A seemingly innocent question in the middle of our Elevator Pitch CPR webinar instantly reveals why the most obvious approach produces the least effective Elevator Pitch.
“How do you segment the things you do so that you don’t try to describe all of what you do”
It’s so tempting
In your Elevator Pitch
To share a laundry list
Of products and services
In a vain attempt
To get your prospect
To respond to one of them.
Yet there’s a much more powerful way
To grab your prospect’s attention.
It’s gut-wrenching
And counter-intuitive
To pick the one thing
You’ll talk about in your Elevator Pitch.
Then it takes nerves of steel.
To state that one thing you do
Then wait
In silence
While your prospect formulates a question.
The temptation
The overwhelming temptation
Is to fill the silence
By blurting out “…and I also…”
At which point
You’ve lost any chance of engaging this prospect.
Embrace the silence!
Your prospect needs time
To absorb your message.
Be patient.
It’s so obvious to us what we do
That we tend to misjudge
The amount of time
It takes others
To hear what we say.
A prospect once stalked me
For an entire evening
At a networking event.
It was the best kind of stalking.
He kept circling back.
Asking different questions.
About my work.
By the end of the evening,
I secured an appointment
Which turned into several sales.
All because I stuck to my one thing.
And gave him time to understand.
Remember,
You can and should
Still offer all your products and services.
The technique is that
From a business networking perspective
You pick one.
One product
Or one service
The one that starts the best conversations.
So, going back to the question from the webinar.
How do you decide which one?
It starts with your client success story.
A specific, delighted customer.
If you’re struggling to tell your client success story in just two sentences
Use our Elevator Pitch Creator for some new ideas.
Then it’s about gauging responses.
Which client success story starts the best conversations?
Happy Networking!