The framework was developed by Tien Tzuo, founder of Zoura. He was the CMO at Salesforce which is the original SaaS company and he came up with this framework to pitch their products.
"What made us successful (at Salesforce) was that we never talked about what we did. What we talked about was - the end of software" – Tien Tzuo, CMO at Salesforce
They have never really talked about what they did as a company but rather this change, this movement that was the beginning of the end of the shrink-wrap software and the beginning of SaaS. Shrink-wrap software was the enemy they were going after, it was the villain in their story. At the time the cloud was something that caused a lot of anxiety, people didn't really know how safe and secure it was, so they were not getting to what they did but talking about this thing that was changing in the world.
You can break the pitch into 3 different stages. These could also become 3 separate landing pages or 3 steps in the sale process where you first get leads and you talk about Room 1, then qualify the leads and talk about Room 2, and move them to Room 3. This framework can be used for many different things, but within the mafia offer context where you are talking to potential prospects and delivering your offer, you can think of it as 3 different segments of that 30-45 minutes pitch.
Most people start in Room 3 (the solution), but that's a big mistake because people aren't yet ready for the solution, they need to be contextualised.
Some people start in Room 2 (problems) and then solutions, but unless you are talking to people with a leaky roof while it's raining, that also falls not so effective.
It's much more effective to start in Room 1 (contextualise the problems), then define the problems.
They learned this things at Salesforce, and if you check out Zoura, you notice that even their website is designed around this. You don't find much about their product or solution, but more about the story of change.
Even though Elon Musk is pitching a battery, because he talks about the bigger context of climate change and how the batteries fits in with solar panels to help us achieve a desired outcome of a zero emission future, that bigger vision doesn't just get people to buy batteries but also to buy solar panels. If he just gone into problem → solution which is "I have a battery that helps you to capture energy from your solar panels that are on the top of your house, so that when the sun is on the other side of the Planet you can power your house", that would only have appeal to people who already have solar panels. By framing it around the 3 rooms, by talking about the bigger context, he could get people who may be on the defensive to buy a solar panel to do that and buy the batteries. This is a much more effective way to pitch your product than problem → solution.
Identify some big relevant change in your customer's life that happened independently of you. If you say "We have invented something that you should check out", that's the change, that's very self-serving and it's not gonna get their attention.
Ideally this is the triggering event, this is the bigger trend, this is the thing that's changing in their world that's causing them to look, or potentially look for a solution.
There are two ways to talk about it: