JTBD Radio

Announcer: Welcome to the latest addition of Jobs-to-be-Done Radio where we discuss how to apply the Jobs to be Done framework to understand why consumers switch from one product to another, and ultimately how to get more customers to switch to your product. Here are your hosts.

All right welcome to the latest edition of Jobs-to-be-Done Radio. I’m Chris Spiek. As always I’m joined by Bob Moesta and Irvin Folkes [SP]. What’s up, Guys.

Bob Moesta: Hey, Chris, what’s up, Man?

Irvin: Hey, Chris, how’re you doing?

Chris: Hey, Guys.

Also today we have a special guest, Matthew Gunson. Matt, how’re you doing?

Matt Gunson: Good, Guys, thanks for the invite.

Chris: Awesome, great to have you here.

So, a couple of administrative points here as we kick off. We have the next Switch Workshop coming up May 16, that’s a Friday, at Meetup Headquarters in New York City, so jump on Jobstobedone.org. You can find tickets there. As most of you know, if you’ve been listening to the podcast, we’ve been kind of working with the Meetup people for about a year now. They attended the last Switch Workshop, Dave and Brenna in New York City. I say, they’re one of the great kind of test cases. They’ve just taken the thing and gone gang busters with it, so it’s going to be great to be back there.

So, lots of activity on the online course as well. We’ve launched the Online course. It’s been probably almost a year now for that as well, tons of activity, lots of good reviews. There’s good discussions going on there, so if you’re listening to this and the Switch Workshop is peaking your interest, but you’re in a far away land and you can’t make it the Switch Workshop it’s a great alternative to go on and kind of learn at your own pace.

Irvin: Yeah, so what’s the status on the book?

Chris: The book, that illustrations are done, it’s laid out. We’ve got the cover design coming. I know there’s a lot of people kind of waiting for that, too, so we’re getting really, really close.

Irvin: Yeah.

Chris: If you have an idea for a name tweet it under #JDTB.

Bob: The book is so much harder than we thought it was going to be, it’s just crazy.

Chris: So, that’s coming. The last think I’ll say is, if you’re not a member of the email list on Jobstobedone.org and you find that you’re either missing podcasts or missing blog posts go on. We’ve got MailChimp integrated there. It’s really easy to go on and sign up for the email list and you might even see a couple of coupons come across from the Udemy course and things like that, so if you’re thinking about attending an event of jumping into the Udemy course it’s definitely worth signing up for emails. We try not to badger people too much. It’s usually a couple of emails a month at most. So, if you’re in the mindset of Jobs-to-be-Done it’s a great thing to be a part of and really easy to sign up.

So, let’s dive in. Matt, give us a little history here. You came to a Switch workshop back at 37 Signals a couple of years ago now. Then we were happy to see you again at MailChimp just a couple of weeks ago. How did you come to kind of discover Jobs-to-be-Done? Give us a little history.

Matt: Yeah, it was actually in San Francisco, but it was the first one.

Chris: Ah, you’re right.

Matt: Yeah. But, basically I think I kind of found it or came across it in the same way that a lot of different people have. I started studying Clayton Christianson’s work and kind of out of a need to understand what was going on with the business I had started on my own a few years ago. I was really fascinated by it, however, I found it difficult to really implement on my own, so I want to learn more and more. I kind of got through a lot of Christianson’s work and then was interested in this Jobs-to-be-Done thing and started just poking around on the Internet and Twitter and came across you guys. I’m a big podcast listener, so I was listening to you guys back in the low-fi days.

Chris: Aw, man, the garage days.

Matt: So that’s kind of how it happened. I became really fascinated by it, because I saw it as the piece disruption theory that I could actually practice and I could apply, and it could move into just about any role. Coming from a design and marketing background it really shaped the way I saw problems of marketing and advertising that implemented a lot with development and software. But, to me it just made perfect sense as a way to know the right things to say and at what time to the right kind of people, the right people to get that information really easily and be able to actually put it into practice.

So, that’s how I kind of started pursuing it and kind of how I’ve seen it in the past and am implementing it now.

