In postings last year I described three kinds of elevator speeches. One, the sales meeting elevator speech or positioning statement is used at the start of a sales meeting to reassure the client that you are a person who knows enough to make the conversation worthwhile.

You don’t use them to convince the client to hire you nor to differentiate you from the competition. You can do these things once you know more about what the client is looking for. For now, you just give the client enough information to get her talking.

A variation on the positioning statement is the theme elevator speech. It is used only in complex sales, sales for large, complex services made over months at many meetings to many buyers against competition. Unlike other positioning statements, these do differentiate you.

In large, complex sales, getting a clear message about why you are special across to many buyers over months can be hard. The many people in the client’s organization involved in some way in the selection process over months will become confused over time about which professionals were with which team.

Suppose that to make the sale you must have ten meetings with a combined total of fifteen members of the client organization. So must two competitors. This is a LOT of meetings. It is imperative that you do something that gives the people in the client organization a clear and simple way to remember what team you are with and how that team is different.

The theme positioning statement is a short, memorable and compelling sentence about what makes you special. Develop it as soon as you know the client’s key concerns and who you are competing against. Once you have created it, you and your team members should repeat it at the beginning of every meeting with a new buyer and as often as is practical at the start of meetings with buyers you already know. It becomes your brand for the purposes of this sale. Here are some examples:

• Knowledge of the Client: We know how special your company’s culture is because we’ve been working with your people to help the company grow for the past fifteen years. (This theme helped a technology consulting firm sell a new service against competitors much better established in that service area.)

• Specialists: Our people work only on [the specific kind of need the client had]. This is what we do. We get results because we have developed an array of techniques and tools focused on [this kind of need]. (This theme helped a firm win business over two larger, multi-service firms.)

• One-Stop Service: We specialize in this kind of problem and can provide every major service required to get it resolved. (This theme helped a firm capture a large share of the market away from firms dealing in only aspects of a large problem a client had to deal with.)

• We Deliver: We’re the firm that successfully defended the five pharmaceutical companies named as co defendants in the class action suit alleging ill effects of taking puscilanta and similar drugs.

You will know that your branding effort is successful when you hear members of the client team start to refer to you in the language you have been using. “Clara works with Bucken Husse. They’re the ones who know how we do things here, because they’ve worked with us for so long.”

I seem to have a different goal for an elevator speech than others do, perhaps because I work for professional service firms.  In a recent post, Glenn Andrew proposes a three-step process for creating one.

In Step One, you pose a do-you-know-how question.  Do you know how easy it is to reach over and shut off the alarm clock and go back to sleep in the morning when you should get up?

In Step Two, you pose a solution.  My firm makes the Run-Away Alarm Clock that keeps moving just our of reach, when you try to shut it off.

In Step Three, you ask for a referral.  Do you know anyone who has trouble getting up in the morning?

I like the first two steps, first getting the client to visualize a problem and stating that you solve it.  But I don’t like Step Three, as least for my clientele.  Imagine recieving the following answer to your question about what someone does for a living:

Do you know how some people who earn big incomes will try to divorce their wives and leave them almost nothing?  I am a divorce attorney who helps the wives get a fair share of the family wealth in a divorce.  Do you know any couples who are divorcing? 

This lawyer provides a valuable service, but asking for a referral so early in a relationship is highly inappropriate.  At least it seems so to me.  I could cite many other examples. 

In the professions, an elevator speech isn’t a sales pitch or a request for a referral.  As I stated in a previous post , Of Water and Buckets, an elevator simply tells the listener what you do in a way she will remember.  That is why my description of how to create an elevator speech leaves out a request for a referral, or for a sales meeting or any other advance.

I am not saying that Glenn Andrew is wrong for many businesses.  Nor am I saying he is all wrong for the professions. To the contrary, his first two steps have taught me something useful that I will apply when I next get a chance.  It is only in the goal of an elevator speech that we disagree significantly, and that is the reason I have a hard time with his third step.  This is just another case in which selling professional services differs from selling products. 

The classic elevator speech is used in brief, informal business encounters, like the fifteen-minute conversation at an association meeting or the late-Friday conversation between two delayed travelers in an airline club lounge.  It’s also useful at a lunch a colleague is hosting for you and one of her clients as an informal first step to cross selling your services.  I have previously described this kind of elevator speech in an earlier posting (Elevator Speeches).

It should be clear:

• I am a lawyer.
• I am an accountant. 
• I am a structural engineer.

