest, it's 10 times easier to build a product around it. But if I actually have it wide open of what can I do, I end up over-engineering the crap out of it and having usually very few people want to buy it because it's like, well, I don't need this and this and this and we need this little part. And so what I learned very early in my career was is I don't want to build the best product, I want to build the prog helps 'em make progress.
And my example of this is QuickBooks. There isn't anybody who likes QuickBooks. Everybody hates QuickBooks. But the reason why they hate QuickBooks is because nobody wants to be an accountant, right? And the aspect here is that when you look at that product, it's literally three times the market share of anybody else. It's 8 billion in valuation. They do 150 million in check printing, which they didn't really want to do, but all they do is focus on the small struggling moments of small businesses and literally say, how do I help in those moments? And that's how QuickBooks got taken or built. And it still to this day does all those things and they've never lost it, and it's never a product anybody's going to say they love. But at the same time, it literally is helping everybody make progress every day.
Eric: So I want to keep going down this path, but why don't we take a step back, let's zoom out for a second for people who haven't heard of jobs to be done, because this comes up multiple times a week in conversations that I have. But I would love to hear from you how you define it and describe it, and then let's keep digging in.
Bob: So the where the place that I started or where I got information was people would tell me basically they'd give me demographics, they might give me some kind of market research around attitudes and kind of consumption and these different, but what Deming and ta, Gucci always pushed to me is saying, what are the underlying root causes to say today's the day they're going to switch from this supplier to that supplier or this product to that product. And if we can understand those root causes that's going on. So jobs is really about understanding what we call four essential forces that play on somebody to make progress. One is a push of the situation, which is this whole aspect of the context you're in. We're almost creatures of habit and we're going to keep doing what we've been doing unless we struggle. And so it's that struggling moment, and part of it could be seeing a better way.
Part of it is that the current way doesn't really work as well anymore, but without the space in the brain to create a space in the brain, nobody can actually see or even advertising because they're just assume they know what they want to do. And so that's the first part of this. So we want to understand the push of what causes people to say, boy, I got to look at something new. The second part though is that most people try to talk to customers about what's going, what they want. And what I learned was is I don't want to talk about how to satisfy them, I want to talk about what dissatisfaction look like. So what are the outcomes that they get from the product or service. And so part of it is I want to be able to grow the business. And it's like, well, what does that mean? Does that grow? You know, have to unpack a lot of it, but part of this is digging deep. And so the methodology itself is not built on traditional market research. It's actually built on criminal and intelligence interrogation because most people lie to themselves and lie and lie by omission. And so part of this is being able to dig past what I call the pavlo language and pass the fantasy and nightmare language to the causation language. What are they really trying to do and why now? And once you understand that, that's where we actually then can kind of hone in. And so I'm taking a class right now on complexity sciences and they talk about the starting point. And my thing is this value is determined not by the outcome you want, but the starting point you have and the outcome you desire. It's the vector that actually causes you to create value. And so part of this is because if I started a different starting point, I'm going to value differently than if I started the, I'll say the worst starting point. And so this is where it's really helped.
So I dunno if that answered all your question, but yeah, no, that's my best attempt.
Eric: I think that's great. And I'll add a little bit of context based on my experience with jobs to be done. So I mentioned before we hit record, I came across jobs to be done when I was at 11 Fs, so a consulting firm essentially, but building digital propositions, building product for banks. And we had a fantastic practice and a leader within that practice who I think Ryan Gardner, who I think you did an event with him at some point while I was there, but he and his team were just brilliant at applying the jobs to be done framework to how we built product at 11 Fs. And so as everything that you talked about, and there's a whole framework and methodology, but essentially the simple way that I understood it without getting into understanding all the nuances of it and the way that you do Orion does was you're solving for the needs that people have. People hire a product or a service to solve a need in their world. The whole, and I don't know if this came from you all or it came from someone else, but people want a quarter inch drill on the wall. They don't want a quarter inch drill. That's that type of thing.
