Getting your story across: The Elevator Pitch for Dummies

By Bill Morrison, Sandler Training Switzerland www.switzerland.sandler.com

Few of us feel particularly comfortable speaking in public and even the task of meeting people at networking events can be quite daunting. When we do have an audience, however large or small we often find that the “fear” response in our brains takes over and we either freeze up or start talking about something in our comfort zone: ourself and our product.

Unfortunately neither of these responses helps us in building our business. If we don't communicate easily and quickly to strangers we know we will lose their attention – most of us are all to familiar with the “1,000 metre stare” people get as they glaze over as we enthuse over our marvellous ideas.

The “Elevator Pitch” or “30 second commercial” is the one great tool we can use to overcome all these problems. I was taught two different ways of tacking this, one is better suited to group discussions and the other for one-to-one or social discussions.

First the way to talk to groups.
1. Get the audience on side, attract the attention of prospective client with a statement of a business problem that your audience may suffer from and which you can help resolve.
2. Establish that you have knowledge in this field by describing the impact of this problem
3. Make a simple statement of what you can do about this.
4. Describe the positive impact you have on your happy clients.

My own version of this looks like this:

1. All round the world organisations working in every type of industry frequently find that they cannot create the growth that they need and deserve, despite having great people and good products  In fact they often lose out to low quality competitors. To a large part this is due to the dysfunctional way that most people approach sales.
2. As a result organisations and people do not achieve their critical objectives. Companies fail and individual careers do not progress.
3. To address this, we help thousands of clients adopt the world class best practice in sales and business development which we have developed over the past 40 years. We use a unique approach to coaching and reinforcement to create positive change in sales behaviour.
4. This allows our clients to move their sales to the next level using a radically different approach that combats the problems of traditional selling.

A great way to start a presentation, but when it comes to more conversational settings you can take the following path:

1. My name
2. What my company does
3. The typical “pains” my clients suffer from which I help them address
4. A question which opens up the conversation.

Both of these have one thing in common; they are the start of a dialogue and hopefully for you the beginning of a sales process. And of course the sales process is only the start of a long term relationship. Good luck.....