Ep. 147 - How to Discover What Really Drives Customer Decisions

Guest: Bob Moesta, Author of “Demand-Side Sales 101”

In this episode, Bob Moesta, author of Demand-Side Sales 101, reveals why uncovering your customers’ “struggling moments” is the single most efficient step for any business. Whether it’s product development, marketing, or sales, understanding the root causes behind why customers make a change transforms every decision you make.

As Bob explains, customers don’t buy products—they hire solutions to make progress. Without a clear struggling moment, there’s no motivation to change, and no sale. By focusing on these moments, you’ll align your entire go-to-market strategy, saving time, money, and effort across teams.

Key Takeaways:

• The Struggling Moment as a Catalyst: Every purchase starts with a struggle. Most companies fail to uncover this because they focus on features or pain points instead of the deeper context driving change.
• Align Teams Around Progress: When marketing, sales, and product understand the customer’s struggle, handoffs disappear, and everyone works toward the same goal—helping the customer progress.
• Most Companies Miss the Mark: 60% of B2B proposals fail due to “no decision.” This happens because companies don’t clearly define or quantify a problem worth solving.

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Transcript

Jason Myers: Welcome to SaaS Backwards, a podcast that helps revenue leaders and SaaS companies to enhance growth and achieve greater profitability. I'm excited about our guest today, Bob Moesta. He's the author of Demand Side Sales 101. It's a book that I've read several times, and I recommend it highly in my messaging reviews because of the customer questioning techniques and methodology that helps you figure out the true motivating factors of why customers have bought from you. Today, we're going to dig in deep about how B2B companies can use the jobs to be done framework to differentiate their messaging, build trust and create real value by simply talking to their customers the right way. Bob, welcome to the show.

Bob Moesta: Thanks, Jason. Very excited to be here and share.

Jason Myers: So just to kick off, for listeners that are unfamiliar with jobs to be done, what are the key principles that make this methodology unique?

Bob Moesta: The basic premise is that people don't buy products, they hire them to make progress in their life. And so part of it is to realize that at some point, one is, people don't randomly buy anything. And ultimately the fact is it's caused and it's our job to actually understand what causes people to say today's the day i need a new CRM or today's the day i need new project management or today's the day i need a new email server. All those things there's something going on in their lives that basically cause them to say i need to do something different and then ultimately there's some outcomes that they're actually seeking. when they pull this new product in their life. And it's not the product, it's the outcomes that they achieve along the way. And so part of it is being able to understand that causation. So let me demonstrate with just a quick graphic, if you will, which is it's actually pretty easy to see is like typically that all of this is about the dynamic of how people change. They go from the old way of doing something to doing the new way of something. And ultimately it's about buying your product and using your product. And so we are creatures of habit and we will keep doing, if you will, the old way until we actually have a struggling moment. Without a struggling moment. The fact is we just keep doing what we're doing. A struggling moment causes you to think there could be a better way. This is too slow. There's a whole bunch of things that go on that cause this circumstance to actually start to build enough energy for you to figure out that you've got to do something different. But the aspect is, it's not just the pain of the situation, it's also the context that they're in that actually makes it a crucible for actually making the change. The other important aspect is they have to have the idea of what the new way will do for them. It's the outcomes that they think about, the progress that they're thinking about. Some people will say, oh, God, this is so slow. And we'll make the assumption that it's about faster. But it's not about faster. It's about doing more. And doing more is very different than doing it faster. And so you start to realize that, ultimately, you have to be able to understand both sides of this equation, of both the context that they're in, the outcomes they want, before we talk about a solution. So if that's a river and you start to look at that river, there's actually a thousand ways to get across the river. I can teach them to swim. I can dig a tunnel. I can build a bridge. I can get a helicopter. All those solutions are things that can help them go from point A to point B, but ultimately it's their context and their outcomes that determine the value they're willing to pay in order to get from A to B. And so all this is to say is I was told when I was, I'm an engineer. I've been building things for over 40 years and the lie I was told as an engineer was build it and they will come. And it's a lie. It's just a straight up lie. They don't come unless it's actually helping them make progress. And so part of this is to realize that the more you can study the progress people are trying to make, the easier it is to build your product.

