Defining your goal

Every person and every situation may differ, but generally, aim to connect through your elevator speech with someone you don’t yet know — or sometimes more important, someone that person knows — who may share an interest or link you to an opportunity you want. A good self-introduction is part of your overall marketing. It helps you build connections over the long run.

You may have noticed that when people are asked to introduce themselves at live meetings, an elevator speech delivered even in a low-key way can result in one or more participants approaching particular speakers later and exchanging business cards. The introduction was well geared to connect with a need. And a memorable pitch — one that’s right on the mark for the audience —may be acted upon by more people later. Use the process I lead you through to generate this kind of interest yourself.

Remember that an elevator speech is only a first step in building relationships. If the scene is an industry event, for example, trust that there is nothing you can say that will land you a job or consulting offer on the spot. Rather, aim to relax and find meeting ground. Contact points may be purely professional or more personal (like a shared interest in opera or antique cars). If the outlook is promising, look for a way to pursue the acquaintanceship.

Defining your audience

Think through your audience’s perspective: what interests them, what they want to know, their pain points and why they should want to know you. A good introduction is intrinsically as much about “them” as it is about “me.” It should explain why they need you.

For this reason, expert networkers always encourage someone they’ve just met to speak first. They listen intently and look for ways to adapt their own introduction so it highlights their potential benefit in becoming acquainted.

Of course, when creating an elevator pitch, you seldom have a single person in mind. Start by thinking in terms of group characteristics: what its members are likely to have in common. The concerns of bar association members are very different from those who belong to a medical or architects’ association, for example. If a group consists of your peers or customers, you know a lot about them and can easily create a useful profile of the group.

A good way to spark a group profile is by visualizing your ideal client or connection: those you have now or would like to have. Think about what they are most interested in and how you align with that. What keeps them up at night? What are their problems and how can you help solve them? This will give you good ideas for putting yourself in focus with prospects in that line of work. (Chapter 2 shows you how to define audience characteristics in depth.)

Analyzing your goal and potential audience gives you a big bonus: It shows you where to show up — the places, events and occasions that enable you to network with the people you want to tell your story to. This strategic thinking leads you to avoid a mistake many businesspeople make: investing all their time with people similar to themselves. If you’re a real estate agent, certainly you can learn a lot from your fellow agents and enjoy their company, and perhaps form strategic partnerships. But if you want to market, it’s smart to go where your buyers are.

Take time to figure out where your prospects congregate. A good information source is www.meetup.com, which exhaustively lists interest groups in your geographic area by subject, covering virtual as well as in-person events. Online research will also turn up business and professional associations relevant to you.

Strategizing your content

To begin developing your pitch, it’s helpful to take a detour to Chapter 8 and read the section on creating a personal value statement. Scan through your core message to find a statement that comes close to expressing the single most important point you want to get across. Then reimagine it in words that work for the ear. For example, here is Jed’s value statement, which I use as a demonstration in Chapter 10:

Artist, art historian and administrator with experience and advanced training in archiving, preservation and photography. Special expertise in designing computer systems to accomplish administrative work more efficiently and economically. Excellent interpersonal skills, adept at training people to use new technology cheerfully.

If Jed met with a group of museum administrators, he might adapt this to say:

Hi, I’m Jed White. I’m a consultant for museums. I build custom computer systems so they can digitize their collections inexpensively and train people to use them. I just finished a project for the Canadian-American War Museum.

Jed’s task here was to recycle the content into a conversational, easy-to-say, specific statement that centers on his most important asset for this audience. I clocked this speech at about 15 seconds — delivery speed varies depending on the region where you grew up, which influences your speech. Note how much you can get across in that time.

The first imperative of a good speech, whatever its length, is to write it — on paper or your computer. This lets you look at, rethink, edit and refine it. The second imperative is to say it. There’s no substitute for speaking it aloud, because it’s ultimately an oral communication and must be polished based on sound.

Of course, you want your speech to seem spontaneous, especially if it’s an elevator pitch, so there’s a third imperative: practice. When you think you’re ready, try it out on friends and see how they react. Then refine it further.

But you don’t necessarily need to recite what you crafted word for word. More important, you need to completely internalize your message so without stress, you can listen to your conversational partner with all antennae out and adapt it on the spot.

Whether you’ve worked on a core value statement or are starting on your elevator speech from scratch, think intensively about whom you help. Whatever your product or service, ultimately someone benefits. Figure out how and what those benefits are. Think also about what in your work you’re passionate about and what makes you feel proudest.

