Email Framework: Jobs-to-be-Done

The Jobs to be Done (JTBD) framework is a useful approach to helping businesses focus on what their customers need. Instead of focusing on product features, JTBD looks at the problems or “jobs” that customers are trying to solve.

Although Jobs-to-be-Done is typically used for product development, Sales and Marketing are also able to apply JTBD because of how it makes crafting customer-centric emails easier.

Here’s a closer look at what the JTBD framework is and how to use it.

What is the Jobs-to-be-Done framework?

According to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, Jobs-to-be-Done is a special framework that helps companies understand customer behavior. 

The underlying principle is that people aren’t buying a product or service. They’re ‘renting’ it to meet their actual needs.

Instead of asking “Who is our target customer?”, the question you want to be asking is “What job is our customer trying to accomplish?” This will help shift your focus to the outcomes customers want.

JTBD vs traditional sales messaging: What’s the difference?

JTBD frames sales copy about the buyer’s context, pains, and desired outcome. It sells what a customer can achieve with your product.

The traditional approach centers on product features and selling your product.

Imagine you’re digging a bunch of holes and need a shovel. Traditional copy will sell you the shovel. JTBD sells you the hole. 

This helps the buyer know how to measure their own success with your product, which puts you on the same page with them. 

Example of Jobs-to-be-Done

Here’s a simplified example.

Ashley is 29 and lives in Seattle with her husband and child. She’s an account executive at a growing tech company. She enjoys cycling on weekends and is an avid coffee drinker (no wonder if she’s from Seattle).

Ashley decides to get an AI SDR for her sales team.

Is it because she’s 29, married, and drinks coffee? No.

She does it because her team spends hours every day sending emails and chasing cold leads, leaving little time to follow up and speak with warm prospects. What Ashley wants is to free up her team’s time to focus on closing deals.

Benefits of the Jobs-to-be-Done framework

At the end of the day, Jobs-to-be-Done is all about your customers’ and prospects’ motivation and context. That’s why even though it’s native to product development, it can be applied across multiple industries because all companies have clients who want their jobs done.

JTBD helps you look past the demographics and concentrate on the real reasons driving peoples’ decisions. You can then create emails that speak directly to customer pain points and present yourself as a solution.

Here are 3 reasons why you’ll want to use the Jobs-to-be-Done email framework for your B2B messages or the basis of your AiSDR personas.

Target real customer needs

JTBD draws your attention to why customers need your solution. Not just who they are.

By understanding their challenges and pains, you can tailor your emails to target the exact problem they want to solve. This makes your emails timely, relevant, and on point.

Personalize for better conversion and engagement

Rather than guessing based on demographics like age or location, JTBD helps you personalize your email content and touch on a prospect’s goals. This makes your outreach meaningful, thoughtful, and targeted without relying on assumptions.

As a result, by focusing on the job a prospect wants done, you can position your product as the best solution. Prospects see value, and they’re more likely to open, read, and respond, leading to better outreach performance.

Adapt to different customer segments

One of JTBD’s main strengths is that it isn’t tied to customer demographics or traits like age, job title, or industry. Consequently, JTBD emails are highly adaptable and easily adjusted to different customer segments without reworking the core content.

For instance, Company A is a small start-up that wants to automate lead generation with minimal time cost. Company B is a medium-sized business that wants to scale its outreach. Although both are very different in their firmographics, they share the same “job” – to streamline sales outreach while optimizing time.

Best practices for JTBD emails

Here are 6 best practices for creating JTBD emails:

• Identify the core job to focus on – Understanding the core job allows you to create an email that speaks to a prospect’s pains and needs.
• Keep the focus on the customer’s ‘job’ – Avoid the temptation of focusing on your product’s features. Highlight how your solution accomplishes the job. Instead of saying “AiSDR automates lead generation”, you might say “Win back 22 hours per week by having AiSDR run your outreach for you.”
• Use the customer’s language to align with their mindset – Resist using jargon or overly technical explanations. Keep your message simple and clear, using the vocabulary of the audience so that they know you get them.
• Appeal to emotions – Tap into the emotional reasons why someone wants to do a job, such as lower stress or more time savings. People buy on emotion (and they’ll sign on logic).
• Make your email concise and solution-focused – Buyers are busy, and they want quick, clear solutions to their pains. Similar to the Justin Michael Method, short, to-the-point emails are more likely to catch their reader’s attention and secure a positive response.
• Test and retest your JTBD emails – Run A/B tests consistently to see which jobs and pain points lead to better results. Customer needs and jobs change over time, so what worked before might not work now.