Jason Myers: Yeah, I really like the term struggling moment. And how would you say that's different than when we, as salespeople, probing for pain or pain statements?

Bob Moesta: So what's interesting is I worked hard on that language because Like you could say, is it a problem? And the problem has a certain level of escalation to it. And people would say, no, I didn't have a problem. I just wanted to do something different. And you start to realize it's anything where the status quo is not actually acceptable anymore. And so part of it is to realize it could be something very small that's not necessarily a problem or a pain point yet, but it's the outcomes that actually cause them to basically want to change. It's this double equation of both the pain and the outcomes. Ultimately, it's those two things that actually come together that cause people to make the change. I think about it as context, which is the bigger picture around who, when, where, and why, to give me what, how, and how much.

Jason Myers: I think that's important to put it in that way of a struggling moment. And also like, where are companies trying to make progress or people trying to make progress in their own jobs? That's really the key.

Bob Moesta: So just to hit on that one point is that companies don't have jobs. People have jobs. People who run companies have jobs because there's a social, emotional, and functional component. So it's not just about the functional stuff we have to do. But it's also about the social and emotional stuff we have to do that actually enable them to say, yeah, today's the day I'm going to pull out my CRM and put a new CRM in. So again, it's not random and it's not just functional.

Jason Myers: So how do you distinguish between the job and the traditional customer need or the feature requests?

Bob Moesta: Yeah. So I actually think the feature request is almost like a kernel of what the need is. So for example, I did some work with a company called Basecamp and they do basically project collaboration. And one of the things we kept hearing was a feature that they wanted was, I need a way to actually see things on the calendar. The feature was a calendar. And so ultimately I looked out and say, all right, if we've got to build a calendar, that's going to be really a big undertaking because it's got to integrate with a whole bunch of different things. It's probably a six to eight month process to basically go build it. It's very complicated. And so before they actually did that, we went and talked to people and says, why do you need a calendar? You have google you have all these why do you need another calendar and it turns out in a project mode they're trying to look for resources that are available. And so ultimately they had this notion of a conference room which was one of the resources and they wanted to actually see if the conference room was available and ultimately they couldn't see what availability was they can only see when it was booked. And so ultimately the fact is what we realized is all we need to do is show the places that it's booked, show the inverse of it, and literally put something up that would say, here's what's availability looks like. And it turns out we didn't have to build a calendar at all. It's just that they needed to see availability. And so it went from a six to 12 month project to literally about three weeks and saved them a bunch of time. And so part of this is the very specific understanding of why do they want the request? What can't they do today that they could do with this new feature that they think you're going to do? And then when you look at it, you can then find multiple ways in which to solve it as opposed to looking at it just by building a calendar. My belief is most customers don't actually know what they want. They try to articulate it through features, but the reality is they don't actually know what's even possible. So they only talk about features they know, like a calendar, as opposed to trying to show you availability. The crazy part is when after they implemented it and they looked at it, the customer said, oh, thank you so much for building a calendar. And we didn't. And so part of this is to realize that it's more about the, again, the who, when, where, and why that actually helps us understand what we have to go build as opposed to the what, how, and how much.

Jason Myers: There's a lot in what you said there, but I'm thinking one of the biggest problems that's still permeating throughout B2B companies is the alignment between sales and marketing. And I think that a lot of times marketing makes assumptions about why customers buy, or they develop their messaging based on committee or what's safe, or they may be listening to sales calls where they're hearing the rational justifications for why they purchased, but they're not really digging in deep. Can you talk about how this framework might help to bring the two groups together a little bit?

