3 Minute Rule -Part 1

 

3 Minute Rule

Three minutes. That’s not much time – barely enough to make a cup of coffee or brush your teeth in the morning. But according to Brant Pinvidic, that’s all the time you need to deliver a successful pitch. In just three minutes, you can sell even the toughest of audiences on any good idea, product, service, or business. 

 So I will talk about

•         why three minutes are all you have to persuade a modern audience
•          how to make the most out of those three minutes

 Your pitch has three minutes to succeed. 

Imagine you are about to have a meeting with some potential investors, customers, partners or collaborators. You’ve got an amazing idea, product, service or company to pitch to them. You know it’s a winner. The only problem is they don’t even know what it is or how it works, let alone why it’s so great. Heck, for all they know, you’re just another person with a same idea to sell. 

 

In other words, you’ve got a lot of explaining and persuading to do – so you better pull out all the stops, right? Design an hour-long PowerPoint presentation that explains everything in meticulous detail. Fill it with a bunch of clever animations, jokes, one-liners and catchphrases. Practice all those tips and tricks you’ve learned about public speaking, sales, and persuasion.  

 

 

BUT, In today’s fast-paced, digitally-connected world, people are constantly bombarded with information, advertising, and various other demands on their time, money, and mental bandwidth. As a result, their attention spans are short, and their patience is even shorter.

 

So by the end of three minutes, your audience will already be leaning yes or no on your proposal. From that point on, you can continue yammering but the die is already cast. Your audience is going to filter the rest of your presentation through the prism of their initial judgment. If it’s positive, they’ll be eager to learn more, and they’ll be receptive to what you have to say. If it’s negative, they’ll be doubtful, critical, resistant, bored or just plain tuned-out.

The three-minute rule also applies to your audience and the people, they have to pitch to. 

 

Imagine you’re pitching an idea for a business venture to a group of representatives from another company. Your pitch drags on for an hour, but you somehow manage to maintain their interest the entire time. 

So far, so good, but here comes the problem. Even if they’re fully on board with your idea by the end of your presentation, they’re probably not the only decision-makers who need to sign off on it. Usually, they’ll have their own people they need to persuade. 

For example, they might have to get approval from their legal and finance teams. As a result, the success of your pitch ultimately depends on how well your audience pitches your idea to other people.

Your pitch is going to form the basis of their pitch. After all, that’s where they’re going to draw their information from. Even if your one-hour presentation is brilliant, your audience won’t be able to replicate it. They’re going to forget most of the details and half-remember the rest. 

Plus, they won’t have enough time to repeat it all in the first place – not by a long shot. If someone ask them for a recap of your presentation, they’re probably going to have a three-minute conversation in passing. And during that conversation, they are just going to take jumbled collection of fragmentary, muddled memories and reel them off the top of the head. 

The resulting “pitch” won’t be very impressive, to say the least. Now, imagine what would have happened if you’d given your audience a simple, snappy three-minute pitch to remember. Your idea would be one step closer to becoming a reality.  

You don’t need to say everything you think you need to say in a pitch.  

 

You need to be much more selective with your content. The key is to realize that there’s a major distinction between what you think you need to say and what you actually need to say when you’re giving a pitch. 

One detail leads to another and then another. Pretty soon, you end up with a convoluted one-hour lecture that’s going to put everyone to sleep.

The point of a pitch is to win your audience over to the thing you’re pitching. To do that, you simply have to convey the general concept of it to them in a way that gets them interested in learning more about it. 

 

 Your pitch needs to answer four questions: 

• What is it? 
• How does it work? 
• Are you sure? 
• Can you do it? 

 

What is it and how does it work? 

These are the most fundamental questions to answer about your topic. By answering them, you’re going to enable your audience to conceptualize the thing you’re pitching. That’s a prerequisite to getting them on board with it. After all, they’re not going to sign up for something if they don’t understand what they’re being asked to sign up for.

 

Answering the questions of what it is and how it works, some bold claims about the thing you’re pitching is going to be made. 

Are you sure? 

Naturally, your audience will want you to back them up. That’s where the third question comes in: Are you sure? To answer this question, you’re simply going to provide some facts and figures that will reinforce the claims you’ve previously made

 Can you do it?

Can you do it? do you have the ability to bring it to market? By answering this question, you’re going to reassure your audience that you can deliver on the thing you’re proposing. 

 

So those are the four questions in a nutshell.

Summary

To persuade a sceptical, savvy and impatient modern audience, your pitch needs to be under three minutes. To create a persuasive pitch that fits into that time frame, it needs to consist of about 25 sentences that answer the following questions: What is it? How does it work? Are you sure? And can you do it?