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It was darker than a pitch-black panther, covered in tar, eating black licorice at the very bottom of the deepest part of the Black Sea.
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Lemony Snicket (The Ersatz Elevator (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #6))
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If you can't recite your elevator pitch at the drop of a hat, stay home.
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Aliza Licht (Leave Your Mark)
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The buyer is always tuned in to one radio station: WIIFM (What's In It For Me). The rest is filtered out as noise.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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Stories connect us at a human level that factual statements and logical arguments can't possibly match.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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Not every single broke and unemployed person needs a job; some need customers.
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Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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Your audience is waiting for your stories. They have memory slots tailor-made to light up and remember you.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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I came to your suite in the middle of the night to bring you a glass of water when you were too lazy to walk to the bathroom. I cleaned your girlfriend’s vomit off the sofa cushions.” Solara’s voice raised a pitch. “For God’s sake, I even fetched her panties when you two left them in the elevator! I wanted to amputate my own hand after that!
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Melissa Landers (Starflight (Starflight, #1))
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Bad marketing is highly product-focused and self-focused. Good marketing, especially direct response marketing, is always customer and problem/solution focused, and that’s exactly how we want our elevator pitch to be. We want to be remembered for what problem we solve rather than for some impressive but incomprehensible title or line of business
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Allan Dib (The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd)
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I also taught my young charges to use the siren as little as possible, because the sound of it elevates the heart rate, and ultimately the pitch and pace of the voice.
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Dave Grossman (On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace)
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Your network is the new professional safety net.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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An elevator pitch for an information product should consist of four components: 1. Your product name and category 2. The problem you are attempting to solve 3. Your proposed solution 4. The key benefit of your solution Here’s
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Michael Hyatt (Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World)
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An elevator pitch for an entertainment product should also consist of four components: 1. Your product name and category 2. The main character’s ambition 3. The conflict he or she encounters 4. The real significance of the story Here’s
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Michael Hyatt (Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World)
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The only people who don’t need elevator pitches are elevator salesmen. I once tried to sell an elevator to a man who owned a one-story building. He didn’t buy from me, but he did sell me on the benefits of leaving his lobby without any bullet holes in my body.
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Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
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It would be incorrect in every sense to say that so near the end of his life he had lost his faith, when in fact
God seemed more abundant to him in the Regina Cleri home than any place he had been before. God was in the folds of his bathrobe, the ache of his knees. God saturated the hallways in the form of a pale electrical light. But now that his heart had become so shiftless and unreliable, now that he should be sensing the afterlife like a sweet scent drifting in from the garden, he had started to wonder if there was in fact no afterlife at all. Look at all these true believers who wanted only to live, look at himself, cling onto this life like a squirrel scrambling up the icy pitch of a roof. In suggesting that there may be nothing ahead of them, he in no way meant to diminish the future; instead, Father Sullivan hoped to elevate the present to a state of the divine. It seemed from this moment of repose that God may well have been life itself. God may have been the baseball games, the beautiful cigarette he smoked alone after checking to see that all the bats had been put back behind the closet door. God could have been the masses in which he had told people how best to prepare for the glorious life everlasting, the one they couldn't see as opposed to the one they were living at that exact moment in the pews of the church hall, washed over in stained glass light. How wrongheaded it seemed now to think that the thrill of heartbeat and breath were just a stepping stone to something greater. What could be greater than the armchair, the window, the snow? Life itself had been holy. We had been brought forth from nothing to see the face of God and in his life Father Sullivan had seen it miraculously for eighty-eight years. Why wouldn't it stand to reason that this had been the whole of existence and now he would retreat back to the nothingness he had come from in order to let someone else have their turn at the view. This was not the workings of disbelief. It was instead a final, joyful realization of all he had been given. It would be possible to overlook just about anything if you were trained to constantly strain forward to see the power and the glory that was waiting up ahead. What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for him.
