What People are Saying
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“Bob has already brought the benefit of applying his JTBD principles to two of the three most important areas in business: product strategy and marketing. This book tackles the third and arguably the most important: sales. Most sales gurus obsess about how to sell. Bob instead invests his time in the more important and underserved side of the equation: how people buy. The result is a fresh perspective and new ideas for an age-old trade.”
Des Traynor, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Intercom
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“I have always enjoyed my interactions with Bob Moesta, as do our demanding students. His work with regard to JTBD is top shelf. I am so glad he is now taking his creative engineering mindset to sales with his new book “Demand-Side Sales 101.” Sales is the lifeblood of any organization and unfortunately, it is too often seen as black magic. We need a more systematic way to approach sales and this extension of JTBD to sales fills an important gap. I recommend this book to anyone in business because nothing really happens until there is a sale.”
Bill Aulet, Professor, MIT'S loan managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, and author of Disciplined Entrepreneurship
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John Roselli, General Manager, Bose Health
“Bob applies his engineering mindset to the sales process. His unique perspective puts a new spin on sales that shows the reader how to sell from the buyer’s perspective. What results is a thoughtful and comprehensive book that equips you to look at sales through a different lens, with frameworks that make it easy to apply the theory.”
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“Bob continues to innovate and apply JTBD principles to many aspects of a business. Sales are one place where it is desperately needed. His empathetic perspective and diverse background bring a fresh perspective to an age-old—and critical—set of skills and disciplines. Most impressively, Bob has applied his engineering thinking to create a process that mirrors how people buy, not how we want to sell. Progress should be the new mantra for sales.”
Craig Wortmann, Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship, Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University; Founder and Executive Director of the Kellogg Sales Institute; CEO, Sales Engine, Inc.
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“I recently took on the role of leading marketing and needed a resource that helped me cut through all of the marketing buzzwords and fads. My company is counting on me for results, not vanity metrics. This book has enabled me to truly understand how best to engage with prospects at each stage of their decision. We have moved away from pushing features at prospects to engaging them in conversations that offer benefits on their terms. As a result, our sales team has prospects who are ready to make qualified decisions, and our account management team has clients that purchased for the right reasons.”
Derik Sutton, Vice President Marketing, Autobooks
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“For many people, sales is either some version of order taking or persuading people to purchase something they may or may not need. Bob reclaims the heart of all great sales: empathetic understanding of what people need and giving them just the right solution to a problem. Using a JTBD approach, Bob helps us see the how and why of people’s purchasing process, and that will fundamentally change how you engage your customers, how you train your people, how you market. If you are an entrepreneur, an aspiring businessperson, and CEO, you need this knowledge.”
Paul LeBlanc, President, Southern New Hampshire University
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Andy Weisbecker, Senior Director, Digital Experience, Target Corporation
“Immediately intuitive but incredibly rich; thinking in Jobs moves you from anecdotes wrapped in business jargon to casual insights in the language of your customers.”
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“The world of business creates, builds, and sells products and services based on attributes, averages, and correlations. The problem is people are not average and their demographics don’t cause them to buy your product. People buy things based on a struggling moment, their current context, their future desired outcomes and trade-offs they are willing to make at the moment. Bob Moesta has taken these simple observations and flipped the lens on the world of sales. This book builds on my foundations from The End Of Average, and uses cause and effect (not correlations) to builds a set of frameworks and tools to change how companies see a customer from just WHO they are to wider set of data including WHEN they struggle, WHERE they struggle, and WHY, thus changing how sales, marketing, and customer support interact with each other and the customer. This book will not only change the way you structure your organizations and sell but change the way you as an individual buy in the future.”
Todd Rose, Professor at the Harvard Graduate School Education and Authored the bestselling book, The End of Average
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“Selling is not a dirty word, yet all too often the traditional academy has treated it as such. It is a lifelong pursuit—the last mile that connects humans and brings us all together. And yet we receive far too little education in how to do it well. Bob Moesta has been thinking about how to do sales well for years—by helping customers make progress. This is the first product in a groundbreaking effort to peel back the layers to selling effectively—something we all do every single day of our lives.”
Michael B. Horn, Co-author, Choosing College and Co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute
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“Sales has always been such a critical component of any successful startup company but are rarely if ever, taught in academia. There are very few sales professors. Why is that? This book fills a muchneeded gap by enabling sales to get back to the core of business education. This is our first chance to start teaching basic principles to prepare entrepreneurs and future business leaders on how to navigate the complexity of sales.”
Mike Belsito, Co-founder of Product Collective; adjunct professor of Design Innovation at Case Western Reserve University
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“As an investor and advisor of early-stage ventures, I am always looking for ways to help my companies accelerate sales growth and lower customer acquisition costs. I’ve been applying Bob and Greg’s Jobs to Be-Done sales framework for years and it has proved to be the most powerful and broadly applicable I’ve ever seen. This book has packaged complex topics into a consumable format and is a must-read for anyone in sales.”
Andrew Glaser, Managing Partner, Laser Ventures
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“The Jobs to be Done theory will change the way you think about sales. But more importantly, the theory will change the way you think about life. It is a beautiful masterpiece because, at its core, it’s simply about helping people make progress. And what could be more noble than that?”
Efosa Ojomo, Global Prosperity Led, Clayton Christensen Institute
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“This book proves that just because a company can make something, doesn’t mean that they should! I love the notion that Bob shares around creating products based on the struggles that consumers are experiencing and the white space that is created when you understand consumer demand and the hacks that consumers have created to meet it. As a product developer, demand-side sales enable us to design the right product for consumers, trading off frivolous features and benefits. This book is a game-changer for teams that want to create products with consumer value.”
Lauren Lackey, President, Centauri Innovations; former VP of R&D, Product Development Consultant
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Jay Gerhart, Director of Innovation, Atrium Health
“Jobs to be Done theory, and specifically Bob’s method of applying it, has been transformational for me in my professional development. His simple but elegant framework, the Forces of Progress, is one of the most useful tools I’ve learned in my career—and personal life. These concepts are going to be so useful to the sales profession—a fundamental reset on purpose and practice.”
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“At some top business schools, we struggle to effectively teach sales—indeed, there continues to be a raging debate about whether sales can be taught. Leave it to an engineer like Bob to show us how. Whether you are looking to learn sales or teach it, Bob’s book should be essential reading.”
Ethan Bernstein, The Edward W. Conard Associate Professor Business Administration, Harvard Business School