​Everyone’s heard of the 30-second elevator speech. But sometimes, it’s a much taller building. 
 
We were recently asked—and this will happen to you, too, soon, if it hasn’t already, so brace yourself—to present our pitch before a business group, with a six-minute time allotment. 
 
Quick: How do you present your business, to a target-rich environment like that, in six minutes? 
 
Follow-on question: How do you carve up those six minutes? Do you spend all of them, well, presenting? 
 
Audience first
 
If you’ve read any articles from us here at Copel Communications, you’ll know that we take a near-religious approach to taking a customer-back approach to everything we do. Start with the customer. What do they want and/or need? Then work back from there, i.e., “customer-back” approach. 
 
Same thing applies for your six-minute preso slot. Know who’s in that audience, in advance. Do your homework. Are they like-minded businesspeople in a similar or adjacent vertical? Or—as was the case for us—are they perhaps members of a networking group, looking to lubricate the two-way process of referrals? 
 
Get your best possible grasp on who they are. What they need. How many will be in the room. The type of room: real or virtual. How much time will there be for Q&A? Is that baked into the six-minutes? Or is it additional? And if so, how much? 
 
Rule of thumb: The more annoying you can be with preliminary questions like these, the more you’ll succeed. 
 
Working backward
 
So. We were going to be facing a business networking group—a common venue. What kinds of businesses? All kinds, with the distinction that they, like us, all operated in the B2B space. 
 
How did they differ from us? 
 
Oooh. That’s a good question you should ask yourself. In other words, how can you differentiate yourself and your offerings? That’s how you’ll cut through the clutter, make your presentation interesting and engaging, and increase your odds of successful business development. 
 
For us, fortunately, the answer to the “how do they differ” question was easy. While we toil in marketing, and many of the others in the audience either do, too, or certainly have exposure to it, we were unique in that our background is 100-percent based in creative services. So that made for a neat way in. 
 
Outline, outline, outline
 
Turns out, for us, the six-minute allotment included the time for the Q&A. That’s a huge detail. So our outline went something like this: 

• Quick personal background. Knowing we were unique, among this crowd, to have worked in creative services, we were able to do some cool “show and tell” with pencil sketches, layouts, and stories. 

 

• Add credibility. You can—and should—do this, too. Don’t be obnoxious, and don’t belabor it, but don’t miss this opportunity. For example, we’ve served as a judge of the Clio Awards. Even from the beginning, our earliest clients included big names such as Warner Bros. and Taco Bell. 

 

• Who we serve. This, you shouldn’t be shocked, was custom-tailored to the audience and their clientele, too. The point here isn’t to be academic. It’s to build business. 

 

• Teaser on how we work. We have a unique—and, frankly, cool—methodology here at Copel Communications. So we quickly walked through this, as if each audience member were a new client of ours. We went slow. Wanted each cool point to sink in. Get them excited about the process and its possibilities for them.

 

• A referral “in.” Since we were fishing for referrals here, we prepared a list of “Questions you can ask your clients,” the answers to which would likely steer them our way. 

 

• Q&A. Given our six-minute total, we allotted about 2.5 minutes to this—with the obvious invitation for subsequent one-on-one’s with whomever wanted/needed more time. 

 
Close, close, close
 
Odds are, your business doesn’t do anything like what we do here at Copel Communications. Yet we’ll bet that that outline above is easily 90-percent useful to you. Some things are just universal. 
 
A speaking opportunity like this, is just that: An opportunity. Seize it. Work the room. Book meetings and calls. Send follow-up emails. 
 
Need help prepping for a six-minute presentation, or other similar opportunity? Contact us. We help our clients with challenges like these all the time. 

​We recently had a client dump a whole bunch of input on us, as part of a larger marketing project we were helping them with. This data dump, incidentally, was incomplete. They gave us links to videos, and slide decks, and web pages, and Word docs… yet when we cross-checked the lists of stuff we were supposed to receive vs. the stuff we actually received, we found gaps. Plus there was stuff—input—that we flat-out didn’t understand. Was it even relevant? Were we missing something? 
 
Clearly, a big team meeting was needed. But our preliminary order of business was simply wrangling all of the input—and making sure that the checklists indeed teed up with requirements of the final deliverable. 
 
This was not easy. 
 
So. Where are we going with this? And how does this help answer the perennial question of “How will this help me make more money?”
 
Seeing the bigger picture
 
Sure, we’d needed to book, organize, and run, a meeting. And the clock was ticking. This, incidentally, gets to the answer to the italicized question we’d posed above. 
 
Time is money. And when you multiply the number of people in the room by what they’re worth, on an hourly basis, the stakes go up real high, real fast. 
 
So this is about more than just booking a meeting. There are bigger takeaways than that. 
 
This is about bringing different people together in service of a larger—and more profitable—goal. And it’s, frankly, about sweating a ton of details in advance. 
 
Chop, chop
 
Know what we ended up creating from all this mess? A “next steps” email to the team we were working with. 
 
Think about that. How many times have you had to compose a “next steps” email? It’s hard.
 
We had to lay out: 

• What we’d received from the client. 

 

• What we still needed from the client. 

 

• What we’d received but didn’t understand or couldn’t make sense of. 

 

• The constraints for the project established by our client’s client—and how all of the above aligned (or didn’t) therewith. 

 

• The goals of the proposed working session. 

 

• A brief overview of that working session’s agenda. 

 
We still have the email we’d sent to our client. It’s just 397 words long. And yet it took us an hour to write. 
 
Yup. 
 
We can’t share it here—it’s confidential—but we’ll bet you could read the thing in under two minutes. 
 
And that was the intention. And that was why it was so hard to compose.
 
Important point: Every recipient and cc on this email is very busy. We had to make our case, be ultra clear, and close with a specific call-to-action (“Shall we send you slots for a meeting?”). 
 
This email took us an hour to write because the initial draft was about double the length of the final one. We sweated the details. We moved paragraphs. We moved sentences within paragraphs. And we cut, cut, cut, as much as we could. 
 
Speed reading
 
Honestly: Do you think that any of our client-recipients of this email would have guessed that it took us an hour to write this two-minute read? Of course not. They never gave it a thought. 
 
We didn’t want them to give it a thought. But we needed to get stuff done, quickly, succinctly, and efficiently, and this much-sweated-over email was the best way to do it. 
 
And think of this: What kinds of replies did this email elicit? Were they equally-well-thought-out, carefully-considered-and-organized responses? 
 
Of course not! They were more like “Good idea; how’s Wednesday?”
 
Were we upset by this? Did we feel slighted or unappreciated? Nope. We beamed. Mission accomplished.
 
Because when you fast-forward this story, 1) all of the missing input magically appeared, prior to the meeting, 2) all of the related gaps were filled, and 3) the meeting itself went swimmingly—a full-court press in which seemingly impossible goals were surmounted in a shockingly short timeframe. 
 
And, frankly, none of it would have happened without the “next steps” email.
 
Now do you see the broader lesson here? 
 
People routinely dash off emails with nary a thought. But sometimes, when the situation calls for it, you’ve got to hunker down and really figure out the tactics of where you’re headed, and do the hard work of putting that into something that can be read at 10x the speed it took to write.
 
Need help getting all of these “tactical marketing ducks” in a row, whether via email or not? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.