Your elevator pitch is the concise statement of the value you provide to your customers. When a prospect hears it, it has to grab their attention, and make real for them the benefits that you can deliver to their business or life.

When it really works, your elevator pitch will engage your prospect so that they want to hear more. You know it’s working when they say in response, “How do you do that?”

Now the door is open to continue the conversation, engage further with the prospect, and possibly convert them into your newest client.

How do you craft a statement like that? There’s a bit of homework involved before you sit down to write.

Start by putting yourself in the shoes of your prospect. And not just any prospect, but the one who is perfect for you. That would be the one who, upon becoming a customer is going to:

• Love what you do for them
• Come back again and again
• Not require a high level of maintenance
• Pay on time
• Refer others to you

You’re speaking directly to this person, so you want to know all about them:

• What challenges they face
• What concerns they have
• What unmet need you could fulfill for them
• The language they use to talk about their issues and concerns

You can try to intuit this things on your own. But unless you’re an accomplished mind-reader, you would do well to interview your existing customers.

Ask them what they like most about your product or service. Ask them what other products and services they like. Find out what kind of car they drive and where they live.  Really get to know them — and focus your attention on the problem you solve for them.

How does it feel to face that problem? And how does it feel to finally have it resolved?

Now you’re ready to write your pitch. My best advice for this part is to:

• Omit needless words (per Strunk and White)
• Be brief. Everyone is time-challenged.
• Write in the active voice.
• To get it right, be prepared to revise it dozens of times. No one is brilliant in the first draft.

Once you’ve got it down on paper, settle on two or three finalists. Run these draft elevator pitches past people you trust. Ask if it works for them — if it really gets to the essence of your business. Decide on a winner, and then start using it in all of your marketing materials, over and over, until everyone knows what your business stands for.

This is how you build mind-share — and market share.

• Establish rapport, which can take forever. (“Hasn’t this weather been something?’)
• Anticipate and disarm your objections.  (“You can’t afford not to own a deluxe Salad Shooter!”)
• Keep the conversation going for as long as possible before disclosing to you the one thing you really want to know – the price.

I actually like to converse, to get to know someone, and to find out about a solution to a problem. In other words, like most people, I like being sold to.

The deal-killer for me is when someone acts like their time is more valuable than your time. That feels like an insult.

And feeling insulted pushes my “I’m not buying” button.

If you’re in sales, how do you avoid this? I’m not entirely sure, but how about some common courtesy? How about abandoning the script and actually listening  to a person, reading their body language, changing course, and when necessary, giving up.

Sometimes you can save a lot of time and energy when you realize that your ideal client is not in front of you. That’s when you stop talking, cut your losses and move on.

Is  that so hard?

Never mind that they used to sell more papers than that per day. But the U-T is not alone. Readers are abandoning newspapers in droves.

Below is a telling chart from The Awl.com.

Look at the incredibly swift descent of the Los Angeles Times — once considered one of the most prestigious newspapers in America (The tallness of the chart prevented me from grabbing it all — the vertical lines represent five year increments from 1990 to 2010).

I did some free-lancing for Times’ San Diego Edition around 1990. The only reason they even had a San Diego Edition, said some, was so they could say they had more than one million subscribers.

It was fun while it lasted!

Case in point: Driving to work this morning I was listening to On Point with Tom Ashbrook at WBUR in Boston. The entire hour was devoted the question “what’s next for advertising?”

The host had on a couple of ex-Madison Avenue ad men who had written books on the death of their industry, and a mommy-blogger who shills for Wal-Mart, Disney and other corporations — not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The ad guys were bemoaning the changes happening in their industry — one of them saying that this is an institution that has shaped our culture for 350 years!

I’m not sure about that. I know I did not hear anything about the self-inflicted damage done when an “industry” coalesces around persuading people, by hook or by crook, to buy things they do not need.

Am I too harsh? In fairness, I did not listen to the entire hour, so maybe they got around to covering it eventually. But I think they were asking the wrong question. They were focused on something like: “What do you do when the primary engine of commerce is showing signs of seizing up?”

That’s a legitimate concern. More fundamental and immediate though, are questions like: “Whom do I choose to believe? And why?”

