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CHAPTER 4

Craft the Elevator Speech

ONCE WE KNOW THE AUDIENCE AS intimately as we can, then it’s time to begin to focus the content in terms of the audience. We begin with the elevator speech. Recall that audiences only remember something like 10 percent to 30 percent of what they hear. If we think of a speech as a very limited act of persuasion, then it follows that we need to be very clear what we’re trying to persuade the audience of. The elevator speech will help us do that. It is, simply, a one-sentence expression of the main reason that you’re giving the speech—on the audience’s terms.

Here’s the scenario: You’re the keynote speaker at a conference. You’re up early on the day of the speech, a little nervous (perhaps more than a little), and a little early getting down to the mezzanine floor of the hotel where the ballroom and your appointment with destiny are. You get on the elevator at the fourteenth floor and hit the button for mezzanine. As the elevator heads down, it stops on the twelfth floor, and a cheery-looking convention delegate with a similar name tag gets on. He determines that the elevator’s heading to the floor he wants, and faces forward.

His eyes shift over to you and your name tag. There’s an immediate (and gratifying) look of recognition in his eyes. “Oh,” he says, “You’re the keynote.”

“Yes,” you admit.

“I’m a golfer, and there is a PGA-class golf course outside. So tell me, why should I attend your speech?” he asks, being a little bit of a smart aleck, and showing that he’s someone who’s attended enough keynotes to know that this crucial detail is worth checking out.

What you say then is the elevator speech. One sentence (you don’t have time for any more) that will motivate this person to attend your speech rather than head out early to the golf course.

What do you say?

You say something like, “Because if you attend my speech, you will learn how to give presentations without fear, presentations that move your audience to action every time.”

My guess is that your interlocutor will attend the event.

What are the elements of the elevator speech? First of all, it must contain a benefit for the potential member of the audience. Something that the person in question will get out of attending. In this case, it’s learning how to give speeches without fear, speeches that move your audience.

Second, it must contain the word you, meaning the audience. That’s to make sure that you keep your attention directly focused where it belongs, on the audience.

Third, it must contain some reference to emotion. In this case, it’s the fear that is usually connected with public speaking. Why? Because emotion is more engaging, and more memorable, than intellectual information. Emotion polarizes people. They are much more likely to react than not. A small number of people may respond by saying, “I don’t need that; I’m never afraid of public speaking.” But that’s a very small number indeed; you won’t lose many potential members of the audience that way. And you’ll gain a whole lot more who do connect with the word and the emotion.

Gear your elevator speech toward solving your audience’s problems.

Most Americans have at least heard of President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, the one in which he urged his fellow citizens to “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” The elevator speech for that address might be something like the following:

Together, you and I can fight Soviet aggression with a strong defense and a strong economy and by helping the rest of the free world.

What’s the benefit to the audience? It gets to go on living; at the time, there was real fear of the Soviet threat that included nuclear aggression. The emotion is fear—and patriotism. Note how the emotional message could have polarized Americans. Perhaps not everyone thought that the Soviet threat was real or was worried about communists taking over the world. But Kennedy gave people a positive side to the message as well. Just about everyone wants a strong economy, after all.

It’s difficult to keep political addresses focused because of the temptation at moments like this to offer a little something to everyone. But Kennedy’s address was better focused than most, and the elevator speech shows how he and his team managed it.

Once you’ve figured out what your elevator speech is, then use that to guide all the rest of the content development. Everything that doesn’t relate to the elevator speech, no matter how fascinating or exciting to you, must be eliminated. If information doesn’t support the key concept, it doesn’t belong in your speech.

Far more speeches fail from a surfeit of information than a deficit. Far too many businesspeople think of a presentation as a data dump—the opportunity to show the audience what they know about a subject.

But that’s not interesting to audiences. What they do care about is how some of the information that you have can help them solve their problems. The elevator speech helps you keep focused on that crucial insight, and it helps keep you focused on the audience itself.

It’s worth repeating: You must focus on one idea and one idea only. Give your audience more than that, and it will quickly get lost in your information, trying desperately to remember irrelevant details and feeling betrayed by you. The audience will think that you’ve led them astray. Many speakers overprepare, because they are afraid that they’ll get asked something they don’t know. But what audiences want is not to be buried in detail, but for you to tell them what’s important, what the key concepts are, what the essence of a body of knowledge is.

Armed with only the material that supports your one key idea, you’re ready to develop the structure of your presentation.

Remember

 Focus your talk on one idea, the essential idea for your audience.

 Summarize that idea in an elevator speech of one sentence.

 The sentence should contain a benefit for the audience, the word you, and a reference to emotion.

 Use the elevator speech to focus the rest of your content development.