Ep. 148 - From Pain Points to Purchase: Understanding Customer Motivation

Guest: Beth McHugh, Fractional Product Leader

When deals stall, buying committees often default to doing nothing. Why? Because they didn’t all agree that the problem was worth solving.

In this episode, Beth McHugh explains why pain points alone rarely drive action and how the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) methodology identifies the “struggling moments” that compel prospects to move forward. These critical moments are when a prospect or team collectively decides that a problem can no longer be ignored.

Beth shares why JTBD is, in her view, the most effective way to uncover the true motivations behind customer decisions. Beyond improving product-market fit, she highlights how JTBD creates alignment across sales, marketing, and product teams, ensuring everyone is focused on what truly matters to customers.

Key Takeaways:

1. Struggling Moments vs. Pain Points: Not all pain points are actionable. JTBD uncovers the struggles customers are motivated to resolve.
2. Driving Differentiation: JTBD helps identify where your product stands out by focusing on the jobs customers are trying to accomplish.
3. Faster Product-Market Validation: With JTBD, you can prioritize development efforts that directly address critical customer needs, reducing wasted resources.

Tune in to learn how to move beyond surface-level insights and position your SaaS offering as the solution customers can’t ignore.

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Thanks for listening to the SaaS Backwards Podcast, brought to you by Austin Lawrence Group. We help SaaS firms reduce churn, accelerate sales, and generate demand. Learn more at AustinLawrence.com.

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Transcript

Jason Myers: Welcome to SaaS Backwards, a podcast that helps revenue leaders at SaaS companies to enhance growth and achieve greater profitability. Today's guest is Beth McHugh. She's a fractional product leader for software startups, and we're going to be digging in deep on the jobs-to-be-done methodology. So Beth, welcome to the podcast.

Beth McHugh: Thanks so much for having me.

Jason Myers: You bet. So let's dig right in. Let's start with jobs to be done or the framework. How does that apply, in your opinion, to product management?

Beth McHugh: Great question, because I think jobs to be done is often misunderstood. But I like to start with, first, instead of talking about features, you're really focusing on what people want to accomplish and what's getting in the way. And I think a lot of people think that they are already doing that by talking to their customers, but it tends to be very surface. And I find jobs to be done framework helps get Deeper, uncover the real needs of your customers and help segmentation and segmenting them on things that matter, not just demographics and those surface level attributes. So as it applies to product management, in my past experience, I've leveraged this to be able to drive product strategy and improve products in a way that customers are excited about.

Jason Myers: Yeah, I agree that most marketers that actually talk to customers really aren't digging deep enough. They're hearing the rational justifications for buying or maybe they've identified typical pain points, but because they haven't been taught to dig and find the emotional underlying reasons that people buy from them, The messaging that comes out of that is going to be similar to everyone else's. And so that's why they struggle to differentiate. Can you talk more about how to get past that surface level?

Beth McHugh: So I can talk about the different frameworks because there are different ways to do this, but they all do help with getting past that surface level. And one example, I was working on an online curriculum product, and we went through a jobs to be done process and be able to dig in and understand the underlying needs and the big struggling moments with teachers and district administrators. And it uncovered an area that was around understanding where students are more deeply. And we focused our product strategy on that and that became one of the big reasons that the company was bought was a lot of the platform features and functionality that really drove and connected directly to the customers. And I will say that from a marketing perspective, you start to get the language of the customers, which I think you do in typical conversations, but When you are focusing on the struggling moments, those are the moments that people are buying. And if you get that language and understanding the struggling moments, that can really help with sales, marketing.

Jason Myers: Yeah, I think as I mentioned, marketers, they're doing their buyer profiles, things like that. They're not really digging into that whole struggling moment well enough. They may have pain points that are typical, but talk a little bit more about the difference between pain points and the struggling moment.

