Organisations have long relied on correlative data—demographics, purchase history, and usage patterns—to guide their innovation, sales, and marketing strategies. While useful, this approach often failed to explain why customers made their choices. The Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework provides a game-changing lens that shifts the focus from correlational patterns to the contextual needs driving customer behaviour.
JTBD theory shifted the conversation from who customers are to what they’re trying to accomplish. This paradigm shift redefined how innovation, sales, marketing, and product development teams approach the challenge of delivering new offers that meet customer needs and the jobs they hire products and services to achieve. The application of the framework to the buying journey has yielded critical insights into how business customers make decisions. With AI disrupting the buying journey and how customers search for information, this framework is more important than ever.
The Jobs to Be Done Framework
Clayton Christensen’s seminal article in the Harvard Business Review, “Know Your Customers’ Jobs to Be Done”, solidified the JTBD theory’s relevance across industries. The article laid out critical insights that shaped how companies understand their customers.
Customers hire products to solve specific “jobs”: Products are not ends in themselves but tools customers use to complete desired outcomes. For example, commuters “hire” a breakfast smoothie to save time while satisfying hunger.
Context is king: Buying decisions are influenced more by the situational context than demographic data. The same customer may “hire” different products based on differing scenarios.
Workarounds signal unmet needs: Observing how customers adapt existing solutions to fit their unique context can reveal unmet hidden needs.
By embracing this mindset, businesses can uncover not just what customers want, but why they want it—and how to deliver value more effectively.
Applying JTBD to the B2B Buying Journey
Researchers from Gartner found that traditional sales and marketing models focused on buying committee roles, funnel stages, and company profiles often failed to capture the complexity of B2B purchasing.
By applying JTBD theory to the B2B buying journey, they uncovered disruptive insights into how business customers make decisions.
Their research found B2B buyers don’t follow the linear journeys that traditional sales funnel models suggest. Instead, buyers move through non-linear paths as they seek solutions to their unique “buying jobs.”
These buying jobs generally fall within four categories:
- Problem identification
- Solution exploration
- Requirements building
- Supplier selection
Buyers use a combination of digital and human interactions and most buyers revisit at least one buying job during their purchase journey.
Customers seek information to advance their buying jobs to be done, not just to compare vendors. Gartner found that 77% of B2B buyers found their purchase journey “extremely complex.” They don’t just want features—they want content and interactions that help them resolve uncertainties and advance their decision-making.
Consensus-building is a major challenge: Larger buying groups make decisions collaboratively, meaning that sales and marketing teams must address varying priorities and help align decision-makers around shared goals.
This insight disrupted traditional thinking about how marketing and sales teams approach customer journeys. It’s no longer just about selling a product but helping customers navigate the complexity of their “jobs.”
The Changing Role of Marketing Content and Journeys
With these revelations, marketers must rethink how they design customer journeys and architect content strategies. Key changes include:
From linear to flexible journeys: Marketers must create modular, non-linear pathways that cater to buyers' varying needs. This includes enabling customers to enter and exit the journey at multiple points.
Context-focused content: Instead of pushing product features, marketers must deliver resources tailored to the specific problems customers face in their context. Think interactive tools, self-service portals, and detailed case studies.
Facilitating alignment: Content should help buyers within an organisation find common ground. This includes providing data points, decision frameworks, and collaborative tools to ease internal consensus-building.
By understanding their buyers’ jobs and crafting experiences that solve them, marketers can ensure their strategies align with how modern customers make decisions.
AI Search and JTBD
Personalised recommendations: AI-driven platforms like chatbots and search engines can now deliver personalised answers to specific “jobs” in real time, allowing companies to provide highly contextual solutions.
As customers turn to AI-driven search tools for answers, marketers must optimise content for conversational AI platforms, ensuring their solutions surface when customers seek help.
In this new world, a brand’s value lies in its ability to solve specific jobs effectively.
Brands that adopt a strategic JBTD approach to their communication strategies position themselves as indispensable partners in their customers’ success.
As AI technologies and dynamic branding strategies continue to evolve, JTBD provides a guiding principle: focus on what customers are trying to achieve and design every interaction to support that journey.
