While attending a small business conference in Phoenix Arizona, I met with a lot of small business owners. What I found was there were people that were either really good at telling me what they do, or they may have needed to go home and work on it. Every day that passed, I thought about how many business owners may be going around providing poor elevator pitches. An elevator pitch is a description on what you do, that can be delivered in 30-60 seconds. If I am in an elevator with you, you should be able to tell me what your company does before we move between a few floors.

Today, I want to help you create a great elevator pitch.

1. Identify your goal: is it brand awareness, is it lead generation?
2. Focus on the problems that you solve and how you can help people. Bonus: Add information or a statistic that shows the value in what you do.
3. Be memorable: what do you want your audience to remember most about you?
4. Communicate Your USP (Unique Selling Proposition): identify and communicate what makes you, your company, or your idea, unique. This should be communicated right after you tell me what you do.
5. Engage with a question: make sure that it is open ended. You will not receive helpful information from a yes or no answer and people may not be willing to give an honest answer to a yes or no question.
6. Put it all together

Here is what my elevator pitch would be:

"I am a strategic insights manager for iContact. I help small and mid size businesses learn how email marketing and marketing automation can help grow their business. I provide value through information, written and verbal on how businesses can obtain a 44x ROI with email marketing and use marketing automation to increase qualified leads by 451% .

Tell me, what kind of results are you seeing with your email marketing campaigns?"

Behind my on the wall, I have a small chalkboard that I write daily thoughts on. Today's thought is about Apple's event today. Apple is good at building anticipation for their products. I wrote on the chalkboard: "Apple EventDay : How do you build anticipation your company." Think about that and let me know about your elevator pitch or how your company builds anticipation in the comments.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.