Product, Marketing and Sales team alignment [with Jay Haynes]

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Jay Haynes, as they will be discussing product, marketing, and sales team alignment in the marketing space and how to plan your marketing strategy around product roadmap.

 

Jay Haynes is the Founder & CEO of thrv.com, the first and only Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) software for product, marketing, and sales teams.

 

Jay’s advancements enable product teams to dramatically increase their effectiveness in using jobs-to-be-done to reduce roadmap risk, accelerate revenue growth, and generate superior equity value. Jobs-to-be-done product management helps CEOs align their product teams with customers and focus their company’s product development on exploiting competitor weaknesses from the view of the customer. 

As an Award-winning executive with three decades of innovation and investing experience, Jay’s customers include Microsoft, Dropbox, eBay, Twitter, American Express, Oracle, Target, and Viacom among others.

 

Connect with Jay:

Website: https://www.thrv.com/jobs-to-be-done 

Jay on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayhaynes/ 

Connect with Andrei:

Marketiu: https://marketiu.com / https://marketiu.ro 

Andrei on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/

Marketiu on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu

Marketiu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency

Marketiu on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/

Email at hello@marketiu.ro

 

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Episode transcript:

 

Andrei Tiu   

Hello, everybody, this is Andrei and you're on the marketing innovation podcast show. Our special guest for today is Jay Haynes who's the founder CEO of thrv.com, the first and only Jobs-to-be-done software for product marketing and sales teams. And today we'll discuss the importance of team alignment in promoting b2b and b2c products, as well as the jobs to be done method and how you can apply it within your business to increase your return. So without further ado, hi Jay, it's a pleasure to be here. How are you? How's the day going? 

 

Jay Haynes   

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

 

Andrei Tiu   

Pleasure. So let's go! First of all, can you tell us a bit about your background and where you're coming from, because you have an impressive background in entrepreneurship and leadership and marketing. So I think it would be really good to give our listeners a bit of context into you as a person. 

 

Jay Haynes   

Yeah, sure. It's, I hope it's an interesting story. So I started my career about 30 years ago, when I graduated from college, in the early 90s, right into a big recession. People don't remember that. But it was the big SNL crisis in the US. And I really spent 10 years in the financial world in the private equity industry, buying companies. And that was pretty, fairly interesting. And it was a great, you know, business education. But basically, back in the 1990s, you could buy companies and use a lot of debt and cut costs, which is still, you know, a big chunk of the private equity industry today, but I was always interested in the innovation question. And we never did anything with the companies that were innovative at all, in product or marketing. It was really financial engineering. In fact, one of the companies we bought was Steinway and Sons, you know, the kind of famous piano company, and I always like to joke that Steinway is literally the least innovative company on the planet, they're making the same product they made 150 years ago, and they're selling the same product. So that got me interested in innovation. I went back to business school, and then worked in product management, and really started to learn, okay, what's the state of our art for product marketing and product management and innovation, which obviously leads to sales. I started a couple companies that had some successes and failures. And then I spent that kind of next 10 years in the world of innovation, at big companies and startups, and really trying to figure out, Okay, how does the world innovate? I worked with Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, investors, and large companies, and there really just weren't any good methods out there. There's nothing that's really scientific. And that's about a decade ago, I really got interested in jobs that did innovation. And I'd studied with Clay Christensen who was a big proponent of jobs done jobs theory, he passed away last year, unfortunately. But you know, he's the famous Harvard Business School professor who talked a lot about disruption, which he's really known for. But really the last part of his career, he focused on jobs, he did innovation, and I got really interested in that, because it's just a more systematic way to think about product management and product marketing.

 

Andrei Tiu   

Okay, so tell us how you got into Thrv. So maybe some of the businesses that you founded, or you're part of in the more recent past, and then how these led you to funding Thrv?