Tailor elevator speeches to the audience and occasion. A search engine optimization expert may tell this to an audience of marketing directors:

I’m Marian Smith, and my consulting group is SEO-Plus. My mission is to get businesses right on top of Google search results. I’m the marketing department’s secret weapon.

While to a roomful of entrepreneurs, she may say:

I’m Marian Smith of SEO-Plus. My company is a one-stop shop for online marketing, websites and social media support. We level the playing field for small businesses — and know how to do it on small budgets. We’re whizzes at SEO.

Here are a few more representative elevator pitches to stir your thinking:

• I’m a personal trainer, and I work with older women who feel out of shape. I design custom programs they’re comfortable with and teach them to do it on their own. I love seeing how just a few sessions can make an amazing difference in their lives.
• I’m a financial planner. I know how important financial planning is for everyone and believe it shouldn’t be a service only rich people can afford. So, I consult by telephone and it works really well — I help people decide how to pay for college, finance retirement, buy a house — whatever their goal is.

Note how a brief elevator speech can generate questions. Keep the answers in your mental pocket. A sample exchange that might happen at a business or social event:

• Speaker: I’m Melanie Black. I’m a dentist and I specialize in preschoolers. I love giving them a good experience so they won’t be scared of going to the dentist. That way they’ll be happy to take care of their teeth all their lives.
• Audience: Hmm … how do you do that?
• Speaker: I take plenty of time to show them all the equipment, which is painted in bright colors. We give them a playset of tools to take home. We minimize any pain, of course, but tell them the truth if something might hurt for a few seconds. Almost always they accept that. Would you like a business card if you know someone with small children who would appreciate how we work?

Actively observe what works well in your own industry environment and what you respond to. Experiment with your own mini-pitches and evolve what works best. Here are some surefire strategies:

• Be specific and concrete about what you do and who it benefits; generalizations make you sound like everybody else.
• Use short words and sentences, and craft them to sound like natural speech, not a memorized statement.
• Make your pitch memorable and easy to repeat.
• Rev up your spirits and voice to sound positive, enthusiastic and lively.
• Infuse your words with your passion for what you do and who you help, as appropriate.
• Support your message with good body language and facial expressions.
• Practice it to the point where you sound spontaneous and can adapt it on the spot. It’s the idea you want to communicate — you can express it differently every time to suit the conversation and occasion.

Welcome the questions your listener may ask and be prepared to answer: “How do you do that?” “What kind of opportunity are you interested in?” “How does it work?”

Using your mini-speech

Elevator speeches lend themselves to closing with a direct question of your own. To any of the examples I cite, you can with suitable variation say, “Do you know anyone who needs that?” “May I give you my card?” “May I have your business card?”

In many situations, it’s perfectly fine to ask for what you want. If you’re looking for a job or a career transition, add that to the end of your introduction or bring it up earlier, but not at the beginning. Help your listener by being specific about your need. “I’m looking for a marketing job” is far less likely to gain a nibble than:

I’m a five-year vet of the financial services industry. Right now, I’m working on an extra degree in marketing because that’s what I really want to do. I’m looking to move into marketing now at a place where my unusual experience would be appreciated. Can you think of anyone I might talk to?

No guarantees, but the person you’re speaking with may well glance around the room or mentally review his contact file to find you a match or give you a lead.

If you’re brand new to the job market or almost so, or currently out of work, it’s also perfectly fine to say that. But be aware of your own assets and speak from strength. And talk about yourself as a professional!

I’m a marketing specialist and I’ll graduate from Tennyson in May. I’ve worked as an intern at several companies. Last summer I worked at PepsiCo with a team developing ways to integrate social media with traditional marketing. I’d love to continue with work like that — can you suggest anyone I might talk to?

Most young people underestimate the value of in-person networking and the enthusiasm with which professional associations and groups customarily welcome them. Many associations are developing programs to connect with students, who they see as vital to the industry’s future and the association’s. They often have a reasonable student membership rate, and in many cases, you can go to meetings without paying for membership at all.

Many associations sponsor a growing number of virtual events to keep members involved, so don’t overlook those opportunities. The plus side of teleconferenced events is that they can extend your geographic reach beyond your own location, which would be hard to do in the case of live events. So, if you’d like a job in a new area, or are open to going anywhere, look for videoconferences in whatever locations you choose and participate. You may not be able to directly interact with someone who impresses you, but you can follow up in writing!