Bob: Yeah, that's right. That's Ted Levitt. So Ted Levitt would say the 1950s Harvard marketing professor. So this isn't really new, if you will. What I did is I made it very operational, but it's like you said, people don't want a quarter in Shirley. They want a quarter inch hole. And the way I would say it is I learned something called the five Why's. Why do you want drill? I want a hole. Why do I want a hole? I want a plug. Why do you want to plug and want a lamp? Why do you want a lamp it so I can read better? You know what, I'm not going to get you a drill. I'm going to go figure out how to build the Kindle. And so it's this notion of taking a step back out of the myopic part of the product and understanding how we fit into people's lives. And the interesting part is if we talk about our product to people, we think the product is at the center of the plate. But nine times out of 10, our product is merely a small piece of the solution of the progress they're trying to make. And it's a set of things to do as opposed to just one thing. So one of the things I did in the mid early 2000 or mid two thousands, 2010, I basically built houses. And what I realized is as much as I was a builder from a customer perspective, my job is I was a mover mover to move them from the old house to the new house. And so we ended up including moving services and storage and all these other aspects to, and to be honest, we fixed up their old house. So because people who couldn't buy our houses could buy their houses. So I did a thousand new homes, I did 500 used homes by reframing the whole business. Not to say we're a builder, but we're helping people move on up and build a better life. And that was our tagline and that's what, so then we were able to build relationships and partnerships and all these different things that helped people make that progress and it made it very frictionless.
Eric: So it's a really good segue into what I wanted to ask you next. So a lot of the research and a lot of the application, you know even mentioned what the work that you're doing now, helping companies bring new products to market. A lot of it is more focused on the product innovation side of things. But actually I say all the time when people say, Hey, what marketing book do you recommend? I read first. I always say Competing Against Luck. And there's of course some conversation around brand in that book, but it all comes down to value. If you can come up with a product service or a brand that adds more value than the other solutions out there, your business is going to grow. So what I want to ask you is how, so for the Marketers list, I think this conversation is relevant to anybody, but for the marketers listening, how do you best apply the jobs to be done framework, methodology, and everything you've learned to building a brand and go to market strategy?
Bob: So this is where again, we might hear the click of, I'm an old guy, so it'd be the click of the radio being turned off, but my underlying frame around a brand is a brand is an effect. It's not a cause. The brand doesn't cause me to bill to buy something, it reminds me. But at the same time, the fact is at some point it's the set of experiences and the struggling moment I have, it becomes the shorthand to remind me that I need this product or that this product can fit into my life. But ultimately the brands don't do the job. The products where the services do the job and the brand is the shorthand. And it's almost attached to the habit part of it, which is once I find something that works, I'm going to continue to buy it over and over and over again.
And so part of this is to realize at some point I feel like we're the brand and managing the experiences that create the brand. And so part of this is to really understand, in some cases, causing something somebody to struggle actually is helpful as opposed to trying to make it too easy. So for example, the more I actually, so at Base Camp, so we work with Base camp a lot. One of the things we actually did is we actually helped people, instead of giving them a free trial, what we did is we actually said, no, we're going to give you base camp personal, which is use base camp for something personal in your life getting married building an addition, buying a house, going on a trip, whatever. And out of that, understand how it works so then you can pull it into your work world, and what we realized is when we offered it as a free trial, the problem was is that people would never pour enough into it to actually understand how it worked. And so this is the thing where at some point it's the experiences we have to create, create the value that then get compacted into the brand. The brand is like a kernel that's going to pop. And so to be honest, how do we actually manage those experiences? And as a marketer, how do you actually understand? To me, you need to be lockstep with the product people because at some point in time it's not just who, right? Marketers are worried about usually who and how do we target, but it's who, where and why am I buying this product? That's the critical aspect of being able to understand it's, it's not, we have a hundred thousand potential customers because at some point that might be who, but the fact is when, where, and why there might be only 10,000 people left that are in the moment ready to buy. And so part of this is to realize that time plays a role in all this as well. And so to me, the brand is that legacy aspect of being able to remember the experiences and associate it so I can buy the right thing the next time as well to build the habit, to build the cash flow, to build the way to go through about it. And so that's one side of it.
Eric: Does the second side of it. Sorry can I so I'll stop there
Bob: Yeah, go ahead.