 

Jay Haynes   

Yeah, great. So I'll tell you kind of an interesting story about a company I was actually brought in by the venture investors. The company had been struggling and the idea was, there's a big opportunity for what's happening in distributed networking. This was the era of Napster. And people kind of forget, if you're in less or as old as I am, that back then in the early 2000s, the cost of streaming anything over the internet, what we're doing right now would be ridiculously expensive. You couldn't do it. So we looked at distributed networking, and we thought that we could come up with a device that would enable you to collect videos, essentially, it was like a TiVo for web videos. Now, it was interesting that the company did okay, but what happened after that was this other company launched called YouTube. And YouTube was obviously enormously successful. So that got me thinking, well, how did we not approach this correctly? What problem are we trying to solve for customers? And that's what we didn't really figure out. And that's whether you're a startup or fortune 500 company, really getting your team across product marketing and sales, to agree on what problem you're solving for your customer, obviously, that's the most important thing you can do. And that's what we should have done better. But I didn't have jobs, we did our jobs theories, the method back then. And that's what really got me interested in jobs theory, and Jesse Dodd. And so I did work in, in this industry, you know, round jfc done. And what it does is creates a lot of data. Without a doubt, you're gonna get a lot of customer data. And if you combine that customer data with things like segmentation and market sizing, and competitive analysis, use and messaging analysis etc. go to market planning, you get an enormous amount of data. And so about seven years ago, that's when I started Thrvf. Because if you're trying to make decisions with a lot of data, whether you're on a product team or marketing team, software is very good at that. That's why you know, software exists, because there's so much data in the world, and we all need to make decisions. So that's really how I started  Thrv: recognising, okay, job students a very effective method. And we can talk about, you know, what it is why, but it creates a lot of data and the last thing product and marketing teams want is more PowerPoint presentations, and sell spreadsheets or email around, right? So we wanted to put this data together that can really coordinate product marketing and sales on the customer. And you can think about what jobs does is it takes the phrase, you know, being customer focused, which every company wants to be customer focused these days, which is a great thing. And whether you're a startup or fortune 500 company, you need to be customer focused. Okay, but what does that mean? Well, starting with, you might have to get a lot of data about customers, and that's where jobs come in. And then you want to keep that customer focus all through your product, the roadmapping process that your product management teams are working on, all through your product marketing processes, when your marketing teams are focused on, messaging, and going to market, you know, etc. And even through to your sales team, especially if you're in the b2b world, you want to keep that customer in focus across those teams. What's really interesting is you want to organise your company around your customers job rather than around the functions of the company. And we can talk about that in more detail. But really, one of the things you can think about what our software does, is help keep teams focused on their customers.

 

Andrei Tiu   

Okay, that's a very good point. So going from here, let's discuss and explain to our listeners here, what's the Jobs-to-be-done method, I think this will be the starting point. So that we can go into a couple of case studies and then talk with the actual importance of having the things aligned and the communications and planning different phases of communications and sales focus around the product map and journey. So Jobes-to-be done.

 

Jay Haynes   

Yeah, it's a great question. So for those who don't know what Jobs-to-be-done is, it's core idea is actually deceptively very simple. It's that customers are actually not buying a product. You think you're selling them a product, and they seem to be transacting purchasing something, but what they're really doing underneath it is hiring that product to get a job done. And in today's innovation terminology, you know, thanks in large part to Clay Christensen, we use the term „Jobs-to-be-done” to explain basically a goal that a customer has, that's independent of any solution. And that's really the key. Is that people, every customer is a real human who's trying to get through their day and you know, achieve goals. And good examples of this are: you can look back at products that we've all used, and we've all switched to new products. So for example, I'm old enough to remember the days of records, when I used to listen to music on records, I actually had eight track tapes, that was a horrible format. But you know, we all switched from records to CDs. And then we all switch from CDs to iPods, then we all switched from iPods to streaming services. So why did that happen? Well, if you use traditional definitions of a market, you would say, well, there was a huge iPod market. You know, Apple sold 200 million iPods at 150 bucks a pop. That's a $30 billion revenue opportunity. So companies also make this mistake all the time: they think the product is the market. And in fact, Microsoft made this mistake with the Zune. I don't know if you own the Zune, very few people did, because it was an iPod competitor. And they thought, well, there's a $30 billion iPod market. „So let's make a Zune competitor.” We're Microsoft, we have a billion customers, we have an operating system, we can connect it to everybody oh by the Zune because they want to be on our Windows system. And of course, they sold zero zooms, they may have lost a huge amount of money in it. So what happened? Well, the customer's job is exactly the same. The job is to create a mood with music, and that job has never changed and it will never change. It's very, very stable. And that's the power of the method is that it gives you a stable target to hit whether you're on a product marketing or sales team. And the reason that we switch to new products is because something comes along that gets the job done faster and more accurately. You can use tonnes of examples like we all use Apple and Google Maps today. But I'm old enough when I used to have a paper map in my car, and you would pull it out to try to figure out how are you going, right? And the reason we switched these new apps, in that case, the job is to get to a destination on time. Again, it's never gonna change 100 years ago, getting to a destination on time was the same as 100 years from now. Now, what's really interesting is sure, that's a high level statement, but how does that help you as a product team or market team figure out what to do? So if you were to say „Hey, we're going to help people get to the destination on time, better than Apple and Google Maps.” How do you figure that out? Well, that's the really hard question. And what's really interesting about the theory is that it shows that even what seems like a simple job, getting to a destination on time, for example, actually has over 100 different customer needs. And that is what is amazing. And the goal of every product marketing and sales team is to satisfy customer needs, you know, better than competitors in the market. So even a job like get to a destination on time, we break it down, we call job-steps. And you can break it down into series job-steps. And each one of those steps has variables. And that's really the key ideas. You can figure out those variables and getting to a destination on time and those things, you know, obviously obvious things like the address, the routes to the stops, the sequence of stops, you're going, where to find parking, when to make turns etc. All those things are variables. And what you're looking for, as a product and marketing team is, which one of those things that your customers currently struggle with the most. And that's why we switch to new products, because we struggle to get the job done in some way. And then something comes along, and it helps get the job done faster, or more accurately. And that's the core of the theory. 

