All B2B products and services are hired to do a job. If you’re unclear on what job prospects or current customers want your solution to do, your product or service is unlikely to gain traction.
B2B jobs-to-be-done research keeps your sales, marketing and product development efforts grounded in the customer experience. Instead of just talking up features, you can highlight what business needs you address and how your solution alleviates customer pain points better than competing solutions.
What is B2B Jobs-To-Be-Done Research?
Most customer knowledge is focused on who a customer is. Organizations typically rely on an ideal customer profile (ICP) to steer strategy. However, many ICPs fail to focus on jobs-to-be-done (JTBD). Without this insight, product, marketing, and sales teams don’t know precisely how a solution will be utilized in a real-world scenario.
Cascade Insights’ B2B Jobs-To-Be-Done Research sheds light on what tasks potential users are struggling to accomplish. You might find that no solution to the pain point exists, or that existing solutions are inadequate. This research addresses the key question of how well your solution meets a true business need.
With this insight, marketing teams can message more effectively, sales teams will have a better sense of who to target, and product teams can build exceptional solutions.
Expert Insight at the Speed of AI
Truly impactful research goes beyond the data you’ve had in front of you for a while. By combining the power of AI with our deep human expertise, we can move faster than other firms while still bringing insightful, comprehensive, and uniquely human perspectives to any research study.
How We Leverage AI: AI significantly enhances our ability to organize and analyze conversational data, quantitative data, and secondary sources of information rapidly. This allows us to identify patterns and trends with greater efficiency.
Fluid Intelligence™: However, AI alone cannot capture the full picture. That’s where our team’s expertise shines. We bring:
- Emotional intelligence – Human researchers interpret intent, emotion, nuance that AI might miss and business implications of those insights.
- Adaptive methodology – We adjust a line of questioning based on participant screener details, live responses, and always dig deeper where necessary.
- Tech sector expertise depth & context awareness – We challenge assumptions, validate insights, and connect them to real-world trends.
- Bias detection and correction – Our researchers detect uncertainty, subtext, and hidden biases all of which can lead a research project astray.
In short, great research isn’t just about collecting words or text. It’s about listening with empathy, paying close attention to your words and tone, nonverbal cues, and what is unsaid as much as clearly stated. These human capabilities drive great research that uncovers valuable insights, ultimately delivering a competitive advantage.
When Do You Need B2B Jobs-To-Be-Done Research?
Our analysis can help you tailor product/service features, messaging, and targeting to better meet customer needs. Here’s when you should consider jobs-to-be-done research.
Your Solution Needs a Buddy
If customers report using other solutions in concert with yours to get the job done, it’s time to look into what’s lacking in your solution. Understanding this gap can highlight new capabilities you should build or even solutions you should acquire.
Lack of Loyalty
If your data shows that customers try your product then don’t come back to it, or that early deployments don’t generate more users, it’s time to look at jobs-to-be-done. That way, you can identify ways your product, marketing, or sales strategies and/or tactics are failing to resolve or effectively communicate to customers’ jobs-to-be-done.
New Capabilities
In the constantly evolving B2B tech landscape, there are always new jobs-to-be-done. A new regulatory framework, large-scale changes in organizational dynamics, global change events and more can all change how and why customers use solutions.
Changes in the Marketplace
With a host of potential applications, how should you choose the best way to harness a new technology or capability? Jobs-to-be-done research can make sure you have a detailed understanding of what your buyers need to accomplish so you can get the most out of your R&D spend.
15 Years In the Tech Sector, Thousands of Conversations With B2B Buyers
We only work with companies that create B2B technology products and services. This has been our specialization for more than a decade. Each day, we interview and survey B2B customers on their tech stack, pain points, and business needs. This B2B context empowers us to ask better questions, find better research participants, and generate better recommendations.
The Right Questions for B2B Jobs-To-Be-Done Research
- When did customers first become aware that a job was being underserved?
- How is this job best defined?
- What business goals/metrics does this job address?
- What existing tools or solutions did customers use to perform the job before looking for new solutions?
- At what point did the customer realize existing tools were insufficient?
- Which buyer personas were involved in searching for a new solution to meet the demands of the job?
- How do customers evaluate the quality of various solutions and how they might resolve their jobs-to-be-done?
- Did customers settle on a new solution that is still imperfect in some way? If so, what are its weaknesses?
- If customers have never purchased an external solution to perform the job in focus, why is that?