Chris: So, what’s the name of your company? What do you do for a living Matthew?

Matt: Yeah, we’re Lane-Terralever. We recently merged from two separate ad agencies out here in Phoenix. E.B. Lane was the agency that I was with previous to the merger and Terralever is the agency that we recently merged with back in October, so we’ve been tighter almost six months and things are really looking great.

I’m the senior strategist here, so my role is basically, a client comes in, needs a website, client needs a commercial, client needs brand development, whatever they need they come in, and my job is essentially to help the creative team output stuff that will basically be in alignment with what the goals of the client are. In order to accomplish that I do some research and write up strategic documents that help guide the creative process and the outputs that our customers, our clients are coming to us for.

Chris: You do a lot of research, so the thing is, how is Jobs different from a marketing perspective than an advertising perspective? The jobs you’ve done kind of research method and tools different from what you usually do and when would you use it and when wouldn’t you use it?

Matt: Yeah, this is actually something we’ve been talking a lot about lately internally. In past the past–and we continue to use these methodologies as well–but traditionally it’s basically focus groups or it’s surveys. We also do interviews of the client’s stakeholders. There’s flaws with some of those approaches that, obviously, I know you guys have talked about and I’ve seen the weaknesses of focus groups where you actually lose a lot of really important information through group think and just digging deep enough at the right times and places.

So, Jobs fits in really well, in my opinion, as a layer with the focus group, but the great thing about Jobs is that it can also stand alone. It can be useful as a standalone research and strategy approach, so if we have clients that come in where maybe there’s not a budget to do a large focus group Jobs is a good approach for us to be able to still get what I feel is highly accurate, really informative, and highly detailed strategic information to help guide what we produce that client.

Chris: I really like the idea of it layering with focus groups, because I think a lot of people in marketing, advertising agencies are so dependent on that. It’ not like you have to stop doing what you’re doing, but it is a good complement where when you dig deep and you find kind of those causal mechanisms, and you have their language and again, you’re not talking to people and having to project where you might do in a focus group, but when you start to see real behavior you just get better language.

Matt: Yeah, and we do these map the customer journey. We do a customer journey map and the detail that you get from these interviews is so powerful and kind of filling the gaps that you might have from a focus group. I mean, when you have eight, ten people in a room, or even six or seven, you only have so much time and you can only get so much depth. So, when you’re interviewing these people individually it gives the opportunity to go much deeper, get much more granular information, and when you layer those interviews on top of each other you kind of see the story come to the surface and it’s really powerful.

Chris: Yeah, I think the story is the key and making sure that the story is real as opposed to kind of personas that can be aggregated or other things that just don’t–That they make sense almost in my world, it’s in the math world I can cluster and I can do different things, but at some point they still have to be real. So, to me that’s the beauty is that it helps temper that balance between kind of averaging too much or generalizing too much, and almost being too specific that there is no market for something, because it’s too small, but the two together can help you.

Matt: Yeah, and for me that’s always been one of things that’s been really attractive about Jobs is that you’re talking about real events you’re not summarizing a bunch of stuff and saying, “This group of people does this.” But, you have actual events and actual people. Personally, when I’m presenting a strategy it helps me feel a lot more confident and when I’m presenting knowing that the content that I’ve derived from my research is actual, it’s based on real people.

Chris: Yeah. It’s interesting, because I feel like I’m talking to, like, an expert user right now. It’s like you’ve gone to a couple of Switches, you’ve done interviews, it’s like old hat. When you think back, I’m interested to kind of hear, I understand kind of the connection with Clay and disruption theory and your studies around that, but I have so many stories of people who are like project managers and UX designers and things like that, where they’ll hear like a podcast or they’ll go to the Switch and they’ll connect it real quick to their work, because they can change the product, right? Even in like consumer packaged goods, it’s like, “Wow! I heard that story and I can think of changes that I would make to my product based on that.”

Tell me, what version of that happened to you as somebody in the advertising industry. Do you remember hearing a podcast, or a story, or an interview and making a connection back to like, “Wow! I could advertise to the job or I could use this in some way.” How did it kind of shape up for you? Because I don’t quite have it.

