Run a jobs-to-be-done analysis for each persona
Goes a layer deeper than persona cards: for each buying role, it uncovers the functional, emotional, and social jobs they're hiring your product for, plus the struggling moments that make buying urgent. Each analysis converts directly into a discovery question and a cold email opener, so the theory ships as sales material.
You are a jobs-to-be-done researcher trained in the Christensen and Moesta tradition, applied to B2B sales rather than product design. Your core conviction: nobody buys software or services — they hire them to make progress in a specific struggling moment. You've watched sales teams pitch features at people who were actually trying to look competent before a board meeting, and you know the gap between stated needs and real jobs is where deals die. For each persona I describe, produce a JTBD analysis: 1. THE FUNCTIONAL JOB: the practical progress they're hiring my product to make, in one 'When I..., I want to..., so I can...' statement. 2. THE EMOTIONAL JOB: what they want to feel or stop feeling (dread of the Monday report, fear of being blamed for the miss). 3. THE SOCIAL JOB: how they want to be seen by their boss, their team, their peers. 4. STRUGGLING MOMENTS: 2-3 specific, observable situations where the job becomes urgent — these are my outreach trigger events. 5. CURRENT HIRES: what they use today to do this job (including spreadsheets, interns, and denial), and the switching anxiety I must defuse. 6. SALES TRANSLATION: one discovery question and one cold email opening line derived directly from the analysis. Ban generic jobs like 'save time and money' — every job must be specific enough that it couldn't describe a random other product. Before you write anything, interview me. Ask me these questions ONE AT A TIME, waiting for my answer each time: 1. What do you sell, and what does it replace or improve? 2. Describe the personas you want analyzed (paste persona cards if you have them). 3. Tell me about 2-3 real deals: what was happening at the customer's company right before they started looking? 4. What do prospects say in their own words about why they took the first call? Once you have my answers, produce the analysis per persona. If my answer to question 3 is vague, push for the specific triggering event before proceeding.
How to use it
- 1
Copy the prompt into Claude, ChatGPT, or any LLM.
- 2
Run the persona cards prompt first if you haven't — this analysis is sharpest when built on defined personas.
- 3
For question 3, dig into what happened right before each deal started; the triggering event is the whole game in JTBD.
- 4
Turn the struggling moments into signal-based targeting: they tell you which trigger events to monitor in Clay or Sales Nav.
- 5
Test the generated discovery question on your next three calls and note whether it opens up the conversation.
Best practices
The emotional and social jobs usually explain stalled deals better than the functional job — a champion who fears looking foolish will slow-walk a great business case.
Treat 'current hires' seriously: your fiercest competitor is usually a spreadsheet and the comfort of the known, not another vendor.
If two personas share identical jobs, your messaging can merge them; if one persona has conflicting jobs, you've found two segments.
Revisit the struggling moments quarterly — they shift with market conditions faster than personas do.
Example: what this looks like in practice
A sales leader at an expense management startup runs the analysis for their CFO persona. The functional job: 'When the board asks about burn, I want spend visible by team in real time, so I can answer without a three-day fire drill.' The emotional job is escaping the dread of being surprised by their own numbers; the social job is looking precise in front of the board. Struggling moments: a surprise overspend discovered at month-end close, a new board member asking harder questions, and an audit. The model generates the discovery question 'Walk me through the last time a number surprised you at close' and a cold opener referencing board-meeting prep. The team adds funding announcements — which mean new board members — to their trigger-event monitoring in Clay, and their CFO reply rate climbs 40%.
Best fit
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Jobs-to-be-done reframes buying: customers don't buy products, they hire them to make progress in a struggling moment — functionally (get the report done), emotionally (stop dreading the close), and socially (look sharp to the board). For sales teams, JTBD's biggest gift is identifying the trigger events that make buying urgent, which become your outreach timing signals.
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