If I had a $1 for every time I asked someone what their “elevator pitch” was and got instead a ten-minute diatribe filled with extraneous adjectives and trite buzzwords I’d be able to afford to build water wells in no less than 100 villages in Africa. Truly successful companies not only distill their elevator pitch down to something short sweet and understandable but actually inspire an epiphany.
Merriam-Webster defines “Epiphany” as “a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something (2) : an intuitive grasp of reality through something (as an event) usually simple and striking (3) : an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure.”
YES! This is exactly what every company needs in order to succeed in an over-communicated, over-crowded, market landscape… a succinct sound bite that inspires an epiphany to respond with whenever someone asks what you do. So how do you get there?
It is actually harder than you think to say something descriptive and differentiable with as few words as possible but it is certainly not impossible. It takes patience, relentless objectivity, and the ability to disassociate your knowledge of your product or service to the point where you can create a picture in the mind of your prospect that they can recognize as uniquely you. That, or you can hire a consultant to do it for you.
Another way to get there is to evaluate other companies you admire and distill what attracts you to their description. I can spend hours on one particular YouTube channel that seems to have master this in a very creative way, so much so that the company’s name is Epipheo. These guys have made a business out of creating 90-second epiphany animations. I’ve had the pleasure of creating two “Epipheos” with them which have done wonders to not only break the noise barrier in a very crowded enterprise mobility market but also provided an educational experience on how to get to that “a-ha moment.”
So you challenge today is to come up with your own epiphany and then get that description into as few words as possible without the use of acronyms, techno-jargon or trite buzzwords. The rewards will be many when you succeed.
Recent Comments