Love this topic, one of my favorite things to ask someone I meet. "Let's hear your elevator pitch." It also serves as a really good lesson about using point of view in communication.
tl;dr - Be sure to have multiple versions of your elevator pitch to suit the audience.
As a marketing guy, I felt it was worth a reply to say that you shouldn't have just one elevator pitch. The better question is "What versions do you have of your elevator pitch?"
Reading through these, most work great if you're speaking with someone already familiar with your field, but if you're talking to pretty much anyone else it's likely to soar over their head.
You absolutely need a detailed version for people in your field or related fields but consider having two others:
-one for someone who may be in a technical field or have some kind of other engineering background but not metallurgy or materials who won't know your acronyms and terminology. (A coworker of a friend at a retail product manufacturing company, maybe.)
-one for someone likely completely unfamiliar with anything to do with your field/industry, to whom you may as well be speaking Latin when you talk about additive manufacturing, tribology, SEM, non-ferrous alloys, etc. (Someone you meet at a non-professional social event.)
You won't always know which one to use, but context and setting often provide pretty solid clues. If the goal is to leave the person with a quick idea of what you do and you use terminology they can't understand, you missed the point. I'm guessing many of you already have these and used the context of the ASM forum to chose the one you shared, but I've heard this happen too many times not to comment just in case it helps someone out there.
The marketing lesson here is that considering the audience's point of view when designing your communications versus always using your own POV, is key.
If you start with a simpler pitch when talking to someone who's actually more familiar with the field, they are
more likely to follow up with something like "Oh, I'm familiar with metallurgy, we do X, Y and Z..."
If you start with one that sails over their head, they're
highly unlikely to tell you that they have no clue what you just said. Maybe you get a nod and "That's interesting."
I'll use myself as an example. With my role in marketing, the first two are fairly similar because I don't have to get too far down into the weeds on myself, I focus on the company. "Hi, I'm Eric Walton...":
1) I am director of marketing for a company specializing in non-destructive and destructive testing with a full metallurgy lab. We do engineering consulting as well as training for NDT and welding certifications. We are A2LA and Nadcap accredited and are a certified AWS test facility.
2) I am director of marketing for a company specializing in non-destructive and destructive testing with a full metallurgy lab. We do engineering consulting and training. We do a wide variety of work for automotive, aerospace, defense, power generation, transportation and a number of other industries.
3) I handle marketing for a company that investigates why things might break, finds ways to break things and figures out why and how things broke. We help our clients make sure that their products don't fail and kill people.
Sometimes the last one is fun to start with if you know you have a chance to explain more as a follow up. It can serve as a nice icebreaker. Many of you already have that one nailed.
Sorry for the long post, couldn't help myself.
------------------------------
Eric Walton
Director of Marketing
United Technical Inc.
Whitmore Lake MI
248-667-9185
------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: 02-17-2021 11:26
From: Carrie Hawk
Subject: What's your elevator pitch??
You have 15 seconds to tell someone what you do - what's your pitch??
I'll start: I'm Carrie Hawk, a ceramic engineer. Ceramic engineering is anything from toilet bowls to space shuttle tiles.
What's yours???
------------------------------
Carrie Hawk
ASM International
Community Engagement Specialist
440-338-5497
carrieh@asminternational.org
------------------------------