5 Easy ways to write your 30 second commercial.
I really hate pushy salesmen - the ones who use high-pressure tactics and try to “hard sell” me. Because of salespeople like that I always wanted to distance myself from sales. I never thought of myself as a salesman, and when I did have to wear that hat as a business owner I always tried to let my product do the work for me. I didn’t like “selling.”
But as I got a little older, I came to realize that the old saying, “Everyone in this company is in sales!” isn’t true. The saying should just be, “Everyone is in sales!”
Everyone is selling all the time. If you want to go to Outback and your friend wants to go to Red Lobster, one of you will be sold. When you meet new people you’re going to have to sell your personality. When you want a new job you’re going to have to sell your potential employer on your skills and experience. Everyone is always selling…always.
And what is the number one question you’re asked across all facets of your life? The number one question that starts all the selling in the first place? That question is; “So, what do you do?”
That’s the lead-in question asked when introduced to new people in social settings. That’s the lead-in question asked when you meet new people at business conventions. It’s the lead-in question people ask. And it gives you a perfect opportunity to sell without selling. It gives you an opening to present your “30 second commercial” to get their attention.
Why do you want a 30 second commercial? What will it do for you? How do you write one? Great questions! Let’s start with why you want to have a polished 30 second commercial ready to go when meeting new people.
Why 30 seconds?
Studies show that most people form their first impression of you within the first thirty seconds of meeting you, and first impressions are tough to change. So you want to keep your introduction short - enough to pique their interest without boring them.
If you’re brief, articulate and present some interesting “pain hooks” in your introduction, they’ll ask questions and keep the conversation moving along. They’ll also likely create a favorable impression of you as someone who’s “with it” and “put together.” In business, this can make or break a relationship.
What will a 30 second commercial do for you?
If you’re well rehearsed you will appear extremely confident and poised. You can sum up yourself and your product or service in just a few sentences, many people just ramble on and on and on and on - boring! Even if you’re not feeling particularly sophisticated and confident, this is the appearance you’ll give to others.
It’s also a great way to present your services (or your company’s services) in a way that’s easy for the other person to absorb, digest and respond to. You’ll give them two or three things that can prompt further discussion. If you’ve done your job well, the other person won’t be left scratching their head at your response, while an awkward silence lingers between the both of you.
Your goal should be to give them enough information to keep the conversation flowing smoothly and to make them want to get to know you better.
How do you write a 30 second commercial?
As promised, here are five easy steps to use when creating your 30 second commercial:
1) Start by creating five or six “pain hooks” to use as a starting point. A pain hook is designed to elicit a pain response from your listener (emotionally). It should make them reflect on some business or personal pain they’re currently experiencing.
We try harder to avoid and move away from pain. This drive to avoid pain is much stronger than our drive to find pleasure. If someone has a business pain, your pain hook should make them think about that pain and show them how you can solve their pain.
2) Once you have your pain hooks, you need to find the thing you do that can solve all of them. You might have multiple ways of solving the problems, but you have to make sure you can solve the problem.
3) Pick your top three pain hooks - the strongest ones - these will be the base of your 30 second commercial. These should be the pain hooks that the people you meet most likely encounter.
4) Work your pain hooks into a professional sounding sound-bite and write it out. Keep it shorter than you think you should, when spoken it will take you longer than you think to say everything and you don’t want to sound rushed.
5) Rehearse your 30 second commercial until it feels and sounds natural, and rolling it off your tongue is second nature. You don’t want to sound like you’re reciting a memorized script - you should ad-lib as needed and adjust it to the people you’re presenting your 30 second commercial. Be loose, be fun, but be prepared.
You should get into the practice of using your 30 second commercial whenever you meet new people; they will inevitably ask, “So, what do you do?”
Five years ago I ran an Internet company. We sold dial-up, high-speed, web hosting, web design, application design, and more. Our informal motto was, “If it touches the Internet, we do it.” Of course, most people are not highly technical, and lots of buzz words would make their eyes glaze right over. So I had to have a good 30 second commercial to not confuse people when telling them what we did.
My 30 second commercial sounded something like this:
I own Qserve Internet. We’re a small Internet company and we service both home and business users. A lot of our customers like us because we don’t have busy signals. Others like us for our reasonable web-hosting rates. But I think our biggest advantage is our commitment to quality. We work to maintain a high level of quality so when you do get connected, you stay connected! Plus when you call us, you always talk to a real, live person, not a machine.
In my 30 second commercial I had 4 pain hooks; they were:
“No busy signals” - Our geographic area in the late 1990s experienced an explosion in Internet usage. A lot of the local Internet companies couldn’t keep up with the growth, and busy signals were common. We always worked hard to keep our user-per-line ratio favorable without generating busy signals. It was a metric we monitored like a hawk, and while we didn’t “guarantee” no busy signals, we rarely had them. It was one of the main reasons our referral business was so good.
“Competitive web-hosting rates” - At the start of the Internet explosion web hosting rates in our area were sky-high. As competition came to town the prices came down, but there were a lot of places where the price was much higher than average. We focused on being competitive, but offering a good deal for our customers. We had a lot of customers who moved their web site to our company for this reason.
“Staying connected” - Being in a Midwestern state, we had a lot of rural areas we served. We invested heavily with the phone company to have all digital lines back to our main data center. We had a very good reputation for keeping calls connected, while our competition was only “so-so” at this. It was a big pain-point for a lot of people in our area, and solving it won us a lot of business and a lot of accounts.
“Talk to a real person” - We always answered the phone. We believed that it made a difference since our biggest (and bigger) competitors used auto-answer phone systems. Over the years we received a lot of compliments, email and letters from our customers because of this. We also got a lot of business, and it was not uncommon to get an account solely because we were one of the only companies in town who answered their phones.
I would also tailor my message depending on who I was speaking with. If I was talking to someone on the street, I would emphasis home-service pain hooks and mention business pain hooks. If I was in a networking group, or a business meeting, I would emphasize our business pain hooks and depending on the group I might not even mention home service at all.
The key though was that I was prepared with a handful of pain hooks that I could use. I was also rehearsed and I practiced my 30 second commercial often enough that I sounded very natural, confident and “put together.”
Today I work in an entirely different industry, and I have an all new 30 second commercial. My position isn’t directly involved in sales, but I still use my 30 second commercial and work in pain hooks when answering that oft-asked question, “What do you do?”
I challenge you to create a 30 second commercial for yourself. It might not land you that million-dollar account, but it will certainly make you stand out, sound poised, confident and in control to everyone with whom you’re introduced!
Add comment January 9th, 2006