Beth McHugh: I actually worked with a client on this and, you know, there's pains that come with trying to accomplish a job. So this was with therapists when they were working with their clients and being able to better document data points and capture those. And there was a pain there. But when we took the lens of jobs to be done and understanding the struggling moments, like, is this painful enough to purchase a product? And if it's not, then they are not going to make the change. They are not going to make the switch. And so you can uncover pain points, but the level to which that's a pain point that people actually struggle and need to find a product to solve that struggle point, that to me is the biggest difference because there's a lot of pain. I have pain getting my kids up and ready in the morning and not going to buy a product to help them put on their shoes and do other things. So there's that difference between pain points that come up and the ones that actually matter to purchasing and finding solutions and making that switch, because it takes a lot of effort to do that. And I think sometimes that goes missing, that if it's better and it's going to make your life better, you think people will buy it, but they need to really feel that pain at a level of the struggling moment to be able to make that leap.

Jason Myers: Yeah, we're big fans of the challenger sale. One of the things that talks about is getting agreement on a problem that's worth solving. And just like you mentioned, difficulty getting your kids up in the morning, it's a problem, but is it worth solving, right? It's not something that I'm gonna worry about that much. And I think that's why companies lose out to no decision. They're not really attracting customers that agree that this is a problem worth solving.

Beth McHugh: And I think sometimes that, is great to uncover as well. If you're building, especially in the startup space, if you're building a product and you're spending a lot of time and money, and this has happened on a few occasions, and when you actually look at those struggling moments, the pain points that they build around are not producing sales because they were not enough of a struggle. And being able to uncover what those are to be able to pivot that product. So with this one example of the startup client, we recognize that it wasn't as big of a pain point for the individual, but it was for when it comes to group practice and being able to pivot towards group sales as opposed to the individual. So there is different ways to segment those customers. So that could be a struggling moment for a different type of customer as well. So it helps identify the types of customers that might be struggling most with that to be able to drive sales.

Jason Myers: Yeah, that's interesting. And I often talk about it as it applies to the sales process. But I think that you hinted in there that it's really important for finding product market fit, right? And de-risking the whole opportunity.

Beth McHugh: Exactly. And unfortunately, so many people I've talked to have spent already a lot of money building something and are almost afraid to go down this to find out that it's not in the right direction. So I love when I get to work with startup founders earlier in the process to be able to de-risk it earlier as opposed to coming in after lots of money has been spent and being able to tell them that, unfortunately, this is not hitting that struggling moment or being enough of a problem to drive sales for this audience.

Jason Myers: Now, you bill yourself as a fractional product manager. How does that differ from traditional product management roles?

Beth McHugh: So I'm a consultant technically, but when it comes to the difference between a consultant and fractional and just traditional, it's becoming more popular, the word fractional. I think it's been around, but it's really someone who is working with a company and they are operating like a full-time product person in terms of just getting plopped into the organization, as opposed to being that consultant that is often at an arm's length distance with the organization, but they are playing the part time. So you are playing the role of a CPO or a product leader at an organization that has a gap. And that gap could be either it's a startup founder who's not yet ready to hire a full-time CPO, but they either don't have the skill set or they don't have the time and need someone to come on to fill that gap or gap filling for maternity leave or other leaves or maybe a leader left. So it's supposed to be short term. It's supposed to be helping companies get someone in there immediately to be able to continue and move things forward because it's risky to hire someone really quickly. You want to find that right fit for a full-time role.

Jason Myers: And what are some of the common objections you get from fractional product management and how do you address it?

Beth McHugh: So the two big ones I get, one is onboarding. So there's a little bit of a resistance if I have to onboard you as a fractional, I'm going to hire someone at some point, should I just wait to onboard that other person? And I'll say the people playing the part of fractional, they have done this before. They have led teams before, they have built products before, and not that someone that you would hire wouldn't, but they've done this at a lot of organizations that they come in and hit the ground running. And so the onboarding for a full-time hire, you talk about the 30, 60, 90, you want to let them come in, meet everyone, whereas a fractional comes in and is hitting the ground running within days and making an impact. And that's what I love to do. I love to move fast. I love to get in there and get into the details. So the second objection I would say is price. So you are not getting someone full-time, you're getting someone part-time. I think people expect if you're getting someone for half the time, it's half the cost. But this role is someone who is doing this fractionally, so they're coming in and hitting the round running. And if you are not filling this role, and you're waiting for that full-time hire, sometimes that cost of not hiring someone for that is a lot higher than the cost of bringing in a fractional.