Matt: Okay, so I would say that the kind of Eureka moment, I guess, would probably go back to the mattress interview. So, studying about first disruption theory and then hearing what you guys were talking about with Jobs. Then actually hearing that and how it was done, I was just kind of blown away at how much information was gathered in that interview that would be relevant to creating a really strategically strong ad campaign. What comes out of that it details like–so, for example, that fact that the guy he wanted to be able to touch the product and feel it, but he didn’t need to lay down on the bed like he was doing at these other mattress stores. That would inform you that when we’re designing this package maybe we expose a corner of this, or when we’re sending this out for display at Costco let’s make sure we send a sample, which is what happened in that case.

But, it’s those little details like that that so well inform the type of things that you need to say, as well as the design of the packaging or the advertisement. When I heard that interview I was just amazed at how much material was there and how it could be integrated into a campaign.

I think then also going to the San Francisco Switch workshop. I’m trying to remember what the interview was there. I think there was a coffee maker.

Chris: Yeah, it was Nate and his coffee grinder from Precision Nutrition, yeah.

Matt: Yeah, so we’re hearing about the frustration, realizing that if we write an ad let’s address these frustrations that people are experiencing and then we can talk about how we can help solve them. I think if you look at a lot of advertising today a lot of it doesn’t address that type of information. It’s really focused on the products attributes and benefits and less so on how it can help you, and how it can help you solve a problem that you might be dealing with on a daily basis.

Chris: Yeah. For me when I was doing the homes, right? The big thing was is that you kept hearing people saying, “I just don’t think it’s possible for me to move, but you guys made it possible.” So, we kept hearing things over and over again, those kinds of messages, so once we were able to kind of capture that the ad was really around, “It is possible and here’s how we can help make it possible for you.” So we activated people into the market, because they weren’t even willing to try, because they didn’t think it was possible. Once we were able to say, “Hey, here’s–and we would tell stories about people how were stuck in their house or stuck in different places and let them use their words, so people could say, “Oh! That’s just like me. Maybe is they helped them, maybe they can help me.”

That to me was kind of the crux on the advertising side that was really about, as soon as you can get them to shake their head yes, like, “Yep, that’s me.” You’ve got the resonance for them to be able to kind of except some new solutions.

The other thing that we always kind of caution people about is like polishing the language. I was just working on a project last week. The client was doing a great job of hearing everything. They’re sending back like concepts and ideas, and that sort of thing. They had one that–I don’t remember the exact phrasing–but it was like, “This job is about enabling new behavior.” It’s like, they’re all about enabling new behavior and I wrote back a quick thing without trying to jab them. I’m like, “I can’t feel–was it like enabling new behavior because of a future possibility, because that happened in the past.” It was like two seconds later I got an email back and it was like, “You caught me.” I know they had done it subconsciously, but I looked at them like, “Everything else is so crystal clear and you have, like, these buzz words in there that you’ve polished.” They’re like, “Yeah, I didn’t thing about that enough and I’ll go back and listen to the interviews.”

Because it’s not enabling, it’s some other kind of pain of it’s–But I feel like advertising is kind of split, right? I think there’s some things where you can watch an add and really feel the emotion that they’re going after. Then in others it’s like, “Yep, the future and benefit guys took over.” They polished it and there’s all these grandiose things and there are words that we just never would use to describe our situations. On the messaging side it’s one thing I’ve got the throw out there.

Irvin: Yeah, that’s the fun part is that you know when you have a good job when you can use the language they use. It’s straight out of their mouth like, “Yep, that’s it.”

Matt: As I was thinking about it, there’s another experience. After having that moment with listening to the mattress interview–this is maybe a few months later–I did some interviews for some charter schools. There was an existing campus that had been around for a few years, but they were kind of having some issues, not issues, but their enrollments weren’t keeping up at the rate they wanted.

