People do not buy your service, they hire it

Charles Revson built Revlon into one of the biggest cosmetics companies in the world. He described what he sold like this. In the factory we make cosmetics. In the drugstore we sell hope.

That is the whole idea in one line, and it is older than any framework built on top of it. Nobody wakes up wanting lipstick. They want to walk into a room a particular way. The lipstick is how they get there.

The same is true of whatever you sell. Your customers are not buying your service. They are hiring it to move themselves from where they are to somewhere better. Practitioners call this the job to be done. The name is clumsy and the idea underneath it is not.

A job is a change, not a task

This is where most people take a wrong turn, so it is worth being slow about.

A job is not the task your service performs. Lodging the tax return is a task. Storing and retrieving music is a task. The job is the change the customer is trying to make in their situation, and the task is only one way to serve it.

The difference matters commercially. If you believe your job is storing and retrieving music, you build a better music library. Spotify did not build a better music library. It worked out that nobody ever wanted to own a music collection, they wanted to hear the song they had in mind, and then it removed the job of collecting altogether. Every competitor busy improving the library lost, and they lost to something that was not on their list of competitors.

So ask what your customer's situation looks like before they ring you, and what they want it to look like afterwards. Not the transaction. The change.

Before they hire you, they have to fire something

There is always an incumbent. It is rarely a competitor.

Most of the time the thing your customer is currently using is a spreadsheet, a mate who knows a bit about it, a habit they have had for nine years, or doing nothing and hoping. Before they can hire you, they have to sack that. And sacking something you have relied on is uncomfortable, even when it is plainly not working.

This is why good offers still lose. The customer agreed with everything you said and then did not move. They were not weighing you against another quote. They were weighing the change against the discomfort of making it.

Two forces are always in play, and most businesses only work on one.

• The pull. How much better the new situation is. Nearly all sales material lives here.
• The friction. What they have to give up, admit, learn, or explain to someone else in order to switch. Almost nobody works on this, and it is usually the one that decides it.

If you want more customers, reducing the friction is often cheaper than increasing the pull, and it is nearly always faster.

Asking what they want does not find it

The obvious move is to ask. It mostly does not work, and the reason is not that people lie.

Asked what they want, a customer answers with a better version of what they already have. They cannot describe progress they have not yet imagined. They can only describe the thing in front of them with the annoying parts removed.

What they can do accurately is tell you a story. So do not ask what they want. Ask what happened.

• What was going on the week you decided to do something about this?
• What did you try before you rang us?
• Who else did you have to talk to before you could go ahead?
• What nearly stopped you?

Those are questions about events, and people remember events accurately. Ten of those conversations with recent customers will tell you more than any number of surveys, because a survey collects opinions and this collects behaviour.

Zoom out, not in

Here is the part that runs against the usual advice.

When an offer is not landing, the instinct is to get narrower. Tighten the service, name a tighter audience, get more specific about the deliverable. Sometimes that is right. Often the problem is the opposite one, and narrowing makes it worse.

If you are describing your service as a task, narrowing it only gives you a smaller task. Zooming out to the progress is what gives you room. It also shows you who you are really competing with, which is usually not the business down the road but the spreadsheet, the mate, and doing nothing.

Be specific about the situation your customer is in and about the constraint holding them there. Be broad about the progress they are after. That combination is what an offer people recognise sounds like.