In any networking situation, the people you talk to are just as eager as you are to make a new connection and to be heard. Listen with both ears. When you detect an opportunity to follow up by helping someone else in even a small way, take it, without necessarily expecting a return favor. After a meeting with someone of interest, great networkers develop relationships by sending a relevant clipping or link, or information about a travel destination or something else that came up. Or if the exchange is mutually promising and common ground is clear, they suggest further conversation or getting together in whatever way is practical.

Representing your organization and yourself

When you introduce yourself as a representative of your company or other organization, you speak for it. Often focusing on yourself isn’t appropriate when you’re talking to potential customers or industry groups. Introducing the organization is first priority. But do identify your role. For example:

I’m Nancy Williams and I’m the head of business development for Brash and Brumble. We’re a local company that helps attorneys develop their branding through new social media strategies. I work with the team that creates the visuals for the client campaigns.

Your description of the organization should ideally be a 15- to 20-second expression of company core value created in much the same way as a personal elevator pitch. It should meet the same criteria — memorability, sharp focus, enthusiastic tone. Your company may have a ready-made pitch, a way of explaining the organization that you can adapt.

If you’re a consultant or the owner of a one-person enterprise, you can speak in your own name or the company’s and use the editorial “we” if you wish:

I’m Mark Smith, and my company is Four Legs on the Move. We transport horses all over the country for races and competitions … .

Distilling who you are through an elevator pitch gives you a great focus for all your communication, including your website, online profiles and the “about” credit when you write a blog or article. It gives you the best kernel for creating a tagline. Some people use a version on their letterhead or email signature.

And you’ve practiced the same methodology that will serve you well for all the presentations you may give that are more than 20 seconds, which I discuss next.

The magic of learning good communication techniques is that they work for everything you’re called on or choose to write, and everything you write well helps you tell other people who you are and what you can do. And never think that what you do (or want to do) is too dull or limited to feed an interesting elevator speech. Dig deeper: Why did you choose your focus? Who needs it? Where do you want to take your skill? Know who you are, and the rest follows.

While it may be in order to use a version of your introduction at social occasions, don’t use it indiscriminately and label yourself a self-promoting bore. On the other hand, one of the most successful sales coaches I know routinely starts conversations when waiting in lines in any situation and remarkably often, ends up with good business leads.

Planning what to say

Just as for an elevator speech, make decisions for a presentation based on your goal and your audience. What do you want to do: Motivate? Inspire? Sell something? Share information? Impress with your expertise? Change people’s opinions or behavior? Each goal calls for different content, whatever the subject. And the advice that follows should be adapted to the format — speech, workshop, business pitch, presentation — and venue.

The more closely you define your goal, the better the guidance you give yourself. For example, when you want to share information, think through why you want to share it. Helping your audience work harder and smarter is different from aiming to sign audience members up for one-on-one coaching. The first goal demands that you motivate the audience and deliver practical how-to information. To accomplish the second, you’d calibrate how much information to give away so that audience members are enticed to want more.

The audience to whom you’re giving the information is the other half of the planning equation. If you’re a scientist, you naturally present different material to other professionals as opposed to a lay audience interested in something useful or fun. Give real thought to what your listeners wants to know, what they worry about and what they care about. How will what you say solve problems? Or make life better, even if just a tiny bit?

Unless you are a technical professional talking to people just like yourself, presentations are not usually the medium for deep, detailed, complex material. Despite how most teaching is still done, oral learning by itself is not very effective. And on-screen visuals and video in the way that most people use them don’t help much.

Always the best rule of thumb: Keep it simple. When you plan a presentation, start at the end. What do you most want your audience to walk away with and remember? The best teachers aim to increase their students’ knowledge and understanding incrementally rather than in giant leaps. It’s best not to be overly ambitious and try to pour everything you know into 15 minutes of fast talk.

It’s critical to know the time frame for your presentation. If half an hour is allocated, remember, according to the situation, to allow some of that time for you to be introduced, and to leave time at the end for questions. This probably brings 30 minutes down to 20 at best. Obviously if you have 15 minutes, or an hour, your content planning will be substantially different. You may need to narrow down your subject for smaller time frames.

Try to articulate a theme for your presentation — a basic message. Framing your material with a point of view, and putting things into perspective, is far more effective than giving people “just the facts.” Most of us feel we’re already drowning in information. We want to be told what the data means; what the product or service does for us; what will be different if we adopt the idea or invest in the belief.