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Ann Patchett (Run)
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Nobody cares about you, your brand, or your company. You're irrelevant...until proven otherwise.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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A memory dart is your shorthand verbal business card. It is your identity implanted directly into the memory of your listener.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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What we offer needs to be a clear and obvious fit for our customers. We need to help others envision exactly what they're buying - in concrete terms.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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Balancing so many things at once means that too often we only skim across the surface of an issue. As our concentration span shrinks, we risk losing the capacity to think about things carefully, to consider their complexity, to examine their long-term implications. We can become drawn to the elevator pitch, to the simple explanation, to the quick fix. At the same time, we become less capable of genuinely listening to one another, as
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Donniel Hartman (Speaking iEngage: Creating a New Narrative Regarding the Significance of Israel for Jewish Life)
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If you're going to err, err on the side of simplicity...assume that you have a very brief time to make an impression, and that you'll be allocated a tiny amount of memory space in overloaded and preoccupied brains of your audience.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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Your social value is fluid and changes with the environment you are in—or the environment you create. If you wish to elevate your social value in any given situation, you can do so by redirecting people into a domain where you are in charge. This is easier to do than you might think. Our
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Oren Klaff (Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal)
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There are other star players in the field of gene editing. Most of them deserve to be the focus of biographies or perhaps even movies. (The elevator pitch: A Beautiful Mind meets Jurassic Park.) They play important roles in this book, because I want to show that science is a team sport. But I also want to show the impact that a persistent, sharply inquisitive, stubborn, and edgily competitive player can have. With a smile that sometimes (but not always) masks the wariness in her eyes, Jennifer Doudna turned out to be a great central character. She has the instincts to be collaborative, as any scientist must, but ingrained in her character is a competitive streak, which most great innovators have. With her emotions usually carefully controlled, she wears her star status lightly.
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Walter Isaacson (The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race)
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EN EL ASCENSOR . El elevator pitch es un discurso breve, de unos tres minutos, cuyo objetivo es llamar la atención y despertar el interés por nuestro proyecto. Simula un poco el tiempo que dura un viaje en ascensor, si tuviéramos la suerte de cruzarnos con algún potencial inversor. Es un primer paso que no da tiempo para explicaciones demasiado detalladas, pero sí para causar la impresión que deseamos y generar el interés suficiente como para obtener una nueva reunión. En esta presentación lo que hacemos es contar quienes somos, cómo trabajamos, la oportunidad que queremos capturar y cuál es la propuesta de valor principal. En este brevísimo lapso de tiempo seguimos como premisa la idea de que primero nos vendemos a nosotros como emprendedores, luego a nuestro proyecto como oportunidad, y al final al producto y su valor.
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Ariel Arrieta (Aprender a Emprender (Spanish Edition))
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The elevator came to a jerking halt and the doors slid open. A young vault manager was waiting for us. She looked up and then froze in fear, dropping the papers she was holding. I don't remember much else about her, but I'll never forget her scream. It wasn't even particularly memorable. Like most, it started like a high-pitched yelp and ended in hysterical sobbing. The timing was what threw me off. During most robberies, it takes a few seconds before someone lets out a yelp. Sometimes there is even this strange pregnant silence through the whole thing because everyone's too shocked and scared to move. But not this time. As soon as the elevator doors opened up, the woman started screaming.
I grabbed her by the hair and threw her into one of the teller windows.