Jason Myers: And are you ever brought in to assist current product teams that are having difficulty implementing the jobs-to-be-done framework?

Beth McHugh: I could probably put a lot of different titles next to my name because you flex in those moments. When it's fractional, I think that can be best because you are coming into the organization and you're embedded in the organization and you can bring jobs to be done with that role. But I have also worked with organizations where the team is already in place and I'm helping augment and support them to bring jobs to be done into that. It can be a little bit more challenging because you're not as embedded as long as you have the executive team in the room when you're doing that, it can be successful. But I think sometimes if it's treated like a side project, it can be more challenging to take that information and get it to really be embedded into the organization.

Jason Myers: So what are some of the common challenges product marketers face when trying to implement the jobs to be done framework, in your opinion?

Beth McHugh: So I think the biggest challenge is executive buy-in. It can be hard to convey the power of jobs to be done. I think a lot of organizations think we're already talking to our customers, we're already doing something like this. And it's hard to get the buy-in on what this really looks like until you see it. And you also need time to make it really effective, time from executives, and I think that could be hard to get that buy-in. There's always a fear of spending time doing research and talking to people and getting these fuzzy outputs because maybe that's happened in the past. But starting with 10 interviews, this isn't a multiple month long project, can really help with starting to dive into jobs to be done, getting that initial push and getting that executive buy-in. But that can be the biggest challenges. You need your customer to be at the executive level to be able to get the right people around the table.

Jason Myers: Yeah, and that's a great segue into talking about sales and marketing alignment. May not be as big of an issue with startups that you work with, but how are you ensuring that collaboration is happening with all the departments around revenue functions?

Beth McHugh: I think it can be less of a challenge at startups for very small startups, although I work with startups that are larger as well. And unfortunately, there's so many worlds where product sales and marketing are in these silos and aren't collaborating as much. And I think that's because Sales is talking to customers, so they have great input on customers, so they want to tell product what to build. And product is trying to talk to customers, but sales sometimes doesn't let them talk to customers. And marketing has a product marketing function, typically, too, and they're doing market research. And so I think the roles and responsibilities are set up where there's a dynamic that can make that very challenging. And that's what I love so much about jobs to be done because I found if you are able to bring these different roles around the table, implement the jobs to be done framework, and interview customers in a way that you are getting at these struggle moments, everybody sees it, everybody gets it, you get to have the conversations about what you heard, and that builds on the collaboration. So I think there's ways to do it where you can start collaborating in other ways, but the best way I've seen is to start with jobs to be done as that way to bring everyone together and talk the same language in a line.

Jason Myers: Yeah, that's really interesting. We talk a lot about how if you're only going to go off of sales calls, you're really only hearing the rational justifications for why people are looking for that particular product. And so you're making too many assumptions as to the underlying reasons that they might be looking to purchase something right now.

Beth McHugh: I think one of the big challenges is you get feedback from sales that we must build X. Well, there's, from a product perspective, there's a million ways that you can build X. And you don't know which way is actually going to align to the journey, the context, which customers, there's so much more depth there. But all you get is we need to build X feature. And so that sometimes can turn into having to build requirements around that when you don't really have the understanding. And then why isn't anybody using it? Because we didn't build it in the right way. Or there's a blame game that goes on too. I feel like the alignment piece can be super challenging without a framework like this.

Jason Myers: Yeah, I like the idea of jobs to be done as the uniting framework around gaining alignment. In other words, if everyone understands what the true motivations are for making a purchase, then marketing is going to be in line with the right messaging as they put out content. Sales is going to have the right narrative as they're talking to customers and trying to prospect. And the customer service is going to understand where the product may need development to keep clients or develop more features. But talk a little bit more about that.

