How To Create A Killer Elevator Pitch… In 60 Seconds or Less!
How To Create A Killer Elevator Pitch… In 60 Seconds or Less!
by Paul Keetch
Being able to succinctly describe your business is an essential networking skill for two important reasons.
First, the person you’re talking to can quickly and easily understand if they, or someone they know, is a potential customer of yours.
Second, knowing specifically how to communicate your business essence allows you to spend more time speaking to people who are genuinely interested in what you do and how you do it and less time trying to “sell” prospects who are never going to become your customer.
Here is my 3-step system to creating a killer elevator pitch!
Step 1 – Identify The Pain You Solve In The Market
There are two things you want to accomplish in this step – identify the specific pain you resolve in the market and get the person you are talking to agreeing with you.
You do this by stating the problem you solve in the form of a question such as, “Do you know how the vast majority of new businesses fail within the first five years?”
This states the pain (the rampant failure of new businesses) and gets the person you’re talking to in agreement with you (everyone knows this to be true).
Step 2 – Describe Your Perfect Customer & How You Work With Them
Here you want to be very specific about what niche (or micro-niche) that has the problem described in step 1 and how you help them overcome that pain.
For example, you might say, “I mentor coaches and other personal service providers on strategic ways market themselves more effectively and on a shoe-string budget.”
Already, if the person you’re talking to self-identifies with the pain you’ve described in step one and now fits into the category of who (coaches and other personal service providers) and how (mentor them to market themselves more effectively and on a shoe-string) their interest is piqued.
Step 3 – Outline How Your Customers Benefit From Working With You
This one gets a little tricky, but is still pretty straight forward. The real benefits of working with you don’t come from the specific result you help bring about (more customers, better relationships, fitness, health, etc) but from what those results create for them.
More customers may actually mean that they earn more and are able to provide for their family or travel the world and live the life they’ve always dreamed of.
In the example above, this may look like, “So that they can have a steady stream of qualified clients coming in every month, helping more and more people while creating a generous income for themselves!”
The primary benefit here is that they can help more and more people as well as create a generous income, a challenge faced by many of the coaches and personal service providers I work with.
Bringing It All Together!
Here is what an elevator pitch would look like when you bring all three elements together:
Do you know how the vast majority of new businesses fail within the first five years? I mentor coaches and other personal service providers on strategic ways market themselves more effectively and on a shoe-string budget, so that they can have a steady stream of qualified clients coming in every month, helping more and more people while creating a generous income for themselves!
That’s all there is to it. A killer elevator pitch you can easily remember and that flows off your tongue will allow you to spend more time marketing to truly qualified prospects.
3 Tips for Marketing In a Recession
3 Tips for Marketing In a Recession
By Paul Keetch
Marketing at any time should be a carefully managed process, but this is even more important when trying to sustain or grow your business during a recession or other economic downturn.
Here are 3 tips to help you get the most out of your marketing in any economy:
Recession Marketing Tip #1 – Determine Your Profit Point
Determine the profit point (the point at which sales from your marketing expenditure breaks even and pays for itself) by dividing the average profit per sale into the total marketing or advertising cost.
For example, if you spend $1000 on marketing a $100 product, you might think that 10 sales is your break-even point. Unless you have a 100% profit margin, this could be a potentially fatal error! Assuming your profit margin is 20%, your profit per sale is actually only $20, which means that you would need to generate 50 sales $100 in order to break even.
When you know your break even number ahead of time, you will know without a doubt whether a particular campaign generated a positive return on investment or not.
Recession Marketing Tip #2 – Track Everything
One mistake many business owners make is not tracking each individual marketing or advertising campaign. You cannot properly determine whether or not a particular campaign is hitting your pre-determined profit point or not without knowing where your leads are coming from.
Use custom web addresses such as www.YourCompany.com/adsource or vanity URLs (www.YourCompanyNow.com for example) to easily track advertisements that drive people to your website. Coupon codes, customized extension numbers or “virtual employee names” where you give the phone number to call and the instruction to “ask for Sally” (who doesn’t exist) or instructions to “clip this coupon” or “mention this ad” when visiting your physical location.
Make it part of your internal process to ask people where heard about you and make note of it in a spreadsheet so that you can track your results over time.
Recession Marketing Tip #3 – Do More of What Works, Less of What Doesn’t
When and if you find a marketing campaign that is consistently failing to produce enough sales to cover your investment and reach the profit point, you should immediately make a decision to either change the advertisement in some way in order to get a better result or simply stop the activity immediately.
Unless you know that your initial $100 sale will be worth many thousands of dollars over the long term (because you know your average lifetime customer value) then continuing with a money-losing campaign without at least trying to improve it is a sure way to reduced profits or even losses on your bottom line results. Even then, you should always seek to improve the results you’re getting from every marketing campaign.
On the other hand, when you find a campaign that is consistently hitting or, even better, exceeding your pre-determined profit point, then you should find ways to get more exposure in the same or similar sources.
For example, if you are advertising in a particular magazine bi-weekly, you may want to test a weekly advertisement instead. If the campaign is paying for itself and producing a profit over and above your initial investment in one magazine, you may want to try reaching a similar audience in a different, but related publication.
When you follow all three of these tips and apply them consistently and in order you will see definite improvements in your overall marketing results.
Paul Keetch is a seasoned entrepreneur and marketing coach who has helped hundreds of small business owners grow into bigger business owners. He is co-author of the acclaimed ebook Make My Marketing Work: How to Win Customers and Make More Money. Get a copy of his book online at http://www.MakeMyMarketingWork.com.
Meteor Over Alberta, Canada
Meteors, I’m told, hit the Earth’s atmosphere just about every day of the year… but it’s not every day that one this big flashes through the sky, lighting up the night as though the sun had just burst out from behind us.
Check this video captured on a Police cruiser camera in Alberta…
I think I’d be more than a little freaked out if I had seen that happen live!
Here is another video of the same event, from a different perspective:
- Paul