You know what the elevator pitch is…it is the little talk you give about your career or new product or new company, all condensed into the time it takes you to ride up in the elevator. So not much time.
Done well, every word matters and there’s no wasted you-know’s and um’s.
High level friends, venture capitalists and others who have A-D-D love elevator speeches. Concentration being what it is today, the shorter the better. Hey, what about those Minnesota Twins!!
I have a new idea. I am calling it the Visual Elevator Speech, copyrighted by GLH.
Every business leader I know has a constant issue with his team not being able to communicate what it is they do. Staff management types recite the company mission, (maybe), but leave out important parts. Sales people do a feature dump on prospects…”No, YOU LISTEN, here is what I am selling!!”
Every once in a while a top leader will get his team together to “get back to basics.” These meetings typically take four hours or, if moderated by an outside consultant type person, four days. At the end we all sing Kum-Bay-Yah.
Instead try this.
Design ten 4 by 6 postcards, only the art side. You must have a picture and at least three sentences+your company’s logo, your kicker text. Use Google images and find the picture you want…then come up with the copy.
These postcards are going to your prospects or other audience. Imagine sending them a postcard each week for ten weeks straight. Do they get what you do?
Can you condense your message down to the postcard? Can you find their hot button, or pain, or need, or whatever it is you call it now in your own sales training program?
Three sentences and a picture. Show me what you got.
Here are two examples for you. At Linkup, the coolest of the job search engines, we index company websites and present those jobs to job seekers. By showing job seekers only these jobs and taking them directly to the company’s own website, they are better prepared, more likely to understand the company and so forth. Here are two postcards that condense those thoughts. My tenth one is a LOT better and so will yours.