Bob Moesta: Yeah. So there's a couple of things. One is that when you hear the customer story, what's so interesting is there's just not a previous call where we talked about this is if you hear their story, it sounds irrational. There's just something there that this doesn't make any sense. And my aspect is that what most people want to do is then throw that out and say, that's not a target customer. But the reality is when you actually start to understand the context wrapped around it, and you understand the details, the irrational becomes rational when you actually understand the rest of the story. And so part of it is that you don't understand those things. There's something called the timeline. And when we look at the timeline, the fact is that people go through phases of how they buy. There's a first thought, and Clay Christensen said this best, is a question creates a space in the brain for a solution to fall into. And so part of marketing's job is to open people's brains to actually understanding that they have a struggling moment. Right. And so part of this is being able to realize you have to ask a question and not give an answer. So for example, like I worked with Casper mattresses and one of the things we actually learned is if we just said, how'd you sleep last night? Don't ask any other question. How'd you sleep last night? Because the question where people actually are struggling will go, that's a good question. I didn't sleep very well. But if you said, Hey, how'd you sleep last night? Need a new mattress? It's too soon to actually throw the solution in there. They need time to actually let that question ferment in their head to basically create the space to, yeah, maybe I should exercise more. Maybe I should go to bed earlier. And ultimately they move into what we call passive looking where they start to look for solutions and to see if it's a problem, but it's about learning what the problem is. and what to do and that's again marketing job is actually help understand and help them actually start to learn about what's the problem is weather problem aware and solution underwear. The next phase is then active looking, where they start to realize it's a big enough problem, and this is where sales and marketing have to interact. Because at some point, we have to now start to talk about the product, and we have to talk about their context of what's in, of why it really is something that they need to do. Because again, there's a lot of energy that has to be there to make the change. And then ultimately, the fact is they get to deciding, and deciding is about trade-offs. And so part is about comparing and contrasting. And so you start to realize like you need ways to compare to trust, but you don't need these side by side comparisons. You need to actually give them three really different ways to solve the problem so they can make the decision of which way to go. And so you start to realize nine times out of 10 as a salesperson, I'll give them one proposal. But the reality is I always give people three alternatives to approach that problem. We could do it this way, we could do it that way, or we could do it this way. It's the reason is because ultimately people need to make trade-offs and they need to compare things to actually get the meaning of it. So what that means is if I give people three things, what happens is they actually don't compare all three things. They actually make a decision right away of the one that should be out. So, if it's A, B, and C, and they look at the three of them, they go, oh, B's out. So, now they have A and C left. What's interesting is we'd think that they'd compare A and C to each other, but they don't because the B, they actually made a decision. They're confident about that decision. They compare A to B and C to B and eliminate the other one and then say, oh, I'll take A. But the reality is they didn't actually take A. They eliminated B and C because they had the rationale to do it. And so part of this is for sales and marketing to work together to actually help people make the progress along the way. Most people have a handoff in this system, right? You get the leads go to the sales people, the sales, the contracts go to customer success. And we have more friction in that handoff between marketing sales and customer success. When you start to realize if we're all focused on the progress people are trying to make, we actually work for the same team. And so that's how we actually start to remove some of that friction is we don't talk about his handoffs we talk about is where is the customer in their buying process. Not in our sales funnel in the buying process cuz they have to have a way to buy. And ultimately they can go from act or deciding to literally covid happens and they move back to passive looking they go back to marketing. So part of this is understanding how that all works.

Jason Myers: Well, that's great. I think companies understand that intellectually, right? I think marketers understand we got to look for the customer journey and what that looks like and try to map it out, but they're missing something big when they try to go do that.

Bob Moesta: Yeah, they seem to assume it's linear. The way I say it is what has to happen to your customer to make them ready to buy your things? There's something that has to happen to them. Ultimately, the journey is not about a great journey. It's about understanding the things they have to go through in order to become aware that they actually need to do something different. Ultimately, you want to actually realize that sometimes if you make it too easy, there's actually too much buyer remorse. Part of it is actually adding enough friction in the right spots so people can actually come to the conclusion like, this is the best way to move forward. Ultimately, just having a name or having a company or having a telephone number or having an email, that might be a lead, but maybe they're actually a suspect. Until I understand their pushes, their pulls, the anxieties, the context they're in, the outcomes they want, the trade-offs they're willing to make, I can't actually call them a prospect until they go from basically going from that suspect to a prospect. Ultimately, knowing that information is what actually moves people through the funnel in the right way.

Jason Myers: Yeah, it's interesting you say that because I've been using the term suspect for a long time, especially when it comes to marketers and calling it MQLs or marketing qualified leads. They think that's a lead, but it's actually misdiagnosed. It's a suspect, right?

