What do you do? – Crafting a great answer…

Grant Leboff: Michael, one of the questions that people get asked perennially and, actually, are often not very good at answering is that question, “What do you do?” How do you craft a great answer to that question, “What do you do?”

Michael Dodd: That’s a classic one that people should be ready for and they often aren’t. What you really want to do is make sure you’ve got a variety of answers ready that are going to hit the spots for that particular audience or person who is asking, so that you’re actually making sure that you’re giving something which is relevant to them.

You also want a short version because it’s often called an elevator pitch, where you’re just between the 7th floor and the 9th floor, and someone says, “What do you do?” and you need to give a very short answer, and possibly a longer answer, maybe a one minute answer, and a 90 second answer, so that you can say more.

But the ultimate thing is to make sure you’re hitting the “what’s in it for me” factor for the person who’s asking and you’re illustrating it, so that you’re not just showing “I can do this for you, Grant, but I can … Actually, I had someone who was actually in marketing the other day, and they were a bit nervous about doing media interviews. So I was able to go through the kind of questions that marketing people are asked when they’re on CNN and the BBC, and, in fact, they ended up being on both CNN and the BBC and they did really well. In fact, the number of clients they got as a result of that media exposure was phenomenal..”

What I’m doing there is painting a picture in the mind of showing that giving great answers in media interviews can help marketing people just like you. That’s what you want to make sure you’re doing in your elevator pitch. Whether you’re selling widgets or whether you’re providing software services, you’ve got to make sure that people can actually see what it is and see the results that they can get by engaging with your company.

Grant Leboff: What that suggests is actually when you talk about the elevator pitch as it were, that there shouldn’t be one good one, but you should have a variety of stories that perhaps you’d tell. So you might have your “what’s in it for me” answer and then the story that you tag on will change depending on whom you’re speaking to. Would that be the best way of approaching it?

Michael Dodd: It can be a really good way. I always advise people to have a treasure chest of great examples to show what they do because the right answer for the wrong person is not the right answer. If you’ve got someone or perhaps you’ve got an audience of a particular profession, you may do stuff for them. Maybe it’s an audience of engineers, but you also do stuff for accountants and for techie people. You want to make sure that you’ve got that answer, which shows what your company can do to help engineers and they’ll be far more interested in that than they will be in what you can do for architects or for plumbers.

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