The 3M test
Material, margin, momentum: the three questions an offer has to pass with your own leadership before it is pitched to a customer.
The 3M test is the internal gate in value selling. Before an offer is taken to a customer it is sold, formally, to your own leadership, and it has to pass three questions. Is it material: big enough to matter to the customer and to you? Does it carry margin: will the business make money delivering it, or is it a favour dressed as a strategy? Does it have momentum: is there someone senior on your side who will keep it moving when the first obstacle appears?
The test exists because the most common way a proposition dies is not rejection by the customer. It is quiet starvation inside the supplier, when delivery, finance or product were never asked. An offer that has not been sold inside your company is not an offer. It is a rumour.
Set out in full in: Creating Customer Value Propositions with AI (Kogan Page, 2027), chapter 8.
Related terms
Value selling
Selling the proposition twice: first inside your own company, then to the customer's decision-making unit in their financial language.
Customer value proposition
The answer to the customer's one real question: what is this worth to me? Said in two sentences, in their financial language.
See the method run on one real account in three days: the One Page Proposition.