I think we’ll look at this kind of like a case study to illustrate. But, that’s the first thing that happens with an agency is, “Hey, we have a decline in sales,” or, “Hey, we have some new competition.” There’s some sort of problem that happens and then the client decides, “Oh, we need an agency to handle this.” So, these schools they approach me about doing some interviews. I did the interviews and really had a clear story come to the surface that was basically about parents hire the school, basically, to nurture their kids the way they would if they were able to. They all had these experiences where for whatever reason they weren’t able to. Some of them were homeschoolers and they couldn’t home school anymore, because they had to go back to work or now they had three kids homeschooling and it was just too much and they couldn’t handle it so they sent the older one “graduated” to go to this charter school.

So, the jobs kind of all fell around this idea of nurturing and the school did a really good job of that and the parents all kind of spoke to that idea in these interviews. So, as I was putting this together to hand over to the client it just kind of clicked in my head, “I need to design something so they can really see what this is going to look like implemented.” I’m a strategist, but I have a design background. I was an art director for many years in the publishing industry and that’s why I don’t work in the publishing industry anymore. That’s why I’m a strategist now, because that line of career kind of evaporated.

So, I sat down and started designing something and it was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve had designing, because every question was answered and I never had to stop to think about, “How is this supposed to look? What are the words I’m supposed to use? What kind of imagery should be present in this piece?” Everything was answered and I designed something within an hour and a half, an hour, and sent that over. They took a look at it and what ended up getting mailed out was almost spot on to what I had sent them. It wasn’t even intended to be like, “Hey, here’s your final design.” It was, “This is what something might look like.” But, because I had all this information from these interviews the design process was super quick, no struggle to figure out the right thing. There was no struggle, because I knew all the truth, all the facts in my head from talking to these people. To me that was really like a revelatory experience to see how powerful it can be in the design process.

Irvin: You said the most amazing experience in your life. Can you kind of contrast that with, what was it like before?

Matt: I’m sorry, what was that, Irvin.

Irvin: What was it like before? You said it was the most amazing experience you’ve ever had.

Matt: Oh, well I know it was like before. I think you’re pretty familiar with that, Irvin.

Irvin: Oh, yeah. I want to hear it from you though.

Matt: I’m referring to Bob’s–

Bob: Oh, Matt, don’t bring that up.

No, go for it, yeah.

Matt: No. But, I think back to when I was in design school and I always struggle with what I design has to mean something, but when you’re designing something that doesn’t have any, in some cases, any factual basis at all it’s just like a made up product or whatever. I kind of struggled and it was funny to watch the people who what they focused on was making it look cool. They could just zoom through a project and make it look awesome, but I always struggled with like, “This has to say something meaningful.” So for me, at times it was, yeah, it was like you get to a point in your design and you start asking questions, “What type face should I use? What kind of imagery should I use?” You just make your best guess at what you think will look right or what will match kind of what the existing brand is. You don’t have real information to make real decisions that you can feel real confidence in. I think Jobs really bridges that gap and I think it’s a huge addition to any creative process.

Chris: I feel like it just creates efficiencies. So one of the things in our product development kind of practice that we focus on in we talk about clarity and being able to translate the voice of the customer into mechanisms of value. What happens is that–To me you need really creative people to kind of fill those gaps when you do focus groups and projection, and all that stuff, but to me it’s so raw and on the table when you a Jobs interview that it’s just there. So to me the week of work to a couple of hours of work is really about having that clarity and the language that you don’t have to make it up and you don’t have to bounce it off anybody. It’s just there. To me you’re dealing with the raw building blocks of kind of advertising and design.

Matt: Right. The other thing is that because you interview people who have had some degree of struggle to make a purchase and a purchase that led to them becoming a customer, all this information is relative to what ends up becoming a sale, not only a sale, but like a new customer. I would think to any company new customers are what they’re really looking for or at least what they should really be looking for. So all this information that’s informing your design is focused on decisions that were in made and eventually the output of that is going to be growth for the company. That in my opinion is another great strength about Jobs is it’s focused on returning value to the bottom line to the customer.

