Personas don't buy - People trying to make progress do

Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) theory helps you see what most go-to-market (GTM) teams miss: how buyers actually decide.

👀 Why are most GTM teams still telling stories that buyers don’t believe or care about?

Jobs to Be Done has been around for decades. And yet, it still sits outside most messaging, sales, and campaign work.

JTBD works—but it’s unfamiliar.

It’s a shift in thinking. And for most teams, it requires a leap: out of the funnel, out of the persona deck, and into the buyer’s real decision-making process.

👇 Here’s what happens when you stop guessing—and start listening to how decisions really unfold.

JTBD Is Still in the “Innovator” Phase, A long way from Mainstream Adoption

Clayton Christensen helped popularise the idea more than 20 years ago, working closely with his friend and collaborator Bob Moesta, who remains one of its most persistent and practical champions.

Together, they introduced a way of thinking that challenged how we define value and why customers buy. People don’t buy products; they hire them to make progress in their lives.

JTBD is moving from the “Innovators” phase of Geoffrey Moore’s Technology Adoption Life Cycle to a much larger cadre of “Early Adopters’. No dominant vendor is pushing it. There’s no platform standardising it. There’s no certification, making it credible to procurement teams.

It’s open-source thinking, practised by a distributed guild of consultants, operators, and early adopters. This creates depth of practice among those who use it, and invisibility among those who don’t.

The practitioners who’ve invested the time to test the theory, build practice, and learn how real change happens inside buying decisions see transformational results. Without a commercial gorilla championing the approach, it stays confined to the flat part of the innovation curve.

This is still early. The signal is unmistakable for those paying attention. With this comes the opportunity to differentiate, and early adopters will gain a competitive advantage, because “How you sell, trumps what you sell”.

🔗 Christensen Institute on JTBD

The Status Quo Has Strong Gravity

I've run messaging workshops for the past 20 years, like everyone else. The top rep. A product lead. Someone from marketing. The CEO or whoever could tell the story best. We’d map capabilities to pain points, build personas, and debate positioning.

It felt collaborative. Sometimes brilliant. But it always started from inside the building.

That process is still the default in most teams. This happens because it’s familiar, rather than because it works.

Sales and marketing practices haven’t kept up with how people actually make decisions. And while the buying behaviour has radically changed, the story most teams are telling has not..

The Most Useful Insight Is the Buyer’s Own Story

The most effective teams start with direct conversations with recent buyers to understand how decisions were actually made.

What they liked comes later. What they hope you build next comes later. What changed, and what almost stopped them, comes first.

Inside those stories, four forces show up every time: The supporting forces for change, juxtaposed by two forces opposing change.

• The push of the problem – something about the current state became untenable
• The pull of a better outcome – a picture of progress that felt worth pursuing
• The gravity of habit – the comfort and justification of staying put
• The anxiety of change – risks, friction, uncertainty, and fear of regret

These four forces are your buyer’s reality. And in 95% of presentations, they’re nowhere to be found.

Until they are, your GTM is mostly guesswork.

When Insight Leads, GTM Delivers Measurable Outcomes

Once teams understand how decisions actually unfold, the work gets dramatically more effective.

• Intercom saw 500% growth in just 18 months after applying JTBD methodology, quadrupling website traffic by speaking the language of demand-side and adding 3× revenue through better pricing based on how customers actually valued their progress.
• Mindit grew its customer base by 50% after a 90-day JTBD GTM sprint by repositioning its offerings. They ceased competing solely on price and began emphasising the strategic co-creator role they hold within their customers' IT organisations, highlighting the trusted partnership, innovation, and risk reduction they deliver. This shift changed how prospects viewed Mindit, and the decision shifted from price to outcomes.
• Autobooks, working with Gia Laudi, Claire Suellentrop, and the Forget the Funnel team, transformed their growth trajectory by narrowing focus to the job that mattered most: helping small businesses get paid. Initially positioned as an “all-in-one” financial platform, they discovered through JTBD interviews that customers weren’t hiring them for bookkeeping or accounting—they just wanted credit card payments to land directly in their bank account. That insight reframed the messaging, onboarding, and product experience. Within 30 days, sign-ups jumped 64% and credit card payment adoption grew 300%. One clear job, clearly communicated, changed the game.

These are step-function changes that happen when your GTM aligns with how decisions actually get made.

• Sales conversations simplify
• Messaging becomes easier to write and land
• Campaigns stop trying to invent urgency
• Teams align around what actually matters

This is field intelligence. And it changes everything.

GTM Stalls When the Narrative Misses

When deals slow down, the default response is more activity. More outreach. More content. Another hire. A sharper pitch.

Activity isn’t the issue. The story doesn’t match how the buyer sees the decision.

You fix this by changing where your message begins, rather than by refining your message.

JTBD gives you that reset point.

If You’re in Market and It’s Getting Harder to Move Deals…

You’re experiencing something real. We’re seeing the same patterns everywhere:

• Weak pipeline
• Low win rates
• Elongated sales cycles, numerous stakeholders
• Slow, flat, or declining growth

Some of that’s structural. AI is reshaping priorities. The SaaS technology adoption curve is in the late majority or laggard phase, and AI Agents are driving a completely new cycle of adoption. Buying criteria are evolving.

A core issue remains. Most teams still don’t understand the buyer’s decision as a story of progress.

JTBD does. And it gives you the tools to translate that story into a clear, confident, commercially practical GTM.

Comment JTBD or reply, and we’ll share how teams are using this approach to unlock momentum without guessing, pitching, or waiting.

There are no templates. There are no funnels. Just buyer stories, told well.