 

Andrei Tiu   

So basically, because deconstructing the whole thing, like the job that you need to achieve, and then trying to shape your unique selling point around the current sort of barriers that a customer might have in the product that they're using at the moment. Like for example, maybe you have a Windows and you are not like a Windows computer, not very happy with thumping around it. And then you have the Mac, which is faster, easier to access stuff, I mean, more multimedia focused etc. etc. And then you decide that to be free, because it appeals to something that will be constructed from the main objective, which is the you know, basically dating, let's say, working online or something like that. 

 

Jay Haynes   

Yeah, that's right. So let me give you a great example. There's a tonne of Apple examples. But let me give you an example of where, if you were to try it, let's say you were a marketing team, and you're trying to beat Apple and Google Maps. Now, that would be a very, very hard thing to do. Because they have about 100% market share, and their products are free, how would you even remotely come up with some marketing message, and certainly even a feature in your product roadmap, that would beat Apple Google Maps? Well, in Jobs-to be-done, the process of doing that would first be to understand the whole job of getting to the destination on time. And, you know, there and people can see this on our website, if they want to go look at all the needs, there's 106 needs to that job, which is really amazing. And the next thing you'd want to do is say, Okay, well, where's the segment of the market that struggles to get to a destination on time? And this is also where jobs theory is really, really powerful. Because if you do traditional profiling, which a lot of marketing teams do, they'll create personas, there's Joe and Kate, who are male and female ones, rural or urban, high income, low income, high education, low education, they create these fictional characters. And those can be useful for some things. But if you're really trying to segment the market, in our example, here of getting to a destination on time to figure out who struggles, those personas may or may not be the reason why people struggle, it might not have anything to do with the fact that you're male or female. And we don't have to get into the details now, but there's very quantitative ways of doing this with jobs-theory. And the way that we do it is: we look for customer struggles, and we run these quantitative surveys and then we say, Okay, well, who all struggle in the same way. And it turns out, we actually have data on this market, that getting to a destination on time, one of the most underserved parts of that job is a huge segment that cannot plan their stops, to stay on time. And those are the people who have to do things like determine the optimal sequence of stops. So if you're a travelling professional or a salesperson or rep or something, and you've got to go to customer meetings, and you've got to unknown locations, and you got to do that frequently. You were like underserved in that market. So that's how we uncover unmet customer needs. And then now you can look at how you are going to message against Apple and Google. Well, first of all, what feature would you build. And in this case, you know the need is to determine the optimal sequence of stops, that's a variable in the job. It's an action a customer has to take with a variable in a job-step to plan the stops, and like the job itself, it's independent of any need, it doesn't mention AI or machine learning, or VR AR, like the hip technologies blockchain. And the reason that's so important is if you're going to build a feature that might use some interesting technologies, like machine learning, you build that so that it helps the customer determine the optimal sequence of stops, in this example, and then your messages would be around the functional thing that customer is trying to do, which is get to destinations on time, fast and accurately, and determine the optimal sequence of stops any emotions that they're going to feel. So you want to take people from feeling anxiety, about getting the job done, to feeling confidence. And that's really important in marketing messages, too. It's like, you've got to get the functional job done. But you've got to get people to believe that they're going to have this change in emotional state. Because if you're a busy professional, you're trying to get to these meetings that matter to your career, that's anxiety inducing. So your messages shouldn't be, Hey, we have the latest machine learning algorithms, because frankly, no customer cares about machine learning algorithms, what they care about, is that you help them get the job done faster and more accurately. So that's in a nutshell, the process, there's a lot there, I'd have to unpack what the basic idea is, you can focus on the job, the independent customer needs, that have nothing to do with the product. And then a message to get the job done faster and more accurately.

