Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress, book by Bob Moesta

partial excerpts

Bob has already brought the benefit of applying his JTBD principles to two of the three most important areas in business: product strategy and marketing. This book tackles the third and arguably the most important: sales. Most sales gurus obsess about how to sell. Bob instead invests his time in the more important and underserved side of the equation: how people buy.

Foreword By Jason Fried

I learned sales at fifteen.
I was working at a small shoe store in Deerfield, Illinois, where I grew up. I loved sneakers. I was a sneakerhead

I literally studied shoes

nothing I knew mattered. Sure it mattered to me, but my job was to sell shoes. I wasn’t selling shoes to sneaker freaks like me; I was selling shoes to everyday customers

my manager encouraged me to shut up, watch, and listen

Turns out, people had different reasons for picking shoes.

sales isn’t about selling what you want to sell, or even what you, as a salesperson, would want to buy. Selling isn’t about you. Great sales requires a complete devotion to being curious about other people.

your customers probably don’t think of you the way you think of yourself. And you almost certainly don’t know who your competition really is.

Everyone’s struggling with something, and that’s where the opportunity lies to help people make progress.

people don’t have a “project management problem.”

People struggle to know where a project stands. People struggle to maintain accountability across teams. People struggle to know who’s working on what, and when those things will be done. People struggle with presenting a professional appearance with clients. People struggle to keep everything organized in one place so people know where things are. People struggle to communicate clearly so they don’t have to repeat themselves.

We’ve not only changed how we present Basecamp, but we’ve changed how we build Basecamp

Introduction

My apprehensive leap into sales and marketing began twenty years ago, when I took a startup from $500,000 to $18 million in a short twenty months. But it started out miserably…

As an engineer—a real geek at heart—I had little notion of what sales encompassed when I stepped into my first sales role. I thought of sales as a series of techniques, tools, and processes

I boldly took a lead sales and marketing role at a home products company manufacturing and selling solid surface countertops for kitchens and bathrooms

Immediately, I struggled! This felt more like art than science: people, emotions, exceptions—no equations, very scary. The hair on the back of my neck went up whenever I encountered someone because I thought of every person I met as a prospective customer, all the time

I began to make trade-offs, compromising on both sides of the table—with the customer and internally with the company: if they wanted black, well then I’d figure out black. I caused havoc back at the office. The customers were managing me and our process, where I felt I had been reduced to an order taker

I thought the problem was my sales technique. Since I had no real sales training, I began to consume everything I could

I sought out a sales coach

2. The Frameworks for Demand-Side Selling

The Five Whys

Part of the “Five Whys” is to take a step back and not talk about what the customer wants from the solution perspective

We use this methodology when interviewing our customers to get to the root of the problem they are trying to solve. Companies are selling drills instead of holes because they do not ask why enough times.

You cannot design the way your customer makes progress; you need to understand their definition of progress and design your process around it.

Let’s define JTBD. It starts when people are in a struggling circumstance (situation), and they want to make progress.

building their solution starts with understanding their situation and why they are thinking about making progress in the first place, as well as what their vision of progress looks like.

Sometimes people start with a struggling circumstance but have no idea what the other side looks like

Typically, this is where people will complain but not do anything about it. The best thing to do here is to take them to a condo and show them what progress looks like, not hire a snowplow.

Eliminating the struggle is not progress, them overcoming the struggle is progress. Both pieces are critical; the key to understanding causation is found in the circumstance and the outcome.

Great sales begins with understanding the JTBD by your customer and the progress they are trying to make: What is the situation they are in? What’s the outcome they seek? What are the tradeoffs they are willing to make?

We are going to introduce three key frameworks for how people buy:

• The three sources of energy or motivation (functional, emotional, and social)
• The four forces of progress (push, pull, anxiety, and habit forces)
• The JTBD timeline (sequence of events and actions to make progress) (See later Learning to Build book)

The Three Sources of Energy—Types of Motivations for Progress

The Four Forces of Progress

The Timeline for Progress

six stages (Stages of Consumer Buying Decision Process)

What is a tradeoff?

Designing products for big and little hires

Seeing the Whole: Why Do People Buy?

4. Seeing the World Through the Customer’s Eyes

Wrapped up in the details you will find the social and emotional energy that caused someone to buy. Without the little things, the sale never happens. To help people make progress, you must understand how other people who bought your product or service before made progress. This starts with interviewing existing customers.