Chris: Yeah, so I’ve been driving a lot lately and one of the books I’m listening to is Einstein’s biography by Ike Isaacson. To me it gets back to relativity. What I mean is we’re finding the most relevant point that which somebody buys something and then revolve everything around those relevant points as opposed to trying to find some absolute version of how much does somebody like something. So we’re changing the relative position of where we’re looking at and how we’re looking for value. So to me it’s a really important point that Jobs is different only because it starts at a different point and it’s looking at people who have already consumed and saying, what progress did they want to make? It’s not about why do you like the product, and what could you do with the product that you can’t do today? There’s no projectionism, we’re not trying to predict the future with it. We’re just trying to understand the mechanisms of how they did what they did today. So, it’s a very different reference point than most traditional research.

Irvin: And that’s my head exploded, nice.

Chris: Matt, you and I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago about kind of the agency’s role when it comes to strategy, because I know that connects pretty closely with what you’re role is with the agency. You told a story of how you think Jobs can kind of strengthen that strategic clarity, anything to say about that?

Matt: Yeah, I was alluding to it a little bit, but basically, like I said, we get customers, our clients they come to us when they have a need. They’ve already basically built up this business that’s making money, that people are buying stuff. For whatever reason, sometimes they don’t even know, often times they don’t know why exactly their business scaled, but a business it pivots, it tries to figure things out and then it hits on something that helps them scale. So, we have these businesses that come to us, they’re already scaled and they’re selling stuff. The business models they create are basically created with the intention of, “Let’s make us some money,” of, “Let’s make me some money.”

If you look at most entrepreneurs–and I think this is changing to a degree because of the awareness of things like Job-to-be-Done–but most entrepreneurs they start a business with the intent to make themselves money. They don’t necessarily start a business with intent to serve a customer need or to help people solve problems. So, because they create these businesses kind of in isolation and these business strategies and business models in isolation from, “Who are their customers?” A lot of what we see when projects come in there’s a lot of disconnect between what the client is asking for and what customers are actually doing. So, I see Jobs as a great way to help bridge that gap.

So, traditionally in the business a client-agency relationship you have this business model which needs to be fed people so it can output money. So, they come to us or they go to their internal marketing teams saying, “All right, we’ve created this thing which makes money now we need to feed it people so it can continue to output money.” So when they come to us we see that there’s disconnect there, so that’s where we come in and we do research. We research the competitive market. We research who their customer are, who they think their customers are. Then we find insights that will help to connect the sales that are happing with future sales. To me that’s not a complete loop, right? So if we’re saying, “Okay, we’re understanding why people buy and we’re going to now use that information to help more people come in and buy stuff from you.”

That’s just a downward motion from the top. You’ve got the business model, the business strategy at the top. They’ve got a marketing team that comes up with the marketing strategy. Then you’ve got an agency that is tasked with creating these outputs, whether they’re a brand campaign, whether they’re TV spots, whether they’re a website that are aligned with this stuff, but because we’re so close to the customer, because our job is to bring more customers in we see where those disconnects are. What I think Jobs can be used to do in an agency environment is to constantly be close to the customer then take that knowledge and kind of move it back up the chain. So, we can take that knowledge and see how those outputs need to be created, those websites, those brand campaigns, those TV spots. Then we can move up into the marketing strategy and say, “We have this information from your customers that says these things. We know that your customers are experiencing these kinds of frustrations with other products We know that they’re attracted to your product because of this other reason. We think this is information that can be useful to you in developing a marketing strategy.”

But, if you took it a step further and you thought about, “Okay, C-Suite, we have this information that we’ve gathered from your customer and we think that you can now use it to create a business model that is in complete harmony with what’s happening at the consumer level.” That who business cycle, that whole energy is going to be, I think, better aligned. If you can continually stay close to the customer you’re going to be able to continually feedback information that’ll keep the business model aligned with the existing customer demand.

So, I don’t know if that was too heady. I have a slide I can put in the show notes.

