Lesson 1 | Elevator pitches should be pitched (3:09 minutes)
Elevator pitches should be pitched
Okay, so the first decision of the 4 Decision System is Agree to Meet. And to do that you're going to need to get their interest or get their attention. So, how are you going to do that? The historical approach is the elevator pitch. What's the elevator pitch? And the elevator pitch really upsets us. It's frustrating to us. The more we've looked at it, the tougher it gets for a bunch of reasons. The first is it's not uncommon for people to go through our training programs who have been in the business for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, and they do not have a clear answer for, "So what do you do?" It's like, oh no. We'll get all kinds of stuff. They'll say, "I'm a financial advisor," or "I sell insurance," or "I sell investments." They'll say, "Why don't you tell me what you do?" Then they start to tune their answer accordingly and try and come up with something.
And what we want to do is make sure that you've got a really, really clean way to do it. Now think about elevator pitch. The first time somebody says, "What do you do?," the first thing we have to keep in mind is odds are they didn't mean it. They weren't actually asking, oh my goodness, what do you do? No, they're saying, "What do you do?" In North America, it is a typical social greeting in the conversation. It's like, so what do you do? You're looking for ways to connect. People are trying to put people into boxes. They're not actually asking lots of times because they want to know. They're just asking because it's something you ask. So first, let's understand that.
The second is let's understand that this rarely happens in an elevator, so why it's called an elevator pitch, it goes back to apparently the 1950s and the concept of you've boarded an elevator, and the CEO of the largest corporation in the building is in there with you. You'll be traveling six floors, and you have six floors of travel to get their attention. What will you say? The reality is it doesn't play out that way. You're not in an elevator. Frankly, in the first time that you meet someone, really, should you be pitching them? Is that the time to do that? Is that the time to talk about us, and our credentials, and our history, and why we're brilliant? No, let's save it for later. Let's talk about it, but let's save it for later.
What we did is we pulled this apart and looked at it and said, "What really happens?" What happens is there's some kind of social interaction, whether it's truly in a social environment, or casual environment, or even a business social environment. There's more of a social exchange that's going on. We want to see if we can get them into a business conversation. Is there an opportunity there? We want to go from this place to this place, and there's a gap in between. What we want to do is we want to cross, see if they will cross a bridge from a social conversation to a business conversation. We call this the Bridge Talk.
One thing that's kind of interesting is if you look at one of the old French words for bridge, it's rapport. What we're looking to do is see what kind of bridge where there will be some rapport can we create that will allow them to transition from one to another? Now to do this in a different way than the past where we're not in an elevator, we're not pitching them, and we're not really pushing for the sale, we need to use some new criteria. We're going to show you what that is next.