Are you as tired as this author is of those old fashioned and boring elevator pitches?
If you are, tell your vendors, friends, links and other’s in your connected network to use their noodle and come up with something more interesting. Something that will show their creativity and ensure that you will continue to be interested in their company, offerings and creative approach into the future..
An elevator pitch according to Wikipedia is a short summary used to quickly and simply define a product, service, or organization and its value proposition. I can remember this subject coming up at my new man training school at a major corporation over 30 years ago. It was fun to play around with different approaches and compare how well one could define themselves and their company. The problem is, once a company has settled on something they tend to forget about it and it just becomes blah, blah blah and as such does not evolve as the company does. Much the same story exists for companies brand strategies. But that’s another story or post.
Let’s look at a couple of examples. I worked for a Loss Prevention Company at one point. When the owner was asked what they do, he very succinctly stated, “We analyze transaction data to detect patterns of employee theft”. This certainly fits the model of less than 30 seconds and begs a question on the part of the person asking the question. The questions could be myriad, but would have the desired effect of beginning a conversation.
When we launched SafeSourcing, we tried to come up with an elevator statement or speech that would do the same thing. “We are an e-procurement company” didn’t really work. Neither did “We are a procure to pay company”, because at the time we were not. We thought about “We are a strategic sourcing company”, but that did not quite cut it either. To often believe it or not the question would be what’s procurement or just Oh.
Today our current elevator statement is a little long winded and goes like this “We are an e-procurement company offering a complete procure-to-pay suite of applications. The heart of our family of products is our popular reverse auction technology. We help you reduce cost, improve efficiency and extend the reach of your procurement group with an historic ROI greater than 10X”. This statement is true, but as stated is a little to long winded and not overly creative. The good news is we continue to try and work on this all of the time. Does your provider?
Today I tried to come up with a few more that might peak an executives interest around subjects that are important to them and might get them to say “Tell me more”.
So, here you go.
1. “We help company’s find new sources of business that they did not know existed”!
2. “We help our customers justify not having to reduce headcount”.
3. “We help our customers create funding to support internal job growth”.
4. “We improve our customer’s profitability in the current accounting period”.
5. “We are a job creation company”.
The trick here is to be creative and honest while being able to be equally succinct in your follow up answers.
If you’d like to learn how we can apply any of the above statements to your company, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services account manager.
We look forward to and appreciate your comments.
