Tradeshow season is right around the corner for many, making now a good time to renovate your elevator speech.

In case you need a refresher, an elevator speech is a 15-30 second sound bite (or business pitch in the B2B world) that succinctly, and hopefully memorably, introduces yourself, your product and what you do. Essentially, thirty seconds is about how long an elevator ride is, sometimes longer.  So, depending on how fast you talk, you don’t have a lot of time to capture someone’s interest. Tradeshows are the perfect example.

Someone walks up to your booth – you have their attention – but what do you say to keep them intrigued enough to stay and hear more, or do business with you? Those 30 seconds (or longer) start to get a little nerve-racking.

No need to panic! You’re an expert at your product, so spend time now to perfecting your elevator speech.

image credit: ryanrenfrew.blogspot.com

Before you get on the floor this fall, think through these to rejuvenate your elevator speech:

• What’s in it for your audience? How can you tie in what’s in it for them in your mini-spiel? Will they ultimately save money? Will their life be less stressful? Always be thinking about the WIFFY and how you can tie it into your message!
• Come prepared, but don’t make it appear as though you’re reading from an index card. Be able to act “on the fly” depending on the situation and your audience!
• Find a balance with what you want to say. Your elevator speech has to be informative and compelling, not one or the other.
• Be unique. Again, understand the WIFFY and see how you can say something so relevant to them but exciting at the same time that you stand out quickly. What’s your #1 differentiator that they need to know?
• Practice. As a past Toastmaster, I know how important it is to practice. Before the show starts, make sure you’ve tested it out with a colleague.

Want more? Before we get out this fall, I’m going to be checking out the following book from the library: Small Message, Big Message, by Terri Sjoidin.

What are some of your elevator speech successes and disasters?

2011 is just flying by, and that got me thinking about Business-to-Business marketing trends as we transition into the new year. I did some research and came across a great article discussing seven trends in B2B marketing for 2011-2012.

While none of them are earth shattering, they should act as great reminders for marketers to incorporate into engagements.

1. The need to more effectively quantify and communicate value created for customers
2. Developing approaches to better understand what customers really need
3. Finding, “sensing,” identifying and assessing new opportunities for growth
4. Developing closer ties with customers, suppliers, channel partnerships
5. Capitalize on new growth/emerging markets
6. Balancing short-term requirements and long-term opportunities
7. Segmentation

At Canyon we’re consistently working with our clients to incorporate these trends into their marketing efforts. My job is to support the account team with the development and management of channel enablement programs. I support the team to get partners, trained, certified and out the door to start selling.

We’re constantly looking for new opportunities to help our clients grow their businesses and automate processes to streamline the selling process.

Our team’s main focus for these enablement programs has been to develop a simple and straightforward user experience for partners. We’ve done this primarily through automation. By implementing automated capabilities, partners are able to utilize the tools to complete all the required training and certification at their convenience and track progress in real time.

This also helps us automatically track the progress of partners’ efforts, to help them complete the programs. We’re constantly evolving these programs as new automation capabilities and technologies emerge.

What trends do you see emerging for B2B marketers by the end of the year (and even into the next)?

If you are anything like me, you pride yourself on being up to date, and in touch with the latest and greatest programs and services on the internet. Though Google+ has taken a lot of the limelight lately, another program/service that has emerged that has really grabbed my attention.

Spotify is a music player/program that allows you to both listen to cloud-based music and upload your own local files into the player so that it is all inclusive. Though free on its basic level, Spotify has a $5 and $10 pricing tier that unlocks other various features that make it even neater (no ads, mobile device usage, etc.).

In addition, it is one of the first players to integrate a social aspect, allowing friends to view and listen to your playlists and so on. Spotify, to me at least, is a progressive feeling hybrid of everything that has come before it; be it Pandora, Grooveshark, or iTunes.

Amidst all of this, the backbone of Spotify is that it allows its users to create their own extremely personalized and expressive experience.

Spotify offers a little bit of something for everyone. It has a huge library of instantly available cloud music, a radio feature (like Pandora), a clean and simple interface, the ability to add your own local music files, and of course the social aspect of being able to create and share playlists.

By having all of this, Spotify captures many different user types and offers them something they want, making it a very broad, but personalized experience.

In the B2B world, this same concept can be applied through persona development of your projects. A critical part of project development (especially in the digital space) is knowing who your target end-users are. Knowing these personas – their likes, their dislikes, the way they want to be communicated to, allows you to develop a strategy and experience with the quantity and quality of touch points needed to be successful. Knowing your target allows you to reach them more effectively!

So the next time you are in the planning phase, think about your users! Personalizing touch points for a variety of personas can ultimately make the user experience better and more focused, leading to greater adoption and success across the board.

Are you putting enough research into your persona development? What is it you look for in a user-experience these days? What web sites speak to you?

If you have ever read some of my blog posts in the past, you will quickly pick up on the fact that I really focus much of my work on enablement programs within the B2B technology sector. I eat, sleep and breathe enablement programs and with my team, I am constantly thinking about how to better enable technology partners to market and sell products/solutions.

Our success in this field over the past two years with these programs have been based on adapting our programs to the latest web strategy/technologies, our clients’ business needs and, of course, market trends. But the lowest hanging fruit for adapting and improving our programs has been customer feedback!

It simply goes back to basics.

Canyon Communications swears by program surveys to adapt, improve and continue enablement program success. But surveys aren’t just for enablement programs, they can also provide eye-popping insight into your current product/solution offerings.

Want to know what your customers like, don’t like, what they would like more of, how you are perceived, how you compare to other competitors, etc.? Just ask!

Before you begin to implement surveys for your business/programs, here are some things to keep in mind:

• Know your audience and develop a survey that you know they will have time/interest
• Provide an incentive to your customers if their time is extremely limited
• Try to keep it to 10 questions or less for higher conversion rates
• Opt for a mix of open-ended, multiple choice and yes/no questions for a maximum insight
• Let them know you are conducting a survey to simply improve upon their experience with your solutions/products
• For every question you ask, be sure there is every available option for someone to answer the question accurately

Need help with your customer surveys or have questions on what survey software to use? Contact Canyon and we can help you gain the insight you need.