Attract more clients with the right message.
There are no magical short cuts to the top in small business. But a killer elevator pitch can expedite the trip.
Your elevator pitch is the concise statement of the value you provide to your customers. When a prospect hears it, it has to grab their attention, and make real for them the benefits that you can deliver to their business or life.
When it really works, your elevator pitch will engage your prospect so that they want to hear more. You know it’s working when they say in response, “How do you do that?”
Have you ever met a salesperson who seems compelled to present an entire dog-and-pony show to everyone they meet? They’ve been schooled to:
I actually like to converse, to get to know someone, and to find out about a solution to a problem. In other words, like most people, I like being sold to.
The San Diego Union-Tribune, under new ownership in the last year, no longer features the old “Copley Ring of 
Truth” in the page 1 masthead. Now they have a statement along the lines of: “More than 1.374 million readers per week.”
Never mind that they used to sell more papers than that per day. But the U-T is not alone. Readers are abandoning newspapers in droves.
Below is a telling chart from The Awl.com.
Look at the incredibly swift descent of the Los Angeles Times — once considered one of the most prestigious newspapers in America (The tallness of the chart prevented me from grabbing it all — the vertical lines represent five year increments from 1990 to 2010).
A disruptive force blew into our lives this summer and shattered our family routine.
Mealtimes were whenever. Exercise regimens went out the window. The yard was overgrown, the laundry piled up. Neighbors heard screaming and crying at all hours of the day and night.
And there was that joie de vivre that you can only get with a newborn in the house.
Let me explain: In March we decided to volunteer with the Angels Foster Family Network, a San Diego-based agency that matches foster babies with caregivers. My sister-in-law and her husband had blazed the trail, and like them, as I somewhat famously declared at the orientation meeting, we were signing up to provide respite care, giving the real foster parents a short break when they needed it.
At least, that was the plan.
It’s a fact of life: Whenever you sit down to write something, you can presume that the audience is in some state of attention deficit.
The person you are trying to reach (that’s you, right now) is multi-tasking in one way or another: monitoring the e-mail coming in through Outlook; maybe taking a call or a text message on the cell phone; keeping an eye on the TV and/or carrying on a conversation with someone else who is actually in the room. Or scrolling through TweetDeck, for crying out loud.
“Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup…”
When they first hear about Twitter and the prospect of sending 140-character messages out, most people go, “Why the hell would I want to do that?”
After you play with it for a while you begin to get Twitter: It’s your own channel, to which you may invite whomever you want.
So what kind of bite-sized programming would you put on your own 140-character- at-a-time channel?
If, for instance, you are:
Then you probably see how Twitter could become an effective tool.
A lot of people using Twitter are following (or have following them) a ridiculous number of people. Once you get past 20 or so, it’s like watching channels on TV — you have to make choices. It’s just not possible to stay current with every station.
I don’t think so. He had an associate who put in a good word with the Queen, but he didn’t have someone asking him if he was working on the right problem.
Neither (as far as I know) did Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin or Sam Walton. Yet they each pushed themselves to achieve incredible, world-changing feats.
OK, they each had their own special genius.
Guess what? So do you.
I’ve worked for a couple of coaching companies, OneCoach and TEC /Vistage, so I’ve seen how having a business coach in your corner can make a huge difference.
I ran a faster marathon (and achieved one of my life goals) because I had a great coach, pushing me further than I might have gone on my own.
But here’s the thing: You can actually coach yourself.
This is not just me biting the hands that used to feed me. I really believe that while it’d be great to have a Vince Lombardi in your corner, only you can make the commitment to do the things you need to do to get your enterprise (and your life) to the next level.
Sure, new skills, and what they call “out-of-the-box thinking” and are required. But if you’re motivated, you really can transform your business and your life.
Life is a series of choices. And just about every day, you come into a situation where you want people to choose you.
To achieve the result you want, you need to convince them of the superiority of:
You’re in sales, in other words. We all are. Every sale requires the ability to convince your audience to take the next step. This is marketing, and we’re all in that too. And persuasive copy is the foundation of effective marketing.
My point is, you need to know how to write.
Not like Shakespeare, but with a basic level of competence. Even if all you’re writing is Craigslist ads, you need to know how to persuade with the written word. And if you are running your own business today, it’s absolutely mandatory that you be able to reach people and convince them with clear and compelling language.
The problem is that for many people, sitting down to write is as much fun as taking a seat in the dentist’s chair. But writing well is not that difficult. So lets do something about that.
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