People have been muting commercials for decades, and more and more are zooming past them with the DVR. The Yellow Pages and most direct mail go straight into the recyling bin. The kids don’t listen to radio, so they never hear 30-second spots. And no one misses any of that crap because it was mostly disingenuous and misleading, purposely designed to induce anxiety and aimed well below “the better angels of our nature.”

No single institution is to blame for the economic mess we’re in today. And there’s not always a clear cause and effect. But is advertising at least partially culpable for:

• the pervasive sense that everyone is lying
• an assumption that we are all entitled to “the best”
• over-blown, grandiose expectations across the board
• a collective inertia that prevents us from facing (and beginning to solve) serious societal challenges

The American Dream once referred to the classic Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story, in which our hero works hard and in the end achieves hard-earned wealth (which equals happiness, needless to say). As we all know, that much ballyhooed dream has been perverted into a fantasy of effortless wealth and easy fame.

Gee, how did that happen?

Advertising is not necessarily evil. But in the style it’s been practiced for the last 50 or 60 years, it deserves a lot of credit for the dumbing down of a country that’s gotten quantifiably stupider in comparison to places where they actually study in school.

As if showing hundreds of millions of people an endless parade of inventively creative false promises, delivered by fabulously attractive people, would leave everyone perfectly aligned mentally, spriritually, physically and emotionally.

Will Facebook and Twitter serve us any better? There’s at least a built-in accountability at work. Sincerity is harder to fake when anyone can track your conversation over time. So we’ve got that going for us.

Is the Internet going to become a giant truth-in-advertising machine? We can only hope.

Mealtimes were whenever. Exercise regimens went out the window. The yard was overgrown, the laundry piled up.  Neighbors heard screaming and crying at all hours of the day and night.

And there was that joie de vivre that you can only get with a newborn in the house.

Let me explain: In March we decided to volunteer with the Angels Foster Family Network, a San Diego-based agency that matches foster babies with caregivers. My sister-in-law and her husband had blazed the trail, and like them, as I somewhat famously declared at the orientation meeting, we were signing up to provide respite care, giving the real foster parents a short break when they needed it.

At least, that was the plan.

And according to plan, in April and May we provided short breaks for a couple of foster families. Then in early June we learned that a newborn (to protect the extremely innocent, let’s call him Baby M) was going to need care for a few days, possibly longer, due to extenuating circumstances with his initial foster family.

We were excited about having a tiny baby in the house – and tiny he was. Baby M was under two weeks old and about seven pounds on the day we met him. At that weight and age, a baby must feed every few hours, and they’re not shy about letting you know when they’re hungry. Oh, and their little digestion systems don’t work perfectly yet, and they let you know that too.

They communicate these things the only way they know how – in full-throated screams at the top of their lungs. Imagine having a clock radio set to a thrash-metal station, going off randomly, at full blast, around the clock. Being parents, we knew this about babies. Which is why I had presented us as members of Team Respite.

Well, for various reasons, our few days stretched into about seven weeks.  Now, as any human with a heart will tell you, it doesn’t take long to bond with an infant. Within a few days, you’re smitten. Despite the sleep deprivation.

While Tracy and I had no genetic dog in this hunt, so to speak, our parental instincts flipped on fully. Which is to say that, when you pay rapt attention to a baby (something we are all hard-wired to do), you find that it’s only natural to go all in. To commit yourself completely. And once that happens, you’re on your way:

• You realize that two mostly mature adults working together can be a formidable force, as you high-five while passing in the hallway at 3 a.m.
• All of your personal effects begin to smell like baby. Even when you’re at the office.
• You look at a dinner roll and it reminds you of a tiny foot.
• The first smile just about knocks you off your feet.

The real point: Making this sort of all-in commitment, even for a limited engagement, has tremendous rewards – for you as well as for the person you are helping. And actually, the universe delivers this kind of opportunity all the time.  Starting from a posture of gratitude for the advantages and capabilities you have, you don’t have to look hard for something that’s broken. And that you, with your unique gifts, can help fix.

The Angels Foster Family Network is just one (highly recommended) agency that facilitates some of the fixing that needs to happen. Every day, you have the opportunity to do something. It might be visiting the elderly, reading aloud to those who can’t, or donating a few hours or your time to a cause you like.