Bob Moesta: I have to gather the information. So a lot of the interviewing techniques that I borrowed from was came from mostly criminal and intelligence interrogation methods because most customers lie. They don't lie on purpose. They don't even know what to say sometimes. And so they're going to say these words. And so you have to learn how to dig deeper and you have to almost treat it like an investigated journalist. So when they say, boy, we're really having a hard time with this. Well, what's the impact of that? You have to actually unpack the language down to what is the things that are happening to them that make them ready for them to buy. It's in their court. We can't convince them of anything. They have to convince themselves.

Jason Myers: It's interesting in consultative sales methodology, we're taught to dig and ask those questions, and I think marketers aren't. So when they go to interview customers, usually it's from a case study perspective or something like that, but they're not trained to dig to get the true reasons. And my hypothesis is that a lot of these customers, yes, they lie, but they also don't understand themselves necessarily as to why they bought until you start pinging them the right way, right?

Bob Moesta: Well, this is why I don't actually start this process with active prospects. I start by talking to 10 people who actually already bought. And so if they've already done something, now this is not about hypothesizing what they would do. They actually did stuff. And now we can start to see the patterns of behavior of this and this happened, and oh, this is what they were hoping for, and this is what they were worried about, and this is what else they did. And as we see the patterns of it, we start to realize those patterns repeat themselves into two or three or four different patterns of what we call jobs to be done of why people buy something. It's not just one reason. three to six different pathways of how people get to you. And if you can understand the causation, once you have it established from past behavior of past customers, you can then see where other customers are on that path and which path are they taking. Are they taking path one or path three? And ultimately when they're in one path, they actually are only worried about three or four things. Marketing wants to talk about all the different aspects of it to it. But the reality is like in any one path, there's only four or five things that are important to them at that point in time. And so we overload them and then they almost turtle. They almost tuck into their shell and go, oh yeah, I can't talk about this because I don't know all this other stuff that you're talking about. And so part of this is actually knowing what path they're on and where do they want to go and how do you help them get there.

Jason Myers: How does this work in an enterprise sale where there are multiple people in the buying committees? This is a big issue I struggle with all the time. I might find somebody that agrees with me that this is a problem that needs to be solved right now, and then somebody else says, no, we don't need to do that.

Bob Moesta: So when you go back and talk to where you had an enterprise sale, there's typically one person who is literally the amount of energy to actually make it all happen. Ninety percent of everybody else is there to say no. And so part of this is to basically get them not to say, don't need to say yes, but we just got to make sure they don't say no. And so ultimately it's about managing what we call the anxiety forces. So here's what I'm going to share one more time. Ultimately in a B2B sale where there's actually a committee, Part of this is to realize that the old way has to be attacked and say that there's a push of the situation. Something's going wrong and it's irrelevant of what the solution is. And so the first thing is you have to get everybody to agree that the problem exists. If you can't get people to agree on the problem exists, then the reality is like, there's almost like you're dead in the water. But typically I'm trying to find the one person who is the champion, who's willing to actually, their job is on the line, they're actually new to the job and they want to stop the insanity. There's other things going on, but typically there's one person, maybe two, but typically one person who's really in charge of it. The second part is that once you actually can get everybody in the committee to agree the problem, the fact is when you put up a solution, there's actually pull, oh, that would be a great solution. But the reality is there's a bunch of anxiety of what are we going to do with the old data and how are we going to train everybody and when would we do this and all that anxiety around it. And so part of it is to realize what you need to be able to do is focus on actually reducing the anxiety forces. to actually then creating the pull out of it. Most people try to add more features to create more pull, but the reality is if you reduce the friction, which is the habit of the present and the anxiety, you actually will then make the sale go faster. And so part of this is to realize like at some point you've got to be able to actually understand what are the things that are worrying us. Again, we talked to 10 customers who actually already bought. They're actually going to tell you the anxieties they had in the moment of buying. And so then you can actually start to bring up the anxieties that most customers or prospects don't want to talk about, but you say like, I know you're worried about your data. Oh my gosh, we are like, so here's how we're going to integrate the data back in. It's going to take this much to do that, but we can start fresh if you want to do that. And so all of a sudden you start to actually learn how to play with basically creating pull and reducing anxiety. The way I look at it is push and pull are the fuel that cause the change, and anxiety and habit are the friction that actually resist the change. And most committees are about basically this huge part of anxiety of making the change or giving up on something they loved in the past. And so I try to find the person who actually can help me fuel the change, and then we manage the anxiety and the habit from basically that person's perspective.

