Mike Verret: How to Create an Elevator Pitch for Your Business

What is your elevator pitch? On today’s episode, Mike Verret, Principal at Verret & Associates with over 25 years of marketing experience, explains the importance of how you talk about your business to potential clients.

Your elevator pitch is how you describe what your business does in a concise and intriguing way that makes listeners want to learn more. When the audience is engaged in asking questions, they are more likely to remember you. Your pitch should have a clear message that resonates with your listeners and that is unique enough to make you stand apart from your competition.

Tune into this week’s episode of Powerful Marketing Tips for a conversation about crafting the perfect elevator pitch. Learn what comprises an elevator pitch and why how we talk about our businesses makes all the difference.

Quotes:

“Ultimately what I’ve done is create a business where I work with other businesses for three weeks, three meetings to get them to one way they talk about themselves. That creates consistency in their marketing, efficiency in their marketing…and it makes you memorable. An audience only remembers one of three things. They remember first, best, and different…We just need to appear different in the audience’s eyes…That’s become the focus of what I do based on my 25 years of experience working with audiences.” (04:04-05:08)
“Your elevator is eight floors and it starts with what you do, but your objective is just to get to the next floor and get them to ask the next question…My first floor is about connection, creating that need to say tell me more. I’m in PR but I say I make news…tell me more about making news is what I’m trying to elicit. My second floor is about my audience and what they’re going through and I want them to ask so how do you help them. So, I can get to the third floor which is my solution and from there they ask how does that work? My fourth floor becomes my process….The fifth floor is what services do you provide. Those services can now hang off of that process and have context…Sixth floor: how does it benefit? Seventh floor: can you prove it? …Finally, the eighth floor is what do you want me to do next? Can I have your card? Is there a way to get in touch with you? If you invert that thinking with those questions like it’s going up an elevator, invert it so it’s going down, that's the way human beings would ask questions to elicit information. So what do you do? What does that mean? How do you help them? How does that work? What services do you provide? What do I get out of it? Do you have proof to back it up? Let's talk more. That’s it.” (13:30-15:24)
“How do you make the leader realize that the effects of what he’s doing reverberate all the way through the organization and create that urgency around doing it right?” (22:26-22:35)
“There is one message that can relate to different audience sections…One message: here’s how it relates to you audience one, here’s how it relates to you user two, user three. Now you have permission to talk to different audiences. Once you’ve gotten them all aligned around one main message.” (23:04-23:28)
“It all has to do with perspective. We’re always too close to our own business.” (28:39-28:42)
“The most important thing to think about is to search what you do on Google. Look at what everybody else is doing and figure out how to not look like them.” (29:16-29:28)