Beth McHugh: One thing that I love having after doing a round of jobs to be done research is you have the stories and you have those stories in your head of these different types of customers. And so if everybody has those stories in their head, the specifics, that's what's the power of jobs to be done. It's people telling their story as opposed to you asking, how do you like this feature? And the more surface level questions about what they want to accomplish. If everybody has that deep level understanding, you can have people watch the videos throughout the organization. Not everybody is going to be able to be involved in the initial jobs to be done research, but if leaders are, that trickles down and there's so much more connection between what sales is doing, what marketing doing, and it feels so much more cohesive too.

Jason Myers: And how long does that process typically take?

Beth McHugh: I've been doing research since 2006 from a user experience standpoint. And I used to feel like you had to do a lot of interviews, although a lot of the research says, you know, once you get over 10 to 12, it starts to become mushy, which it does. And what I found is the more and more you hone in on what you're interviewing and what you're trying to pull out of those interviews, especially with Bob Mesta's direction of how to do the interviews, you can do 10 interviews and things become super clear. There is the analysis part, but from a recruiting 10 people to setting up 10 hour-long interviews to analysis can take a week to two weeks. If you are really focused in on that, where I think prior research would take me a month to do it and then the analysis would take very long because you had so much data, the analysis becomes a lot more straightforward. because you know exactly what you're analyzing instead of trying to analyze a lot of different things in the interviews. I'm a curious person, so when I was doing interviews earlier in my career, I would be curious about everything that they talked about and try to dig into everything. But this framework helps really reduce time to be able to go through a cycle in a week, week and a half, and have outputs that drive strategy.

Jason Myers: And how would you approach the challenge of separating strategic and tactical responsibilities in product management?

Beth McHugh: This is something that I see at a lot of organizations. And I think it's a big problem where when it is separated too much, it's a game of telephone. I think it's easier because I'm at startups where you're wearing so many different hats, where I have had the strategic and the tactical and really bridged that gap. But as organizations grow, product management can still hold both those spaces. It's just what you're responsible for from a product perspective can become smaller. I'm a big believer in Marty Kagan's approach on this. He talks a lot about that when you start. separating the role of product, you break this down. It becomes a game of telephone. There are ways to support product through other roles like project management or someone helping with scheduling customers. But if you break down someone's throwing, here's the strategy over the fence, and the tactical person is trying to make sense of that and build the requirements and working with the product or the engineers, it starts to break down. So yes, there's writing the very detailed requirements that can have support from it. But when it comes to watching the strategy turn into what the product's building with the engineers, there needs to be a close alignment with product or I've found it can fall off the rails and not be really aligning to what the vision was for where the product was going.

Jason Myers: And can you also discuss the importance of continuous product discovery and how that relates to the jobs to be done framework?

Beth McHugh: So jobs to be done is very important up front where you are trying to identify what your hypotheses even are. You're not testing hypotheses, but up front you're really wide open in terms of what are people trying to accomplish? What are the struggle moments that are getting in the way? And I think pieces of that come into continuous product discovery. So continuous product discovery is more about weekly or frequent touches with your customers, with the team that's building the product, where you can conduct these small research activities. So it can go from jobs to be done, and the threads of jobs to be done come down into continuous product discovery, but you might be looking at different opportunities, different solutions, and continuing to test those with customers. So I see it as a continuum where Jobs-to-be-Done is a foundation that is with you throughout all of it, and you continue to check back in on those jobs-to-be-done, but then continuous product discovery helps with getting from identifying the opportunities to identifying the solutions that will solve those problems and struggling moments.

Jason Myers: And when you talk about sales driving product development, but at the same time they're hesitant to have you interview customers, how do you flip the script on that and convince them that the jobs to be done exercise is really the most important thing that they need to be doing?