Jason Myers: You said a lot that was important here. Most notably, we talk to clients all the time about the messaging, whether it's an advertisement, your website copy or blogs or white papers or whatever, the most important thing that you can do is get agreement on a problem worth solving. Yes. So, and that's true of an entire committee. I think a lot of companies don't do the work to really uncover what those problems are that are worth solving, which is why they end up losing a majority of the time to no decision, because they're not actually attracting people that agree that this is a problem worth solving.

Bob Moesta: Sixty percent of most B2B proposals go to no decision. And part of that is because they don't actually quantify the problem big enough. Again, we talk about the solution all time. And what I'm talking about is we don't talk about the solution at all. We talk about what's the situation you're in and why do you need to change? And what are you hoping for on the other side? If I don't have those two things established, there's nothing for my product to stick to. And so I need to talk about that from that perspective. So I work with a company called autobooks. So basically they install the ability inside banks to help small businesses do invoicing and collect credit cards on their iPhone. But the reason why banks would actually want to hire this product is there's three reasons. One is that they have a strategic focus on helping small business, which is sometimes the case, but not necessarily. They're basically working on their digital banking products and it's time to add this as a feature. Or the third one is they need to increase deposits. And so what happens is they go, how does this help increase deposits? Oh, it turns out that most people are putting that money to Square and PayPal. And when they actually took the numbers and said, if you could actually do this money direct into your account and have access to it today, because PayPal and Square actually hold it for five to seven days. And so all of a sudden they could have access to it today. The reality is it turns out it's 17 times the normal deposits of the small business. And so all of a sudden that 17 X in deposits become a way in which they can actually do more loans. And so all of a sudden it's like they went to a banking trade show and they literally had, look, which problem do you have? Do you have a digital banking problem? Do you have a small business basically focused problem where you want to help that? Or do you have a deposit problem? And to be honest, this is the first time that they were able to just put the problems up there and people would walk by and they'd stop and they'd look. And all they'd ask was, which number, one, two, or three? And they'd say, oh, we're number three. And then they'd walk in and talk to him. He goes, every other conference before that, I had to literally stand in the aisle and literally cause people to have a conversation with me. But because we were so clear on the problems we solved for them, they can actually come and have a conversation with us.

Jason Myers: That's so important. When we talk about how most websites that we review, like, don't talk about the problem at all. They launch right into platitudes. and maybe some features or like who it's for or whatever, but they're not talking about the problem. The number one thing that I recommend when reviewing websites is that we've got to understand what the problem they're trying to solve. I think a lot of marketers don't actually know what that is.

Bob Moesta: The crazy part is, for example, the same company, Autobooks, was doing demos and they tried to book as many demos because they thought the demo was where people would buy. But what we found out is sometimes people would do demos when they were just trying to understand the problem. And so that was demo one. And all of a sudden they wanted to see all the possibilities. That was demo two. And then deciding was demo three. And we realized instead of having one demo, we needed three demos and we had to ask them where they were in their buying process. It seems like it was more work. It turns out it actually halved the selling cycle and it actually almost doubled closes because it met them where they were as opposed to assuming everybody who wanted a demo was ready to close. Some people were literally not ready to close at all because it was like two people wind the demo so they could actually go socialize it to everybody else to talk about the problem.

Jason Myers: We just did an interview with a demo expert and they say the same thing, like you need to take your different cohorts and develop different demos, but you should have a vision demo for that very reason, where some people are just trying to figure out the impact of the problem and if it's worth solving, right? That's right.

Bob Moesta: That's right. Because a lot of people don't know if it's actually worth solving.

Jason Myers: Without that motivation, there's no sale. Exactly. So what mistakes do you see marketing and sales teams make when they try to implement the jobs to be done framework?