 

Andrei Tiu   

Super. So if it's okay with you, I think it'd be really cool if we could talk some practical examples here, also from the b2b space, because many nowadays, like from some of the more recent case studies that we were involved with, they were around this SAS products and software, which is a massive market in the UK has been booming for a while, but not only here. So what we saw was that, okay, the product was launching us, this was happening a lot in startups, when you have a new platform, or you have a new software, typically SaaS and then you launch it. And then you have the product team and the marketing and the sales, outbound sales full on trying to sell the marketing trying to build a lead generation funnel and the inbound marketing side of things. And then the product wanting to push new features wanting the sort of marketing around the product as well, which many times can be a bit different, because it goes many times to customers as well as new potential customers. And in this whole process, mainly, if it's a fast growing startup, things can get miss-aligned, or feedback from somewhere, like sales might not come or arrive in time in the product team in order to be incorporated in a product map, and then, pushed through for development and stuff like that. So it would be really interesting for the people here that might be part of such teams in such businesses, to discuss some of the ways that maybe some of your clients would Thrv or priding itself can solve these problems in this modern, highly competitive market scenario.

 

Jay Haynes  

Yeah, that's great. That's a great question. And we do a lot of work with b2b companies. And one of the reasons is Jobs-to-be-done is great for markets that are very complex. One of the things you can think about the method is it helps you take complexity and make it manageable. And b2b markets are very, very complex. So the way that we generally start this, which is super important,  is who is the b2b customer? And we see this a lot, the team's product marketing, sales team don't really agree on who the customer is, and that's such an interesting problem to solve, and we separate customers into three different categories. The most important customer is the job beneficiary. That is the person who benefits from getting the job done. And in b2b markets a lot of times it's the executive because you've got whether it's a you're targeting CFOs or operating officers or CEOs or VPS of marketing or finance or sales, or whatever it is, in a b2b, in specific industries as well, you've got to figure out who benefits from getting this job done. Right? And then you've got to figure out, of course, what is the job what is what is your customer's goal, what are they trying to achieve? And the second type of customer is the job executor. And the job executor is important. It's someone who is helping the job beneficiary get the job done. Now, let me give you some great examples, because you mentioned SaaS, and b2b has seen a huge change in the past 10 - 20 years, in the type of customers you would target. So before SaaS applications, what did you do as a business customer? Well, you had an IT department and you had IT managers who set up your servers. And if you were gonna instal Siebel, as your CRM or other DRP systems, you had on premise on site, software that you would get installed. And that was the huge industry, you remember, the big professional services firms spent? They were generating billions of dollars a year just installing software. So their customer was an IT manager. What happened in that market? Well, the IT manager, the job executed went away. Because who benefits from SaaS applications? Well, you know, in CRM, it's obviously sales people. So what sales people have to do today to use the Sabbath SaaS applications? They go to a web page, they log in. That's it. No, IT manager no executor. And this happens in every single market. So the first thing for any b2b team is to really understand who your customer is, because we work with a lot of companies, and they're targeting job executioners, which is a huge risk, because someone is going to come along and create a product where the job beneficiary doesn't need a job executor to get the job done. Let me give you another example of a medical market because this seems even crazier. You've probably had your blood drawn, right? Whether it's you know, for physical or your health test, or you need some sort of sample to diagnose or something, and you go to a person called a phlebotomist and a phlebotomist is, of course, a very highly trained professional, who knows how to stick your arm with a needle, and make sure nothing goes wrong. And the job there is to obtain a blood sample. And, obviously, you as the person who's trying to optimise your health obtaining a blood sample, you're the beneficiary, right, the phlebotomist is just executing the job. We worked with a company called Seven Cents, and they've built the device where a patient can take their own blood, which seems totally terrifying, right? I'm not a beetle guy, but I understand the fears. And so you stick this thing on your arm, and it's got a microneedle array, and it's almost painless. So it creates a vacuum and it sucks blood. So even in that case, even that kind of extreme, highly trained professional job, the job executor is gonna go away, there's a patient, you can draw your own blood. There's just so many examples. So in b2b markets, the first thing is to figure out who the customer is. The next thing is, what really is the job? What level of abstraction are you focused on, because every business exists to create equity value. You could just say the whole job domain for business is to create equity value. Now, you've got other stakeholders, of course, and companies are recognising they have stakeholders, including their employees and the communities they work in. But the way that our system is set up in the world today, if your CEO or board and you're not generating revenue and profitability growth, you're going to get fired. That's why business works. And so you have to break that down into different jobs, according to the function within the company, whether it's finance operations, sales, Product Marketing, whatever, or within your specific industry, is it you know, travelling entertainment, is it aviation, manufacturing, you know, consumer packaged goods, finance, whatever. And within those functions in industry, there are the jobs that you should be targeting. And that's, that's the key to the start of the business, the Business Jobs return journey.