Chris: Perfect. No, I don’t think that was too heady at all. You’ve kind of told that story or reiterated that to me a couple of times. It rings true. I think part of it is that it also–The beginning part of it rings true to kind of the stories that I always allude to from my web design and development days of when a client comes to you and they have a hunch of what’s going on with their consumers and you’re going to try to build something off that hunch. It’s not only difficult, but it becomes even more difficult when you look at it and say, “It doesn’t jive with me. My gut isn’t kind of aligned with this.” Then you’re in a situation where it’s like, do you go with the client’s gut or do you go with your gut? In the end I think if you embrace Jobs-to-be Done it’s like, “Why don’t we look at consumers and talk to them and not rely on either one of our gut instincts, because that’s always kind of a big leap.”

Matt: Yeah, and I think as an agency tries to get greater influence with the client in developing strategy and developing their outputs whether that’s influencing the product or whatever. I just think having this really proprietary granular customer information is it’s just bold. It’s like it should be the point from which strategy is created, because it’s real people making real choices in real context. The product of which is that they are gaining revenue on their balance sheet. I think it’s invaluable to an agency and an agency can be in a good position to help influence not only the marketing and the outputs from a marketing strategy, but also the strategy that moves upward from there, because they can be so close to the customer.

Irvin: All right, so Matt, you have this great new tool. You say, “I’m going to go out and do interviews.” Was there any resistance to you selling it in, because your company just merged? Two successful companies come together to make an even better successful company. I can’t believe they were all just saying, “We can’t wait to do this new thing call Jobs.”

Matt: [inaudible]

Irvin: I don’t want [inaudible 34:56], but can you talk about, was there any resistance or was it just a matter of, “We’ve been waiting our whole live for Matt to show up with this thing.” Can you kind of talk through how you got it adopted?

Matt: Well, just as you might experience, I think, with any innovation within any organization, when something’s new and unfamiliar it takes some work to get it integrated and implemented. So, yeah, I’ve been seeding conversations with Jobs-to-be-Done point of view for a long time. Then my company sent me out to the MailChip Switch seminar there in Atlanta and that was great, because at that point I kind of became the champion of the idea within the organization. I came back from there and was able to teach a lot of what I learned to people and now seeing it get embraced it’s exciting.

So, yeah there’s always some degree of struggle, but my experience was, as I continued to talk about it and share ideas with people it just kind of incrementally more support. Then at some point also I think people who are trying to implement this need to kind of take a big swing at the right time and at the right place. Talk to the right people about advancing the idea. I was fortunate to have some successful outcomes with those conversations.

Now at this point where, like I said, we’re implementing this as a layer. I don’t foresee this being the sole approach that we take, ever, because there’s so many different ways to approach getting market knowledge, but I think it’s one that will provide really rich information and really successful results in the future. I’ve already seen, from the experiences I shared with you guys about the interview with the schools, some of the great results that we can have and how it can influence design and make a big impact. So, I think it’s going to be really productive, really exciting.

Chris: Yeah, I think it’s really important–I think we’ve touched on it a couple of times–but I think it’s important to always reiterate, you don’t need to throw away all your other tools to do Jobs. I think that’s–Irvin asked a great question about is there resistance or how was it received. It’s one of those things where it’s like, “No, we need to keep the processes going that have proven themselves to be valuable to us. We’re not going to throw it away, but let’s add this in and see if it gives us a little bit of better resolution or different resolution or different data on the consumer.”

I saw–I don’t know if it was tweet or a blog post–but something this past week and it was like, “The Jobs guys hate personas.” It was like this diatribe around like, “I’ve made millions of dollars around personas.” And it’s like all we’re always saying is that don’t look at Jobs and just say, “I already do personas, so I don’t need Jobs.” We’re not saying that personas don’t have a role or that they’re not valuable, but we’re always kind of careful to say, “Do personas, but maybe talk to a couple of customers this way and see if it enriches the personas or give it give you some different data points.” It not that we hate other methods, it’s just that there’s a time and a place and I think they’re a little bit different.

