Presentations in Action - Jerry Weissman [12]
Let’s call them XYZ. During XYZ’s road show, I received an excited call from an investment banker friend in New York who had just attended the luncheon presentation. He said, “This was the best road show you’ve ever coached!”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because they did it in 15 minutes, and the investors were delighted to get back to their offices.”
It is doubtful that you will face the same challenges and stakes in your presentations as national leaders and IPO road show executives, but you can learn from the masters. Your audience doesn’t need to hear every encyclopedic detail of your business proposal. They have neither the time nor the patience—especially in this Twitter-driven world—to listen to long presentations.
Keep brevity in mind while you are developing your presentations, and when you are finished and ready to present, take one more look at it and find more material you can omit. Follow Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s famous advice Less Is More, and its corollary: “When in doubt, leave it out.”
12. The Elevator Pitch in One Sentence: How to Describe Your Business Succinctly
In a Wall Street Journal article about the Herculean tasks facing President Barack Obama—the economic crisis, the environment, health care reform, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea—columnist Peggy Noonan referenced Clare Boothe Luce, a noted twentieth-century playwright, journalist, ambassador, and congresswoman. Ms. Luce “told about a conversation she had in 1962 in the White House with her old friend John F. Kennedy. She told him, she said, that ‘a great man is one sentence.’”
Ms. Noonan defined that one sentence as “leadership [that] can be so well summed up in a single sentence that you don’t have to hear his name to know who’s being talked about. ‘He preserved the union and freed the slaves,’ or, ‘He lifted us out of a great depression and helped to win a World War.’ You didn’t have to be told ‘Lincoln’ or ‘FDR.’”F12.1
As a conservative columnist and former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Ms. Noonan said that Mr. Obama was replacing “his sentence with 10 paragraphs” and recommended that he should try to narrow his focus because “an administration about everything is an administration about nothing.” Jon Stewart, a longtime supporter of Mr. Obama, echoed Ms. Noonan on an episode of his The Daily Show, saying, “So, Mister President, while I am impressed with your Renaissance man level of knowledge in a plethora of subjects, may I humbly say, ‘That’s great! Now fix the economy!’”F12.2
The one-sentence recommendation is also applicable to business, with particular regard to the universally referenced elevator pitch—so named to refer to the way you’d describe your business if you stepped into an elevator and suddenly saw that hot prospect you’ve been trying to buttonhole. The allusion is intended to limit the pitch to the length of an elevator ride. Unfortunately, most such pitches in business are often as long as elevator rides in the Empire State Building, the equivalent of what Ms. Noonan calls President Obama’s “10 paragraphs.”
A guide to help you create a succinct elevator pitch can be found in the words of Rosser Reeves, a prominent advertising executive with the Ted Bates agency during the middle of the twentieth century.
Mr. Reeves coined the term “Unique Selling Proposition (USP),” defined in his biographical sketch in Advertising Age magazine as “the one reason the product needed to be bought or was better than its competitors.”F12.3
These USPs often took