I recently attended a train the trainer session for Kauffman Foundation’s FastTrac new business training programs. To start off the day, one of the first exercises was to stand and give your elevator speech to the group.
The idea behind an elevator speech is that if you get on an elevator with someone, and they ask “What do your do?” you should have a one or two sentence speech ready that you can deliver during a brief elevator ride that clearly and concisely describes your business.
There were probably 100 people in the room, all experienced business trainers and facilitators. Everyone provided their elevator speech. I remember only three.
One gentleman stood up and said he owned the largest organic cattle ranch in Texas. While this actually had nothing to do with small business development, it was a great opening line. It got everyone's attention. He then followed it up with his role as a business trainer, which unfortunately was much less memorable.
A second gentleman stood up and told everyone he ran a smoke detector testing company. His company would come to your house and push the little red button on your smoke detector to verify it was working. This was certainly an attention getter. Many people had a similar reaction - “What?” It turns out, that this particular gentleman actually ran a marketing business. He used this opening line about smoke detector testing to get you to pay attention to the true pitch about his marketing business.
A third gentleman stood up and told everyone he “Helped business owners retire as millionaires.” That's all he said. The next logical question for most of the people in the room was, “Okay now tell me how you do that.”
Getting to “Okay now tell me how you do that,” is the purpose of an elevator speech. You have a very, very limited amount of time to get someone's attention and you want to tell them what you do in such a way that they will ask for more information.
By doing so, you have turned a brief conversation to a more in-depth discussion of what you do, how you do it, and perhaps what you can do for them.
The elevator speech that I use is “I help people create profitable businesses.”
I provide this one sentence, and then say no more. This gives a person the opportunity to ask me the follow-up question – “How do you do that?”
This opens the door to explain how we work with businesses and individual entrepreneurs understand finance and the financial side of their business; how we can help them plan the business; and ultimately how we can help them turn their ideas into a viable business.
A great elevator speech is short, concise, and leads to the follow-up question "How do you do that?"