It should use concrete, simple language: 

• I am a lawyer.  I specialize in family law. 
• I am an accountant.  Specifically, I am a tax accountant. 
• I am a structural engineer. I deal mostly with cases where structures have failed.

It should be memorable:

• I am a lawyer.  I specialize in family law. Many of my clients have children or other dependents who will need taking care of long after the client will be able to provide it.  I help make sure that care is put in place.
• I am an accountant.  Specifically, I am a tax accountant.  And I work with smaller companies for whom workers comp and other taxes are a significant cash drain.  I help them make sure that they aren’t paying any more than they are required to. My clients in your industry include Antimacassar, Inc. and Necessary Needlepoint.
• I am a structural engineer. I deal mostly with cases where structures have failed. I specialize in figuring out why buildings or bridges fell down.  In this city, we have worked on the collapse of the spectator stands at Run Off Raceway.

(For more, see our category on elevator speeches.)

Before a client engages in a serious conversation about her business or legal concern, she might request a short description of what you do. She quite naturally wants to know who she is talking with so that she can decide whether or not it is worth the effort to describe her need in detail.

You must be careful to give her just enough information to make her comfortable that you are, indeed, the person to talk with. If you say too much, you may draw so much attention to yourself that she starts asking a lot of questions about you. If that happens, she may make the decision that you aren’t suited to her need, before you even learn what that need is.

In this situation you need a short, compelling description of what you do. In other words, an elevator speech. We call this kind a positioning statement. It is the most variable of the three kinds of elevator speeches I described earlier, because selling situations differ. Let’s look at how a location consultant might alter his positioning statement to accommodate different selling situations. Just for starters:

The client may know nothing about either him or his firm: We help companies select locations for new facilities. My personal specialty is selecting sites for research laboratories like the one that I understand you need to build. We have helped companies as diverse as Trigestis Pharmaceuticals, Permian Oil and SnackTime Foods select laboratory locations. We look at recruitment of researchers, customer interaction, incentives and any other critical factor that varies with geography.

The client may know you and your firm for one service, when you are selling another: You know us mostly for our location selection work. Many of the companies we work with also seek our help in moving to that new location. We help develop employee relocation policies, employee communication plans, plans for moving furniture and lab equipment and other critical elements of getting a lab up and running on time and on budget. We provide these services to well over half of our location selection clients.

The client may know you and your firm, but not the colleague who has come with you:  I have brought Chris Browne with me today, because you asked about the potential to obtain incentives from communities we are considering for your new lab. Chris leads our negotiation practice and negotiates on everything from tax reductions to site infrastructure improvements and from lease costs to the size of subsidies for training new personnel.

After providing a positioning statement, you want to ask a question that will get the client talking about her need. That’s who we are. Perhaps you could tell us a bit about the lab in question and why you are thinking of relocating it.

Remember that the goal of the positioning statement is to give the client just enough information that she will feel comfortable talking about her issue. You aren’t trying to sell her anything yet. You aren’t trying to differentiate your firm from all of the possible competitors. You just want to give her enough information to make her feel it’s worth telling you what she wants.

After she tells you what she wants, you can tell her why yours is the best firm to solve her problem and how you differ from her alternatives. But not now. Now you listen.

(For more, see our category on elevator speeches.)

In one of those helpful articles that points out something that should be obvious, but is overlooked, Doug Stern warns us in his Marketing Profs article “The Myth of the Elevator Speech” that people asking about what we do for a living doesn’t mean that they want to know much.    It’s often a conversation filler; a polite question that should be treated as such.

The broader message implied in Stern’s article, one that should also be obvious, is that we each need several elevator speeches to use in different kinds of situations.  I can think of three that we all should have:

1>     The Stern Elevator Speech
2>     The Positioning Statement or Sales Meeting Elevator Speech
3>     The Classic Elevator Speech

I’ll describe the first one here, and write about the other two in upcoming blog posts this month.

The Stern Elevator Speech

Here Stern isn’t an adjective; it’s Doug’s last name, used in his honor to describe the elevator speech used in social, rather than business, situations.  Rather than stern, it should be light and conversational.  If it makes people smile, so much the better.  I like the ending that draws out the other person, because I’m shy and like it best when the other person talks.

I’m a mortgage banker, the person responsible for the current recession. And you?

I’m an accountant.  I count beans and, occasionally, money.

