Why they buy is not who they are

Every go-to-market plan has a persona in it somewhere. A title, an industry, a headcount band, sometimes a first name and a stock photo. It feels like knowing your customer. Here is the correction, from Derrick Reimer's recap of Gia Laudi's talk on the go-to-market moat nobody talks about:

It's why they buy, and that's not equivalent to who they are. Going too far down the path of thinking in terms of personas can be limiting.

Derrick Reimer

A persona answers who. A job answers why — what the buyer was trying to get done at the moment they went looking for something like you. The two are not the same axis, and when they disagree the job wins, because the job is what they are paying for.

Two experts, one conclusion

The finding does not rest on one talk. Anthony Pierri's positioning framework arrives at the same place from the other direction: segment by the workflow, not by firmographics. Industry, headcount and revenue describe the shape of a company. The workflow describes what a team inside it actually does on a Tuesday, and that is where the buying happens.

Two practitioners, working on different problems, landed on the same instruction: segment by the job and the workflow, not by the industry.

What the persona cannot see

Suppose a law firm and an architecture practice. On any firmographic list they are in different rows — different industry codes, different titles for the person who would buy, different everything. Now suppose both have just promoted a batch of new partners and need every one of them photographed, on brand, before the quarter ends. For a photography studio those two are one segment. Same job, same deadline, same objection, same sensitivity to price.

Now suppose two law firms. Same industry, same size, same title on the buyer. One has that job this quarter; the other had it last year and is done. On the persona list they are identical. On the job list they are not in the same file.

That is the whole argument in two pairs. The persona groups companies that do not buy the same way, and separates companies that do.

This is not the horizontal cut

If you have read the case for niching down, you have seen its table: the horizontal cut — anyone with this job to do — churns hardest, and the vertical and orthogonal cuts grow faster. So is segment by the job the horizontal mistake with a better name?

No, and the difference is specificity. The horizontal cut is the product's function — anyone who needs invoices sent, anyone who needs photographs taken. A job is a situation: a firm that has just promoted a batch of partners and has a brand standard to meet by quarter end. Stated at that level, most companies do not have the job. It is at least as narrow as a vertical, and it is narrow along the axis that predicts buying.

The orthogonal cut in that table — one role, across industries — is the persona at its best, and it is a good proxy. The role that owns the job is usually the same role from one industry to the next. But it is a proxy. The role is who holds the job; the job is why they call. When a company that has never had the role suddenly has the job, the proxy fails and the job does not.

That article decides how narrow to go, and why narrowing wins the customers outside the narrow description. This one decides what you narrow on. They are different questions, and the size argument is not repeated here.

The cascade, and where the job is found

Laudi's ordering inverts the usual sequence. Most teams start at the message and work downwards. Her cascade runs the other way: growth depends on messaging, messaging on positioning, positioning on the customer, and the customer on data. Data is the foundation, not the reporting layer on top.

That has one practical consequence for finding the job. It is not found in a workshop. It is found in what the people who already bought were doing in the week before they bought — the trigger, the workflow that broke, the deadline. If you have customers, the job is in their stories, and the question is not what industry are you in but what was happening when you went looking for us. If you have none yet, the job is what the first calls are for — and it is a large part of why the founder runs those calls rather than a hire: below a certain revenue you are not executing a sales process, you are discovering which job converts.

What it changes in the list

Most prospect lists have columns for industry, size, title and location, and a column for the job would look strange. Add it anyway, and make it evidence rather than a label: the careers page listing three roles in one region, the announcement, the promotion round. A company whose job column is empty is a company you are guessing about.

That column is also where timing lives. A company can have the job and still not be ready this quarter — readiness is a separate test, asked after this one, about whether a specific person's quarter depends on it. The job decides whether a company is a candidate at all. Activation decides whether it is a candidate now.

Five things

1. Write the job in one sentence — what a buyer is trying to get done at the moment they look for you. If the sentence names an industry, it is a persona.
2. Keep the persona as a proxy, not a definition. The role usually owns the job; the job is still the thing.
3. Add a job column to the list, filled with evidence, and stop qualifying the rows where it is empty.
4. Find the job in the data on who bought, before the positioning and long before the messaging.
5. Then ask about timing. Job first, activation second. They are two questions, and they fail differently.