Ride an Elevator to Fame and Fortune

The "elevator speech" is a brief, carefully constructed statement that tells people the most important information about you, your company, and your products. It crystallizes the most important information about your sales value proposition into a well-organized, delicious paragraph or two of compelling information for your target customer or prospect.

Sidebar: related resources

Links
• SalesLinks on communication
skills and techniques

Columns by Jack Carroll
• Customer sales communication—
essential questions and answers
• Is your switch on or off?
• The ultimate sales skill
• The place of magic in sales and selling

The idea behind the elevator speech is that—by accident—you meet a target prospect in an elevator on the 25th floor. She asks what you do. You have an opportunity to give it your best shot before getting to the ground floor where you both get off. When you arrive at the lobby she now knows everything of importance about what you do for a living, and why it is valuable to her and her company to consider becoming a customer.

If you think you can communicate your sales message clearly and concisely without doing this exercise or discipline, it might be an interesting exercise for you to try doing it your way with a disinterested third party, and then circle back and do it this way, and let them compare.

The elevator speech is a very powerful sales tool for almost everyone. Here are the six basics of constructing an elevator speech:

What is your product/service/solution?
Who is the customer it is intended for?
What need or problem does it address?
What does it do?
How does it work and what are the benefits to me?
Why are you different and better than others?

Below you'll find these questions with answers provided for a fictitious computer support database tool. Replace these with information about your own product/service/solution, and we'll generate a rough draft of your own elevator speech that you can print out, fine tune, and use.

1. What is your product/service/solution?

The	product service solution
that I sell is a(n)	computer support knowledge database on CD-ROM.

2. Who is the customer it is intended for?

It is for	help desk managers and computer support people
that	help computer users with their hardware and software needs and problems.

3. What need or problem does it address?

Those people have the following need, problem, or desire:

They need to reduce downtime and identify/resolve end user hardware and software problems quickly and accurately..

4. What does it do?

Our product helps them overcome those problems and issues (or satisfy those desires) by
providing help desk personnel with an easy to search and find encyclopedia of computer support questions and answers about the most common problems encountered by computer users.

5. How does it work and what are the benefits to me?

Here are the specific things that it does in order to do that (features, functions, and benefits):
* Quick look-up of information on CD-ROM. * Easy network access and availability * Comprehensive libraries of information from major publishers * Multi vendor support for resolving conflict problems * Ease of use and in-depth install information and tutorials for walking new users through the install and learning process, and * Eliminates the need for more support people on the help desk..

6. Why are you different and better than your competitors?

Our product is better/faster/easier/less expensive because:
We are the first support solution to allow support users to create and expand their own knowledge databases. This saves significant amounts of time researching problems because the new solutions are added to the database as they are found. We are the only solution providing installation support which accounts for 35% of support call volume.

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