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Roger Hobbs (Ghostman (Jack White, #1))
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Gentile’s office in downtown Las Vegas, I got on the elevator and turned around and there was a TV camera. It was just the two of us in the little box, me and the man with the big machine on his shoulder. He was filming me as I stood there silent. “Turn the camera off,” I said. He didn’t. I tried to move away from him in the elevator, and somehow in the maneuvering he bumped my chin with the black plastic end of his machine and I snapped. I slugged him, or actually I slugged the camera. He turned it off. The maids case was like a county fair compared with the Silverman disappearance, which had happened in the media capital of the world. It had happened within blocks of the studios of the three major networks and the New York Times. The tabloids reveled in the rich narrative of the case, and Mom and Kenny became notorious throughout the Western Hemisphere. Most crimes are pedestrian and tawdry. Though each perpetrator has his own rap sheet and motivation and banged-up psyche, the crime blotter is very repetitive. A wife beater kills his wife. A crack addict uses a gun to get money for his habit. Liquor-store holdups, domestic abuse, drug dealer shoot-outs, DWIs, and so on. This one had a story line you could reduce to a movie pitch. Mother/Son Grifters Held in Millionaire’s Disappearance! My mother’s over-the-top persona, Kenny’s shady polish, and the ridiculous rumors of mother-son incest gave the media a narrative it couldn’t resist. Mom and Kenny were the smart, interesting, evil criminals with the elaborate, diabolical plan who exist in fiction and rarely in real life. The media landed on my life with elephant feet. I was under siege as soon as I returned to my office after my family’s excursion to Newport Beach. The deluge started at 10 A.M. on July 8, 1998. I kept a list in a drawer of the media outlets that called or dropped by our little one-story L-shaped office building on Decatur. It was a tabloid clusterfuck. Every network, newspaper, local news station, and wire service sent troops. Dateline and 20/20 competed to see who could get a Kimes segment on-air first. Dateline did two shows about Mom and Kenny. I developed a strategy for dealing with reporters. My unusual training in the media arts as the son of Sante, and as a de facto paralegal in the maids case, meant that I had a better idea of how to deal with reporters than my staff did. They might find it exciting that someone wanted to talk to them, and forget to stop at “No comment.” I knew better. So I hid from the camera crews in a back room, so there’d be no pictures, and I handled the calls myself. I told my secretary not to bother asking who was on the line and to transfer all comers back to me. I would get the name and affiliation of the reporter, write down the info on my roster, and
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Kent Walker (Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime (Avon Books)))
“
the elevator pitch and the value proposition, two annoyingly overused expressions that mean different things to different people. Last time I checked, there was not a whole lot of business being transacted in elevators.
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Mike Weinberg (New Sales. Simplified.: The Essential Handbook for Prospecting and New Business Development)
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My target customer will be? (Tip: how would you describe your primary target customer) The problem my customer wants to solve is? (Tip: what does your customer struggle with or what need do they want to fulfill) My customer’s need can be solved with? (Tip: give a very concise description / elevator pitch of your product) Why can’t my customer solve this today? (Tip: what are the obstacles that have prevented my customer from solving this already) The measurable outcome my customer wants to achieve is? (Tip: what measurable change in your your customer’s life makes them love your product) My primary customer acquisition tactic will be? (Tip: you will likely have multiple marketing channels, but there is often one method, at most two, that dominates your customer acquisition — what is your current guess) My earliest adopter will be? (Tip: remember that you can’t get to the mainstream customer without getting early adopters first) I will make money (revenue) by? (Tip: don’t list all the ideas for making money, but pick your primary one) My primary competition will be? (Tip: think about both direct and indirect competition) I will beat my competitors primarily because of? (Tip: what truly differentiates you from the competition?) My biggest risk to financial viability is? (Tip: what could prevent you from getting to breakeven? is there something baked into your revenue or cost model that you can de-risk?) My biggest technical or engineering risk is? (Tip: is there a major technical challenge that might hinder building your product?)
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Giff Constable (Talking to Humans)
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When we start our elevator pitch or keynote address, or when somebody visits our website, they’re burning calories to process the information we’re sharing. And if we don’t say something (and say something quickly) they can use to survive or thrive, they will tune us out.
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Donald Miller (Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen)
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The tendency to focus on the positive comes long before the customer actually makes a purchase decision. Early in the sales process, for example, when sellers are trying to get to higher levels within the account, a salesperson might say, “Mr. Customer, I would like to get a few minutes with your CFO to show him how cost-effective our products are relative to increasing productivity and maximizing the return on your investment.” Sounds like a mini elevator pitch, doesn’t it? Here’s the reverse. “Mr. Customer, would it make sense to spend a few minutes and bring your CFO up to speed, so he doesn’t have a knee-jerk reaction and torpedo the idea?” In preparation for QBS training events, I always ask for a conference call to customize the material for the intended audience. But I don’t ask for a manager’s time so I can “understand their business and deliver better training.” Although these are positive benefits, they don’t necessarily create a sense of urgency. Therefore, I am more inclined to ask a vice president of sales for time on their calendar, “so we don’t completely miss the boat at the upcoming training event.” Both of these questions refer to benefits that would come from strategizing in advance. But how you ask does make a difference.
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Thomas Freese (Secrets of Question-Based Selling: How the Most Powerful Tool in Business Can Double Your Sales Results (Top Selling Books to Increase Profit, Money Books for Growth))
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To instigate a power frame collision, use a mildly shocking but not unfriendly act to cause it. Use defiance and light humor. This captures attention and elevates your status by creating something called “local star power.” (You will read about creating status and local star power in Chapter 3.)