Bob Moesta: Yeah. I think the first thing is that they focus too much on the product. So there's this concept of what we call supply side and demand side. Right. Which is that the supply side is where we have the product and it's ultimately the things we push to the market. And then there's the demand side of what's going on in the consumer's mind that basically caused them to pull something into the market. And so you start to realize that the fact that we know about the product and we talk about features and benefit typically. We climb up the product market fit wall, which is that wall is 10 feet thick and a hundred feet high and it's concrete. And we climb up on top of it and we see as product experts, we see markets and segments and personas and prospects and leads. But the reality is what we have to do is we have to go down and understand what causes people to say today's the day they need this product. Ultimately, the fact is, you want to go interview the last 10 customers. The last 10 customers will help you understand exactly what were they using before your product, what was the context that actually was foisted upon them that caused the struggling moments. When they actually have a struggling moment, think about new desired outcomes, which are what are those outcomes. Then they start to look for candidates. They look over the wall. So ultimately what happens is we want to develop the requirements from what the demand side says as opposed to the product side. Because ultimately you can just keep racing against your competitors and adding features and ultimately you outpace the market and you end up getting in trouble. So if you think of the camera market, which is kind of amazing, right? Nikon, Canon, Hasselblad, Fuji, all these people who are in the camera market, what did they do? They literally focused on bigger sensors, better lenses, faster camera size, all that other stuff, and ultimately ended up outpacing the market. And the person who walked in and owns it is Apple. So this is where the best camera is the camera with you. And instead of actually having to know how to use the camera and then use the software, they made it all one thing. And ultimately if you look at the number of units from two thousand fourteen to two thousand twenty five there off ninety percent in units. Ninety percent right yet camera pictures are up over a thousand acts. People are taking way more photos than they ever did and part of it was the fact that they kept focusing not on the requirements of the customer they kept focusing on the requirements of the competitors. And that's where they get it wrong.

Jason Myers: Yeah. And speaking of competition, a lot of companies complain that it's hard to find ways to differentiate. Seems like this is the best way to find it.

Bob Moesta: It is because a lot of times it's the social and emotional pieces as opposed to the functional pieces. Like. In some cases, it might be how you actually do implementation might be the actual very big differentiator than the product. And so you start to realize that at some point, understanding their people, the pushes, the pulls, the anxieties, the habits, you can actually start to craft it. And the product is not separate from service. It's not separate from implementation. It's not separate from training. It's not separate from all those things. And so you have to realize they're buying a package. And we think of those other pieces as ancillary. And sometimes they're actually central to the entire offering.

Jason Myers: What advice do you have for practitioners that are looking to improve their skills and conducting jobs to be done research and analysis?

Bob Moesta: Yeah. So the first thing I would tell you is there's a book by Chris Voss called Never Split the Difference. Love that one. I started to write a book on how to do these interviews, but there's two really big things. One is how do you mirror and match people? What you start to realize is the way people get comfortable to tell you more is you have to learn how to mirror and match them. And so you don't ask them, why'd you do this? You ask like, wow, why'd you do that? You start to learn how to be more empathetic and make sure you're actually using your knowledge to actually help understand what they're doing as opposed to judging. The second is, no is way better than yes. And so a lot of times I'll actually play back their answers incorrectly because at some point in time they'll say, no, that wasn't it. This is what it is. And no, you can always get more detail from, but yes, there's nothing more to say. You can say yes, because so here's the thing is, is if you ask somebody like, boy, I just want it to be easy. And you'll say, what's easy. I don't know. It's just easy like this, easy like that. I'm like, okay, well tell me what's hard about it. Oh my God. Too many steps. It's too much to remember. Like they can come back and tell you all the hard things about it, but they can never tell you the easy things about it. And so the fact is you have to actually understand how to ask these questions to unpack that language. And so that's the first thing is Chris Voss's book. Never split the difference. We'll teach you some of those skills and techniques. The other thing is, I always say, is to start with a beginner's mind. And for example, when I started an interview, the first thing is I never talk about the product. So if they bring up a feature, my question isn't about, tell me about the feature. My question is, why is that feature important? What could you do with that feature that you couldn't do today? What is the real outcome that you're seeking from that feature. So i'm trying to not go into the product i'm trying to go out to the outcome or away from the product towards the customer understand what will that feature do. So it's ultimately understanding kind of that part of it and not and not to talk about the product at all in these interviews. I think the last thing is to realize that it's about causation. Nobody randomly does anything. Randomness to me is, I know it's not a four-letter word, but I would say it's like a four-letter word. In my house, it's actually worse than the F word because random focuses you on actually just waiting. You have to wait for things to happen if things are random because you say they're not caused. But everything is caused and randomness is really the way we describe what we don't know. And most people just throw up their arms and say, well, it's just random. The reality is we have to be investigative. We have to think of ourselves as interrogators. We have to figure out the causation. The moment we figure out the causation of why people buy our product, that's when we have actually the gold.

