Speaker 2: 0:20

Thank you. Meet Evan Polin, the president of Polin Performance Group. A master in sales coaching with over two decades of experience, evan is not just a consultant. He's a force in sales, focusing on mindset, planning and skill development. He's also the co-author of Selling Professional Services, the Sandler Way. Joining him is Craig Andrews, partner and CEO of Beholder Agency. An expert in growth marketing With 20 years under his belt, craig blends marketing creativity with strategy to propel businesses forward, making Beholder Agency a leader in effective marketing solutions. Together, evan and Craig are here to share their wisdom on winning strategies, best practices and transformative insights that will fuel your growth. Get ready to revolutionize your sales and marketing approach right here on the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed.

Speaker 1: 1:12

Welcome to the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed. I'm Craig Andrews and my co-host with me today is Evan Polin. How are you doing today, Evan?

Speaker 3: 1:20

I'm doing great, Craig. How are you doing?

Speaker 1: 1:22

I'm not too bad. I'm not too bad. So, fresh off of our first show, when it was just you and I, we were talking about 2025 and this is the year to really get ramped up and get going, and I felt like today would be a great episode to touch on. Probably one of the other more important things as people back out talking and getting ramped up about the new year is to talk about the elevator pitch. Right, and I know you've been harping how important elevator pitches are right and I'm going to start off by having you define it. But you know, we've both been part of ProVisors and we're both in a position where we hear a lot of elevator pitches in all the different places we see all the different places. We go across the country talking to totally different people in totally different industries, and I'm sure you've heard some good ones and you've heard some bad ones. Tell me a little about your experience first.

Speaker 3: 2:08

Sure, yeah, absolutely. I've heard a couple of good ones and a lot that it's awesome. They have a lot of room for improvement, a lot of opportunity for growth and to get better this year. But when I'm working with my clients, the elevator pitch is one of the first things that I work on, Because if you can't capture somebody's attention in the first 15 or 20 seconds, there's no way that they're going to hang in there to listen to what you do for three, four, five, six minutes. So having a really good, really fine-tuned elevator pitch is really key and really vital.

Speaker 3: 2:44

And this time of year it's important for people to go back, look at what they're saying. A lot of times Q4, beginning of Q1, companies will tweak their offerings, tweak what it is that they're doing, but sometimes the folks out in the field, the folks talking to prospects, don't go back and retweak and they keep talking about things as if they were 2024 or 2023. And if your service offerings have changed but you're still giving the same old elevator pitch, your message isn't going to ring true as people get to talk to you a little bit more. So it's really important, especially now, to look at how you're presenting yourself to the outside world to see what's working, what needs to be tweaked, and then to really use this time to get that all squared away, Because as we get into the spring, things ramp up in terms of conferences, in terms of networking events and you really want to make sure that you've got your elevator pitch really honed in before you get out there talking to the masses.

Speaker 1: 3:46

So what I would say, to kind of continue on that point, is, just in case people don't know, because we don't make an assumption and we're the playbook, so we're giving them the answers Tell them what an elevator pitch is in your definition as the sales guru.

Speaker 3: 4:00

So for me, the elevator pitch is how you describe your products or your services in the first 20 to 40 seconds of the very first conversation that you have with somebody.

Speaker 3: 4:14

So that elevator pitch gets across who you are, who you help, and it really needs to be compelling, otherwise people are going to start to tune out, the eyes are going to go on screensaver and you're going to lose their attention. So with the elevator pitch the analogy that I like to use because I've met very, very few people who close a deal on the elevator pitch the elevator pitch is like a resume for somebody who's looking for a job. The resume is not going to get them the job. It's going to get the potential employer interested enough to want to bring somebody in to talk with them further, to bring them in for an interview. It's the same thing with the elevator pitch. Very few of us are going to close the deal on the elevator pitch, but it's going to let you know whether or not that person who you're talking to is interested in continuing the conversation for the next two to five minutes.

Speaker 1: 5:09

And what I'll tell you is I can tell the people who, I can already feel it. I can feel the eyeballs. People who are watching this or listening to this are already rolling their eyes. I know what an elevator pitch is, but what I want to do is I really want to break it down into detail in terms of some of the components that make this so important. One first impressions matter. You brought it up as like a job interview. Imagine going to a job interview wearing sneakers and a t-shirt, but you might have the best product in the world, but you're dressed as like a sneakers and t-shirt. You've already lost them Gone. They're not taking you seriously.