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Oren Klaff (Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal)
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Someone is out there waiting to love me. Someone will see all that I am and provide ample space for me to just be. Someone will contribute to the life I’ve created for myself without dimming my light.
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Evelyn Leigh (Elevator Pitch)
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Seizing Situational Status Here are the steps involved in elevating your status in any situation. You will recognize some of these actions from framing, and for good reason. Frame control and status are closely related, as are the pitch techniques you will learn in Chapter 4. 1. Politely ignore power rituals and avoid beta traps. 2. Be unaffected by your customer’s global status (meaning the customer’s status inside and outside the business environment). 3. Look for opportunities to perpetrate small denials and defiances that strengthen your frame and elevate your status. 4. As soon as you take power, quickly move the discussion into an area where you are the domain expert, where your knowledge and information are unassailable by your audience. 5. Apply a prize frame by positioning yourself as the reward for making the decision to do business with you. 6. Confirm your alpha status by making your customer, who now temporarily occupies a beta position, make a statement that qualifies your higher status.
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Oren Klaff (Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal)
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A man had to attend a large convention in Chicago. On this particular trip he decided to bring his wife. When they arrived at their hotel and were shown to their room, the man said: "You rest here while I register - I'll be back within an hour." The wife lies down on the bed... just then; an elevated train passes by very close to the window and shakes the room so hard she's thrown out of the bed. Thinking this must be a freak occurrence, she lies down once more. Again a train shakes the room so violently, she's pitched to the floor. Exasperated, she calls the front desk, asks for the manager. The manager says he'll be right up. The manager (naturally) is skeptical but the wife insists the story is true. "Look,... lie here on the bed - you'll be thrown right to the floor!" So he lies down next to the wife... Just then the husband walks in. "What," he says, "are you doing here?" The manager replies: "Would you believe I'm waiting for a train?
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E. King (Best Adult Jokes Ever)
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It was an invention with huge potential in saving money and lives, but Otis faced a skeptical and fearful public. So he rented out the main exhibit hall of what was then New York City’s largest convention center. On the floor of the hall he constructed an open elevator platform and a shaft in which the platform could rise and descend. One afternoon, he gathered convention-goers for a demonstration. He climbed onto the platform and directed an assistant to hoist the elevator to its top height, about three stories off the ground. Then, as he stood and gazed down at the crowd, Otis took an ax and slashed the rope that was suspending the elevator in midair. The audience gasped. The platform fell. But in seconds, the safety brake engaged and halted the elevator’s descent. Still alive and standing, Otis looked out at the shaken crowd and said, “All safe, gentlemen. All safe.”1 The moment marked two firsts. It was the first demonstration of an elevator safe enough to carry people. (Otis, you might have guessed by now, went on to found the Otis Elevator Company.) And more important for our purposes, it was a simple, succinct, and effective way to convey a complex message in an effort to move others—the world’s first elevator pitch.
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Daniel H. Pink (To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others)
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#4 Failing to master the elevator pitch. My
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Chris LoPresti (INSIGHTS: Reflections From 101 of Yale's Most Successful Entrepreneurs)
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Tokyo is so vast, and can be so cruelly impersonal, that the succor provided by its occasional oasis is sweeter than that of any other place I’ve known. There is the quiet of shrines like Hikawa, inducing a somber sort of reflection that for me has always been the same pitch as the reverberation of a temple chime; the solace of tiny nomiya, neighborhood watering holes, with only two or perhaps four seats facing a bar less than half the length of a door, presided over by an ageless mama-san, who can be soothing or stern, depending on the needs of her customer, an arrangement that dispenses more comfort and understanding than any psychiatrist’s couch; the strangely anonymous camaraderie of yatai and tachinomi, the outdoor eating stalls that serve beer in large mugs and grilled food on skewers, stalls that sprout like wild mushrooms on dark corners and in the shadows of elevated train tracks, the laughter of their patrons diffusing into the night air like little pockets of light against the darkness without.