Jason Myers: Last question on this is about efficiency. Everybody talks about You know, we have to create efficiency in today's environment. Yet, I think a lot of companies aren't doing this work, which seems to me to be the most efficient thing that they could do.

Bob Moesta: So the interesting part is that this is very fundamental research. Most people say, oh, we're way beyond this. And the reality is, is what happens is they actually don't have it. If you really look at most products, most products are inherited from somebody else. These underlying root causes, I call these the root causes of what cause people to buy, get lost. And so what I would tell you is every time you're doing a transition from one team to another team or you have a new set of people, they should be doing these kinds of interviews. They should be talking about why people buy. and understanding the causation and interviewing, not talking to salespeople on why they bought. Because salespeople only have half the story. You need to talk to real customers about why they bought and what was the real story behind it. And you'll start to realize you'll get marketing copy out of it. You'll get sales techniques out of it. You'll get stories to tell prospects about it. You'll get a whole bunch of other good things about it. But people are so worried about getting it right. And the reality is what I would tell you is just to have conversations with your customers around this notion of why in the world did they pick us on this time. And to be honest, it's the same thing if people are leaving. Why in the world did you decide to go somewhere else today? Because my belief is you'll learn so much about it. Most people have to learn how to dig because most people say, oh, they were just cheaper. It turns out that over 50% of the people say it was cheaper. It's not cheaper. That's the easiest way to shut you up from actually getting through it.

Jason Myers: So important point there that not just for marketing sales, it's for customer service as well and how we expand accounts and retain.

Bob Moesta: Well, to be honest, it's also for product. I'm a product guy and this is what I had to do to actually build great product because I had to have all this understanding. And then it turns out that marketing and sales and customer success can use it. So when you talk about efficiency, it's literally 10 to 12 interviews and literally that information can go to all the departments of the organization.

Jason Myers: Absolutely.

Bob Moesta: Alright can you get a new book out cold talk about that a little bit so i always asked to entrepreneurs and basically startups around the notion of what are the biggest things they struggle with. And and on the list was this notion of talent and basically acquiring talent and keeping talent. And so I applied this whole methodology of jobs to be done to basically, why do people fire one company and go to another company? And so it's ultimately looking at the person as the product, and it's called job moves. And it's basically a process to basically help people understand what progress do you want to make in your career? And ultimately, how do we actually help you figure out how to find the next job that actually will help you make progress?

Jason Myers: And so how can people get ahold of you if they're interested in this topic?

Bob Moesta: Yeah. LinkedIn is the best place. I do quite a bit of posting around that and video. I am dyslexic. So the fact is, is if you write me a long note, it's better for us to get on the phone, but otherwise LinkedIn is the best place to find me. Otherwise you can find more at the rewired group.com. If I can help, let me know.

Jason Myers: That's great. And again, I recommend highly that marketers read the book, Demand Side Sales, even though the sales in the title, but it's really a book for marketers, right?

Bob Moesta: Yeah, I would also highly recommend a book that I wrote the forward for. It's called Forget the Funnel by Claire Sullentrop and Gia. And they literally are marketers who write copy all the time. And Joanna Wiebe is another person who is very much, and April Dunford, they're all people who are marketers around this. They take this fuel and they turn it into magic. And so if you follow Joanna or you follow April Dunford or Claire or Gia, they're all really good marketers around this as well.

Jason Myers: Well, that's fantastic. I'll put that in my queue. All right, that's great. Again, thanks for appearing on the podcast.

Bob Moesta: Thanks for having me on. I love to share. My goal is to help as many people as I can in my life. So this is one way I can get a lot of distribution. So I appreciate everybody listening and coming and going all the way to the end.

Jason Myers: You bet. And thanks for joining us today as an audience. If you haven't subscribed to SaaS Backwards, please do that wherever podcasts are distributed. Again, thanks a lot, Bob. And we look forward to future conversations.