Speaker 1: 5:41

Part two is how much time it takes in sales to actually develop the process all the way through. So if your elevator pitch is really sharp and concise, the connection happens a little faster because there's no confusion, and in the marketing space, I'm worried about confusion. Confusion is not good in marketing. Third, clarity the phrase that I hear a lot from other people is that people say one of the biggest things that bother them is I didn't know, you did that, right. That line of, oh, you do that, who? Right, right, that's. That's a lack of clarity Right, and the elevator pitch will help create clarity so that you're not in a situation where they go oh, I talked to somebody else about that service.

Speaker 1: 6:23

So the elevator pitch can start the process of being clear and you want to make sure that you do the right work to work. Work with Evan, do the right, so less time that you're spending working and working and working, having meeting after meeting after meeting just to try to explain yourself, can cut down that time tremendously just by having good conversions. Let me say a good elevator pitch, excuse me. Yeah, knowing that you're the guru, can you give us a little bit in terms of the components of a good elevator pitch? Can you give us a little bit in terms of the?

Speaker 3: 6:58

components of a good elevator pitch. Well, and even before I jump into the components, let me just share with you a couple of pitfalls that I see a lot of companies run into. I was just doing a session this week with one of my clients. They sell a really, really, really technical product, so we were going through the elevator pitches. Had somebody practice I also like to call the elevator pitch a 30 second commercial put the, put the timer on them. They stopped First thing. He said yeah, how'd it go? He said I think it went okay. Said how long did you think your 30 second commercial was? He said I, I don't know how long was my 30 minutes. I said no, you were close to the first time. 30 minutes An hour, I'm sorry, a minute and 45 seconds. I said how many people, before you give them a chance to talk, are going to hang in there for a minute 45 before they understand what you?

Speaker 1: 7:58

do, and I can understand that, because a lot of times as business owners, we're so excited about what we do that we have diarrhea of the mouth right and we start over-talking.

Speaker 3: 8:08

I'm glad you said that, because that brings me to pet peeve number one, with people who think they have a great elevator pitch but it's really not benefiting them. Yeah, there are so many business owners, salespeople, that are so proud of their product, they are so proud of their service, that their elevator pitch is a verbal brochure, which is essentially let me tell you a little bit about me. Let me tell you a little bit more about myself. Let me tell you why I'm so great and let's bit about me. Let me tell you a little bit more about myself. Let me tell you why I'm so great, and let's focus on me. And most of your prospects don't want to hear that initially. Nope, you talked about we're both a part of Provisors.

Speaker 3: 8:50

When I hear people give their elevator pitch and it's all about them I mentioned the term a minute ago my eyes go on screensaver. I am tuning out after 10 or 15 seconds. If I don't see how this applies to me, I'm out. Yeah, I mean yeah. Well, I'm going to get to that in a second. I may physically still be in front of you, but mentally I'm on a beach somewhere. I am somewhere else. I'm thinking about who I want to talk to next, but I'm not there. So you know that is a major challenge that I see a lot of people have. They're so enamored with themselves they don't think about what's really important. You had mentioned it before. I mentioned it on a previous podcast the with them, the what's in it.

Speaker 3: 9:30

For me, a really good elevator pitch focuses on the problems that you solve for your potential customers. So if you are not talking about things using your terminology if you're not talking about things that they care about, they could care less about your features and your benefits and all of the things that you do. If they don't see how it applies to them, it doesn't matter. So one of the changes that I need to have a lot of my clients make at the beginning is focusing on the with them, the what's in it for me, for your clients, how is this going to impact them? What is the benefit going to be? Because if you can't get that across in the first 20 to 25 seconds, you're going to lose them and the rest of the time you're talking, you're going to be wasting your time. So the second big mistake that I see people make when it comes to the elevator pitch is they want to try to convert anybody, anybody with a pulse, anybody who's living, breathing, hasn't hung up on me, hasn't turned to go talk to the next person. I want to pitch them. Major, major, major mistake.

Speaker 3: 10:43

I know that lots of people listening to this podcast go to networking events, go to trade shows, go to places where there's lots and lots of potential prospects. More often than not, we do not have time to talk with everybody who's at that event. We don't have time to talk to everybody who's in that room. My job for myself, for my clients, with the elevator pitch, is to qualify or disqualify as quickly as possible.

