What were you doing 3 minutes before you read this?
What are you doing 3 minutes after you have read it?
Who cares?
You should. But only in the context of your customers.
Its a really interesting concept that I came across for the first time recently.
The idea goes something like this
You can learn a great deal about customers by studying the broader context in which they use your product or service. To do this, ask what your customer is doing three minutes immediately before and three minutes after he uses your product or service.
Its great for example for cross selling opportunities. Customers seek solutions not just products.
I have come across numerous situations where this applies in my business, but when I was selling software one of our products provided CEO's with a dashboard of the overall business performance.
What I hadn't fully appreciated — until we applied the three-minute rule — was that immediately after getting our data, a large number of these CEO's were painstakingly importing it into Excel and reformatting it or asking their FD's to do it.
This observation led us to prioritise developing a more seamless Excel plug-in feature with enhanced formatting capability over other product development initiatives. The result was an almost immediate and very significant uplift in sales.
So when you are talking to your customers about how they use your product try asking next time what they did in the 3 minutes preceding and the 3 minutes after and see what selling opportunities that presents.
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