Convincing the public at large

Each of us, in our daily professional life has to introduce ourselves to strangers or even to clarify what we do to our friends and family.

The more we are in high tech business, the most difficult this exercise is. Some of us, in the secure transactions industry can get away with this by just saying: "I allow your mobile phone to work" or "thanks to my job, you can use your credit card to pay securely". But in most cases, the exercise is a lot more difficult, especially for those of us involved in emerging markets.

The more we go away form mass markets and from consumer-oriented business, the harder it is to explain what we do. Also, working on innovative projects that are not yet visible to the general public makes it even harder.

Most of the time, what we need to clarify has to be shortened in an elevator pitch we can deliver in less than 60 seconds. A way to explain our role and positioning is to describe which problem we solve, but even this way, tackling a too wide problem makes the demonstration fuzzy, while targeting a too narrow problem makes it too specific to be understood by our random contacts.

Another way is to start from what our competitors, present or future, do and justify why and how we do it better. This way we go from a simple presentation to a set of positive arguments to start to get to our value proposition.

As we not only live within our world of experts, all of us have to learn how to introduce ourselves to the public. We have to make it explicit and straight to the point to make sure people will not only understand us but also remember us, and, this way, increase their faith in the technology we work in.

It is always a nice way to clarify how what we do is going to change the world.

At the end, the goal of an elevator pitch is to let the person you meet wanting to know more, eager for more information to satisfy his curiosity. This also makes us more comfortable: it is always easier to answer questions…