Forget the Elevator Speech
When talking about marketing and - one of my least favorite terms - “value proposition,” we often hear, “What’s your elevator speech?” The question is, of course, designed to get you to somehow dazzle your potential customer in as few a words as possible. Da pressure! Da pressure!
Well, here in New Mexico, we don’t have that many elevators and the ones we do have don’t go very far. (The tallest building in downtown Albuquerque is 22 stories).
I tell clients to not obsess about the pitch, but to think what they would say to encourage people to follow them off the elevator to learn more. And, that means telling people why more than what. Why do you do that thing you do? Why are you excited about your company, your product, your service? Why did you start the whole she-bang in the first place? Why should they care?
Sure, you shouldn’t have to press the stop button to recite your opus…but, passion goes a lot further than canned marketing polish any day.
Besides - how many people actually look at each other, much less talk in elevators…hmmmm?
(Above image from Flickr, Chantal Foster, via Duke City Fix. For those of you who wonder “Why Albuquerque?” - check out the photos! They’ll give you at least a glimmer of why many of us wouldn’t live any place else.)
If you’d like to leave a comment, please do so. It may take a bit to show up since I hate making people type in little letters (I can’t read most of them myself) - so I moderate all comments. Feel free to disagree - debate is healthy. However, I’ve blacklisted the worst obscenities, including the “f” word, as part of the troll wall.
Tags: marketing, marketing troubleshooting, Albuquerque, entrepreneur sanity check
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July 31st, 2007 at 8:18 am
The goal of the 60 second pitch is always the same - to generate enough interest to move to the 5 minute pitch. Sad to say, but most people never get to the point that they can show me the level of excitement in a 30 second pitch that gets my interest.
Another hint: if your 30 second pitch relies on the fact that you offer rock bottom pricing, rather on the merits of your product, you’ve got something seriously wrong with either your products or your sales program.
I saw that last week. Got an initial pitch that came down to absurdly low pricing. All because the salesman had never been trained on the product and was getting ridden hard by the sales operation. So he fell back on the only sales technique he had available, dropping to the lowest price he had right out of the gate.
July 31st, 2007 at 8:22 am
Indeed, once you go to price, you have no where else to go.
August 1st, 2007 at 10:02 am
An elevator speech kinda screams “all about me,” doesn’t it? Sure, you need some clear, succinct statement of who you are and what you do. I think Seth Godin challenges 7 words or less. Even on a short ride, the rest of the time can be spent with a question or two about the other person. What a concept - being interested in the other person - a conversation.
August 30th, 2007 at 11:16 am
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