Attend any business networking event, and you’ll find entrepreneurs who nail their elevator speeches and others who just, well, don’t. Businesses that run on EOS® have a secret weapon for perfecting their elevator speeches: the Vision/Traction Organizer™ (V/TO)! When your business runs on EOS, you can easily use your V/TO to create your elevator speech too.
How This Works
Does your elevator speech cover the most important things you want a potential customer to know? You need only three parts of the V/TO to accomplish this: your Core Focus™, 3 Uniques™, and a guarantee.
Core Focus
Your Core Focus acts as the foundation for your business. It outlines your common purpose, cause, or passion. Some call this the “why” they get out of bed in the morning. Your Core Focus also identifies your niche, the one thing your company truly excels at doing. These two combined are what your organization does better than anyone in your market.
3 Uniques™
Your company’s 3 Uniques define what makes your company special. Marketing nerds call them differentiators. Business geeks call them value propositions. I call them the three good reasons your clients call you instead of your competition.
Guarantee
Having a guarantee takes the risk out of using your services or products. It shows your prospects that you stand behind what you say and will do what you say or promise. So long as you feel confident in backing up your guarantee, I’ve found it’s a huge selling point.
A solid guarantee lowers a potential client’s resistance because it takes the risk out of working with your company. They have no reason not to buy from you.
That’s it. Put all those pieces into a few easy lines to remember, and you have an effective elevator speech. But once you have it, how and when do you use it?
Always Be Selling
Anyone who works in sales or who owns a business lives by this phrase. No matter your current success or your assumed interest someone has in your product or service, always be selling (ABS).
You just never know who you’ll meet and where. You could talk to someone at a bar, on the golf course, or standing in line at the grocery store. Heck, I got my first EOS client in my own front yard!
The State of the Company address offers leaders a chance to teach everyone the company’s elevator speech. Memorizing these few lines gets everybody on board with what the company does and becomes their “salespeople.”
I always preach to my clients that everyone in your organization should serve as a salesperson for their company. Their jobs depend on it anyway.
Let’s face it, a lot of people hate selling. The elevator speech makes it easy because just saying your new elevator pitch doesn’t feel like “selling.” I promise. It gets everybody ABS-ing instead of just the salespeople selling.
Say a company has 100 employees. Once they all learn the elevator speech, the company now has 100 brand ambassadors. They become walking billboards because they have the words to talk about their company quickly and precisely.
Think about how many people those employees interact with in their daily lives outside of work. To be able to describe what their company does succinctly can pay dividends in very unexpected ways.
It also gives a company’s messaging consistency, which we teach with EOS.
The Result?
When I started suggesting my clients use their V/TO to craft their elevator speeches, they would light up. Most couldn’t believe they missed this obvious benefit of the effort they put into creating their V/TO.
I’ve never had a client say, “That’s a dumb idea.” If anything, it makes them LOVE their V/TO even more.
When you think about it, it’s the simplest thing, yet it has a huge impact. Clients have had great results.
One shining example is Standfast TRAM. They have a very specific, very niche fall-protection system for working at heights on tanker trunks. Without a clear, concise elevator speech, you’d have no idea what their company does.
The best part of this is that the V/TO is just one of many free tools in the EOS Toolbox™.
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