When selling your business concept, keep your thoughts succinct and your delivery brief – like a six-word speech in a one-floor elevator ride, says Mario Pretorius.GK
Can you sell your Firm’s reason for existence, goal, advantage in 6 words or less?
This may sound difficult, but it’s a fair challenge. It’s the elevator speech in a 1 floor ride. “Why should we choose you?” not ”What do you sell”. The first denotes a benefit of note in context of an offering.
Imagine a missionary stepping off the boat and three steps into the jungle he finds his first prospect – which sticks a spear under his chin.
“Why are you here?”
“I’ve come to make converts form heathens like you for my church”
“Why should I join? You have 3 words left”
Wonderful opportunity, failure means death. This is the example that I love to use:
“Go to heaven”
“And if I don’t?”
“Go to….” You knew this answer.
Now he can expand on what heaven is, how to get there, the awfulness of a bad choice and later teach his tormentor to read, translate the Good Book into the native language, build the church etc. His short speech sold the oldest and probably the most successful organisation outside of the Roman Empire.
What are your 6 words, or less? Can you encapsulate your reason for living in the same way? Why you married her from an array of choices?
Keep your thoughts succinct on this. You will have to sell your saliva-inducing concept hundreds of times amongst your peers – and you want not only their instant respect for your acumen but also their business as soon as possible.
This makes it easy for your front-liners and their spouses to answer that pertinent question: Why are you working at X? Without this, what meaning would their professional lives have other than the drudgery of slave labour in a place where no-one can spell out their worth?
The same is true for the rest of your staff including their kids. Daddy works at X where they make people go to heaven. Or hell. That’s a cool place. Imagine how your reputation spreads – or if not, hell is where it doesn’t.
This tip is an extract from the manuscript of “The Unconventional CEO: Common sense outside of conventional Management thinking” (by Mario Pretorius).
