Over the years lots has been written about elevator speeches but most of what I have read doesn’t really fit with my thoughts on the subject so I figured I would let you all know how I feel about the subject.

Elevator speeches need to be tailored to fit the environment you are in…so one size fits all is plain wrong!

As an example, you are a member of a closed networking group that meets every week for breakfast and at that meeting you get a chance to talk for 30 seconds or so. What do you say? Do you say the same exact thing each and every week? Do you practice that or do you just wing it?

I have seen people who just wing it, I have seen people who have a memorized speech and I have seen everybody else in between and you know what…I stop listening to most of them after just a few weeks of being a member of the group. They just don’t hold my interest. To me that is a failure of the elevator speech and a waste of 30 seconds of everyone’s lives.

There was one guy that never practiced, never prepared but always had our attention. He was a crusty old guy that couldn’t even spell the words politically correct and we all literally held our breath when he get up because we just didn’t know what he was going to say. Sometimes he was crude, sometimes he was funny, sometimes he made a really good point but he ALWAYS had a captive audience.

Why? Because he changed his topic and his focus every week…he did it to be funny but he did it.

So let me give you some pointers on elevator speeches:

1. Know your audience. If you are in a roomful of lawyers change your speech to fit what they want to hear. In other words, don’t talk about how pretty your paint colors are…talk about how professional, warm and classy your work makes a corporate office look.
2. Pick 3-4 of your best products/services and focus your speech on one of those products each week.
3. Talk about benefits and emotions not cold hard facts. How do you help people solve problems instead of the chemical makeup of your product.
4. Stop talking about customer service! Anybody who has been networking for longer than a week is sick and tired of hearing about how good everybody’s customer service is. That’s the fallback for everybody these days…don’t be that guy. If you really and truly do have the best customer service in your industry then fine…but at least use customer testimonials to show off this advantage instead of just saying we have the best customer service in the world.
5. Bring props! People love to see and touch instead of just hearing. If it’s appropriate bring something for them to touch or at least look at. If you are a house painter, get some of your best work blown up to poster size with full color and hold it up over your head while you are talking about how professional of a job you do.

Mixers and/or business card exchanges in my opinion require a whole different approach. For these events I customize my speech and cut it way down in time and length. 95% of the people who go to these things want to talk about themselves and what they are selling not about you or what you are selling. The other 5% are lying about it!

So give them what they want and make an impression. Don’t prattle on and on about who you are and what you do, let them talk about themselves and ask questions. They will at some point ask about you, tell them very, very quickly what it is you do in the form of a benefits statement (example: I put people in front of other business people for $10 a week) and then ask them a question about themselves or their product.

You will make more of an impression and will have a much better chance of getting in front of them again when you have more time to explain what you do if you are able to impress them in that 5 minute