Speaker 3: 11:09

I'd rather talk to somebody, see in the first 20 seconds that what I'm talking about isn't resonating at all with them, seconds that what I'm talking about isn't resonating at all with them, and then knowing that it's time to pivot and move on to talk to somebody else, versus just continuing to focus on myself. If I talk about my products and services, it's going to take me a lot longer to know whether or not that applies to the other person, but if I'm saying hey, craig, the challenges that I run into, the challenges that business owners I work with, are A, b and C, which of those things are you running into? You're either going to pick up what I'm putting down and you're going to say hey, well, geez, tell me a little bit more about how you do X, y and Z.

Speaker 3: 11:50

Yeah into those issues before. Great. I now know that it's either time that, yo, you picked one of those things, so then we're going to start to dive in. Hey, craig, tell me a little bit more about that. You know what's going on with issue number the two that you picked or if you're like I didn't know that any company had those problems, I've never run into those issues okay, great, we may not be a good fit and we may pivot out of the conversation in the next 25, 30 seconds, and that's OK. But not everybody with a pulse is a prospect.

Speaker 1: 12:22

Well, jump in there real quick. Yep, you know. That goes to the point I just made recently. You just just in case anybody didn't pick it up he just increases conversions, right there, right, the key in sports we're both sports fans is the more efficient person probably has the better outcome. End of story, right? So taking anybody at a trade show possible who you haven't kind of pre-qualified based on what the pains that you solve, is totally going to put you in a lot of busy work. Which is why most of those follow ups never happen is because they're really not the qualified people that you really should be talking to other than just calling through a list. So I'm sorry.

Speaker 3: 13:06

I think that's a great point. So my elevator pitch has a couple of components. First, and hopefully for most people, this is the easy part your name and the name of your company or the name of your firm. I I only have a couple people screw that part up you're not talking about me, are you?

Speaker 3: 13:28

not anymore. Credit's come a long way over the years. Second, I want a four or five word descriptor of what your service is, of what you do. Next, what I want to do is talk about the problems that I saw for my clients. So typically I'm picking two or three problems and what I like to do is use emotional words. I help companies who are frustrated with X, who are disappointed with Y, who are upset with Z, but I'm focusing on problems that I'm presuming that my prospect has. And then the last part is key in terms of being able to quickly qualify or disqualify.

Speaker 3: 14:12

I am wrapping up with an open ended question, so I may finish up with so which of those are your biggest challenges, or which of those things are you running into? It forces the other person to give you an open-ended answer. So if I'm the Craig and I are talking and I say, hey, craig, you know, do any of those things apply to you? And Craig goes nope, conversation's pretty much over. It's tough to recover from that. But if I say, hey, craig, out of those things which are the biggest challenges, he's got to give me an opening. He may say, well geez, I'm not running into any of those. Still opens me up to ask one more question.

Speaker 3: 14:48

Okay, well, if you're not running into any of those, when it comes to generating more business, what is the biggest challenge you're running into? And it again opens up for conversation. And if craig goes, nope, we're good. My biggest issue is I don't have enough bodies to service all of the work that we're doing. Now, I know I'm gonna wrap up the conversation in the next minute or two. Tell greg, tell craig it's great to hear well, how well he's doing and then I'll pivot to the next conversation. Yeah, but it's those three components your name, a short descriptor of what you do, two or three problems that you solve, that you have a pretty good idea based on the audience that you're talking to, that may relate to the other person, and then finishing up with the open-ended question at the end.

Speaker 1: 15:35

So, to pivot there a little bit, I know we've been talking a lot of sales stuff in terms of how we go out to networking events or the meetings that we go to, but I want to emphasize the importance here of understanding this conciseness of the marketing component of things, whether it be website ad copy. If you're going to a trade show and you're putting all the information up on your banners, how would it possibly work out for you, Evan, if the same things that you're speaking in person are actually reflected around you, right, and all your paperwork and all your copy that you're handing out? What if all of that was in congruency together and you're now saying the same thing? What would that possibly do for a business?

