It seems like when you’re first starting your business everyone is always telling you to boil down what you do into a simple and concise phrase or sentence. Most people will refer to this as your “elevator speech” as in if you were stuck on an elevator with someone else and they asked you what you did you could explain it before you reached your floor and had to get off the elevator. For me this has always been very difficult to do with my other business and it was one of the driving factors for me to move towards something like FreshySites.
Everyone is confused
If you can’t tell someone else in one sentence what you do then it’s too confusing. Well, too confusing to expect any real good future word of mouth advertising. Your explanation has be to so plain that they walk away from that one sentence knowing it exactly and are able to explain it to others. The total value of building this kind of explanation into your product or service from the start should not be underestimated.
How it plays out
When I talk to someone about the Advertising and Marketing Group that I am a part of they always seem to leave the conversation not quite sure of what it is that we do. We do tv commercials, we do websites, we do branding, we do print work, we do a lot. However, when I talk to someone about FreshySites website design they seem to always get it and get it very quickly – “We build affordable and beautiful websites for small business and organizations.” What’s even better is that many times these conversations have led to a third party referral back to our web design services proving that the message is easily spread and re-told.
Plan on it
It’s really an amazing but very simple thing to have a concise elevator speech and I think it has to be in the forefront when you are designing your business plan and model or else it will be something you and your team are wrestling with for a long time to come.
