What’s the benefit of a cheese plate?

In my last entry I talked about crafting a contrived or chamber of commerce elevator pitch where you are introducing yourself to a large group and need to be memorable. In this entry, I’ll talk about the second type of elevator pitch, the sincere or person-to-person pitch. This is your cheese plate of elevator pitches.

Well, what the heck is that supposed to mean?  I’m glad you asked.

Everyone is different. Everyone has different needs and different pains. While you can’t craft a specific elevator pitch for every single pain in the world, you can hit the high spots. Looks at your customer base and identify the main pains that afflict these individuals and their businesses. How do your products and services address these pains? Take time to list the four to ten major pains suffered by your customers and then create bullets under each pain topic about how you can make their pain less intense or go away altogether. If you’ve ever put together a formal marketing plan, you probably already have done much of this work.

As you look at the bullets under each pain topic, what benefits of your products and services are addressing the particular pain topic? If you were paying attention to the last post, I eluded to Rule #3: only you care about features. Features don’t make your customer’s life better. Features make you happy because you can talk about features very easily. You think you can use features to better sell your products without having to know much about your customer or take the time to learn their business. However, features are a short-cut to failure! 

Identify the benefits and the associated product or service that address the pain of your customer. Then script a story about how your product addresses the pain of your customer. Start your story with a bold statement about how your product reduces or eliminates that particular pain. Start with a short paragraph story and whittle and hone it down to one or two sentences. Select the exact wording that best tells your story in a dramatic and concise way that will speak directly to that particular customer pain. Once you’ve got the story boiled down to its essence with the perfect words and phrases, practice saying it out loud. Sometimes these phrases don’t as work well spoken as they did in your mind.

Remember, nobody cares that you have a boutique food shop with different daily specials. But if you’re speaking with a working mother managing a busy family, she will be interested in providing her family a nutritious and tasty sit-down-and-eat-it-together meal, using your convenient call-in order service where she can pick up a fully-prepared meal with all the sides on her way home from the office. Now that’s a solution to a pain.

You should craft a story for each of these pain topics. Memorize each and practicing saying them out loud so you can pull one from memory as needed to match the particular situation facing you. Unfortunately, unlike the chamber pitch where you have plenty of time to craft the exact message for that particular situation, you need to have a whole cheese try of elevator pitch choices ready depending on the particular needs of an ever changing situation. You never know when you’ll be presented an opportunity to give your pitch, so be ready.

Do you have a great elevator pitch that you’d like to share? If so, list it in the comments or send me an email.