 

Andrei Tiu    

Okay. It just occurred to me, I know, we didn't discuss this before. So it would be interesting to see some insights from here if you can share, of course. But how did you use this one you launched, or through the growth of that you guys saw?

 

Jay Haynes   

Yeah, that's great. And it's a great question. We are building Thrv on Thrv using Jobs-to-be-done. Not surprising, out here in California, we like to say we were eating our own dog food as the saying goes. And that's really what we recognise is a few things. That product teams really struggle to prioritise their roadmap, product teams, companies have tonnes of feature ideas, whether it comes from the product team, the marketing team, or the sales team or customer requests. How do you focus, what in your product roadmap is going to lead to success? So how do you launch things from a product teams directive that your marketing team can successfully market and your sales team can sell. So that's what we looked at, we were like, okay, we have to help improve this process because most products fail. It really is extraordinary. In today's day and age, of course, you still have this incredibly high failure rate for products, and, certainly for new products, but even for new product features. And the other thing is that, you know, product and marketing teams miss-competitive threats all the time. People forget that Blackberry. Blackberry's market cap was four times Apple's. Blackberry was four times bigger than Apple when the iPhone launched. So they had a roadmap, and they thought they were on a path that continued growth, and yet now, they're basically worth zero today. I mean, effectively, a company, I think there's still a business, but they factually lost $80 billion in market cap. So that's what we realised we were like, how can we help teams look into their roadmap and say We're on a path to generate revenue growth? How do you tie your roadmap to your revenue? And that's also a big risk equation for product and marketing teams, because the real dollars that get spent and put at risk are when you start developing a product, and you're going to market and you're going to sell it, that's extremely expensive. So you're taking your company's capital, even if you're a startup, this is why we like to say to startups to you should do this work before you write one line of code, or engineer, the first thing that you're going to manufacturer, you should do all this work, because it's much less expensive, and lowers your risk dramatically to really understand your customers job and where they struggle before you risk that capital. So when you start investing that, and this happens, certainly bigger companies to where you're spending hundreds of millions, potentially billions of dollars on your roadmap, you have no visibility, is that really going to generate revenue? Blackberry thought it was going to. Obviously it didn't. So that's the way we like to think about it. 

 

Andrei Tiu   

Super. And going back to when we were discussing about the sales, marketing and product team alignment, maybe if we can, or if you have in mind any examples of startups that you were working with, that were using maybe Thrv, as well as other project management tools, and how maybe either they were working with both, and that was helping them accelerate their decision making and processes or whether they chose Thrv for a particular reason? Because, I mean, just for clarity here, I know that many people on the show might be using stuff like Asana, and Trello and all these tools, mainstream ones, but I was curious, and I want you to maybe shine a bit of light in terms of the differences between something like Thrv and Jobs-to-be-done and other project management tools. 

 

