Make customer progress your growth engine
Your method for a customer-centric and sustainable growth strategy.
What is your business challenge?
Not exactly knowing what customers care about and how they buy is a leading cause of inefficiencies and failures.
- Disagreement over customer needs
- Need to constantly adapt the product in development to changing requirements
- Marketing messaging trail and error
- Not knowing why customers leave
- Need for discounting to sell
- Building a product without a sufficient market
- Not achieving digital transformation objective (>70% fail)
- Ineffective positioning of the product
- Offer product too expensive or too cheap
- Failing to impress customers
Learn what customers want, what to build, and how to sell. Eliminate the root cause of issues and risks.
Your action plan
Take advantage of a new Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) based customer-centricity strategy. Deploy a strategy development method that realizes the greatest market potential and is supported by your stakeholders.
So, you think you know what customers need to buy?
The belief that you know your target audience well enough is your biggest liability.
Plausibility – deceptive certainty
Plausible assumptions about customers give you a false sense of safety.
According to our analysis, without targeted customer discovery, cognitive biases and blind spots of organizations are significant:
- up to 90% factors that impede the acquisition or use of a new solutions are unknown,
- up to 81% of an organization’s assumptions cannot be validated,
- on average, only 30% of an organization’s assumptions can be confirmed.
The plausibility trap - All your assumptions about the market are plausible but you don't know your biases and blind spots.
Even if you conduct customer research, the chances are that you will produce data that is not sufficient for the development of a customer-centric strategy.
- Dramatically increase the validity of your customer knowledge.
- Adjust your preconceptions, close your knowledge gaps.
- Lay the foundation for informed decisions.
Strategy development for sustainable growth
Use the only constant that is proven to create sustainable growth: Value creation – jointly for customers and providers.
- Identify the most underserved customer needs with the greatest business potential.
- Align the organization behind customer needs.
- Execute as one entity.
Because our method is aimed directly at developing a customer-centric strategy – without detours – it is efficient and fast.
6 Practices - The Key to Sustainable Growth
- Focus your strategy development on what customers care about.
- Adopt the purpose of improving customers’ lives or businesses.
- Aspire to be the most helpful provider by developing innovative solutions and supporting needs development and acquisition.
- Boost your impact by acting as one company.
- Tap into the most direct source of customer needs, motivation, and context.
- Rely on an information source you can trust – straight from customers.
- Use customer interviews to hear first-hand about their experiences.
- Learn from stories to understand the meaning of the customer journey.
- Structure interviews into actionable data points.
- Filter out data without a clear meaning.
- Maximize utilization of the interview content.
- Provide easy access to interview data.
- Create insights from the data points.
- Map tasks customer try to accomplish to understand their complexity and purpose.
- Understand customers’ pains and gains.
- Create empathy with your stakeholders by illustrating customer journeys.
- Decide what customer needs to take on based on rational decision-making criteria.
- Prioritize needs based on their value for customers and your organization.
- Assess needs and decide jointly with all relevant stakeholders involved.
- Document your decision-making assumptions.
- Use the data and insights from your research to inform your strategy.
- Create strategy to support the jobs customers want to get done and the customer journey.
- Align product and service design, marketing and sales strategies around customer progress.
- Become the preferred provider by supporting customer holistically.
Choose Your Starting Point
Do you work for a consulting company, an agency, or a forward-thinking organization? Take the path that is right for you.
We are by your side
Achieve continuous alignment with customers
We help you transform to a customer-centric organization
participants trained
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interviews conducted
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years experience consulting on Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD)
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Organizations we proudly inspired, educated or consulted
Accelerators, Education & Government Agencies
Agencies and Consulting
Financial Services
Manufacturing and Services
Software and IT
Testimonials
We applied the "Jobs to be Done" theory and "Customer Progress Design" methodology from unipro solutions to better align our product development process with the needs of end customers. We develop products with a focus on sustainability and circular economy (C2C) and by applying the methods we have learned what our customers demand and how we can help them to achieve it.
Markus SteckhanChief Strategy Officer WIK – ELEKTROGERÄTE Entwicklungs- und Service-GmbH & Co. KG 
Using the Jobs to Be Done approach has provided us with the insights we needed to focus our strategic measures where the benefits for our customers and our company are greatest.
Farkonda HaschemzadaSenior Director Corporate Strategy & Digitalization at Fraport AG 
Customer Progress Design allows the essential aspects of market research to be translated into a target-oriented and user-friendly concept. In addition, it ensures that the insights gained are used consistently and sensibly to align all levels of objectives of a customer-oriented company, from the mission to operational planning
Prof. Dr. Dennis AlbertProfessor for Marketing Management and Innovation at Wiesbaden Business School 
The Customer Progress Design method helped us uncover the unmet needs of our target customers, without being distracted by our own biases. This approach helped us to “feel” the customer’s pain, discover great new product ideas and reprioritize our existing ideas.
David A. Bell, Ph.DChairman and CEO GrandCare Health Services, LLC 
We learned about the Customer Progress Design method as a systematic approach to developing a customer-centric strategy. We have been able to experience how this method can be used to effectively experience and map the reality of customers' lives. We can use these insights to develop product, marketing and sales concepts that bring real added value to our customers.
Ingo FuchsExecutive Director Remmers Group 
Our client expected Safari Consulting to provide recommendations for more effective marketing messages. With the Customer Progress Design method we achieved this goal systematically, customer-centered and fast. Along the way, we were able to deliver approaches for new strategies.
Stefan HochManaging Director Safari Consulting 
I don't know of any method that can get me faster to crucial customer insights.
Stephan AbelerConsultant for customer-centric transformation and COO of cxomni 
The jobs-to-be-done theory helps us to understand our customers better and to improve our products in a customer-centric way. In particular, the "Wheel of Progress" offers companies the opportunity to change their perspective. The Jobs theory approach holds great potential for companies.
Andreas KnuhrTeam leader of the Thuringian agency for skilled labor 
As a digital agency, DUMBO uses "The Wheel of Progress" to structure interviews and identify "Jobs-to-be-done". This way, we enrich our design process with a mental model that helps us gain qualitative insights repetitively and reliably without losing flexibility.
Robert GoeschCo-Founder & Managing Director DUMBO GmbH 
The structured customer research process based on The Wheel of Progress accelerates the time to turn the input from customers into actionable insights to improve the customer journey.
John GusiffChief Experience Officer, Customer Centric Solutions LLC 
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Call to Action
- The degree of your customer-centricity determines your organization's competitiveness and success.
- Customer-centricity is without alternatives when it comes to achieving sustainable growth.
- Understanding what matters for customers and how they buy solves the biggest root cause of business challenges.
- Improving customer centricity is not a method fad, shiny object or a "generate more leads" scheme. It is honest performance improvement: doing what's right for customers and your organization.
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Today, you will make the most significant decision for your company, yourself, and your customers:
Leave and do business as usual or get in touch and maximize your customer orientation.
Don't delay the application of a customer-centric strategy
Each day of delay means
- missing opportunities and falling behind the competition,
- being disconnected from the changing desires of customers,
- continuing internal misalignment with customers.
Every day counts.
