The elevator speech

Many companies train their sales forces to memorize an elevator speech. Imagine you’re at a conference in a large hotel, and someone important (perhaps a known big potential customer) steps into the elevator with you on the 35th floor. She sees your conference badge and asks:

What does your company do?

In a few precious seconds, when the elevator reaches the lobby, the opportunity will be lost. Your heart is pounding … this is the moment you’ve trained for. It’s showtime. Your response has to be hard-hitting, concise, powerful. How can you do it in less than a minute? You recite the carefully crafted elevator speech.

Companies agonize over the elevator speech. Hordes of people brainstorm and revise, arguing about what to include and what to leave out. Sadly, these people are largely sales and marketing types … those most afflicted with trendy jargon:

Clumps of words ending in –tion

Application of communication information simplification implementation realization …

The -ize words

Optimize, productize, maximize, minimize, synthesize, digitize, utilize …

Gerunds (ending in –ing)

Improving, growing, increasing, migrating, illustrating, mitigating, extracting …

Words so overused that they mean nothing

It’s all about, it’s around, in terms of, from that perspective, in that space, paradigm, leverage, issue, ecosystem, landscape …

Everyone on the Elevator Speech Committee wants to get a word in. Or several. They stuff and keep stuffing until it’s a one-sentence monstrosity you couldn’t deliver in one breath unless you were a trained opera singer. And they’re pleased with themselves.

The sad result? Your big chance in the elevator finds you poorly armed. You really want to say:

We make software that helps you manage your data and saves you money – with the information systems you already have! How cool is that?

But the official company speech you’ve rehearsed probably sounds like this:

At our company, it’s all about documentation consolidation and integration of information around the automation space, utilizing and leveraging the solutions that deliver functionality in terms of a new business perspective paradigm, impacting how we maximize our alternatives in the optimization landscape without jeopardizing the capabilities of the existing legacy ecosystem.

When you reach the lobby, you’ll probably wonder why the prospect doesn’t ask for your business card. She seemed so captivated, mesmerized, transfixed.

Maybe she was having a seizure …

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