What do you do when someone asks you what you do for a living? Do you—like most people—just tell them your job title or what you sell?
I used to do this. Years ago, when I was taking my Master Practitioner’s course in Colorado, fellow course participants asked me what I did. I just said, “I’m a copywriter,” and left it at that.
The problem was, many people don’t know what an advertising copywriter is. And if you who are reading this are a copywriter too, you’ve probably had the same problem. You’d get a “That’s nice.” Or some people think you have something to do with copyright law. Many people just don’t know.
You can solve that quandary of describing what you do (or what your business does) and avoid getting the blank look from people with your own elevator pitch.
The Elevator Pitch
It’s a summary of a product, service, business, or project. The name comes from the fact that an elevator pitch can be delivered in the time span of an elevator ride (about thirty seconds which is about 150 words or so). It’s a min-infomercial about you, your products, or your business.
By the time you finish reading this article, you’ll be able to slap together an effective elevator pitch. Then you’ll add a little NLP to make it more memorable and motivational.
Creating a elevator pitch is just like creating any other copywriting piece: You consider who your audience is, you consider how you can help them reach their goals, and you use emotionally charged language without sounding full of hype.
Here’s a basic pitch for this NLP blog:
“My blog helps people get more of what they want by using persuasive language to change other people’s behaviors.”
Now that you have the basic pitch, let’s add a little NLP to enhance it a bit.
SOME LANGUAGE PATTERNS YOU CAN USE IN AN EFFECTIVE ELEVATOR PITCH:
1. Questions. Questions engage a person more than straight out statements do. Questions can contain all sorts of embedded commands, reframes, and other patterns.
2. Presuppositions. What do you want your listener to assume is true about you or your business? An elevator pitch is a great place to use a presuppositions (Learn more about using presuppositions in NLP Language Patterns for Advertising).
3. Milton Model. Pacing current experience, Linguistic binds, Conversational postulates, etc.
ELEVATOR PITCH EXAMPLE WITH NLP ADDED:
For this blog: “What’s it like when you get someone to do something they wouldn’t ordinarily have done? Very satisfying, is it not? Well, my blog helps people get more of what they want by using persuasive language to change other people’s behaviors.”
CONCLUSION…
So there you have it: Creating (and using) elevator speeches for your job or your business with a little NLP thrown in to spice it up is fairly easy: Think big promise. Think benefits. Inject emotion. And add some NLP to create motivational triggers.
After you’ve come up and used your elevator pitch, you might like to change it from time to time as you come up with new ideas.
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