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YOU
KNOW WHAT YOUR COMPANY DOES. CAN YOU EXPLAIN IT
IN 30 SECONDS?
If not, you’re in trouble. Here’s
how to perfect your pitch: A business lesson in
the form of a screenplay.
By Alison Stein Wellner, Published July 2007
[FADE IN]
EXTERIOR--A bright-blue,
cloudless sky on a spring morning in Austin. An
office park, populated with identical brown buildings
interspersed with grassy areas and trees.
INTERIOR--A small conference
room. At one end stands a whiteboard with a screen
pulled down in front of it. Seated near the head
of the table is DAVE YEWMAN, co-owner
of Elevator Speech, a consulting firm based in
Austin and Portland, Oregon, that specializes
in media and presentation training--specifically
in helping clients craft pithy 30-second descriptions
of their companies. According to Yewman, executives
who can't, in half a minute, clearly explain what
they do and why anyone should care miss out--on
sales, funding, partnerships, and more opportunities.
His firm uses video to dramatically show clients
how bad they often are at explaining their businesses.
Across the table, looking
at a silver Mac laptop and fiddling with portable
speakers, is Yewman's business partner, ANDY
CRAIG, head clean-shaven, wearing a pressed
lavender shirt. A week earlier, Craig spent a
day with a video camera trained on eight executives
of uControl, an Austin-based home security start-up,
asking each of them a simple question: "What
does your company do?" He and Yewman then
spent several days watching the tapes and taking
notes. They're about to deliver the results to
JIM JOHNSON, uControl's CEO, who sits
at the other end of the conference table. He looks
a little nervous. His company, which is 18 months
old and has 18 employees, is competing for contracts
with the nation's largest cable and phone companies,
and Johnson needs any edge he can get. Seated
next to him is JASON DOMANGUE, uControl's
director of marketing. His pen is poised and he
is ready to take notes.
ANDY [Stands
up behind his chair to lead things off] Have
any of you ever read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell?
JIM It's
in my closet, about to be read.
ANDY [Smiles
sympathetically] I have a lot of those, too.
That book is about first impressions. That's actually
what we are talking about when we talk about an
elevator speech: first impressions and the power
of first impressions to your business.
DAVE What
we are concerned with is that first 20 to 30 seconds.
If you are coming out with a whole bunch of gobbledygook,
no matter how well you say it, people are going
to go, what the hell does that mean?
[JASON nods. JIM
looks impassive.]
DAVE I'd
like to begin by pumping you guys up a little
bit. What we're going to do first is show you
the worst elevator speech ever. It was caught
on national TV.
[Everyone in the room
chuckles. ANDY points his remote control at the
computer.]
[CUT TO: Screen in front
of the room, where 60 Minutes correspondent
BOB SIMON stands, head cocked skeptically,
next to a young guy with a dark suit and spiky
hair. It is JEFF DACHIS, who then owned
an e-business consultancy called Razorfish.]
BOB SIMON
So, what do you do?
JEFF DACHIS
We've asked our clients to recontextualize their
business. We've recontextualized what it is to
be in the services business.
SIMON There
are many people such as myself who have trouble
with the word recontextualize. Tell me
what you do. In English.
DACHIS We
provide services to companies to help them win.
SIMON But
so do trucking firms…
DACHIS Absolutely,
absolutely, and our talent is to do a certain
thing while trucking firms do…
SIMON [interrupting]
But what is it you do?
DACHIS We
radically transform business to invent and reinvent
them.
SIMON That's
still very vague.
[CUT TO:]
ANDY [Standing
at the head of the table, shaking his head]
So let's just get past the fact that they made
up a word. I've looked up recontextualize a million
times in a million places and it's just not a
real word. So that's the first problem. The second
problem is that Simon gave them several kicks
at the can. Now, I don't know about you, but none
of my potential customers would give me all of
those chances, and say, "I still don't understand."
Recontextualizing, radically recontextualizing,
helping companies win. What does that mean? It
is not clear at all what they do.
So…what does uControl
do? How are you guys talking about your company?
[JIM and JASON squirm
slightly in their seats. They know they're about
to watch themselves on video. ANDY smiles
reassuringly.]
[CUT TO: Screen in the
front of the room, where uControl execs are answering
the question posed off-camera: What does uControl
do?]
JIM [Onscreen,
with a small shrug] We're building a next-generation
home security system.
JIM KITCHEN
[uControl's director of product management]
UControl provides home security and automation
services to a number of markets, primarily, you
know, to consumers and enabling other service
providers to provide that service to their consumers
as well.
JASON [Speaking
rapidly] We attach to existing alarm systems
and provide three value props. One is we offer
better physical connectivity and that's via three
redundant channels that we offer out of the whole
backdoor monitoring solution. Two, we offer virtual
connectivity, which gives you the ability to control
and monitor your alarm system over the Web or
your cell phone. And we offer you better value
for the same price you're paying your current
monitoring company. We offer the previous two
feature buckets I described for the same price.