To crystallize your basic message, try it the Hollywood way: Figure out how to express it in a single sentence. In fact, billion-dollar movies may be funded based on pitches such as, “Boy robot and girl robot fall in love and want a baby.” A business equivalent? Perhaps for an audience of talent management specialists, “Managers who take our cross-cultural workshops perform 19 percent better.” For a new product, your theme can be as simple as “Buy this gizmo because it shaves 11 percent off your electric bill.” For a charitable cause, “Five dollars per week will buy food for 20 orphaned llamas.”

Crafting your presentations with writing

Other than rocket science and brain surgery, perhaps, no thought is so complex that you cannot express it in clear, simple language. If you find it a challenge to be simple and clear, take it as a signal that you may need to understand your subject better. Or rethink it entirely.

If you have trouble homing in on your message or start to lose track of it, tell it to somebody: Explain what you want to get across and go on to detail the major relevant ideas, facts and points you want to make. Record what you say and build on this plan.

Writing helps you think through your presentation content and approach, so start with a piece of paper or your computer screen. Depending on how you work best, you can:

• Draft a full script, based on subheads if this method works for you, or create an outline that covers all your main points. Many people recommend building on no more than three main ideas.
• Identify a set of idea chunks and sequence them in a natural way so you can deliver your content in logical order, but plan to create the actual language on the spot.

Spelling it all out with Option 1 may seem more secure, but consider that you’d either have to read it verbatim — the worst presentation technique — or completely memorize it. This is extremely hard, and struggling to remember what you memorized is sure to turn off the audience. So, you’ll need to boil your script back down to cues that remind you of the points you want to make.

Option 2, then, is often the best way to go. You must be totally comfortable with your material: Know your stuff and know your audience. Think through each area you want to cover and speak to it one piece at a time. You can remind yourself of your topics with an index card or two or what you put on the screen.

Delivering this way makes your content seem fresh — and it is, because you’re framing the words as you speak and responding to your audience’s expressions, gestures, body language. If as you talk it sounds like you’re figuring it out, that’s fine, unless you’re really slow: A thoughtful delivery brings the audience along with you and typically matches their learning speed.

A useful compromise between memorizing-the-whole-thing and creating-it-as-you-go is to script and carefully rehearse your opening section, over and over again, so you start off with maximum confidence and create audience trust in the value of paying attention. Experiment with friends before the event and adjust the script if the input is helpful.

Maintaining maximum eye contact with your audience is essential. Therefore, do not depend on reading a draft or outline. If the event is so formal you need to read the whole speech, find out if there’s a teleprompter — but understand that using it well takes real practice. This is also true of teleprompter apps you can use on your smartphone or other device. Another approach is to type the speech in a large font with pauses built in so you can look up often. For example:

• Four score and seven years ago
• our fathers brought forth
• on this continent …

However you achieve it, always remember that audience contact is much more important than remembering every word or even every thought. Expect that you may leave things out. No one but you will know. A U.S. president once gave a famous speech built around four points, an organization he spelled out at the beginning. He only delivered three points, but they were so well presented, no one appeared to notice.

Techniques to keep in mind at the planning stage:

• Use basic, natural language as you do in conversation: short words, short sentences. You want to be instantly understood and trusted.
• Build in natural pauses — the oral equivalent of white space — between ideas, sections and important sentences to help people absorb what you say.
• Say your words aloud as you write and listen for an easy flow; when you find awkward hard-to-say patches, or you run out of breath, rewrite and check the sound again.
• Avoid using too many statistics or numbers, because they dull the senses and numb the brain.
• Use metaphors and other comparisons to make your point: “The applicants could have filled half a football field” is better than citing a figure.
• Use graphic language and action verbs to engage the emotions and paint pictures. Check a thesaurus for alternative high-energy words to spark things up.
• Time your presentation to fit the expected space and identify areas to skip should you run on too long to avoid shortchanging your close. Also have some extra material in your head should you run short (usually not the case).
• Have a few content options in mind: When you see your audience losing interest, switch tracks and move on to something else.

Integrating visuals

It’s not accidental that I’ve not yet mentioned Microsoft PowerPoint, Prezi, Keynote, Google Slides or their proliferating younger cousins. And for good reason: Despite all too common practice, visuals should always be treated as support for your message, not the main show.

Don’t use a presentation system to plan and write what you’ll say. Your message becomes distorted when you try to jam it into a limiting, structured format. Resist making decisions about what to include or omit based on preallocated pieces of space or flashy templates.