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Barry Eisler (A Lonely Resurrection (John Rain #2))
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Moreover, pupil dilation, blinking rate, voice pitch elevation, and other reliable cues not only measure cognitive load but emotional responses as
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Anonymous
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dusty light invaded the pitch-black core of him. He felt a dull ache in his ankles. Rising up like a ballet dancer on the balls of his feet, he stretched his Achilles tendons and calf muscles. The pain and the music stopped, and then the sliver of light disappeared. The elevator gate rattled. “Geiger?” Harry said. The word came to Geiger as if called to him across a canyon. He turned to find Harry standing in the doorway, bafflement breaking across his face. “Jesus Christ. What the hell happened?” Geiger glanced back at Hall. “We’re leaving,” he said, as if he were informing the body instead of Harry. Harry put the attaché case down at his feet. “Oh fuck. What’d you do to him? Is—is he dead?” “No. We have to go now.” Geiger moved for the door, and Harry put his hands up like a traffic cop. Geiger stopped, staring at Harry’s raised palms. “Wait a second,” Harry said. “Just wait, okay? Jesus Christ.” He put his palms to his cheeks. “What the hell is going on with you?” “We have to go.” “Can we talk about this for a minute?” “Right now, Harry, it’s more important that we leave.” “I disagree, man. This is crazy. This is truly nuts,
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Mark Allen Smith (The Inquisitor: A Novel)
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From the CEO to the receptionist to the office manager, everybody at your startup business should know that one-minute elevator pitch.
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Timi Nadela (Get To The Top)
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There are those who create adversaries by means of falsehood and propaganda. Once the divisions are heightened to a fever-pitch, these contrived adversaries are each placed on some socially engineered battlefield designed for a pitched battle of attrition. Yet the pinnacle of such social deception is that those who created this fabricated dynamic strategically insert themselves into it as the mitigating hero so that they might be elevated by the falsehood that they created, while the true heroes are left forgotten in the real battlefields where they have held the peace.
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Craig D. Lounsbrough
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When Crick and Watson began, they knew very little about DNA for sure, and part of what they were most sure of was wrong. To consider DNA as a physical object, they wanted diameters, lengths, linkages and rotations, screw pitch, density, water content, bonds, and bonds and again bonds. The sport would be to see how little data they could make do with and still get it right: the less scaffolding visible, the more elegant and astonishing the structure. More than sport was involved. Crick, following Pauling, elevated this penurious elegance into a theoretical principle, the corollary of model-building. “You must remember, we were trying to solve it with the fewest possible assumptions,” Crick said. “There’s a perfectly sound reason—it isn’t just a matter of aesthetics or because we thought it was a nice game—why you should use the minimum of experimental data. The fact is, you remember, that we knew that Bragg and Kendrew and Perutz had been misled by the experimental data. And therefore every bit of experimental evidence we had got at any one time we were prepared to throw away, because we said it may be misleading just the way that 5.1 reflection in alpha keratin was misleading.” We were in his office in Cambridge; thinking out loud, he got up and began to pace back and forth, with long, loping steps, in the clear lane in front of his desk, speaking in the rhythm of his stride. “They missed the alpha helix because of that reflection! You see. And the fact that they didn’t put the peptide bond in right. The point is that evidence can be unreliable, and therefore you should use as little of it as you can. And when we confront problems today, we’re in exactly the same situation. We have three or four bits of data, we don’t know which one is reliable, so we say, now, if we discard that one and assume it’s wrong—even though we have no evidence that it’s wrong—then we can look at the rest of the data and see if we can make sense of that. And that’s what we do all the time. I mean, people don’t realize that not only can data be wrong in science, it can be misleading. There isn’t such a thing as a hard fact when you’re trying to discover something. It’s only afterwards that the facts become hard.
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Horace Freeland Judson (The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology)
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In truth, I don’t think elevator pitches even matter that much. It’s one of those sales techniques you hear about, but they never actually happen in the real world. What the story does reveal, though, is that stories don’t have to be long to be effective. They just need to be as long as they need to be.