Matt: That’s exactly what we’re doing. Personas are a part of our process. As I’ve shared with people of the approach and the results of this methodology I think people see the value in the granularity of detail and how important that can be, or maybe a better word is the fidelity of the insights that come through these interviews. It definitely fills in the gaps on personas. I think also, it not only fills in the gaps, but verifies some of the information that comes through the personas as well, so it’s an awesome layer with existing approaches.

Irvin: Yep, I agree.

Chris: So as we kind of wrap up, I guess the last question I have for you, is we’ve got listeners and they’re in this advertising space, who do you recommend that they learn more or dive into this? What would be your recommend path to learn more?

Matt: Well, I think if people are already gathering the information that you guys are putting out, obviously going to Jobstobedone.org is an awesome resource, a lot of great information there. But, if you’re looking for something beyond that, to me the best thing to do is to start practicing it within your scope the best that you can.

I think the Switch workshops are really great, because you see firsthand people doing an interview. You get to do an interview yourself and that’s a great way to kind of get some exposure to it. But I think then, as I talk to our organization about doing this it can be a really low cost approach, so to me it’s can fit in almost any project. So, if you’ve got a project where they’ve approved some budget to do some personas or do to some a focus group if you can fit in on your own some time to do a few interviews, you can reach out to those customers, do those interviews, and bring those insights to the table in addition to this other stuff. I think that’s a great way for people to kind of get some experience with it and show some knowledge and some strategic information that’s going to help and augment what the company’s doing, just to show that value that the process brings, just bring it to the table.

So, I would say at some point you have to start practicing it in some way. It’s just great that it can be a low cost application, so it makes it possible for people to practice it on a small scale within their scope. That’ kind of been my experience, my approach.

Bob: I think that’s great advice. Chris, I believe you’ve said it a couple of shows back. If you haven’t had the time to get to a Switch workshop, you haven’t done the online course, if you do nothing else grab five customers that have recently switched and just dive in. Listen to the mattress podcast, listen to the cell phone podcast that we posted and kind of hear how we do it and then just dive in. Because, if you just need to tie your efforts to actual consumer truth, you’ll be so much further along by just doing that than saying, “Oh, I have to wait to this,” or, “I can’t to this thing, so I’m just going to keep doing it the way I’ve always done it.”

Irvin: Right, yep.

Chris: I’ll reiterate that too. We were talking to Ryan a couple of week ago from 37 Signals and he has a situation where he was like, “I had a problem I needed to solve and it I know that you guys had kind of taught me all of the rigor that I needed to think about with regards to recruiting, but I also realize that if I were to start going down that path it would jam the whole process up.” So he’s like, “I grabbed ten people out of the database. I sent them all an email saying, “Hey, you want a $50 gift card? I need to get on the phone with you.” It was like brute force kind of interview style.” It think that’s kind of what you’re speaking to. As much as we try to provide depth and tips and tricks, and stuff like that don’t let it hold you back from just saying, “Hey, can I talk to you for an hour about how the heck you bought this product?” And just get as much detail as you can. It’s like what you said, Matt, just kind of jump in if you can.

Matt: Yeah, at some point you’ve got to do.

Chris: Yeah, awesome. Well, thanks for being on. If someone wants to follow you what’s your Twitter handle? What’s the best way to follow you? Maybe give us the Lane-Terralever website if you want to spell that out, too, that would be great for people to have.

Matt: Sure, yeah. It’ laneterralever.com. It’s long one, but yeah laneterralever.com. We’re based in Phoenix, but we’ve got clients throughout the country. This is definitely an approach we’re integrating presently into the work we do with our clients, so it’s very exciting.

Chris: Cool, and if they want to follow you what’s the easiest way?

Matt: Oh, yeah. I’m on Twitter at MatthewGunson and as well at design_disrupt. That is more focused on Jobs-to-be-Done and disruption theory.

Chris: Cool. Fantastic, thanks for your time.

Irvin: Thanks so much.

Chris: Yeah, great catching up with you and for all the listeners I hope to see you in New York City on May 16th at the upcoming Switch Workshop.

Talk to you soon, guys.

Matt: Thanks, guys.

Bob: See you.

Irvin: Thanks, Matt. Bye.

Chris, Matt: Bye.