Beth McHugh: So there's a few different angles, because I think it depends a bit on the sales team and who you're working with. Step one, trying to get in on those sales calls just to be a listener, just to be in them, understand what's going on. And then step two, if I start to build trust, seeing if I can ask questions. Sometimes there's those customers that they feel more comfortable. They have a really good relationship with them. They're always eager to talk to them. Maybe those are the customers to start with and start asking questions in this way. Once the sales department or people on the sales team see how you're asking the questions and what comes out of asking them in that way, the light bulb starts to go off. And I feel like that's when I've built trust and been able to get in more sales calls. And I've partnered with individual sales people to identify customer needs. That can then start to scale out to a larger initiative with jobs to be done. Another angle I've taken is you can recruit prospects. So people who are not in your circle, you can recruit through platforms like respondent.io and you can show some of the jobs to be done work without really tapping into that customer set necessarily. And so showing it in another way to then build that trust. Because a lot of it is about building trust. Understandably, this is their customer they're trying to nurture and they don't necessarily know how you're going to talk to them, what questions you might ask that might put their sales deal off track. So a big thing I find is building that trust first by finding those ways to show jobs to be done in smaller moments that can then build to a larger project.

Jason Myers: And I know companies have varying degrees of collaboration in their culture, right? So how do you assess that initially when you're entering into an engagement and what do you do with a company that's pretty hierarchical and not used to collaborating?

Beth McHugh: This also happened a lot, and I think when you mean collaborative, I wouldn't necessarily call it collaborative, but I think there needs to be alignment and empowerment. And collaborative in terms of a cross-functional collaborative, cross-functional at the executive level, but collaborative, there's only so many hours an executive can be, and hopefully not into the weeds sometimes of all the day-to-day decisions. Going back to Marty Kagan, as someone that I follow a lot, he has a book, Transform, and he talks a lot about this. It's a lot of change management to get this to happen. I'm a big believer, again, not surprising probably at this point, that jobs to be done can really help with that. transition because it aligns everyone around their biggest outcome. Everybody wants to build a successful product. That is something everyone at the organization is wanting to do and they want to be a part of that. And so I think that can set the tone to start the collaboration between cross-functional teams. And it can be that foundation without coming at it from, which I think other people do unsuccessfully, trying to embed new processes and procedures. And it feels so sterile in terms of we're doing this new way of working. And there isn't really that why behind it. If you are familiar with Marty Kagan, he has a book, Transform. I collaborate with coaches in that area because there is a overlap here. So I would call it more alignment, empowerment, and cross-functional collaboration that needs to happen. And there's a lot that happens at each of those levels. the empowerment needs to happen, but there needs to be a trust. And to get that trust, I think everyone needs to feel aligned. And that is where, again, I circle back to jobs to be done can be the one that can really kick this off and help that be more successful. Because I've seen a lot of companies, and I've heard they hire these really costly organizations, the big names, to come in and make this transformation, and it doesn't work. People have spent a lot of money. Transformation doesn't work. And I think it's because there is a pushing of processes and procedures, and there's not that core seat at the middle of why everybody is excited to do this transformation.

Jason Myers: Assuming we do the work here with jobs to be done, why do you think it's a major competitive advantage?

Beth McHugh: I think that is inherently what it does. It is the way to identify how you can differentiate from your competitors, especially now with AI. It used to be that building things was difficult and designing things was difficult. And now there's amazing designers, amazing developers. I think the career pathways have gone that way. There's a lot of people in those roles. And now it's all about how you differentiate yourself. It's always been about how you differentiate yourself in the market, but with our culture now of these quick wins and what can we build quickly and the pressures of time to get things, get them launched and not really sit with and understand your customers with all that pressure, I think most companies are just build, build, building, throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks and not doing this deep work, which really is necessary to understand how you can connect more with your customer. And so I hope more companies are doing this. And it clarifies where you can differentiate which types of customers and jobs to be done are you focused on versus competitors can be focused on these other areas. And that's fine. But you start to see where you can add on where you can expand. So there's the best companies are doing this.