The Five Key Principles

The Top Ten JTBD Interview Tips

Case Study Example

5. Mapping Demand-Side Buying to Supply-Side Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success

For each of these case studies you may think there is no way anybody else lived this story. But you’d be wrong!

Let’s delve into the why

Chad switched banks, because “Bank A” failed to understand his business, treated him as a low priority, and offered him cookie-cutter options, while Chad knew there was a time pressure ahead.

Jen tried virtual care because her coworkers kept questioning her illness; it was Sunday and she wanted to stop the probing on Monday morning.

Rachel bought a new computer because her old one wouldn’t boot; she was now pressed for time and couldn’t risk missing a deadline.

consistent patterns

The key flip here is to use the JTBD timeline as the frame around how people make progress.

First Thought (6 stages)

Building Progress on the Buyer’s Timeline

First Thought

First thought is about admitting there’s a problem

How do you cause a first thought? Everything starts with understanding the customer’s perspective

With first thought, you create questions in the buyer’s mind. The questions create space in the brain for solutions to fall into. It’s mostly about push. You want the buyer to question what they are doing and realize it’s not working.

Chad’s business was changing

It became clear that “Bank A” did not understand his business

The Question: Chad realized there was a problem, “Maybe I need a new bank?

Jen’s

People keep asking her, “Have you seen a doctor yet?

Rachel

Although she said there were issues for roughly a year, these problems were not enough that they triggered her first thought

Rachel’s true first thought happened about six weeks before she purchased the new computer when her husband suggested she needed a new one. He injected the idea into her head, despite Rachel’s defense that she did not need one. The Question: Rachel’s husband injects the thought, “Maybe I need a new computer?”*

Passive Looking

There’s very little transition between first thought and passive looking

Here, you want buyers to repeatedly see your product or services popping up in their daily life, especially in places where they’re struggling the most. They are exploring the possible solutions to their problem

After the third phone call, Chad is done dealing with “Bank A.” He is unwilling to keep spinning his wheels

Jen’s now sorting through her medicine cabinet for over-the-counter remedies, drinking fluids, and getting plenty of rest. She passively looks all the way from Friday until Sunday. Passive looking is going through life, knowing there’s a problem, and not thinking it’s big enough to react yet.

Jen wakes up Sunday morning still feeling crummy. She knows that she has a long week of work ahead and decides that she should see a doctor. Jen is now in active looking.

Since her husband injected the idea of the new computer into her head, Rachel is more aware of every problem and glitch

Triggering event: The current computer won’t even boot when she needs it to. This event pushes Rachel from passive to active looking. Rachel texts her husband and says she needs a new computer.

Active Looking

Deciding

Onboarding

Ongoing Use

The Kano Model

Meeting the Buyer in the Right Time and Place

Think of each of the six phases in the sales process as a system, like a “black box” problem in math, with inputs, outputs, and outcomes. As a salesperson, your job is to meet the buyer in each of the six stages

Making It Real

6. Connecting the Dots Between Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support

Deciding, onboarding, and ongoing use are a combination of customer support and sales. Sales covers the entire process! But because the three departments don’t talk, customers get mixed messages.

What’s the difference between sales and marketing?

Marketers are the people building the brochures

They work at a very high, abstract, macro level. They have an ideal or imagined customer

Sales is more complicated because it’s micro-level. In sales you deal directly with the real customer

Let’s break down the three case studies by looking at the sales process as two parts instead of three.

• Sales and marketing
• Sales and customer support

How to Stop Getting Fired and Start Getting Hired

Chad’s story is a particularly interesting case study because we can analyze it from two perspectives: the bank that got fired, and the bank that got hired.

Sales and Marketing

Let’s start from the first thought, and from a sales and marketing perspective. Imagine you are the competing bank. How would you attract Chad? How would you package something with the right message, features, and advertising to pull him in? Remember that the push of the situation and the magnetism of the new solution need to be stronger than the anxieties and habit before someone will buy.

Many people think all banks are the same. So if you think this, and your bank sucks, you don’t say, “Oh boy, I think I need to get a better bank.” You don’t believe there is a better bank. As a result, you don’t even know that you’re struggling with your current bank. Part of marketing and selling is showing customers that something else exists.