I’m an economist, and if that doesn’t depress you sufficiently, let me know and I’ll tell you more.  What about you?

In Stern conversations (not stern ones), don’t—don’t—bore the other person with a lengthy description of what you do.  For example, a litigation support consultant should not try for a clear statement of what she does.  If you say:
I conduct the forensic accounting analyses that determine financial facts and legal culpability under litigation and that provide valuations of damages.
the other person will either flee, change the subject or, with dread, feel obliged to ask you to explain yourself.  Instead, you might say:

I make up the facts that lawyers like Jim, here, twist in court.

Remember, keep your Stern Elevator Speeches lively and conversational.

(Note to Doug Stern: This posting would have been much easier to write if your last name had been something like Light or Jolly.)

(For more, see our category on elevator speeches.)

An elevator speech is supposed to be the description of your services that you would give to a prospective client who is held captive in a descending elevator for thirty seconds.  I have never tried it on an elevator and don’t know anyone who has. 

Assuming for the moment that you can rendezvous with a client for such a ride, that the elevator is empty enough that you aren’t looking at the back of the client’s head, a mere inch in front of your own, and that the client is in a particularly generous mood—all of which pretty much exclude this from occurring in New York City—it would be useful to have something ready to say.  And, yes, there are other situations when a concise description of what you do is helpful to have on call.

Let’s look at one elevator speech to see what we can learn from it.  I have changed it slightly from the words I was given to protect the innocent, but it is essentially the same:

We use proven group psychological techniques to reconfigure and improve the way people communicate, associate and collaborate to ensure dedication to change.

This example shows what is wrong with many elevator speeches.  It tells how the firm does its work (. . . proven group psychological techniques . . .) when it should only tell what the firm does and how the client benefits from it.

The client won’t be interested in how you do your work until she is considering hiring you.  It is abstract to the level of incomprehensibility.  Each word, one suspects, was carefully chosen because of some nuance of meaning not shared with us.  Being abstract and filled with long words that are hard to absorb it is unmemorable.  As the client steps across the threshold of the elevator, she purges it from her mind. 

And I hate all the “-ates.”  They annoy me.

• Uninteresting
• Abstract
• Incomprehensible
• Unmemorable
• Annoying

Surely, that isn’t what an elevator speech is supposed to be.
Instead, it should be:

Benefits Focused:  Until the prospective client grasps how she will benefit from your service, she won’t be interested in how you do your work.  Imagine an endodontist in an elevator describing the superior features of his approach to root canal work, when your teeth are in good shape.  Chances are you wouldn’t have much interest.

Concrete:  It must use words that conjure up physical objects.

Easily Understood:  It should use short, common words, as much as possible.  So, for example, we might be able to replace communicate with talk and replace collaborate and associate with work together.

Memorable: Words describing simple actions are memorable, because they create a little video in our mind’s eye.

Professional:  This is not the place to be cute.

How about:

We help people embrace the need for change, whether it be for a new technology, for a turnaround, for a new strategy or for some other cause.  Then we help these same people bring the needed change about, whether working in teams or as individuals.  For example, we helped a luxury hotel chain turn around a reputation for poor service by helping its staff members change the way they responded to guests’ requests for help.

Do you understand what this firm does now?  If so, I will let you off the elevator and you can go home.

Recently, I helped one client sharpen his elevator speech and another to spruce up a letter with which she planned to introduce herself before she called a prospective client to ask for a meeting.  Both were making a common mistake by pouring too much content into these tiny vessels.  They did this becaue they forgot their objectives.

An elevator speech, so called because it is what you would say to a prospective client you ran into during a thirty second elevator ride, tells a busy client who you are and what you do in words that are easily undestood and memorable.  In thirty seconds you can’t do much more than that.  An introductory letter may spark enough curiosity for a client to take your call and talk to you for a few minutes.  After all, you have about three short paragraphs, because a busy client who doesn’t know you won’t read an epistle.  If the client grasps what you do or takes your phone call, you have achieved a lot for a small investment of time.

If you try to accomplish more than these bare objectives, you may not achieve even them.  Niether the elevator speech of the introductory letter can differentiate you from your competitors or explain the full range of your services.  They certainly can’t persuade the client to hire you.  Trying to achieve these things is analogous to trying to fit three gallons of water into a one-gallon bucket; it makes a mess of the job.  In every contact with a client, remember what you objective is and you will have a better chance of accomplishing it.

And now I must stop before I try to get too much content from a small, if important, point.