Customer vs. Buyer: Key Differences!

Entrepreneurs get so focused on understanding target customers that they don’t always think carefully about actual buyers.

I was meeting a startup founder who was obsessed with perfecting the features of his app. He was selling a B2B software tool, and he and his team were pouring all their resources into development in order to make their product the “best on the market.” But his sales were stagnant, and he couldn’t figure out why. No matter how great his product functioned, he couldn’t get more people using it.

“Who is your primary buyer?” I asked him. “As-in who is the specific person at the company who is going to champion your product’s adoption and will be using it every day?”

“It’s probably someone on the marketing team,” he said. “Or anyone having to manage a lot of ad campaigns across different platforms.”

“And what’s the most important feature for that person?” I asked.

He spent the next few minutes talking about some sort of comprehensive campaign management tool that did something to help optimize ad spends. Honestly, I didn’t particularly understand, nor did I need to understand because I knew he was wrong.

He was exactly like so many other entrepreneurs I’ve met over the years: He was so focused on building his product that he couldn’t see what his buyer really wanted.

The real job your product needs to do

One of the best ways of explaining why products don’t matter nearly as much as most entrepreneurs think comes from the work of former Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen often spoke about the concept of “jobs to be done.” The idea is that people don’t just buy products because they want certain features; they “hire” products to perform a specific job in their lives. For example, I just bought a new iPad mini. An entrepreneur focused on features would assume I bought the iPad because I wanted a tablet that was small, lightweight, fast, powerful, portable, etc. But that’s not why I bought it. I bought it because I enjoy watching TV shows in bed at night before falling asleep, but I don’t want to disturb my wife, and I don’t want to watch shows on my tiny phone screen. As a result, I’ved “hired” the iPad to help me comfortably watch shows in bed without disturbing my wife.

By subscribing to this “jobs to be done” concept of Christensen’s, entrepreneurs start to understand that every purchase is made using the same basic principle. This means, in order for entrepreneurs to sell their products/services as effectively as possible, they need to stop trying to build amazing products and start trying to figure out what jobs their buyers are trying to get done. Admittedly, it’s not an entirely intuitive approach, but it’s very helpful for improving customer acquisition.

Discovering my product’s “job”

I had to learn this lesson the hard way. Back when I was in the same position as the entrepreneur I was meeting with and busy building my own B2B software tool, I spent the majority of my time early in the process trying to create an amazing product capable of creating enormous value for our customers. However, no matter how amazing my product functioned, sales continued to stagnate.

By chance (or maybe luck), one of my early buyers asked if we could add a way to print the metrics dashboard from the interface onto a shareable PDF. According to him, the current dashboard looked pretty on screen, but he could never get it printed properly when he wanted to show results to his boss.

The request was easy enough to accomplish, so we built a simple “share metrics” button that created a pretty PDF displaying all the key metrics.

Almost immediately after launching the “share metrics” button I started getting requests from other buyers. They wanted to be able to tweak the date ranges, they wanted to adjust colors, they wanted to add other data, and all sorts of other tweaks.

The number of emails I received amazed me. In just two weeks, more of my buyers messaged me about that one silly button than all the other messages I’d received about the core product during the prior two years.

That’s when I began to understand what was happening and how I’d been focused on the wrong thing. Despite what I’d believed, my product’s functionality was never the issue. Sure, it did something valuable for the companies that used it, but our customers didn’t associate that value with the person running the tool. The seemingly silly “share metrics” button changed that by allowing our actual buyers to easily demonstrate the value they were creating for their companies.

In other words, the “share metrics” button didn’t directly improve the functionality of the product to create more value for the company, but it improved the ability of our buyers to make themselves look useful to their superiors. And that sense of value was the real job our product was performing: it made employees look good.

Selling a “why” instead of a “what”

When I finally recognized the real job my product was doing, everything changed. I completely pivoted my company’s sales strategy. We stopped selling our software based on what it could do for companies that bought it and started selling it based on how it could help our buyers who actually had to use it.

The shift in our pitch was subtle but powerful. Instead of focusing solely on the product’s features, we began highlighting the fact that our product could make the employees using it look like rockstars to their bosses. And guess what? Sales increased dramatically. To understand why, you just have to think about it from the perspective of an actual user of the software. If you’re selling to mid-level managers at Fortune 500 companies, the people you’re selling to aren’t just focused on implementing a tool that helps their companies be successful — they’re focused on surviving in a complex corporate ecosystem where they need to prove to their bosses that they’re making smart decisions.

This focus on the human buyers rather than the corporate customers is where so many entrepreneurs mess up. They obsess about their product — their baby — and what it can do for the customers that use it while completely forgetting that their buyers are people with their own personal challenges. More often than not, your buyer’s biggest challenge is fundamentally different than whatever their companies need, which is why you always need to be asking yourself: What’s the real job my product is doing for my buyers?

Always remember that the success of your startup won’t be determined by how well your product works. It’ll be determined by how well you understand and address the true needs of the people using it.