Keep in mind, you'll constantly be revising your elevator speech. The different iterations of your speech can be driven by:
- You have a job vs. You're looking for a job
- Professional Association Event vs. Career Fair
- Networking Group (career search) vs. Entrepreneurial Meet-ups
You'll have to think about how you want to be thought of in each group setting. What do you bring to the group that's valuable or relevant to them. You'll also have to be able to shorten your speech down to 30 seconds if necessary. Most networking events will indicate how long you'll have to introduce yourself. It can range from 30 seconds up to 2 minutes.
Sometimes, you'll have to break it into 2 pieces: a professional overview and a personal piece of information about yourself, such as your personal interests or hobbies. But let's start with the basics:
Your Profile
Provide your title, which can also be a tag line. This can be something to help people remember you, or it can be a positioning statement to demonstrate your specialty. You can try different things to see what clicks with people, or what generates questions. I've tried a lot of different tag lines, but am currently using Six Sigma Black Belt Leader because I've noticed people always come up to me afterwards to ask me about Six Sigma. There are usually very few black belts at the events I go to.
Follow this up with your most recent company and job title. If relevant, you can also provide information for the job prior to that as well. Then include a brief overview of what you did. For example:
Hi, my name is Michael Conrad. I'm a Six Sigma Black Belt Leader, and have worked at various companies such as Intuit, Nissan, and LendingTree. I was most recently Director of Corporate Quality at LendingTree, where I worked with the business leaders to help them define their strategies, revise and align processes to these strategies, execute solutions to improve their business, and provide dashboards to measure and maintain these improvements.
But if I'm at a Marketing or Internet seminar, I'll start with Marketing and Operations Leader. I've heard people use tag lines such as Corporate Defogger (Strategic Marketing), De-engineering Expert (VP IT), Corporate Lubricant (don't ask), and more.
Your Accomplishments
When you have 1 - 2 minutes to talk, you can list out some of your major accomplishments. Make sure to include numbers, but don't provide more than 2 examples. I rarely go into this in my elevator speech, but will provide these when people ask about Six Sigma. This gives me a reason to demonstrate how Six Sigma can be used.
Your Career Objective
Identify what you're looking for:
- The ideal position
- Size of the company (if this matters)
- Industries of interest
- Your target location (geography)
This helps people hone in on what you're trying to find. It also helps everyone be more effective in providing you with help. You don't want people telling you about a great opportunity on the East Coast when you don't want to move out of Los Angeles.
Your Target Companies
This is probably the single most important element of your elevator speech if you're in job transition. I truly believe that people inherently want to help you; they just don't know how. When you identify companies you're interested in, they now understand clearly how they can help you.
But remember, people will be reluctant to help you if you're a taker. That's why it's always important to ask how you can help them (and mean it). You need to go to networking events thinking about how you can help others. If you really think about it, those are the kind of people we all want to work with anyways.
When you help people, they'll be very willing to help you; and if they know anyone at your target companies, they'll help make the introductions.
Practice, Practice, Practice
I think that says it all. Make sure you practice your speech, and the different iterations of your speech. You don't want to use notes to tell people about who you are (you should already know).
I hope this helps as you develop your elevator speech. If you have an approach that's been successful, please share them by adding your comments below.( 1 Vote, Average: 5.00 out of 5 )
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