Jason Myers: So what resources do you recommend for people that want to learn how to implement the jobs to be done framework? Because it's not as simple as finding the list of the right questions to ask. You really have to learn how to listen to what they're saying and dig for the right responses, right?

Beth McHugh: One place I'd start is Bob Mesta's Demand-Side Sales 101. When I was talking about pushes and pulls and these struggle moments, a lot of that language comes from that book. I got to witness Bob do one of his interviews in person, and it was amazing to be able to categorize based on how he was interviewing, the pushes of what gets someone from where they are now to where they want to be, the pulls of that. What are those things that are pulling them in that direction? And then especially identifying the anxieties and the habits that are pulling them away from that direction, because that's what happens to a lot of us. We have this thing we want to do, but we can't get there because there is this friction and these struggling moments. pulling us backwards, the anxieties and the habits that pull us backwards. And so he talks a lot about those areas. I know the Clay Christensen Institute also has some resources on their website. There's another framework that I have used in the past which is Tony Ulrich, and he has a book, Jobs to be Done. He has a lot more structured way of handling it in terms of the way to define a job statement and the way to create a job map. So that's another resource that I've used in the past. I've been digging more into Bob's stuff more recently. And also following on LinkedIn. So I always find myself in rabbit holes of following someone that I love and then finding a person that talks a lot about him and following them. And so it can be your own curious journey as well from those starting points.

Jason Myers: That's great. I've read Demand Side Sales myself. It's a really excellent resource. I'll have to check out Tony's book as well. I'm wondering, many SaaS marketers complain about how difficult it is to differentiate, especially in the sea of noise that's out there. And when I look at their website messaging, it's clear that they haven't done this work. or else they would have a lot clearer messaging. So it seems like anyone that's struggling to differentiate should really consider doing a jobs-to-be-done exercise with their current customers. Would you agree?

Beth McHugh: I think the struggle, often, a lot of products want to be everything to everyone, and people hear things from the customers they're talking to, and it just becomes this Frankenstein of a product, both from a messaging standpoint, from a sales standpoint, and from a product standpoint is just this Frankenstein of all these things and the power of jobs to be done is to understand which jobs you are focused on, what are the struggling moments that you're focused on to resolve and those words coming out so that the customers who are struggling with that come to you. And it just makes life a lot easier across the board. I personally had a struggle moment when I was going from working at an organization where it was a small company, it was a lot more established, had a lot of data and went into startups. And the resources I had around research and user research did not work at a startup. And that's where I found jobs to be done. And it made my job as a product manager so much easier because instead of trying to use the right prioritization method for this long list of features and you didn't feel good about how it was more, who was the loudest voice in the room to try to get to what you were building, this helped clarify, this is the strategy, this is the direction you're moving in. So all those other things I can ignore because we know that we are focused here. So it is super powerful on that level.

Jason Myers: Great. And that sounds like a good place to land the episode. So if people want to get a hold of you, what's the best way to do that?

Beth McHugh: On LinkedIn, I'm usually pretty friendly. Just give me a message. Don't blindly try to connect with me. Please put a message. That's how I respond. Or Beth at TiltaConsulting.com. So T-I-L-L-T-A Consulting.com.

Jason Myers: Great. And our agency is called Austin Lawrence Group. We sponsor the SaaS Backwards podcast. And you can find us at austinlawrence.com. And that's spelled just like the two cities, Austin, Texas, and Lawrence, Kansas. If you'd like some help figuring out how to optimize your messaging for today's buyer, take us up on a free offer to do a marketing and messaging review. We'll look at your website messaging content and advertising and give you some ideas on how you can maximize those SQL conversions. Just reach out to me, jm at austinlawrence.com. And of course, if you haven't subscribed to the podcast, please do so. Hey, Beth, thanks for joining us today on the podcast.

Beth McHugh: Thank you so much for having me. It was a great discussion.