Take your Elevator Speech to the top floor by converting it into an ‘Escalator Speech’. Assume you’re going down on the escalator as someone passes by you going up on the other one. You only have a few seconds to communicate. So, your Escalator Speech is an even more concise version of your Elevator Speech.
Mine is ‘I empower business leaders to communicate confidently’ Short, simple and likely to generate some questions when the other person turns around and follows me back down.
I recently responded to a reader who liked my take on this topic and offered his own sample – ‘I’m a communication skills expert’. While it’s short and concise, it’s still all about him, not them. And the term ‘expert’ has some ego-centric baggage connected with it, which can be a turn-off for some people.
I asked him about the results people achieve after working with him and suggested he build his statement around impact. It could be ‘I empower (or energize – either verb is better than the wimpy ‘help’) people (but, better to define his target market here, such as ‘sales professionals’, ‘entrepreneurs’ or ‘executives’) to communicate with more power (or success or impact, etc.).
So, with some polish and practice, it became ‘I energize executives to present with impact’. Crafting something that concise is a lot of work, I admit, but it’s well worth the time and effort if you want to make it to the top floor.