Common mistakes when using JTBD in emails (and how to avoid them)

JTBD fails when it’s vague, inconsistent, or still the traditional sales approach in disguise. Here are a few common mistakes and how to fix them:

To define specific and relevant jobs that resonate with your prospect from the first line, you need to know your audience really well, starting from their pain points.

How to research customer struggles for JTBD emails

Great JTBD emails come from great listening. Ask your customers about their struggles and hear what they’ve got to say. Some handy tactics are:

• Interviews – Talk to 5–10 new customers and 5–10 recent churners to capture their pushes, pulls, anxieties, and habits with open-ended questions 
• Surveys – Run brief (up to 10 minutes) JTBD surveys across your entire customer list to validate top struggles and desired outcomes at scale
• Support ticket analysis – Mine tickets and help-center queries for problem-related language
• Behavior patterns – Look for paths followed by a large share of customers (e.g., “pricing → integrations docs → trial”) and map them to jobs (budgeting, IT validation, hands-on trial)

What if you’re launching a new product and don’t yet have actual customers? Talk to potential customers, such as those who have expressed interest in your product or who are using a competitor’s solution but considering a switch.

Close the loop by testing email copy that frames the problem in the customers’ exact words from interviews (“Rushing to put together a report before standup?”). That’s how you sound like a partner and gain your prospects’ trust.

After you learn what your customers struggle with and how they frame that struggle, it’s time to create JTBD personas to segment your outreach.

Segmenting your outreach using JTBD personas

JTBD personas are similar to buyer personas in the way that they both represent a decision-maker on the customer side. The main difference is their starting point, which is demographic traits for a buyer persona and a job for a JTBD persona.

You will likely have multiple JTBD personas within one customer company:

Each of your outreach sequences must be built for a specific JTBD persona.

How to use the Jobs-to-be-Done framework in sales outreach

Here’s a step-by-step walkthrough of how to apply the jobs-to-be-done framework to emails.

What job will you focus on?

Start by figuring out the specific task your prospect is trying to accomplish.

For example, if your prospect is an account executive, the ‘job’ might be pushing deals through the sales pipeline faster or improving the team’s quality of outreach. Similarly, an SDR might need to run high-volume outreach.

Just make sure that you’re focusing on a job they want to get done, not a surface-level problem.

What struggle will you highlight?

Show that you understand the challenge they’re facing while trying to complete the job.

This helps build trust and shows you’ve taken the time to comprehend their situation. For instance, you might mention how slow and time-consuming prospecting can be or how tedious it is to manage leads and data entry efficiently.

How will you position your solution?

Present your solution as the ideal approach to getting their job done faster, easier, or more effectively.

People like specificity, so be specific about how your solution addresses their struggles. This is the perfect time to let your copywriting skills shine by using:

• Concrete phrases
• References and imagery your audience likes
• Present tense
• Non-round numbers

What are the results they can expect?

Try not to fall into the old habit of focusing on features.

Build your message around how your solution will improve their results and generate better performance. The trick is to connect your features with the outcome prospects care about most – a job well done.

What is their decision-making stage?

JTBD works for different decision-making stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. At each stage, the buyer has the same job but expects slightly different progress. Here’s how to tweak your copy to match these expectations:

To test the job and stage fit, build a simple matrix with jobs as rows and stages as columns. Draft two versions of email per cell, then A/B test them.

Write the subject line last, after you’ve already crafted the email body that makes a clear promise tailored to the job and stage. Your subject should reflect that promise. 

Best subject lines for JTBD emails (with examples)

Subject lines for JTBD emails should reflect the job, the struggle, or the outcome. Keep them short (5-7 words at most), specific, and human, like these examples:

• Still juggling spreadsheets? There’s a better way
• Close on time without weekend fixes
• Migrate reports without breaking approvals
• Publish exec-ready dashboards in minutes
• Stop copy-pasting CSVs every Monday
• Replace manual handoffs in finance ops
• Cut rework from your month-end checklist

Each of these subject lines points to a job customers “hire” your product to do, and the friction they want to escape.

You can use the customers’ exact words from surveys and interviews to craft JTBD subject lines. Try these, and track metrics to see how well they work.

Measuring JTBD email performance: Key metrics to track

The key metrics to track for JTBD email performance are:

• Response rate – How many responses do you get?
• Positive reply rate – How many yes’s, sign-ups, and bookings did you get?
• CTA conversion – How many prospects convert to customers at the end of the sequence?
• Time to first response – How much time passes between sending the first email and getting a response?

The latter metric reveals urgency: the stronger the job, the sooner you get a reply.

Tie wins to the job you targeted, not the persona you picked. That’s how JTBD becomes a repeatable email engine.

Jobs-to-be-Done example

Here’s an example of a possible JTBD email.

General framework

Here is the general structure of a JTBD email.

Example email

Here is a possible JTBD email following the main structure.