“Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.”
That’s Albert Einstein talking. The lesson is that your sales message needs to get refined down to its essence because you’re often only going to get one chance to deliver it. The classic approach to this is the so-called Elevator Speech which supposes that you’re in an elevator, you meet someone and they ask what you do. You’ve got about 10 seconds to tell them before the bell rings and the door opens.
I almost always want to hear a sales rep’s elevator speech very early in their training process and I seldom hear a good one. So what are the criteria for a good 10 second sound bite about your business?
- It must tell from your customer’s POV: ‘We help companies save money on XYZ’
- It must encourage questions. In the example above, if a prospect has an interest in saving XYZ then they will ask: How do you do that?
- It should be one sentence or, at most, two short ones.
- No industry jargon. The person you’re talking to may not know the talk but they may know someone who does.
- No words that you tend to stumble over. Write an elevator speech and practice it out loud (the car is a good place). Anytime you stumble or put in an um you either need to clarify or practice more. Recording yourself doing this will be an eye-opener! (if you don’t own one get out and buy a cheap digital pocket recorder or get an attachment for your iPod- you’ll gain a lot by recording your sales pitch)
- It should be instantly memorable. You’re talking to someone, give your speech and a minute later a colleague of theirs says ‘So, what does she do?’. Your speech should come out of their mouth.
A great elevator speech makes a great basis for an opening sales script. Because you’ve had plenty of time to practice it with lots of different people including non-customers, it should be very natural. If it fits the criteria above it opens up a conversation that the rest of your script can direct and focus.
So what do you do?
Here’s another Einstein quote:
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Thanks to Max.
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