There are no magical short cuts to the top in small business. But a killer elevator pitch can expedite the trip.
Your elevator pitch is the concise statement of the value you provide to your customers. When a prospect hears it, it has to grab their attention, and make real for them the benefits that you can deliver to their business or life.
When it really works, your elevator pitch will engage your prospect so that they want to hear more. You know it’s working when they say in response, “How do you do that?”
Now the door is open to continue the conversation, engage further with the prospect, and possibly convert them into your newest client.
How do you craft a statement like that? There’s a bit of homework involved before you sit down to write.
Start by putting yourself in the shoes of your prospect. And not just any prospect, but the one who is perfect for you. That would be the one who, upon becoming a customer is going to:
- Love what you do for them
- Come back again and again
- Not require a high level of maintenance
- Pay on time
- Refer others to you
You’re speaking directly to this person, so you want to know all about them:
- What challenges they face
- What concerns they have
- What unmet need you could fulfill for them
- The language they use to talk about their issues and concerns
You can try to intuit this things on your own. But unless you’re an accomplished mind-reader, you would do well to interview your existing customers.
Ask them what they like most about your product or service. Ask them what other products and services they like. Find out what kind of car they drive and where they live. Really get to know them — and focus your attention on the problem you solve for them.
How does it feel to face that problem? And how does it feel to finally have it resolved?
Now you’re ready to write your pitch. My best advice for this part is to:
- Omit needless words (per Strunk and White)
- Be brief. Everyone is time-challenged.
- Write in the active voice.
- To get it right, be prepared to revise it dozens of times. No one is brilliant in the first draft.
Once you’ve got it down on paper, settle on two or three finalists. Run these draft elevator pitches past people you trust. Ask if it works for them — if it really gets to the essence of your business. Decide on a winner, and then start using it in all of your marketing materials, over and over, until everyone knows what your business stands for.
This is how you build mind-share — and market share.
Have you ever met a salesperson who seems compelled to present an entire dog-and-pony show
to everyone they meet? They’ve been schooled to:
- Establish rapport, which can take forever. (“Hasn’t this weather been something?’)
- Anticipate and disarm your objections. (“You can’t afford not to own a deluxe Salad Shooter!”)
- Keep the conversation going for as long as possible before disclosing to you the one thing you really want to know – the price.
I actually like to converse, to get to know someone, and to find out about a solution to a problem. In other words, like most people, I like being sold to.
The deal-killer for me is when someone acts like their time is more valuable than your time. That feels like an insult.
And feeling insulted pushes my “I’m not buying” button.
If you’re in sales, how do you avoid this? I’m not entirely sure, but how about some common courtesy? How about abandoning the script and actually listening to a person, reading their body language, changing course, and when necessary, giving up.
Sometimes you can save a lot of time and energy when you realize that your ideal client is not in front of you. That’s when you stop talking, cut your losses and move on.
Is that so hard?
The San Diego Union-Tribune, under new ownership in the last year, no longer features the old “Copley Ring of 
Truth” in the page 1 masthead. Now they have a statement along the lines of: “More than 1.374 million readers per week.”
Never mind that they used to sell more papers than that per day. But the U-T is not alone. Readers are abandoning newspapers in droves.
Below is a telling chart from The Awl.com.
Look at the incredibly swift descent of the Los Angeles Times — once considered one of the most prestigious newspapers in America (The tallness of the chart prevented me from grabbing it all — the vertical lines represent five year increments from 1990 to 2010).
I did some free-lancing for Times’ San Diego Edition around 1990. The only reason they even had a San Diego Edition, said some, was so they could say they had more than one million subscribers.
It was fun while it lasted!
Old media continues to cover new media as if they are discovering something the rest of us haven’t yet noticed.
Case in point: Driving to work this morning I was listening to On Point with Tom Ashbroo
k at WBUR in Boston. The entire hour was devoted the question “what’s next for advertising?”