Eric: Cause I just want to jump in and get your thoughts on this real quick because I think that the brand is part of the experience. It could either be the retail experience of actually purchasing something or it could be just the association that you have with it. And maybe you're saying the same thing in terms of how it reminds you or brings you back to the value of the product. But for example, if you put on a pair of Nikes versus Sketchers, you are probably going to feel differently. And it has nothing to do with actually how the shoes are built. It has to do with the brand that's on them. Same thing with BMW versus Honda, or you could go in so many different directions with that. So because we're so emotional and not always rational with how we make decisions, I think the brand actually plays a big role in how we experience products and services. What do you think about that?
Bob: Yeah, I think that's right. But I think the fact is in some cases some people will say, well, I don't deserve a BMW yet, and so I need a Honda. And so part of this is to realize the brand becomes part of the consideration set, but it's not the underlying reason. And so it becomes what we would call a hiring and firing criteria of like, well, do I want this car? It's like, well, it's a good car, but it's like doesn't have great quality and that's the brand association with it, but it's the poor quality that causes it for the brand to go down, not the brand is a bad brand. And so it's to realize that it's a shorthand for a lot of things and you have to be able to understand where and when does the brand come into play when they're making these decisions. And what you start to realize is when you see the choice set as a process and understand that in a lot of cases it might be somebody referring you to the brand Referer that actually has more credibility that's putting their equity into the brand. So if you recommend to me BMW and I know you really well, then you are pouring your brand equity into bmw. And I'll be like, oh, I should buy it because Eric likes it. But part of this is to understand the mechanisms of how brand works. And so this is one of those things, is it? And what I would say is a lot of times we end up over biasing what the role the brand has and what you look at is when people actually purchase, in some cases, I'm going to go BMW first because this is what, for me, I would go Porsche first, but I would go them and then I have to eliminate to move to something else. And so it becomes part of the process to choose, but it doesn't actually, it's not the underlying energy to drive me to buy, if that makes sense.
Eric: Interesting.
Bob: I dunno if that makes sense.
Eric: Sorry, I cut you Off. Right.
Bob: So again, I, I've prefaced this whole thing by starting with a, I'm an engineer and so I'm not a word person and most brands are about associations and words and emotions. And what I would say is my thing is the emotions come first and the brand that the job brand can do for me comes after I have the emotions.
Eric: And you were going to say a second thing a couple minutes ago before I cut you off
Eric: I think the second part of this is that is a lot that the brand brands. So I wrote a book called Demand Side Sales, and one of the reasons why I bought BU built it is I had gone and gotten my MBA and I realized having done seven startups that the hardest part of anything I ever did was selling. And I kept going, why are there no sales professors <laugh> in business school? And you start to realize it's pretty hard to do the sales part of it. And they would say, well, it's all about product. And it turns out that in 1985 there, before 1985, there were sales professors and then there were marketing professors. But the moment that marketing basically got brand equity, which was both an expense and a balance sheet item, literally almost all the professor, all the sales professors went away.
Bob: And so part of this is to realize that at some point, sales is still the hardest part of any organization and that people separate sales and marketing as different organ, different organizations because they have different functions. But from the customer perspective, they're actually still one. And so one of the things I keep preaching is that this is why our friend Derek and Derek Sutton and Kyle Basi, they're connected so close at the hip on how they actually do auto books and how they go to market because they realize they can't work. Neither one can be successful without each other, but they're not pointing the finger at each other like, oh, you gave me crappy leads, or you're not converting these leads. And we end up creating so much friction inside the organization. So to me, the aspect here is getting marketing and sales aligned on the progress that their customers are trying to make and the role that marketing plays and the role that sales plays to do that.
Eric: It's one of the things that I see challenger businesses, so they can be startup scale-ups, but they can also be bigger businesses that are just able to continuously grow quickly. Every business can be a challenger. It's how you think and act and grow. It's one of the biggest things that I see them do differently is the integration between the different functions, particularly sales and marketing, if it's a B2B business, because that's the type of world that we play in. And a lot of it comes down to the people as much as it does the process or the technology or the systems that you have, it's how compatible are the people and how do you as a leader set them up to prioritize that type of collaboration. But sales and marketing are two sides of the growth coin. You need to have both of them working very closely together and it gives you a huge advantage if you do.
