Can An Elevator Speech Be Interesting?

I was on a call yesterday talking about “How to Say What You Do,” and the call host brought up the question of the elevator speech. She laughed, because you could hear that as soon as she said “elevator speech” her voice got heavy and flat. The elevator speech doesn’t always get a lot of love. I hear from clients, and from people on my list, all the time that the elevator speech feels blah, feels forced, feels unnecessary, is too hard, and never sounds good.
 
But here’s the thing that no one ever says about the elevator speech: (by the way, you don’t have to call it an elevator speech, call it your verbal introduction, either way, it’s what you say when someone says “what do you do?)
 
What makes the elevator speech so hard, and also so wonderful, to work on, is that a good one requires that you actually wrestle with the biggest questions about your business: who are you here to serve, and what is it you have to say to them.
 
So, when someone says they are having trouble pulling together an elevator speech, it’s almost always one of three things going on:
 
They don’t know who they are speaking to.
 
They don’t have words for what they bring to the table that’s different and unique.
 
They don’t how to blend what the audience wants with what they do in a way that makes sense.
 
So, your elevator speech is not this little bitty thing you throw together in five minutes. It’s a streamlined, elegant expression of the biggest, deepest thing you are here to share made relevant to your audience. A good elevator sounds effortless, and it’s easy to forget the blood, sweat, and tears that went into pulling it together.
 
Plus, it’s where you start the conversation. So if you have a massive fail to connect at this stage of the game, the game is pretty much over. It’s worth taking the time to dig a little deeper and come up with something you’re actually excited to share with people.
 
Once you do, you’ll not only have a way to start the conversation, you’ll also have the raw material for all the rest of your communication: your tagline, your headlines, even your copy.
 
Here’s three quick tips to elevate your elevator speech:
 
1. Your elevator speech should be 80-95 percent about your audience and what they want.
 
This isn’t the time and place to unfold the full depth and power of what you do or to explain in great detail what makes you different. If you get this right, you’ll earn the chance to do all that later.
 
2. In which case, you’d better make a decision about who you are speaking to.
 
It’s hard to make your elevator speech 80-95% about what your audience wants if you aren’t sure who they are or what they want. It may be true that many different types of people could benefit from your services. But if you try to talk to them all simultaneously, you will make yourself crazy. Who should you pick? The audience that sees your value the quickest and is most likely to pay you for it.
 
3. Once you’ve spoken to their needs, add love.
 
You know the saying: God is in the details? When it comes to your business language, the love is in your words. The ones you choose to describe your audience, describe their challenge, or describe what outcomes they get have the potential to reveal the love and compassion you have for them and the depth of understanding you have of their challenges. And that’s what makes them move towards you.