Jay Haynes   

Yeah, that's great. And, and I think they're, they're trying to do different things. And we work with companies that are working with all the different, you know, Product Management and project management tool, whether it's Asana, JIRA etc.,Microsoft Team Foundation Server. The way that you can think about it is, the output of Jobs-to-be-done is the input into those tools. Because let's use the JIRA example, it's obviously one of the biggest tools that people are using, whether it's Asana. You could do anything with those tools, they're kind of like a blank spreadsheet, right? You could type in whatever you want, in your sprint to try and achieve or whatever you're trying to get done in a project management tool. What we do is actually the work even before that. You can think of it, it's sometimes called the very front end of innovation, is really figuring out from your customers perspective What are you going to build? but also, more importantly, why? Why are you going to build that? So if you have product ideas, and you're putting them in these other tools, that's okay, that's great. Ideas are wonderful. But sometimes we like to joke, we have no product ideas. Because what we're looking at is the problem the customer has, first and foremost, even before coming up with ideas. And so that's how you can really differentiate those tools from Thrv and Jobs-be- done in general, is that just saying, okay, independent of any products or solutions or technologies before you try and evaluate machine learning, or AI or blockchain or whatever it is, let's figure out what the customer is struggling with. And that's really the most important decision a company can make is are they in the right market, where there are unmet needs, where customers are willing to pay for new solutions. Especially for a startup. Because the market decision you make and remember, we define markets from the point of view of the customer and the job is trying to get done, not the product like the iPod, and if you do that, if you pick the right market, that is half the battle, maybe even more. Sequoia, this is I love this story, Don Valentine, who was the founder of Sequoia, famously invested in this little company called Apple, and this kind of crazy, unkept hippie named Steve Jobs. And everybody thought, oh, wow, they were such pioneers for investing in this crazy hippie who claimed, who eventually became this kind of visionary product leader and innovator. But if you listen to what Sequoia and Don Valentine have said about what they were investing in, they were investing in the market. It wasn't Steve Jobs at all, it was the fact that it currently when Apple launched, this was in the late 1970s, computers cost $25,000 to $250,000. And Steve Jobs said, Hey, look, I can make this computer that costs $2500. And they knew that computers were really useful tools. And Don Valentine said, we were investing in that market, it just happened to be Steve Jobs was in this really, incredibly important market, and that is true for every company. So those other tools are great, you've made that decision about what market, what customer and what unmet need or satisfy what your product strategy should look like, but you still need to make that decision, that's the most important decision you can make as an entrepreneur or as a fortune 500 company. 

 

Andrei Tiu   

So for example, Thrv or the Jobs-to-be done method, my feeling is that we can refer to either because they are doing kind of the same thing, which is finding the actual job that needs to be done. So how would i be using it and how often in order for it to be effective, because, as it happens at the innovation stage and not the implementation stage kind of where something like JIRA or Asana would come into place. My feeling, but this is just from our discussion so far, is that these things should be managed by only the management team and also not being reviewed, or the decisions that are made on the basis of the insights here, should not be changed on a very constant basis in order to allow sprint's to happen or implementation time to happen. So what, in your opinion, would be a healthy way of applying this method into a business? 

 

Jay Haynes   

Yeah, that's great. So that is a really great question. So the way that we think about it, is, we know what's not going to change. So what doesn't change, and that is your customers job, you know, if they're trying to, if they're parents trying to get a babysitter tonight, or they're consumers trying to get to a destination on time, or a cardiovascular surgeon trying to restore already blood flow, or if your sales team tried to acquire customers, whatever the job is, that is not going to change. And figuring out which segment in that market is underserved, is incredibly important as well. And the products and services will change, so some of that, the unmet needs will get satisfied. So that might change. But when you have that stability in what you're focused on, that's how you can coordinate your product strategy across your product marketing and sales team. So the way that we think about it, is, you actually should have everybody from your product marketing sales team, because those teams are customer focused. If they're not, you're in big trouble. They should be customer focused, I mean, your operations team can make your operations more efficient cut your cost, your finance team must do your finance, but your product marketing sales team or your customer focus teams, that means that everybody across those organisations, should one agree on who your customer is, what their job is, what are the unmet needs, what segment are you targeting, and that creates your product strategy. It's interesting, if you walk around companies, we do this all the time, really, everybody agrees that product marketing sales teams that the mission is to satisfy unmet customer needs better than competitors. And people say yes, of course, that's our business. That's why we're in business. And then we asked, you know, what does the customer need? And no one agrees on that. So that's a huge problem. That's why we want to bring these three teams together, because everybody should agree on that. And then the next thing we ask is, you need to have a good product strategy, right? in order to build market and sell your products. And they'll say "yes, yes, we need great product strategy". And we ask, "okay, what is your product strategy?" And teams, they don't even agree on what their product strategy is. They can't simply articulate their product strategy. So everybody at your company, on the customer facing teams should be able to say, what a customer need is, what customer needs your targeting and what your product strategy is. And that's a very hard thing to do. I'm not trying to be flippant about this that is very, very difficult. And that's why we started Thrv, to help teams through this process have agreed on it. So whatever's changing on your product side, and it will change because there's new technology, you want to constantly be launching features, that the whole idea of a roadmap is that you're going to do things in the short and medium and long term, that focus on your customer, but you still you really want to understand and empathise with your customer. And that's very difficult to do, because customer problems are very complex. Like I mentioned with getting to the destination on time, there's 106 needs. So you've got to constantly be going back to that data. When you're making this downstream decisions. Whether you're an engineer, you know, making trade off decisions on the feature requirements, or whether you're a marketing team member who's making analysis of your competitors messaging or trying to figure out your messaging or why aren't you generating as many leads as you should be? Or you're a sales team, and we do a lot of sales team training. We're trying to get the sales team not to sell their features in their product, but first to empathise with where that customer is struggling so that then when they tell the customer here's how we can solve your problems. That's a much more believable story because they understand the jobs and the unmet needs.

