moesta-demand.md

Stage 0 — Demand evidence (Bob Moesta)

Source: Bob Moesta, with Chris Spiek and in the Clayton Christensen jobs-to-be-done lineage. See jobstobedone.org and Demand-Side Sales 101.

The premise
The Four Forces
The switch interview
Question bank
Building the language inventory
The demand brief
Common mistakes

The premise

People do not buy products because the features are good. They hire something to make progress in a situation, and they fire whatever they were using before. Demand is created by a struggling moment — a specific, dated, concrete moment of friction — not by a demographic or a persona.

The practical consequence: stop asking customers what they want. Interview people who recently switched and reconstruct what actually happened. Complaints from people who never changed anything tell you little. Only the people who moved can explain why moving was possible.

Expect most of the interview to be noise. The useful part is the portion describing the energy and effort someone spent to make progress.

The Four Forces

Every switching decision is a contest between four forces:

Forces driving change

Push — frustration with the current situation. What stopped working, and when.
Pull — attraction of the new solution. What they imagined it would let them do.

Forces resisting change

Anxiety of the new — what might go wrong if they switch. Migration, learning curve, reputational risk, security review, "what if it's wrong."
Habit of the present — inertia. The current thing sort of works. Someone built it. People know it.

A switch occurs only when push plus pull outweighs anxiety plus habit.

Why this matters for messaging. Teams over-invest in pull — better benefits, slicker demos, more features — and leave anxiety and habit untouched. This is why deals with strong demos end in "no decision." In B2B, habit of the present is the most common invisible opponent, and a self-built internal tool or spreadsheet is the hardest habit of all, because someone's professional identity is attached to it.

Anxiety and habit rarely surface unprompted. Buyers do not volunteer "I'm afraid this will make me look foolish." Ask directly.

Messaging implication: amplify push and pull in the copy; dismantle anxiety and habit in the funnel — with guarantees, proof, references, short reversible pilots, migration paths, and low-friction trials.

The switch interview

Interview people who switched within roughly the last 90 days, while memory is fresh. Ten to fifteen interviews usually surface the pattern.

Reconstruct the timeline rather than asking for opinions:

First thought — when did the idea first enter their head? What happened that day?
Passive looking — they noticed alternatives but weren't shopping. What triggered noticing?
Active looking — something escalated. What? Who else got involved?
Deciding — what tipped it? What almost stopped it?
First use — what did they expect? What surprised them?

Anchor on events, not feelings. "Where were you when you decided?" produces better data than "why did you decide?"

Also interview:

Non-switchers who evaluated and stayed. The purest source of anxiety and habit.
Churned customers. They ran the forces in reverse.
Internal builders. Teams who built their own version and then bought, or built and stayed.

Question bank

Push

Walk me through the day you decided this had to change.
What were you doing before? What broke about it?
Who else was frustrated? What did they say?
What did this cost you the last time it went wrong?

Pull

When you first saw it, what did you picture yourself doing with it?
What did you hope would stop happening?
What did you tell your boss it would do?

Anxiety

What worried you about switching?
What did you think might go wrong?
Who inside your company was against it? What was their argument?
What did you check before committing?

Habit

What did you have to stop doing?
Who built or owned the old way? How did that conversation go?
What are you still doing the old way?

Language harvesting

What would you type into a search box to find something like this?
How did you describe it to a colleague who'd never heard of it?
If you had to explain it to your boss in one sentence, what would you say?

That last set is the highest-value part of the interview for messaging work.

Building the language inventory

Keep a running list, verbatim, of:

Problem nouns — what they call the thing that's broken ("status," "registers," "chasing," "the tracker")
Workaround nouns — what they use today ("a spreadsheet," "a SharePoint list," "a weekly deck")
Outcome verbs — what they want to happen ("flag," "catch," "tell me where to look")
Search phrases — what they'd actually type
Emotional register — the adjectives attached to the pain

Then produce the shadow list: terms only employees use. Every coined term, every internal metaphor, every platform name. These are candidates for retirement from customer-facing copy, however useful they are internally.

The demand brief

# Demand brief — [date, N interviews]

## The struggling moment
One paragraph, in customer language, describing the concrete moment
that starts the search.

## Four Forces
Push: ranked, with verbatim quotes
Pull: ranked, with verbatim quotes
Anxiety: ranked — these become objection handling
Habit: ranked — these become migration and onboarding messaging

## Language inventory
Words they use / words only we use

## Segments
Did the forces differ by group? Where they differ materially,
that's a real segment. Where they don't, it isn't.

## What this rules out
Claims the evidence does not support.

Common mistakes

Interviewing prospects instead of switchers. Prospects speculate. Switchers remember.
Asking "why." People confabulate reasons. Ask what happened, in order.
Treating the loudest customer as the pattern. Aggregate across interviews before concluding.
Skipping anxiety and habit. The most common failure, and the one that costs the most deals.
Cleaning up the language. Record what they said, not a tidier version. The tidier version is how you end up with house vocabulary.
Confusing JTBD schools. There are two interpretations — Moesta's context-plus-desired-outcome view and Ulwick's outcome-driven view. This skill uses Moesta's, because it is aimed at understanding switching. Note the distinction if a user raises it; do not blend them silently.

Moesta demand