Cedric Chin: Speedrunning the Skill of Demand. This is Part 1 in a series of essays about Customer Demand. Skill at understanding demand is what underpins the domain of marketing, sales, and product. There’s an old Peter Drucker saying that goes “the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer” (Drucker on The Purpose and Objectives of a Business)

It’s a little wild that we’ve never talked about demand here at Commoncog. There are thousands of articles about understanding customers. There are so, so many frameworks. Pretty much every good marketer and sales rep I know is obsessed with demand — even if they might not talk about it explicitly. Every attempt at new product innovation is ultimately concerned with seeking out latent market need.

And then we’ll talk about the revolutionary new ideas that The Heart of Innovation introduces.

So why are we talking about it now?

There are two reasons.

The first is prosaic. At the end of 2024, we at Commoncog completed our very first application of the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) Framework — an effort that took us around five months. We’re starting to apply the findings of that framework now. I think it would be useful to write about that experience, when it is still fresh

Second, I was introduced to a book named The Heart of Innovation late last year, when our JTBD interview process was still ongoing... I believe The Heart of Innovation is the first new contribution to the body of knowledge we have around customer demand since the JTBD framework — which itself was developed in the early 2000s.

I was forced to get good at understanding demand in the years between 2018 and 2021. I knew I was finally decent when I doubled the annual recurring revenue of a software company at the end of 2021, adding some seven figures to their top-line with no additional marketing spend.

How I Learnt Demand

I learnt demand in a very obvious way: I was bad at sales and marketing

when I left the company, I knew that if I was going to be effective at business, I would need to get good at one of either sales or marketing, and quickly. I picked marketing. And then I started Commoncog.

Starting a blog was a pragmatic decision. You can think of marketing as having two broad categories: paid or unpaid.

Unpaid marketing was basically content marketing (producing videos, podcasts or articles) that would gain word-of-mouth distribution and eventually — hopefully! — influence a buying decision.

In his 2022 book Learning to Build, entrepreneur and JTBD framework creator Bob Moesta argues that great product builders are really good at five different skills, which he’s observed again and again across the many hundreds of companies and clients he’s worked with. One of those skills he calls ‘uncovering demand’.

seeing struggles, context, and outcomes. (

Folks who are good at understanding demand will think about the nature of customer need without considering the constraints of the company or the product they’re currently involved with.

Perhaps a concrete example would be useful here. When you do content marketing, you quickly learn that you need to do three things:

• You need to pick a topic that is interesting to your target customer.
• You need a differentiated take on the topic — that is, a take that is different from other publications covering the same topic.
• Finally, you need the topic to be large enough, so that you don’t run out of things to write about.

While all three elements are — to some degree — important, that first thing is probably the most important consideration for a successful content marketing strategy. It doesn’t matter how attention-grabbing your content is if you’re not attracting folks who would someday buy your product

figure out who buys Tableau, and then figure out what they’re interested in reading about”.

properties of the most successful customers using Tableau. These are customers that you want to see more of.

Next, you figure out how to reach customers with those properties... what do they read?”

Maybe these folks don’t read. Never mind. Where else can I find them?”

The key thing to notice in that sequence of questions is the relentless focus on finding and then fulfilling customer demand, in a way that ignores neat categories like ‘marketing’ or ‘sales’ or ‘product’.

The customer does not care about your writing, or about your product... A customer buys your product because they believe it will turn them into a more awesome version of themselves. (Bad-Ass)

Sales Safari as a Method to Get Good Quickly

I got better faster only after I learnt Sales Safari from Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman. I paid for their flagship 30x500 course back in 2019, which was really expensive. Thankfully, they now offer a cheaper program called Sales Safari 101, which focuses only on the demand discovery technique that they developed. (customer discovery)

Hoy argues that you should not talk to your customer, but instead use Sales Safari on forum threads and social media hangouts.... My only caveat is that you must put in the work. Sales Safari is more difficult than you might think, especially if you’ve never done ethnographic research.

The Sales Safari Technique

Write the following headings:

Rough notes — Everything that doesn’t fit into the other categories goes here.

Pains

Worldview — Worldviews are approaches or stances towards the world. This is one of the trickiest elements of Sales Safari, but also one of the most important.

Users will rarely talk explicitly about their worldviews, so much of the worldview training in Sales Safari is directed at uncovering worldviews through keen observation.

Jargon

Recommendations — When people talk about pains, they tend to also talk about solutions to those pains.

It will take you more than an hour, on average, to process one call or one decently active forum topic using Sales Safari... Why is this so? The thing that makes Sales Safari difficult is that so much of the analysis is about what is unsaid.

I remember one session where we were listening to a customer support call. The person our rep was talking was the Head of Data for a multi-million dollar, growth stage e-commerce startup. He spent a full 20 minutes, on a 60 minute call, ranting on and on about his BigQuery bill... the analyst had racked up $10,000 in costs from that single day alone.

I stopped the discussion and pointed out that this assessment didn’t make sense. “Consider the context,” I said, “This guy has spent two years building a custom data reporting stack. The license for the commercial OLAP database they use probably costs in the tens of thousands each year... $10k in BigQuery costs is nothing for this team.”
No, I argued, the key pain this Head of Data was feeling was likely that BigQuery costs were unpredictable

when you are doing Sales Safari, you need to take the full context into account — both what is said and unsaid

This sort of analytical discussion repeated again and again until our notes converged — an arduous process. If I remember correctly, we did three customer calls per week for the first two weeks, and then split the workload for the next two weeks when I was certain they were good enough, for a total of 11 customers. This took us a whole month, at about an hour per call.

The end result of a Sales Safari research project is a folder full of notes.

If you are conducting a Sales Safari exercise with best fit customers (ideal customer), the Pain section of your notes will tell you what these customers actually bought you for. You can lump customers into categories based on this analysis, and then opt to reposition around one or two of these categories.

On the other hand, if the subject of your Sales Safari is a forum thread, the Pain section will be a collection of pain points you may start building products or writing copy for.

The Worldview section helps with targeting customers. As a marketer, it is much easier to target worldviews, as opposed to targeting demographics.

The Jargon list comes in handy when you do copywriting

Finally, the Recommendations section is useful when you have to write content marketing, or when you have to think about possible alternatives to your solution

it is easier to layer on new skills — SEO, growth, sales enablement, email campaigns, newsletters, copywriting — once you understand demand.

Wrapping Up

One neat thing about Sales Safari is that it packages a surprising number of effective demand concepts into one simple technique.

Not every customer will purchase your product to solve a pain point. Only customers with a certain worldview will do so. Your job is to seek out that worldview, so that you may filter for it.”

In marketing terminology this is known as market segmentation.

What happens when you want to go one step beyond identifying pain? What happens when you want to bend the arc of the buying decision?

This was exactly the problem that Bob Moesta — alongside legendary business professor Clay Christensen — sought to solve with the Jobs To Be Done framework