 

Andrei Tiu   

Tricky question: How'd you feel about this past year, because from what we saw from the marketing front, but I bet it's the same in sales and product as well, like in almost every business, the needs of the customers have maybe not changed exactly, but surely been out alterated in a way or another. So most likely, using something like this would on a constant basis as we progress through the pandemic would have been a very good health check in order to see whether what we are promoting is still, you know, the value proposition that the customers are looking for. So, what are your thoughts on this?

 

Jay Haynes   

Yeah, what a crazy year. So, we've talked about this a bunch, actually, what's really interesting is, of course, there's some situations where you just need insurance, you need government help, and, you know, part of the role of government is to be a big insurance provider. And if you're a retail restaurant, you just got shut down. I mean, that's just really hard to deal with that. Or if you're a b2b provider who's trying to sell to restaurants, obviously, you just, you've been hit by an extraordinary event that hopefully won't happen again, anytime soon. But then if you look at the jobs, especially b2b markets, businesses still need to get done. What happened was, the jobs are actually exactly the same. But we saw a huge shift in platforms in the way people get the job done. And let me give you a very, very concrete example, because we're sitting here on a zoom cal, today. And we've talked about this even before the pandemic, which is, who actually is your competitor in a b2b market? And we would use zoom and United Airlines as an example. And people would say "Oh, those are two totally different industries. There's web conferencing industry, and then there's airlines, those are just completely different products, different technologies, they seem nothing alike, how could they possibly be competitors?" Well, if you use jobs theory, you can look at that and say "Well, they're both helping salespeople acquire customers." So acquiring customers is a job to be done, of course, it's a b2b job be done, and there's lots of different solutions to do it. And to those different platform, to acquire customers, one is an airline, and airports. So use that platform, you hop on a plane to go talk to customers, the other is web conferencing, video conferencing. And we were saying even before the pandemic, when Zoom used to be worth, its market cap used to be kind of equivalent to the airlines, even though it had much smaller revenue is still the potential growth, we would say airlines should be buying these web conferencing companies. And the reason is that some of their most valuable customers are salespeople who pay full fare to get on a flight last minute to go close the deal. Talk to a customer. And if the airlines lose those customers, because now salespeople can get the job done by using Zoom, then they're in real trouble. And so to answer your question about this last year, what I think happened was it accelerated trends that were already there in some markets. Now, some markets just need to be helped, like restaurants and retailers, small businesses etc. But in other cases, it accelerated the trends, and I would make a prediction, I don't really like to make too many predictions, but I would predict that for enterprise sales, you're never going to get back to the percentage of sales people get on planes to close deals, as you had pre pandemic, it's just never coming back. Because people recognise that Zoom is very good way, it's more efficient, it's not as taxing on your body, we've all probably travelled a lot, where you're at different time zones, and people really want to get back to their kids and see their family and instead of spending time away, so I think there's so many benefits to that kind of accelerated change. Now, the airlines don't like it because they're gonna lose very valuable customers. But if you look at it, it's just the exact same reason that we switched from records, to iPods to streaming services, if the solution can get the job done faster, and more accurately, people will adopt it, customers will adopt it. I think the pandemic just accelerated that change that was already happening.

 

Andrei Tiu    

Thanks a lot. Yes, I agree with that. So let's see what the future brings, I guess. But until next time, what I wanted to ask you while we have people still here on the show, is who are your ideal customers for Thrv? Maybe there's a couple of businesses here that could use this and I'm sure you sparked the interest of many. And I know for a fact that this is one thing that brings a lot of value into multiple startups that we've worked with where we had to actually support in identifying something that should have already been there very clear, which is the unique selling point, the end customer, what are we selling? And this very important that we discussed about, which is what's the actual job that gets done by using the software product if they drop? So who, with the user of Thrv?