Speaker 3: 16:15

So it makes you look like you've got your crap together, that, okay, these guys are authentic. What I'm hearing from the salesperson, what I'm hearing from the business owner, I'm seeing in their collateral, the problems that they say that they solve, or the things that they say they do, what they're showing me. The couple of case studies that are up are all going ahead and reinforcing that message. And it's okay, these people have credibility. I'm more comfortable. But if you're giving an elevator pitch and none of the collateral speaks to what you're talking about, people are going to look at you like you've got three heads and went. Wait a second, are you at the right booth? What you said doesn't match any of what's around, what's going on and even more than that. What I see from a lot of companies is three different salespeople have three completely different pitches and somebody's like, wow, you could be from one of like five different companies. This is all over the place.

Speaker 1: 17:18

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 17:19

And it really hurts from a credibility standpoint. Absolutely, if that magazine's not in alignment.

Speaker 1: 17:25

Yeah, and trust, and I would say is that, before I jump into this next question, part of the things I want to warn people about it goes hand in hand with what you mentioned in terms of products and stuff that they might have offered in 2023. 2024 is not what they do now, but I've had people come in and go. I have business one, two, three and four. Now our attention span ain't that great anymore. It ain't like it was several years ago. So we're holding on to one concept in that elevator pitch. So if you come to me and tell me about all these different businesses that you offer, you're going to definitely get the screensaver. Do you even have screensavers anymore?

Speaker 3: 18:02

Anyway, you're going to definitely get the screensavers right. So let me share one other challenge that I see where companies can really lose out on opportunities. As you know, I work with a lot of law firms, a lot of accounting firms. Yeah, you know I work with a lot of law firms, a lot of accounting firms. A lot of those firms have multiple practice areas. Some of them have five, eight, 10, 12 different practice areas. If a professional from the firm is out there and they're just honed in on their practice area and they don't mention anything else that the firm does, they are going to lose out on 90% of the opportunities that are out there.

Speaker 3: 18:40

So, again, a good practice is to come up. Again. You don't want to pitch all 14 different practice areas, but to come up. You know, if you're a large firm, big picture. Why would it be in a company's best interest to work with a firm that has multiple different practice areas and not have to go hire two, three, four different firms or hire a firm that is quarterbacking everything, everything that's going on?

Speaker 3: 19:04

We're talking about the service that the firm provides and why people like coming back. But if you're so honed in on just your small slice of the business and forget about the other service areas that your business provides, you are going to miss out on lots of opportunities. So for a lot of my clients, they will have a very targeted elevator pitch, or what they're focused on or when they've identified that somebody cares about one small slice of things. But they will also have a larger company-wide or firm-wide elevator pitch. So if they're at a networking event, if they're at a trade show, they can capture a larger percentage of the audience and then bring in that opportunity and then pivot and give it to the appropriate person.

Speaker 1: 19:51

And I would say is that I've been in your sessions on many occasions and the one thing that you do preach which I'm going to elaborate on a little bit more is you shouldn't be memorizing a single line, correct?

Speaker 3: 20:02

Right, those of us who are old enough to remember getting telemarketers calling us at home before we had caller ID. Before there was that seven second delay. When a telemarketer called us at home, we could figure it out in about three seconds. You could tell based on their tone of voice that they either memorized a script or that they were reading off of a script. And almost everybody I've ever talked to in 20 plus years when I brought up this example in sales training sessions, they're like yep, I say once you identify it to salesperson, how much longer does the call normally last? And typically the answer is well as long as it takes me to hang up the phone, or two seconds or three seconds. If they pick up that cadence and pick up.

Speaker 3: 20:51

Okay, people are tuning out and not listening to anything that you say. So you're much better off thinking about okay, what are a couple of the problems that I solve. What is some of what I want to get across Me personally? I've been doing this since 2001. My commercial sounds a little bit different every single time. I'm still hitting on the same three, four, five points, but the words are a little bit different because I've not memorized the script and for me. I also know different kinds of my clients have different issues. So a business owner or a managing partner has different issues than a salesperson or an associate. Small companies have different issues than larger companies. So if I can identify what else somebody does, I'll then pick two or three bullet points that apply or have a better chance of applying to that specific person, versus memorizing my one size fits all pitch. That isn't going to fit too many people.