Seriously, just do it, and see what happens.

Having done our part in this case, we handed Baby M off to another Angels Network family the other day. Saying goodbye to him was more difficult than we anticipated.

When you invest yourself in a baby, even one who is not your offspring, there’s really no faking it. We came when he cried. We fed him, held, rocked and sang to him. We tried to give him some measure of the dignity, love and affection that every newborn person deserves.

So Baby M is on his way now. We’re sleeping through the night again, working out, pulling weeds from the garden, getting back into the rhythm of our lives — and still thinking about him all the time.

The crib we began to think of as ‘his’ is empty.

Ready, soon, for the next little person who needs it.

The person you are trying to reach (that’s you, right now) is multi-tasking in one way or another: monitoring the e-mail coming in through Outlook; maybe taking a call or a text message on the cell phone; keeping an eye on the TV and/or carrying on a conversation with someone else who is actually in the room. Or scrolling through TweetDeck, for crying out loud.

When you are trying to reach this person, less is more. People don’t have a lot of time to waste, so you want to get to the point quickly, because you are considerate of their time.

Maybe you have a lot to say, and it’s all important. You’re going to have to be patient. Marketing is a conversation, and in every conversation, there’s a give and take.

Sure, there is a thud factor that can be impressive when you have volumes of information. This can be good if people have paid you for CDs and binders full of printed content. Online, this kind of info-bloat works against you.

Online, everyone is scanning and trying to catch the whiff of a particular scent. It’s the scent that tells them they are right track — getting closer to what they want.

That scent is in your headlines and subheads, in the copy you choose to put in boldface, in your tone, your graphics and your entire presentation.

It’s in the fact that you do not demand too much of your audience’s precious time, and you choose not to insult them with epic, long-copy sales letters full of outrageous half-truths in all caps.

Speak to people in their language, and get to the point, and you may find that you have an audience — and that is a precious asset indeed.

“… many experts in the art of self-marketing agree that the rapid rise over the last five years of Internet-based social networking sites is a game-changer. Such sites allow like-minded people to forge connections, not just at lunch, but across the country or even overseas, leading to unprecedented opportunities for ambitious people to expand their list of contacts, generate business leads or even develop a new career.”

- Advertising Yourself: Building a Personal Brand Through Social Networks, Knowledge@Wharton

The word is out: There’s a lot to be gained by establishing an online presence for your business. But where do you start?

One week Facebook is hot, and the next week Twitter is all the rage. Are podcasts still a good idea? What about MySpace? Not to mention the couple dozen traditional media channels, from direct mail to radio and TV spots.

Here’s a good way to think about it. My colleague Kevin Popovic at Ideahaus Communications has developed the concept of Satellite Marketing(TM).

As you might infer, this involves setting up a core presence (your Web site) and then using the various other messaging and presentation technologies (from Twitter to PowerPoint to everything in between, and things beyond) to connect with your audiences, wherever they are, so that you can proactively:

• Manage your reputation.
• Present your products and services.
• Stay in touch with  your clients and prospects.
• Build your network.
• Grow your business faster.

What I like about this approach is that it allows you to integrate and orchestrate your media messaging as much (or as little) as you want.

Whether you’re already up to your neck in social media, or just wading into the pool, this is a method for strategizing and executing your social media efforts, so that you’re not just wasting time, but generating positive results for your business.

Check it out — Kevin explains Satellite Marketing in more detail here.

When they first hear about Twitter and the prospect of sending 140-character messages out, most people go, “Why the hell would I want to do that?”

After you play with it for a while you begin to get Twitter: It’s your own channel, to which you may invite whomever you want.

So what kind of bite-sized programming would you put on your own 140-character- at-a-time channel?

If, for instance, you are:

• One of the millions who have lost their jobs in the last few years
• Running a business that’s stuck or not growing as fast as you’d like
• Someone who understands the power of having a network and a personal brand

Then you probably see how Twitter could become an effective tool.

A lot of people using Twitter are following (or have following them) a ridiculous number of people. Once you get past 20 or so, it’s like watching channels on TV — you have to make choices. It’s just not possible to stay current with every station.

