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11/3/2008
WSJ on Nonverbal Communication
A friend recently sent me a link to an article on the Wall
Street Journal entitled
The Power of Nonverbal communication. This is an important
topic because an effective elevator pitch is made up of both
what you say and how you say it, as this quote makes clear...
The experiment that I like the best is one where we looked at people who were pitching business plans. These were midcareer executives who were presenting real business plans for a business-plan competition and then rating each other. It turns out you can estimate their ratings of each other...just by listening to their tone of voice. You didn't have to know anything about the business plan; you didn't have to know anything about the executives. It was how they delivered the plan that determined how it was rated. That's pretty amazing. Because these were not fools. These were executives in their mid-30s -- very successful. And yet they were listening to how excited the presenter was about the plan; they were not listening to the facts.
10/18/2008
Elevator Pitch Essentials Now Available!
Elevator Pitch Essentials is now available for
purchase.
9/26/2008
The
Elevator Pitch and the Message Map
A couple of weeks ago I spent the morning with the leadership
team of a school. The reason that I was brought in was because
at some point prior to that meeting they had brought in a
marketing consultant who had helped them develop a Message Map that looked
something like
this Message Map. The problem was that their Message Map
contained a hundred or so unique message points, and the
executive director and the director of development of the school
were struggling to incorporate all of those one hundred message
points into a two-minute elevator pitch.
As I told the leadership team, while a Message Map can
be a great tool, there is no way that you can cram all of the
contents of it into a two-minute (or less) elevator pitch.
There isn't time.
Instead, all you can do is identify the 2 or 3 most
critical messages and focus on hammering those home. Generally,
those 2 or 3 most critical messages have to do with WHAT you
are, WHY you exist, and WHORU to do what you are doing. If you
do your job of establishing those core points, and you are
speaking to the right audience, then you will be given the
chance to give a more detailed presentation, at which point you
will have the opportunity to get into the details of your
Solution.
9/8/2008
The Book's At The Printer
I wanted to let the people who are waiting for Elevator Pitch
Essentials to ship know that I sent it to the printer on Friday.
I am hoping for a two-week turn-around on the printing, which
means I should have the book in hand before the end of the
month.
7/21/2008
Update On The Book
I am continuing to make progress on the book. Over the
weekend I received the latest galley from the graphic designer
and am in the process of marking it up. I hoping that I will
just need one my round of corrections before I go to the
printer, which puts the finished book in my hands by the end of
August 2008.
5/7/2008
The Religious Elevator Pitch
Today I received a call from the pastor of a Lutheran church
in Minnesota who was interested in using an excerpt from my
Elevator Pitch 101
essay in a hand-out that he was preparing for one of his
sermons. He thought the ideas I discuss in my essay could help
the members of his congregation come up with personal elevator
pitches that would help them explain their faith to others, but
do so in a low-pressure, soft-sell manner.
This is a totally unexpected, but completely logical,
application of the concept of the elevator pitch. At the end of
the day, a person who is evangelizing their faith is selling
something to their audience, and the same rules apply in that
scenario as much as they do in any other sales scenario.
5/5/2008
Getting Started
I am in the process of self-publishing my book
Elevator Pitch Essentials, and I
wanted to create this blog as a way of managing all of the
things that I wanted to say, or should have said, in the book but
either forgot to say or didn't know to say them. I hope to post a new
thought to this blog every week or so.
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