J. BRENT USSERY
[manager of operations, technical services]
UControl is a home security company that provides
monitoring services and enhances existing security
systems with high-technology features such as
communication path redundancy, a Web portal to
monitor events, you can check alarms and events
on your cell phone, it allows you to control access
codes…and lots of cool features like that.
[CUT TO:]
ANDY What's
your response? Let's hear your reaction to that.
JIM [Getting
up to get himself a cup of coffee] It sounds
pretty boring. That's my reaction to that.
JASON It's
very technical.
JIM Yeah,
very technical…but, I mean, we are changing
the home security industry, which has been very
stagnant for 30 years. It's exciting, but it doesn't
come across.
DAVE [Glances
at his notes] There were some good chunks
of language in there: It's nice that I can monitor
when I'm away from the house and that kind of
thing. But it was all about uControl. What does
uControl do? It's almost like a trick question.
Because I don't care. I care about what it can
do for me.
ANDY You
lose them when you're only talking about yourself.
People want to know what's in it for them.
DAVE You've
got to cut right to it, hit them over the head
with it. The magic comes when you can talk like
a human being about your business, and when you
can really deliver a punch on why this is important
to your prospect.
ANDY Do you
guys watch The Daily Show?
[CUT TO: Screen in front
of the room]
ROB CORDDRY
[Daily Show correspondent] In a nutshell,
how would you describe the state of elections
in California?
JILL LAVINE
[registrar of voters] We've got several
big issues that are happening to us. The secretary
of state just decertified all our electronic voting
equipment. We have several lawsuits against us
for not having accessible units for the disabled,
and we don't have enough manpower to actually
man the polls for our elections.
CORDDRY Great.
Now could you take that long-ass answer and put
it into a nutshell for me?
LAVINE [Stares
at him]
CORDDRY [Stares
back at her]
LAVINE The
elections right now in California are a mess.
[CUT TO:]
DAVE Obviously,
that's a little dramatic. But you are trying to
grab them by the grapes with something concise.
It's got to be something that makes them nod their
head or light up or smile or say, "Oh, yeah,
I get it."
Now here is a clip from Bono.
We love Bono. He's talking about something abstract
and technical, debt relief for Africa, and it
comes across so well.
[CUT TO: Screen in front
of the room]
BONO [In
green sunglasses, stubbly face, talking to TIM
RUSSERT] In 50 years, when they look back at this
moment, they will talk about the war against terror,
they will talk about the Internet, and they will
talk about what we did or didn't do in Africa,
about this continent bursting into flames. It
is the most extraordinary thing to watch people
dying three in a bed, two on top and one underneath,
as I have seen in Malawi. It's an astonishing
thing and it is an avoidable catastrophe.
[CUT TO:]
DAVE What
do you remember about that? A continent bursting
into flames. People dying--three in a bed, two
on top one under. It's a really memorable scene.
Now you actually have some pretty good language
that you've come up with about uControl. Let's
take a look and we'll talk about it.
[CUT TO: Screen in front
of the room]
J. BRENT USSERY
We are bringing home security out of the closet.
For example, with most home alarm systems, the
control panel is in the master bedroom closet
and installation is the only time they see it
besides the keypad. We're bringing home security
out of the closet.
[CUT TO:]
[JIM and JASON laugh
uproariously.]
ANDY I'll
stop the tape.
JASON [laughing]
He's been hammering that over our heads for like
a year now. And he's got a chance to put it on
tape.
JIM [Laughing
harder, explains the joke to a mystified
ANDY and DAVE] So there are two guys
that came to our company from the alarm industry,
and one of them came out of the closet, literally,
when he joined our company.
ANDY Oh,
so there's a backstory. We didn't know that. But
it really did jump out at us.
DAVE We thought
it was great.
ANDY And
we didn't know the back back backstory.
[CUT TO: Screen in front
of the room]
JIM Anything
you can do from your alarm's keypad, you can now
do from the Web: arm, disarm the system, assign
new codes, assign a code for your daughter, so
when your daughter comes in and types in her code,
you'll know she got home safely.
[CUT TO:]
DAVE This
is very conversational, very storylike. That's
what we're searching for. Now, this was probably
one minute, 15 seconds into it. And that is the
challenge. Because that is so good, it should
not come in at one minute and 15 seconds. It should
come in at, like, 15 seconds.
[CUT TO: Screen in front
of the room]
CHUCK GRANBERRY
[uControl's manager of internal operations]
Traditional alarm companies say if you have a
problem, call us. They've never empowered their
customers to go on the Web and make choices and
do things.
[CUT TO:]
DAVE Again,
a really nice differentiator, in conversational
language, that demonstrates a broader business
point.
ANDY And
here's a clip you can just send out to your whole
company.
