Elevator Speech Part 3: What You Offer

Now explain what that person you’re selling to gets. Or the organization. You’ve personalized the need or want, identified your unique qualities to solve the problem, and now you have to put the need or want in concrete terms that anybody can see. For example:

For a Trunk Club member, when his wife says it’s time or a new trip or new activity is coming up, or the mood strikes him, he just grabs the phone and calls his Trunk Club counselor. "I need more casual stuff for the golf course, or cargo pants for hiking, or two more slack and sports coat combinations." She knows his size, knows what he likes, what his wife likes, and what he needs. The new clothes come three days later, with a complete money-back guarantee if he or his wife or partner don’t like them.   

Business Plan Software lets Jane jump into and out of her business plan at a moment’s notice whenever she wants. She can start with the core strategy and build it in blocks, planning while she goes, refining projections as needed. It’s built around a solid error-checked, financially and mathematically correct financial model, and a generalized set of suggestions for outlines, but is also completely flexible for adding and deleting topics and creating a unique business plan. Each task, whether topic or table, comes with easy to understand instructions and useful examples.

EmailCenter Pro lets a team share an email address like sales@ or info@ efficiently. Emails can be assigned to team members or not, and answered emails are processed and visible, and unanswered emails remain at the top until answered. Furthermore, it manages collections of snippets or text templates to build on standard but flexibly customizable answers to frequently asked questions.

In each example here, following on the ones in my previous two posts, we should be able to see clearly how this meets the need or solves the problem. Forget features as much as possible, and illustrate benefits. You’ve already described the person with the situation, and built up your being able to solve it, so now it’s just about the solution. Stay focused and concentrated. People will get one or at the most two unique attributes of your business offering. Don’t confuse them with more. 

2 thoughts on “Elevator Speech Part 3: What You Offer

  1. What are we trying to do when we make a business plan? We're trying to convince the lender or venture capitalist to give us some money so that we can make a business, right?

  2. John, I disagree. Business planning is for every business, large or small, that cares about managing well, optimizing, controlling its destiny, working towards goals, and so on. It is not at all just about supporting a loan application or getting investment. Tim.

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