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Welcome to our infrequent newsletter for fans of our books, Made to Stick and Switch! Read on to make your next pitch great, to discover a great new book on change, and to hear our nominees for the Genius Award (including an unlikely rock star).
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SIX TIPS FOR GIVING A GREAT ELEVATOR PITCH
An elevator pitch is a mixture of an explanation and a sales pitch. It’s intended to get people excited about your organization, your new product, or even you personally (in an interview situation). Here’s how to give a good one:
1. Think short – no shorter than 30 seconds and no longer than 3 minutes. Time it.
2. If your topic is complex, use the “anchor & twist” format to orient your audience.
3. Don’t wing it, script it. Once you’ve figured out how to explain something well, there is NO value in novelty. Tell it the same (effective) way every time.
4. ‘Why’ comes before ‘What.’ People will understand better what you’re doing if they first know why you’re doing it. Here’s an example: “Most people invest some of their savings and give some of it away to charity. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do both at once — get interest AND impact? That’s why we invented the Calvert Community Investment Notes.”
5. Mandatory: Include a story. For a product pitch, tell a customer’s story. For a nonprofit pitch, talk about the people you help. For self-promotion, highlight a time when you nailed it.
6. Check out other pitches for inspiration. Here’s one that we worked on for Peter Singer’s great book, The Life You Can Save. And here’s a great article about elevator pitches, starring Dave Yewman and Andy Craig, the masters of the craft.
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WANT TO TRAIN YOUR ORGANIZATION ON SWITCH? Hey — on March 20-21, 2011 we’re going to offer our first training class to certify trainers to teach the material in Switch (our new book on creating change). The class will be in Palo Alto, California. If you do coaching or training for organizations, and you’re interested in adding a Switch class to your repertoire, send us a note at training@heathbrothers.com.
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ESSENTIAL NEW BOOK ON BRIGHT SPOTS THINKING
Remember the story in Switch about Jerry Sternin? He’s the guy who solved the malnutrition problem among very poor Vietnamese rice farmers by figuring out the practices of bright spot moms who were raising healthy kids despite their poverty. Many readers have told us it’s their favorite story in the book. Anyway, there’s a new book out on Sternin’s work called The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems. The book describes amazing case studies of how Jerry and Monique Sternin used bright-spots approaches to solve problems ranging from keeping kids in school in Argentina to preventing multi-drug resistant staph infections in U.S. hospitals. It doesn’t matter what field you’re in, if you want to create change, you should read this book.
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THREE ACTS OF GENIUS
1. David Lee Roth figured out how to avoid catastrophic failures at Van Halen’s live shows. (Chances are you can learn from his insight.)
2. The New York City public health department is waging a brilliant, sticky campaign against sugary sodas. See our article and the poster and the hilariously disgusting video.
3. Did you know Amazon has a patent on its 1-click-order technology? They’ve succeeded by making it ridiculously easy to place an order. Notice how Kiva uses the same idea: They’ve made it ridiculously easy for all of us to be “micro-lenders.” (Go see for yourself.) Are you making it ridiculously easy for your customers to engage with you?
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FOR MORE ON STICKY IDEAS: If you liked Made to Stick but want more hands-on practice, check out the course that we co-designed with our partners, Decker Communications. You can register for their open-enrollment classes – including sessions on Sept 10 (San Fran) and Nov 12 (NYC) — or contact them about hosting a class specifically for your group (madetostick@decker.com).
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Signing off until the next edition, which we promise will come sometime in the next 2 to 17 months… All the best to you.
-dan & chip
heathbrothers.com
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