[CUT TO: Screen in front
of the room]
JASON [Talking
about how uControl monitors homes via phone lines,
cell phone connections, and over the Internet]
We use the word redundant too much. I think we
got a little comfortable using technical terms
because we had so many early adopters we were
selling to, and it was fine to say redundant.
But when we get past those early adopters and
into the mass market, we could get burned. So
I'm trying to stay out of that as much as I can.
But I have not gotten to that euphoria of, this
is the perfect way to describe what we do.
[CUT TO:]
ANDY Every
single company could say something like that.
Our comfort area, particularly in the technology
world, is to fall back to the jargon. You don't
need to look for another word for redundant, you
need to find another way to talk about it. That's
where storytelling comes in. There was a great
story you had, about this guy that switched his
phone service to Vonage and had an alarm system,
and three months later discovered that it hadn't
been monitoring his home the whole time since
his system didn't work over VoIP.
You can talk about redundancy
in the form of a story about it. That's what people
are going to remember. You don't have to say the
word redundant.
Last week, I asked all your
guys this question. I said, "Okay, you want
to make a clean sweep. What is the one thing you
guys do?" Here's what they said.
[CUT TO: Screen in front
of the room]
WADE COHN
[director of software engineering] I
think the biggest would be peace of mind. If someone
cut my phone line, I'm still safe because I've
got other modes of communication.
JIM KITCHEN It
boils down to peace of mind. I get all the data
I need about what's going on in my house. I know
what to expect.
[CUT TO:]
ANDY UControl
gives me peace of mind because I always know.
This is something we really think should go in
front, in the first 10 seconds.
DAVE [Pops
a slide up on the screen with phrases] We
have been talking about these snippets of language.
ANDY What
do you guys do? [Reads from the screen]
We bring home security out of the closet and put
it on the Web and on your wireless phone, so you
can monitor and manage everything about your alarm
system from anywhere in the world. We give you
the peace of mind to know that your family, your
kids, your home are safe and secure all the time.
DAVE What
does uControl do? [Reads from screen]
This is an industry that hasn't changed in 30
years. Seventy percent of the homes that have
alarm systems don't even use them; they are too
hard to use. So what do we do? We make the alarm
system smarter. We make them better.
[DAVE and ANDY look
at JIM expectantly. ANDY grabs
his notebook and prepares to take notes.]
JIM [Speaks
slowly] I like that concept for many of our
audiences. This explains how we are trying to
change an industry. As we talk to consumers, that
works. But right now, we're focused on winning
deals with big cable providers. We've got to hook
them in the first 30 seconds with what we do differently
from the three or four competitors that we always
run up against.
And we've got a couple of
real differentiators. We can work with any alarm
system, even one that's already installed in the
house. We can use anybody's keypads, anybody's
sensors. And we're their infrastructure, which
allows all of that to work. That's typically how
I explain it. But if there is a better, more concise
way…
JASON To
the cable company, when they use us, it looks
like every other deployment of a service that
they do. It hooks in with their infrastructure,
their cable modem. We give them a familiar feeling
for an unfamiliar service that they are about
to deploy.
DAVE I like
that: "familiar feeling; unfamiliar service."
JIM So I
think the first sentence can be, "Hey, we
are going to help you bring home security out
of the closet. Right now, it's locked in the closet,
but you can bring it out and put it on the Web.
And the way we do it is very important. We are
going to bring a familiar feeling to a very unfamiliar
security service."
DAVE What
did you say your other key differentiators were?
JIM There
are a few of them and I'm not sure if any of them
are as important as us being open and agnostic.
It's the theme of openness that, I think, is most
important.
ANDY I guarantee
you'll get a smile or a chuckle when you say:
Bring home security out of the closet and onto
the Web.
DAVE It's
memorable.
ANDY It's
not only memorable; it delivers your message.
Not just fun for fun's sake. It's strong. We like
it.
DAVE Well,
we've talked a lot. The next step is to think
about it, digest it, chew it. Then, we'll come
back and film you again, and say let's change
this and tweak this. After that it's really up
to you guys to internalize it. You guys have done
some work and it shows. You're already far along
for a pretty young company. You've got a pretty
tight message now. Let's just get it focused.
JASON [chuckling]
"Out of the closet."
JIM [laughing]
It's not going to be hard to remember it, that's
for sure.
JASON It
couldn't be more perfect, I promise you. It's
the company culture in a bubble.
JIM It encapsulates
the openness and free thought at our company.
I mean, here is a guy who spent 21 years in the
home security industry and couldn't even tell
the people he worked with that he was gay. The
industry is so close-minded, he was afraid he'd
lose his job.
DAVE It's
a metaphor for your company.
JIM It's
fun.
[JIM shuts his laptop
and looks at the messages that have piled up on
his flashing BlackBerry. JASON chats
with ANDY and DAVE about rolling
the new pitch out to the company. ANDY says
that he'll be back soon to film the team practicing
their new elevator speech.]
[FADE OUT]
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