What are Buyer Jobs and why does it matter?

Funnel in the sales and marketing world is a fictional character made up inside the drama that is an extremely narcissistic profession.

People who buy solutions to do not THINK or ACT inside the linearity of this mythical character.

Instead they are surrounded by chaos and seek to do a few things, in a very decentralized and chaotic way, to make decisions to buy.

Buyer Enablement is a thing and it is a thing for good reason.

Gartner's view of it can be seen here and is generally the framework I believe in.

Their definition is this. 

"Buyer enablement is the provisioning of information that supports the completion of critical activities necessary to make a purchase. Just as sales enablement helps sellers sell, buyer enablement helps buyers buy by providing them with prescriptive advice and practical support to make the buying process easier to navigate and complete"

Further down their page they introduce Buyer Jobs and tell their readers that a purchase will not be made until the buyer satisfies the requirements of each job.

They are:

• Problem

• Solution

• Capability

• Vendor

• Validation

• Consensus

These jobs do not happen in order and often are happening on different teams by different people who are often not talking to each other.

This creates a lot of frustration for sellers because it is the single biggest reason deals either dont happen or take way too long to happen.

For the same reasons, buyers get frustrated.

What they need is help navigating these Jobs in a way that drives consensus among all the parties concerned and there is no one better to help than the seller.

But vendors have to shift their approach to marketing, sales and sales enablement to do more to enable the Buyers ability to navigate these jobs.