Chapter 12

Know your moments

You can't be selected everywhere. So decide where, and by whom, before you make a single thing.

Most marketing starts with what to say and where. This chapter starts earlier: which buyers, at which moments, in which way of buying. Every stage chapter starts from the moments you choose here.

Get the offer right first

No marketing gets a wrong offer selected. The product, its price and where it can be bought decide more choices than any message.

Marketing can't fix those, but it's often first to see they're broken. Buyers who find you, believe you and still choose someone else are telling you about the offer. A moment you can't serve well isn't worth winning.

Derive them, don't brainstorm them

Most maps of buyers are brainstormed in a workshop, and they show it: the buyers the team already talks to, the questions sales already hears, and nothing else. Getting the moments right is the most important step in this book, because everything after it inherits the map. So don't invent it. Four things you already know generate most of it.

• Your industry gives the structure. Research on how organisations buy has named the roles in a buying group for fifty years: the people who use the purchase, influence it, decide, buy, and can block it (Webster and Wind, 1972). Later writers added the person who starts it (Bonoma, 1982). Gartner's research describes six jobs every business buying group has to get done, in no fixed order: identify the problem, explore solutions, build requirements, select a supplier, validate the choice, and build agreement inside the business. It now puts those groups at five to sixteen people (Gartner). Robinson, Faris and Wind's buy classes say whether it's a first purchase, a changed repeat or a straight repeat. And the triggers come from Jenni Romaniuk's category entry points: the situations that bring a category to mind, found by asking why, when, where, while, with whom, with what and how the buyer is feeling (Oxford University Press).
• What you sell gives the needs. Every offer is hired to get a job done, and every job runs through the same steps: define, locate, prepare, confirm, execute, monitor, modify and conclude (Bettencourt and Ulwick, 2008). Each step raises its own questions. Most maps stop at the purchase, and miss everything the buyer needs after it.
• Your alternatives give the switching moments. For each alternative, doing nothing included, four forces decide whether a buyer moves: the push of today's problem, the pull of the new option, the anxiety about it, and the habit of the present (The Re-Wired Group). Each force is a question, or an objection someone in the group will raise.
• Your difference gives the problem insight. A real difference implies that buyers misread their problem. The moments where they frame it are where your reason decides the choice. If no moment needs your difference, it isn't one.

For the bookkeeper, the industry adds a buyer she'd left off the map: the café's accountant, who influences the choice and can block it. The job map adds what happens after the sale: checking the Monday report each week, and changing what's tracked when the menu or the roster changes. Her alternatives (the accountant, software, doing it herself) each bring their own objection. And her difference, weekly wage figures, explains why "wages ate the takings again" is the moment she wins first.

Check every moment, and check the map is whole

A derived moment is still a guess until something backs it. Give each one a source: a sales call, a lost deal, a tender, a review, a forum thread, a question people put to an assistant. Mark each one sourced, inferred or a hypothesis. Take the hypotheses to interviews, and keep going until new conversations stop adding needs. In one well-known study that happened within twelve interviews, with the basics clear within six (Guest, Bunce and Johnson, 2006). Treat that as a guide, not a rule.

Then test the whole map with five questions:

1. Was every person in the buying group considered at every step, with any absence stated?
2. Does every product have its job mapped to the end, past the purchase?
3. Does every alternative, doing nothing included, have its switching moments?
4. Does every part of your difference decide at least one moment?
5. Does every stage, from Known to Kept, have moments?

Expect the map to grow. A single job can hold fifty to a hundred and fifty separate needs (Strategyn). A moment keeps that manageable: it's one person at one step, with the needs held inside it.

The quick version still has its place. Three kinds of buyer and five journey steps, filled from your customers, your sales team and an assistant, will show you where you're losing this afternoon. The full derivation, worked through for one firm, is in the playbooks.

Pick the moments you can win

Not every moment deserves the effort. Three tests sort them.

• Is the buyer worth winning? Some moments belong to customers you can't serve at a profit.
• Do you have a true reason to be selected there? A claim only you can make. Where you have none, being seen is wasted.
• Is the moment open? Ask the machine the buyer's question, and see who it recommends today, and why.

To test properly, use Chapter 13's moment memory map and Chapter 14's presence sample.

The bookkeeper's shortlist

Back to the bookkeeper for cafés. She filled her fifteen squares, then ran the three tests on the six that looked most promising.

The tests cut six moments to three. All three start from a café owner's problem, in her terms. Her old spending ran the other way: most of it went on the generic search, where she had no reason to be chosen.

Small and specific beats broad

Shopify, the online-store platform, told investors in August 2026 that AI-driven orders to its stores had tripled in a year. Three-quarters of AI-attributed purchases came from outside its hundred biggest product categories (Retail TouchPoints).

That's a long tail of categories, not proof that small sellers win. My reading is that a buyer who describes exactly what they need is matched to whoever describes exactly what they sell. Machines reward specifics, and a precise offer gives a small seller a way into moments a famous brand never thought to enter.

Know how they buy

The same moment is won differently in each of the five buying modes.

This afternoon, this quarter

This afternoon: write down three kinds of buyer and five journey steps, then run the five completeness questions over them. For each moment, ask one AI assistant the buyer's question a few times, and note who it recommends.

This quarter: choose the five moments you most want. Write down your reason to be selected in each, and stop spending on the moments where you have none. To defend that cut with numbers, score those moments with the Selectability Score (Part five).

A truth, a reason and a set of moments. Now the stages, one at a time.

Whose evidence this is. The Shopify figures are the company's own, from its earnings call, reported by a trade publication. Gartner sells research and advice to the sellers it studies. Strategyn sells outcome-driven innovation consulting, and The Re-Wired Group sells jobs-to-be-done training. Webster and Wind, Robinson, Faris and Wind, and Guest, Bunce and Johnson are peer-reviewed or academic sources.