Plan and write your presentation as a speech, and then think about supporting visuals. Or work out possible slides simultaneous with the copy as you go. When you prepare the slides, don’t cut and paste onto them the editorial content you wrote: Treat each slide as an individual communication and figure out what (few) words should be included and what visuals help make the same point. Avoid throwing your whole speech onto the screen.

You are — or should be — the central focus when you speak. People tune in to see and hear you, not stare at a screen. Never read from your slides. And don’t distribute your handout before you speak, because it distracts your listeners, who leap ahead to the end and then wait impatiently for you to catch up.

Here are a few basic guidelines for integrating visuals into slide presentations:

• Keep every slide simple and easy to absorb at a glance: no long lists of bullets and sub-bullets, no complex charts and graphs, no sets of statistics.
• Translate important data or statistics into visualizations — for instance, if you’re trying to explain the size of a nanometer, show comparisons such as a human hair and other objects.
• Keep fonts simple and BIG so an in-person audience can read the material from anywhere in the room. How big depends on the size of your room and audience, but generally, don’t go below 24 points. If your presentation is for virtual delivery, you may not need font that large but check readability on various platforms, including smartphones.
• Keep graphics simple and consistent in format, style, colors and type of illustrations. Mixing photographs with cartoons, for example, is usually jarring. Check for legibility before you present to an audience to be sure the text projects well and is easy to read.
• Use the “action” feature of presentation systems for dynamic visuals to show change — for example, how one element of a graph line moves over time. But use animation features sparingly so they are not distracting.
• Incorporate video clips as available to liven things up, but be sure they’re worth the watching time and support your message. Short is usually better. You want to stay the main focus of attention.
• Test everything out before show time to make sure the technology is working, especially if you emailed the slide deck or are using unfamiliar equipment. Video clips in particular may come undone. The savviest presenters stand ready to deliver without their slide decks and Internet access because you just never can absolutely depend on them.

Don’t drive yourself crazy by spending inordinate time on the mechanics of presentation. Focus on the substance. In fact, a good way to stay grounded as you speak is to use your slides as an organizational tool. Set up headlines and subheads that key you to remember important points. This keeps your audience with you, too. For example, build a succession of slides that just say minimal things like: The Problem, What We Did, How it Worked, Our Conclusions, What’s Next — each with maybe just a few lines of copy. Wouldn’t you rather they listen to you for the answers rather than trying to read them?

Or, phrase the ideas as questions: Why did X become a problem? How did we figure it out? How does this help 7 million people?

Standing and delivering

When you do your homework and shape your message to audience expectations and your own goals — first in writing and then by practicing the message to internalize it — you have the right content and have earned confidence to boot.

Practice is how dancers, musicians, actors, athletes and CEOs remember what to do when they’re on stage or other performance arena. Rehearse as many times as necessary to master your own material and feel entirely comfortable with it. If you can’t speak without notes, use cue cards as reminders, but don’t stare at them for minutes or rustle through them to find your place.

Try This: Use prepping techniques. A great many elements are involved in creating and giving effective presentations, which you realize if you know an actor, have worked with a voice coach or have given a formal speech. Practice won’t make perfect, and doesn’t need to. But some useful techniques can go a long way. Following are my ten favorite ideas for feeling professional and confident:

• Warm up. Many professional speakers have an easy exercise routine they do before presenting to help them feel relaxed and limber and get the energy flowing; many warm up their voices as well.
• Stand, don’t sit — even for an elevator speech and video conferencing when practical.
• Keep your posture straight and balanced, but not stiff; no rocking or fidgeting or pacing (but natural hand gestures and natural body movement are excellent).
• Breathe deeply, from very low in your diaphragm. This takes practice.
• Radiate positive energy and pleasure at being there.
• Vary the pitch and tone of your voice and be conscious of pacing: Avoid speed. The best pace may be a little slower than in a natural conversation.
• Maintain voice energy. Don’t trail off at the end of sentences or end with an upward inflection that sounds like you’re asking a question. Pause before and after a major point.
• Focus on one person at a time as you speak, perhaps for five-second intervals — don’t let your eyes dart around or look to the sky for help.
• Notice how people react. If eyes glaze over, or half your audience is looking at their smartphones or toward the exit, slide into a new direction.
• Don’t sweat what you forget. Even if you skip a major point, you’re the only one who knows. Just focus on saying the rest with conviction.

Public speaking is an excellent way to grow your business. If it’s important to you, give yourself some solid grounding. Many good speakers value their experience with Toastmasters International (www.toastmasters.org). And workshops in voice and presentation techniques are often available through local colleges, other educational centers and private sources.