Speaker 1: 21:52

This is the importance of having training with you so that they because everybody assumes they know, but the reality is is that once you kind of work it through the marketing and the sales channel, you're going to see your sales and your marketing processes just go through the roof. This is why we've preached so many times on this podcast about how sales and marketing need to work together. Because if I now have gotten the lead or the information from the head that said that we're going to pivot, but it didn't get down to the lower sales guy and then we just spent thirty thousand dollars to go to a trade show, holy smokes. Now somebody's in trouble because we didn't. We didn't win anything and we didn't make our money back. We didn't get the product sold the whole nine yards. So if the left hand's not talking with the right hand and creating a synergy.

Speaker 1: 22:41

You're really in a lot of trouble. Yeah, no, I was going to bring up. I know that you have a worksheet or a handout that you, that you want to offer.

Speaker 3: 22:49

The workout.

Speaker 1: 22:50

The workout. Why don't you tell them about your, your handout?

Speaker 3: 22:55

Sure. So anybody who's interested, I've got a one pager that'll walk you through the steps of putting together the elevator pitch. So if you go ahead and comment when we post the podcast up on LinkedIn or you can email me, it's evan at polandpgcom. Happy to send you that one pager, but it'll really help you work through the elevator pitch. A couple of suggestions Once you work through the elevator pitch, especially if you're in a really technical field, really technical industry After you create the elevator pitch, practice it in front of somebody who's not in your industry. Get feedback from them. Do they understand what you do or is the message completely lost on them? And when it's completely lost on them, you know that you need to rework it a little bit. The other thing I would suggest is, once you've got your elevator pitch set, you need to practice it 30 or 40 times before it becomes natural, before it rolls off the tongue. 30 or 40 times before it becomes natural, before it rolls off the tongue. It's not going to feel comfortable the first time.

Speaker 1: 24:05

So get ready to practice it 30, 40, 50 times with it. Sorry about that, that was my mistake. Practice it 30, 40 times for it to really set home. If you guys missed that, I think the thing that's important as well and we touch upon this as well, and I want to kind of, as we kind of finish up the show here anything that we're going to talk about, probably from a sales and marketing perspective, is really going to come from a level of consistency.

Speaker 1: 24:26

So you can't be in a position where you're practicing your sales pitch I'm sorry, your elevator pitch, your 30-second commercial, and you go ah, it didn't work, I'm done. You have to be able to let it play itself out and play it and then all of a sudden you'll start to see people catch on. Nothing is ever done on a vacuum on a sales and marketing perspective. I tell people all the time marketing is like a science experiment. Once you find that potion worked on version 25, you're really going to take off from there, just like I'm sure you have when people are working on their sales.

Speaker 3: 24:59

And when it's working for a while, that doesn't mean it's going to work forever. So question for all of you in the audience how many of you are regularly using fax machines? That was a really key technology 20, 25 years ago. If you're still regularly using it in your business probably an issue we need to kind of moderate and make tweaks over time. Yeah, Otherwise your message is going to lose its power.

Speaker 1: 25:25

Yeah, and if you're not using a cell phone now, you're probably really well behind, right? So, anyway, this is the Sales and Marketing Playbook. You can find us on all your major podcast platforms Apple, spotify, amazon and more. You can also see us on YouTube. If you'd like to see our wonderful, beautiful faces, we're on. If you check out the smplaybookcom and you can click the link there for our YouTube channel, you'll get to see Evan and I divulge tons of information for you guys to grow in 2025. Evan, do you have any parting words for the show?

Speaker 3: 25:59

Just keep listening, keep watching, reach out to me if you want that elevator pitch. In the next couple of weeks we're going to have some exciting episodes talking about accountability, talking about AI. So stay tuned for some of our upcoming episodes.

Speaker 1: 26:17

And we're also going to have a part two and a part three to this elevator pitch. That's how important this information is. We're going to break it down from specifically and only the sales perspective. We're going to break it down specifically and only from the marketing perspective. So I'm Craig Andrews and that's my partner in crime, evan Poland, and we will talk to you guys next time. Talk to you guys next time.

Speaker 2: 26:40

Thank you for joining us on this exhilarating journey through the world of sales and marketing. Remember, the playbook is in your hands and the possibilities are limitless. Keep exploring, experimenting and innovating, and watch as your business reaches unprecedented levels of success. And watch as your business reaches unprecedented levels of success. Don't forget to subscribe to the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed on all major podcast platforms and follow us on YouTube, facebook and LinkedIn for even more exclusive content. Until next time, keep hustling and keep winning.