The host had on a couple of ex-Madison Avenue ad men who had written books on the death of their industry, and a mommy-blogger who shills for Wal-Mart, Disney and other corporations — not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The ad guys were bemoaning the changes happening in their industry — one of them saying that this is an institution that has shaped our culture for 350 years!
I’m not sure about that. I know I did not hear anything about the self-inflicted damage done when an “industry” coalesces around persuading people, by hook or by crook, to buy things they do not need. Read more
It’s a fact of life: Whenever you sit down to write something, you can presume that the audience is in some state of attention deficit.
The person you are trying to reach (that’s you, right now) is multi-tasking in one way or another: monitoring the e-mail coming in through Outlook; maybe taking a call or a text message on the cell phone; keeping an eye on the TV and/or carrying on a conversation with someone else who is actually in the room. Or scrolling through TweetDeck, for crying out loud.
When you are trying to reach this person, less is more. People don’t have a lot of time to 
waste, so you want to get to the point quickly, because you are considerate of their time.
Maybe you have a lot to say, and it’s all important. You’re going to have to be patient. Marketing is a conversation, and in every conversation, there’s a give and take.
Sure, there is a thud factor that can be impressive when you have volumes of information. This can be good if people have paid you for CDs and binders full of printed content. Online, this kind of info-bloat works against you.
Online, everyone is scanning and trying to catch the whiff of a particular scent. It’s the scent that tells them they are right track — getting closer to what they want.
That scent is in your headlines and subheads, in the copy you choose to put in boldface, in your tone, your graphics and your entire presentation.
It’s in the fact that you do not demand too much of your audience’s precious time, and you choose not to insult them with epic, long-copy sales letters full of outrageous half-truths in all caps.
Speak to people in their language, and get to the point, and you may find that you have an audience — and that is a precious asset indeed.
On Point, the talk show from WBUR in Boston, had an episode this morning on how everyone (who is still working, at least) works all the time now — how 9 to 5 is a quaint and distant memory.
Blackberries, cell phones and laptops have allowed us to take the office home with us, and that has become the expectation across the board. It’s too true — many of us have sacrificed family meals, leisurely weekends and regular down time. And we need those things.
If you love what you’re doing and you’re really engaged, being “on” 24/7 is not the worst thing in the world. It just requires some effort to balance it out. on the other hand, if you’re not in your dream job today, the demanding round-the-clock nature of work now gives you all the incentive you need to change your situation for the better.
Reflecting upon this, I was inspired to pull over, get out, breathe in the morning mist and feel the sun on my shoulders.
Having gratitude, after all, is part of my job. No matter who is paying me.
“In its latest concession to the worst revenue slide since the Depression, The New York Times has begun selling display advertising on its front page, a step that has become increasingly common across the newspaper industry.”
– The New York Times, Jan. 5, 2009
It’s a sign of the times, pardon the pun.
There was a day, not so very long ago, when a virtual firewall separated the advertising and editorial functions of every self-respecting newspaper.
It was understood that editorial space (aka, “the news hole”) was not for sale, ever – that even if you were CBS, Ford, or the Coldwell Banker Broker of the Month, you could not insert yourself onto the front page. That space was reserved for what the editors judged to be the most urgent matters requiring the attention of the community on that particular day.
No part of that space was available to the highest bidder. Not even the bottom inch of the page.
Times change, of course (ha ha!)
Build a better mousetrap, and the world will largely ignore you.
Tell a compelling story about why your mousetrap is the best in the world, and you’ve got the basis for a sustainable business.
Whatever product or service you provide, the success of your business depends on your ability to:
- Let people know about it.
- Compel them to buy.
Marketing really is everything. And it’s not just true in business, it’s a rule of nature. Flowers advertise themselves to bees with scents and vivid colors. Religions market themselves to the masses with promises of eternal redemption. Pitchers sell their curve balls as hittable, while trying their hardest to make them not so.