The elevator pitch is tough. You’ve spent weeks trying to get your sales prospect on the phone, they finally pick up and now you have the challenging job of having to ‘pitch’ what you do and excite them about it in 30 seconds. So are you doing a good job of it or are you falling at the first hurdle? Let’s find out.

Grab a friend, recite the elevator pitch you use on your sales calls and once you’ve finished ask them one question. “What can you see?”

As humans, we need to make mental pictures from words to really understand what the words mean. So if at the end of your elevator pitch your buddy can’t imagine anything, has no vision for what you’re talking about at all, there’s a pretty decent chance your sales prospect can’t either.

It’s likely you’re doing 1 or a combination of the following things in your elevator pitch. Baffling your prospect with client names, product jargon, overloading them with information, using unnecessarily complicated words and speaking too fast in the hope to cram in all the information. Here’s an example of how my elevator pitch would sound if I was to do the same:

“Over 1200 companies including Mcdonalds, IBM, Comcast, use our technology to deliver employee perks, recognition & employee communications on a single platform called SmartHub™ to optimise their whole employee experience”

All true, but what do you picture in your mind? You probably find it hard to imagine anything at all. A sales prospect is probably working out the best excuse to get off the phone about now.

What about if I said:

‘We help organizations show their employees how valued they are to the business making them happier and more engaged ‘

What do you picture now? I picture happy faces, smiling employees.

There is a clear difference between the 2. The 1st focuses very much on what we do, the 2nd focuses more on the impact we have for our clients. The 2nd helps my sales prospect understand quickly how we help organisations in a clear and simple way.  In under 10 seconds I will have sparked something in their imagination they can make sense of, they can imagine. Of course, it doesn’t go into huge detail about our product offering at this point but it doesn’t need to, all I need to understand during the 1st 90 seconds of that phone call is if I’m talking to a prospect that values employee engagement and is open to learning about how we can help them. Listing client names and product features isn’t going to help me achieve that. It’s time to drop the ‘elevator pitch’ and introduce the ‘vision pitch’

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