Deliver your offer to customers and secure a commitment

What you need to test

The mafia offer pitch is all about testing the insights you’ve gathered from your problem discovery sprints.

• If your insights are indeed on point, you should see clear signs of resonance throughout the pitch reflected in the interviewees body language — nodding heads, smiles, and open feedback are all great signs.
• If you don’t see these, don’t brute force the pitch. Instead transition into running a problem discovery interview to understand why.

Finding prospects

Target a mix of old and new prospects.

1. Use old prospects that match your early adopter criteria

   You should have received permission to follow up from your earlier problem discovery interviews.

   If the prospects match your early-adopter criteria, these are warm qualified leads.

   Arrange a follow-up conversation with them to deliver your mafia offer pitch.

2. Mix in some new prospects

   It’s a good idea to mix in new prospects with every batch of interviews so that you test all your insights with a “beginner’s mind.” Your earlier interviews should have yielded some referrals that you can use. This is also the time to start testing any other channels you identified in your last iteration that can help you start building a repeatable customer factory.

Deliver the pitch

Welcome (Set the stage) [2 minutes]

Briefly set the stage for how you’ll run the meeting:

Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today about our innovation platform. We started building this platform after conducting dozens of interviews with other companies to understand how they perform (job-to-be-done). Before we dive in, it would be helpful to ask you a few questions on how you currently do (job-to-be-done) to make sure there is a fit.

Is that ok?

Collect qualifying criteria (Test job-based customer segmentation) [5 minutes]

Ask some qualifying questions to test for fit. If you’ve already interviewed this prospect, you can skip this section unless there are additional questions you’ve uncovered since you last interviewed them. Also, this is not a full on problem discovery interview but a chance to qualify your prospect on the key distinguishing characteristics that define your ideal early adopter profile.

How do you currently do <job-to-be-done>?

What solutions do you use?

(ask other qualifiers to determine if they are a fit)

If you do encounter new insights that you didn’t earlier in your problem discovery sprints, stay curious and dig deeper. Problem discovery is only done when you’ve heard all the stories out there.