Bob: Well, the hard part comes when I call. So I have a new book coming out called Learning to Build, and it talks about these five skills that entrepreneurs and innovators have, and one of them is called trade offs, and they actually know how to look at a situation and make the trade off to say, Nope, we're going to actually not make it perfect QuickBooks, but we're going to actually make it easier to do this. And so it's one of those things where it's like I always talk about I want to design a product for the complaints. I actually want to design the complaints that I want to happen. What I mean by that, for example, when I do a workshop, the number one thing I always do is it has to be like when it's in person, it has to be 60 degrees in the room. It's cold. Number one complaint I get, it's cold. I don't get anybody telling me the font on page seven is different than the font on page 20. I don't get anybody say there's a misspelling, like universally I get what it's cold. And my whole thing is they never blame themselves. And at the same time, the fact is at some point we will always run around and fix the things people complain about, but we always want people have to complain about something. And so it turns out that there's a lot of times there's busy work we do that doesn't have any impact on value.
Eric: So I'm curious, in your experience working with all of these different businesses on new products innovation, what are some of the recommendations that you have for people listening if they want to get started getting started with this? Is it going to read something? Is it doing one thing differently next week? How do you take all this theory and package it up into some actions that people can actually apply?
Bob: So there's some framework around it. And so my thing is you can just search jobs to be done and there'll be stuff that comes up. But for me, it really gets back to one really important or two important things. One is learning to actually listen. What do people truly mean? And what you start to realize is a lot of times they'll say, oh yeah, well, we just need it to be easier. And people move on. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a second. What do you mean by easier? And next thing you know, it's a 15 minute conversation that there's actually five different dimensions of easier, not one. And so part of this is to actually take the time to understand what people mean. The second is don't spend, don't think you're smart enough to have all the questions. I only ask the next question when I have the answer to the previous question. And so the thing that drives most of my clients crazy is they're like, well, what's the discussion guide you're going to have? I'm like, no idea. What do you mean you don't know? I'm like, I'm going to use this framework of the forces of progress and I'm going to use the timeline and I'm going to go like what in the world caused them to say, today's the day they need a new mattress or they're buying a new marketing agency, whatever. And when you use the frame and ask the questions, you start to realize it's like, oh, we were growing way faster than we were, but it's certain contextual things and outcome things that then enabled them to make this choice. And so part of this is learning those things. And so the first thing to me is, one, talk to your customers. Two is assume you actually don't know half of the story or more. You might think why they bought, but I can almost guarantee you don't know why they bought. And learning to listen and to ask better questions is at the core, to your point of earlier is curiosity. But the thing is you have to be humble enough to realize you actually don't know why they bought.
Eric: Sorry, I keep going back to competing against Locke because that's probably where I've, what I've kind of gotten into the most when it comes to jobs to be done. But I, I've read it once and I've listened to it on audiobook twice, and I love it on audiobook in particular because those kind of case studies, I remember one in particular where someone was interviewing somebody about how they bought a mattress at Costco.
Bob :That's me. That was you. So that's me. Amazing. Brine walk. Yeah. So I'm the milkshake man. So my kids call me the milk because I did the milkshake study with Clay, and then on the mattress interview is with a friend of mine, Brian Walker, or he wasn't a afraid, he was literally somebody out of the audience we pulled and said, who bought something? He said he bought a mattress. And then it's how we usually start a workshop is to just start with let's pull somebody out of the audience and understand how they bought something.
Eric: But it was fascinating to me because to what you said of most people move on. I could feel myself as I was listening to the case study being like, all right, well he said that next question, but then you asked three or four follow up questions to actually get to the root of each of those things. I thought it was really, really interesting.
Bob: Well, and I think the thing it says I a total impulse buy of buying a mattress. And it's like, oh, okay. And in the marketer's world, impulse buy is like a standard concept. And for me, impulse buy is, that's just not true. Nothing is an impulse. You might not have planned to buy it, which makes you call do it. But actually then my follow-up question in the book was, so how long haven't you been able to sleep? He goes, oh, that's been two years. So is it really impulse if you haven't been able to sleep for two years and you've been drinking scotch and you've been working out late and you've been doing all these other things? No, it's like you did, you just went to Costco on a Saturday and realized I didn't plan on buying a mattress, but the moment my wife basically said if you need it, like we're, and oh, by way I had this other thing coming up. It's like it's those three things together. So this is where most people think about it as being one thing that causes people to topple, and it's not it's sets of things. It's who, when, where, and why that come together that make people do this.
Eric: So Bob, we're unfortunately out of time and hopefully people send through questions so that we can do a follow up. But before I let you go, I'm very curious to hear just a minute or two on the research you've been doing around why people leave companies and join companies. Oh yeah. Can you talk about that little bit?
Bob: Yeah. So I've been working with Ethan Bernstein and Michael Horn and Katherine Thompson on this, and it's almost been two years of just interviewing what causes somebody to leave basically from one company to another company or leave from one position to another. And we did it at all levels of somebody who was at a law firm and became a prosecutor and somebody who basically went from Chipotle to basically Amazon and just all different levels. And we're understanding the causal mechanisms of what's going on. And it enables us to start to see two things. One is that employees hire companies as much, if not more than companies hire employees, meaning I'm going to actually choose to go to a new company because wherever I'm at, I'm not progress and I have a new definition of progress, and so how do I figure that out? And so we're building a whole process around helping. So I've coached over a thousand people right now in building this process to help people figure out what are they good at, what gives them energy, what sucks their energy, and how do we actually then shape the kind of work you really want to do that you'll love to do, right? The other part though is that when you go to the employer side of the world is you realize the way we've been doing job descriptions is literally to create, how do we get one person to be able to do as much as possible around this one thing? And what we don't realize is there's, what I was say is the physics involved. I can't find somebody who's strategic and creative and out of the box and detailed and execution and project management. It's a wish that they put in the job description and in the end there's like nobody who fits and they defy one way or the other, and so part of this is to realize, define that one person. They're almost defining unicorns that they have to go find to fill these positions as opposed to redefining the work by which skill sets people truly have. And so it's this really interesting aspect of helping HR or helping, if you will, the hiring manager redefine the work and helping people realize most people wait till their job sucks so bad they leave and then they go take the first job that they get. And it usually is 99% of the time the same job they had before, but worse. And they just end up going over and over again. So part of this is helping people realize how do we help people realize what they really want to do and what are the trade-offs are willing to make to get there?
Bob: It's fascinating, and I think everybody listening can probably,
Bob: The craziest thing that I've, the craziest thing that I've learned is that when people talk about money, almost everybody will say they want more money, but why they want more money is very different. Some people want more money because they want respect. Some people want more money because they now have responsibilities that they have to meet. And so you start to realize that money is not the reason. It's these other things wrapped around it that help them do it. So this is where people will say, I need more money because I got to pay for childcare, but if I actually get a job with childcare, I don't actually need more money. And so you start to realize how do we actually frame these trade-offs in the right way? So the line I always use is most people have taken way more time to study for the S A T or the A C T than they have to study for their next job.
Eric: It's true, Right? It's true. So that's the next thing I'm Working on. When is that coming out? That research?
Bob: Probably not till 2023. I have a book coming out so I have Demand Side Sales that came out last year. This year I have a book called Learning to Build that's coming out in March, I think. And then this one, we just did the book proposal, so it probably won't come out until 2023.
Eric: Cool. Well, I'll look out for it. And I got to go read Demand Side Sales after having a few people talking.
Bob: I would love that. Hear your take on it when you're done.
Eric: Great. Well, Bob, maybe we start the next session that way. Thank you. Perfect. Thank you so much for joining this. It's been a fascinating conversation. I really appreciate it. For people who want to get in touch, get connected, find out more about what you're up to, where should they find you?
Bob LinkedIn's the best place. Just we have a, a website, the Rewired group. But my thing is the best place is LinkedIn and just message me. My thing is willing to answer questions. I always say like, I'm willing to help people an hour at a time, but when you want more time, then we have to do a project. But otherwise, if I can help, I am, I'm trying to help as many people as I can.
Eric: Amazing. Well, it's great to meet you and thank you so much for coming. Thank you,
Bob: Eric. Thanks for your time, take care
Eric: Scratch is a production of Rival. We are a marketing innovation consultancy that helps businesses develop strategies and capabilities to grow faster. If you want to learn more about us, check out we are rival.com. If you want to connect with me, email me eric@wearerival.com or find me on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, share with anyone you think might enjoy it, and please do leave us a review. Thanks for listening and see you next week.
