Jobs-to-be-done

Create the perfect service, price it fairly, pack a smart proposal—and prospects can still ghost if you talk about deliverables instead of the real job they hire you to do. Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) flips the lens from what you sell to why a buyer pulls the trigger. Mastering this lens lets you write copy, craft demos, and set prices that feel obvious, not pushy.

I moved from feature-heavy pitch decks to JTBD framing a decade ago. The shift cut sales cycles in half for a creative agency, a consulting collective, and—later—a SaaS onboarding package. In each case the work stayed the same; only the language and focus changed. Follow the four steps below to anchor your own offer in concrete, purchase-driving jobs.

First, identify the job your best clients are already trying to finish. Forget internal jargon. Ask: “What progress were you chasing the moment you paid my invoice?” A boutique PPC agency might hear, “We need ten sales-ready demos every week without hiring more reps.” A management consultancy could uncover, “We must cut churn before next funding round.” My SaaS clients often say, “We want new users to reach value in five minutes, not fifty.”

Mine interviews, sales calls, and support tickets for phrases like start, finish, remove, avoid, speed up. These verbs reveal motion—proof a real job exists. Note the context triggers too: a new funding round, product launch, or compliance deadline often lights the fire that pushes a purchase over the line.

Summarise each statement in the buyer’s own wording. Resist the urge to translate into solution talk. The clarity of their language is the gold.

Bridge: raw jobs are powerful, yet you still need the pains that make finishing the job urgent, which is next.

Capture every pain that blocks the job. Separate functional pains (missing skills, unclear data) from emotional frictions (risk of public failure, internal politics). When I mapped pains for an analytics consultancy, functional blockers included “no single source of conversion truth” while emotional blockers read “CMO’s last vendor burned political capital.”

Use a simple table with four columns: pain description, evidence quote, current workaround, and cost of inaction. Cost matters because it turns a mild annoyance into a budget-justified project. An agency owner told me, “If we miss Q2 pipeline by ten per cent we delay the next hire,”—that sentence became ammunition in every pitch.

Collect pains across verticals, but keep each ICP separate. Cyber-security SaaS buyers lose sleep over compliance fines; creative studios fear reputation hits. Mixing them muddies copy and weakens perceived relevance.

Bridge: a wall of pains is overwhelming, so next we rank which ones actually move money.

Prioritise jobs and pains using an impact-versus-frequency grid. Impact equals revenue, cost saving, or political capital gained when the job is done. Frequency is how often the pain bites in daily work. Plot each item then circle the top-right quadrant—high impact, high frequency. These are the deal-closing jobs.

For example, a marketing automation consultant saw “build nurture emails” appear often but with low strategic impact, while “prove campaign ROI to the CFO” scored high on both axes. The latter became headline copy; the former moved to a mid-funnel checklist.

Avoid democracy here; you decide with evidence from interviews and metrics, not team votes. A single confirmed million-euro risk outranks five superficial gripes.

Bridge: ranking is useful only if we translate it into a promise buyers instantly grasp, so we turn each top job into a measurable outcome.

Convert priority jobs into crisp outcome statements. Structure: “We help [ICP] achieve [desired progress] in [time frame] so they avoid [key pain].” My agency pitch now reads, “I help Series A SaaS teams book ten extra demos a week within sixty days so fundraising decks show an expanding pipeline.”

Tie every deliverable, meeting, and metric back to that outcome. Proposals open with it, invoices reference it, and onboarding milestones mirror it. When prospects hear the same outcome at each touchpoint, trust compounds.

Finally, sanity-check the outcome against your cost and capacity. If you cannot deliver inside the promised window, shrink scope or extend time. Over-promising on a JTBD claim backfires harder because expectations are explicit.

Bridge: by aligning language, pain ranking, and outcome proof you now own a JTBD statement powerful enough to reshape all go-to-market assets.

Jobs-to-be-done is more than a workshop exercise. It is the operating system for an irresistible B2B offer. Identify the real progress buyers pay for, map the pains that force action, rank what matters most, and articulate a sharp outcome you can prove.

I have watched agencies win retainers, consultants command premium day rates, and a single SaaS product double trial-to-paid conversion using this framework. Your turn. Schedule one customer call this week, capture verbatim job statements, and draft your first outcome line. The next proposal you send should read like the prospect wrote it themselves.