But there are Twitter tools you can use to organize who you’re following into groups, and to limit whose updates you get pinged with, in your in-box and on your cell.

Now suppose you’re running a coffee shop and you just got a great deal on some of the world’s finest coffee beans, and you want to share the love with your best customers. If you’ve got a Twitter account (and you’ve used it to connect with people and update them with relevant/funny information, not to bore then to death with obnoxious sales messages) you can instantly let them know – Come on in this Tuesday for a cup of Hacienda La Esmeralda at a fantastic price!

Do you think that would help build customer loyalty? Think those happy customers might refer others?

As newspapers continue their descent to oblivion, businesses of all sorts and sizes will be scrambling to figure out how to reconnect with prospects and existing clients.

Twitter is not the end-all, be-all of social media. It’s really only one piece of the puzzle. But if you’re at all forward-looking, it’s a good place to start building your social media footprint.

Neither (as far as I know) did Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin or Sam Walton. Yet they each pushed themselves to achieve incredible, world-changing feats.

OK, they each had their own special genius.

Guess what? So do you.

I’ve worked for a couple of coaching companies, OneCoach and TEC /Vistage, so I’ve seen how having a business coach in your corner can make a huge difference.

I ran a faster marathon (and achieved one of my life goals) because I had a great coach, pushing me further than I might have gone on my own.

But here’s the thing: You can actually coach yourself.

This is not just me biting the hands that used to feed me. I really believe that while it’d be great to have a Vince Lombardi in your corner, only you can make the commitment to do the things you need to do to get your enterprise (and your life) to the next level.

Sure, new skills, and what they call “out-of-the-box thinking” and are required. But if you’re motivated, you really can transform your business and your life.

Over the years I’ve accumulated some effective tools and templates, and knowledge of some of the best methods, techniques and strategies around coaching for better business performance.

I’m going to start sharing some of those things here, with a special focus on the core competency that will make a difference for every small-business owner and soloprenuer — and that is communication.

Listen, newspapers are going under (which means marketing and advertising are turning upside down). Big corporations don’t care about you. The trend is toward small, sustainable businesses, operated by “lifestyle entreprenuers” as an integral part of daily life.

If this makes sense to you, then you know that you need a brand. You must have a Web site, a Facebook page, and yes, a Twitter account.

These things are all essential now to anyone running their own business. But you have to use them in practical ways that work for you.

The key to that is to focus on creating clear, concise and compelling messaging. And that’s what we’ll be doing here.

Stay tuned!

To achieve the result you want, you need to convince them of the superiority of:

• The great idea you have
• The phenomenal product you’ve developed
• The awesome service you provide

You’re in sales, in other words. We all are. Every sale requires the ability to convince your audience to take the next step. This is marketing, and we’re all in that too. And persuasive copy is the foundation of effective marketing.

My point is, you need to know how to write.

Not like Shakespeare, but with a basic level of competence.  Even if all you’re writing is Craigslist ads, you need to know how to persuade with the written word. And if you are running your own business today, it’s absolutely mandatory that you be able to reach people and convince them with clear and compelling language.

The problem is that for many people, sitting down to write is as much fun as taking a seat in the dentist’s chair. But writing well is not that difficult. So lets do something about that.

Here’s  the deal: I just came off an intensive two-year gig of persuasive copywriting for a small-business coaching company called OneCoach. I wrote copy for hundreds of  e-mails, Web pages, print pieces etc., that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales.

Like the runner who has trained for years for the marathon, I’ve developed a high level of fitness in copywriting. One thing I’ve learned: With the right focus, anyone can write. You just need to know some of the shortcuts, tools and tricks of writing persuasive copy  — and I can share them with you.

(Edited from here — I was going to present a teleclass om copywriting, but it’s been put on hold…)

This teleclass is going to be full of practical takeaways that you can use to:

• Connect with your ideal client
• Increase your sales
• Grow your business faster now

If you’d like to learn the basics of how to write your own compelling copy, enter your e-mail address in the field at the top of the right column. I’ll send you more information about how to get on the call, so that you can grow your business faster with killer copy that you write yourself!