 

Jay Haynes   

Yeah, that's a great question. So it is we do have customers, anybody that are tiny startups all the way to fortune 50 companies. And we would say the ideal customer is just broadly, teams who really want to be customer focused. And there's different in especially in startups, there's different types of entrepreneurs, some are just, really focused on technology, which is fine, some have the problem themselves. I think those are probably the best entrepreneurs, they're so frustrated, it's not that they start a company solve a problem that they have. And that's effectively a way of doing jobs to be done, right, you know, how to, you're so frustrated with the job yourself that you're going to start a company to solve the problem. So broadly, it's teams product marketing, sales team that really want to be customer focused. And I will also say that the companies and teams that we work with usually find themselves in some sort of situation. And those situations, generally are they're struggling to succeed. So they haven't hit the revenue numbers, they really projected some sort of revenue numbers is not coming to fruition, or they've got a competitor who's entering the market, they can't really figure out their competitor. Or they're really trying to solve the what's,in the startup worlds, what's known as product market fit. They haven't really gotten that together, they keep launching features, and they keep thinking that next phase going to be their growth phase. And it just doesn't turn into growth. That's such an interesting question, we could probably do a whole nother show on product market fit. But what does that mean? And how do you solve that problem? And we work with a broad range of companies, we like working with startups, too, because we want them to succeed. And if you look at the odds are stacked against any startup. And if you look at venture returns, right, almost every startup fails. In fact, the entire venture industry, Bill Solomon from Harvard Business School, published data on this, that if if you didn't have the outside returns of the Google’s and Twitter's and Facebook's of the world, the entire venture asset class wouldn't be worth investing it, you'd be better off investing in the s&p 500. And for a lot of venture funds you would be because they don't crave returns. And from an entrepreneur standpoint, that's really disheartening, because your chance of succeeding a startup is almost zero. I mean, the number of startups to succeed is incredibly small. And so the odds are kind of stacked against you. And we really like helping those entrepreneurs who want to succeed, and not just fail fast and pivot. Right? I mean, those are kind of terms that startups hear all the time is you should fail fast, and you should pivot, and you should get your minimum viable product out the door. I think those terms, and that thinking leads entrepreneurs astray. And the reason why is you want to reduce your risk of failure, you don't want to keep failing. And you don't even want to launch a minimum viable product, I think that is the wrong phrase. You should launch a minimum valuable product, because your product has to be valuable to customers. Viability is not a criteria these days, you and I could sit here and write some software code and fire up some Amazon servers, and we'd have an app or a piece of software, it'd be viable. If we absolutely can, it's not hard to create technology these days, we could even manufacture something pretty easily. So both installing software and hardware, it's pretty easy to do that something can be viable, it will work. But is it valuable if any customer is going to care that it gets some job done for them. And that is what you should look at is that viability, not viability, but the value you're delivering, even before you invest in development. So those are generally the teams that we work with where they really want to solve these problems, they want to be customer focused, and it got some sort of situation where they want to do a better job.

 

Andrei Tiu   

Very insightful and very true as well. So you guys, you must know that Jay also has a history of successful investments as well as being a successful entrepreneur. So I think this was also a bit of the investor. But very good advice indeed. Okay, so for you guys interested in Thrv and JSay's ventures, we'll have all the links in the description of the episode below. Jay, if people want to connect maybe personally with you or discuss potential partnerships and things like this, where's the best for them to reach out to you?

 

Jay Haynes    

Yeah, great. I'm pretty easy to find Jay Hanes- j a y h a n e s. And yes, you can find me on LinkedIn or certainly, at thrv.com.

 

Andrei Tiu   

Super sounds good. Okay, so guys, as always, thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully you found this episode as insightful and useful as I did. And, Jay, thank you so much, again, for being on the show. Really Nice to meet you. And hopefully, we'll repeat this. I really like your point on product market fit. I think we didn't have the chance to explore that in depth on the show. So maybe we can talk about the next episode. And guys, as well, if you have any questions for us, like for Jay and I or you'd like us to discuss on something more specifically, and you feel that will be valuable for your business, hit us up either us at hello@marketiu.com or Jay and we'll try to make that happen. But until next time, Jay, it was a pleasure. Thanks so much.

 

Jay Haynes  

Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

 

Andrei Tiu   

It was a pleasure. Thank you for being here. And guys, as always, keep rocking it and we'll see you on the next episode. Have fun!