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 even 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 referrals over the long run.

Notice what happens at meetings when people are asked to introduce themselves to the group one after another. When someone positions themselves effectively, the delivery is often low-key, but almost always, you’ll observe that at least one person will seek the speaker out to follow up and ask for a business card. And a memorable pitch — one that’s right on the mark for the audience — is remembered and may be acted upon by more people later. Using the process I lead you through, you can generate this kind of interest yourself.

In using your mini-speech, remember that it’s only a first step in building relationships. 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, you can then identify an opportunity to pursue the acquaintanceship.

Defining your audience

You can’t do a good job on an elevator speech unless you think through your audience’s perspective: what interests them, what they want to know, their pain points, and why they’d want to know you. A good introduction is more about “them” than about “me.”

For this reason, expert networkers always encourage someone they’ve just met to speak first. They listen intently, with full focus, and look for ways they can adapt their own introduction and concrete ways to benefit the person.

Of course, when creating an elevator pitch, you seldom have a single person in mind. So start by thinking in terms of group characteristics: what 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.

Try This: A good way to spark your group profile is by visualizing your ideal client or connection. Think about what he or she is most interested in and how you align with that. What keeps her up at night? What are her problems and how can you help her solve them? This will give you good ideas for putting yourself in focus with people in the same line of work.

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. Online research will also turn up relevant business and professional associations.)

Strategizing your content

If you work on your personal value statement, as I spell out in Chapter 10, you are well on your way toward a good elevator speech. 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 went to a meeting of museum administrators, he might adapt this to say:

Hi, I’m Jed White. I’m an arts technology specialist. I build computer programs that save museums a ton of money. Recently, for example, I showed Archive House how to convert a lot of work done by hand to digital methods. And I train people on new technology so they’re happy with it. Right now, I’m looking for a staff opportunity.

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 20 seconds — delivery speed varies a lot 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 antenna 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 affordably. And 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. A few sessions with me often makes an amazing difference in their lives.
• I’m a financial planner. I believe financial planning is so important for everybody, it shouldn’t be a service reserved for the super-rich. So I work by telephone to make good advice affordable. I give people what they want to know — how to pay for college, finance retirement, or buy a house — whatever their goal.

Note how a brief elevator speech can generate questions. Keep the answers in your mental pocket. A sample exchange:

• Dentist: I’m Melanie Black. I’m a dentist and I specialize in preschoolers. I figured out how to give 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.
• Listener: Hmm … how do you do that?
• Dentist: I take plenty of time to show them all the equipment, which is painted in bright colors. I give them a playset of tools to take home. I minimize any pain, of course, but tell them the truth if something might hurt for a few seconds. Almost always they accept that. May I give you my business card if you think of anyone with small children who would appreciate this approach?

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.
• 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?”

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?” Or at least, “May I give you my 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 further along in the conversation. 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 veteran 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 experience would be of value. Can you think of anyone I might talk to?

No guarantees, but if you’re in the right place, the person you’re speaking with is likely to glance around the room to find you a match or give you a lead.

If you’re brand new to the job market or almost so, 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 about to graduate from the program at Tennyson. I’ve worked as an intern at several companies. Last summer I worked at PepsiCo. I’m especially interested in pursuing what I learned there — how to integrate social media with traditional marketing. Can you suggest anyone I might talk to about this?

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 are 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.

In recent years, some associations have begun accommodating out-of-work professionals in their fields in similar ways. Whatever your age and professional status, if you’re aiming for a transition or need job leads, show up!

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. 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 My role is … .

Your description of the organization should ideally be a 15 to 20 second expression of 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 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 Run. We transport horses all over the country for races and competitions … .

Don’t forget, in an elevator speech 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. If you sense an opportunity to follow up by helping someone else in even a small way, take it. Great networkers pursue a relationship 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 coffee or a more formal meeting.

If developing a good elevator speech sounds like a lot of trouble, consider the side benefits. Distilling who you are gives you a great focus for all your communication, including your website, online profiles, and the about-you credit when you write a blog or article. 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. Know who you are, and the rest follows.

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.

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.

Try to crystallize 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.

Try This: To crystallize your basic message, try it the Hollywood way: Figure out a way 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 managers, “Invest in our cross-cultural communication workshops — managers who take them perform 19 percent better.” For a new product, your theme can be as simple as “Invest in this gizmo because it shaves 11 percent off your production costs.”

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.

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 your 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 very hard, and struggling to remember what you memorized always turns of the audience. So you’ll need to boil your script back down to cues to the material you want to deliver.

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.

Try This: A useful compromise between memorizing-the-whole-thing and creating-it-as-you-go is to script and carefully rehearse your opening so you start off with maximum confidence. Be sure to experiment with friends before the event.

Neither the draft nor outline should accompany you to the venue. 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. 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 maintaining audience contact is much more important than remembering every word, or even every thought.

Techniques to keep in mind:

• 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 cadence; 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 whenever you can to engage the emotions and paint pictures. Check a thesaurus for alternative words to spark things up.
• Time your presentation to fit the probable space, allowing for introductions and Q&A, as applicable. Identify areas to skip should you run on too long so that you don’t shortchange your close.
• Have a few content options in mind: When you see your audience losing interest, switch tracks and move on to something else.

Integrating visuals

Notice that I’ve not yet mentioned Microsoft PowerPoint, Prezi, Google Slides, or their 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 PowerPoint or any other 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 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 are there 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:

• 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.
• Use visuals to translate those statistics or ideas into graphic form — 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 that people at the back can read the material. How big depends on the size of your room and audience, but generally, don’t go below 24 points.
• 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 — 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.
• 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 PowerPoint and Internet access altogether because you just never can absolutely depend on them.

Don’t drive yourself crazy by getting absorbed in 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, use a succession of slides that just say 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?

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 in the sporting arena. Rehearse as many times as necessary to master your own material and feel very 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: There are a great many elements 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; and many warm up their voices as well.
• Stand, don’t sit — even for an elevator speech 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, 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.

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