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Kindra Hall (Stories That Stick: How Storytelling Can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business)
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You don’t necessarily have to find your exact idea on Amazon. It’s good to have something unique to offer the marketplace. But it’s important to know if similar ideas sell well. For instance, let’s say you’re in the fitness and nutrition tips for women market. You’re not sure if this topic has a readership in the digital platform. So you’ll hop over to Amazon.com to see what sells. What you find is a variety of titles that sell (at least) 10+ copies each day: ** 1 Day Diet (#8,598) ** Running Sucks (#4,626) ** Flat Belly Diet (#10,823) ** The New Abs Diet for Women (#8,910) ** Six Weeks to Sleeveless and Sexy (#9,973) All these ideas are geared towards the fitness/nutrition for women market. So this is good evidence that people are buying this kind of information. Step #4: Find a Hook for Your Book Right now, you might have a single great idea or you might have a bunch of different topics. What you need to do next is to take each idea and find an angle that will help it sell. It’s not enough to write about a benefit (i.e.: lose weight, get a girl, start a business). Instead you want a compelling title that grabs people’s attention. What you want is a “hook.” A hook is the desired outcome the reader receives when he or she applies what you teach. Done correctly, the hook is an elevator pitch that explains your core concept in a punchy sentence. Personally, I think it’s important to find your hook before you write your book. That way you’ll have a rough idea of what information to include. A hook can include a number of factors: ** An attention grabber (Running Sucks, Super Brain, Why Men Love Bitches) ** A benefit-driven title (Getting Things Done, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It) ** A time-specific result (4-Hour Work Week, The 17-Day Diet, 21 Days to a More Disciplined Life) ** A numbered list of content (21 Prayers of Gratitude, How to Make Him Beg to Be Your Boyfriend in 6 Simple Steps, 52 Small Changes) ** A keyword-specific title (Make Money Online, How to Lose Weight Fast, Get a Girlfriend) You can use more than one hook. Some people combine a few to come up with an interesting title. EXAMPLE: Last month I published an eBook titled: My Blog Traffic Sucks! 8 Simple Steps to Get 100,000 Visitors without Working 8 Days a Week. This was a unique hook because it had multiple factors in the title: ** An attention grabber (My Blog Traffic Sucks!)
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Steve Scott (How to Write a Non-fiction Ebook in 21 Days)
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He sighed. “You really made Headley look like a fool in there.” “He doesn’t make it that hard. What else can you tell me?
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Linwood Barclay (Elevator Pitch)
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larynx (pp. 352–354), and (2) smaller intrinsic muscles that control tension in the glottal vocal folds or that open and close the glottis. These smaller muscles insert on the thyroid, arytenoid, and corniculate cartilages. The opening or closing of the glottis involves rotational movements of the arytenoid cartilages. When you swallow, both sets of muscles work together to prevent food or drink from entering the glottis. Food is crushed and chewed into a pasty mass, known as a bolus, before being swallowed. Muscles of the neck and pharynx then elevate the larynx, bending the epiglottis over the glottis, so that the bolus can glide across the epiglottis rather than falling into the larynx. While this movement is under way, the glottis is closed. Foods or liquids that touch the vestibular folds or glottis trigger the coughing reflex. In a cough, the glottis is kept closed while the chest and abdominal muscles contract, compressing the lungs. When the glottis is opened suddenly, a blast of air from the trachea ejects material that blocks the entrance to the glottis. Sound Production How do you produce sounds? Air passing through your open glottis vibrates its vocal folds and produces sound waves. The pitch of the sound depends on the diameter, length, and tension in your vocal folds. The diameter and length are directly related to the size of your larynx. You control the tension by contracting voluntary muscles that reposition the arytenoid cartilages relative to the thyroid cartilage. When the distance increases, your vocal folds tense and the pitch rises. When the distance decreases, your vocal folds relax and the pitch falls. Children have slender, short vocal folds, so their voices tend to be high pitched. At puberty, the larynx of males enlarges much more than that of females. The vocal cords of an adult male are thicker and longer, so they produce lower tones than those of an adult female. Sound production at the larynx is called phonation (fo.-NA .-shun; phone, voice). Phonation is one part of speech production. Clear speech also requires articulation, the modification of those sounds by voluntary movements of other structures, such as the tongue, teeth, and lips to form words. In a stringed instrument, such as a guitar, the quality of the sound produced does not depend solely on the nature of the vibrating string. Rather, the entire instrument becomes involved as the walls vibrate and the composite sound echoes within the hollow body. Similar amplification and resonance take place within your pharynx, oral cavity, nasal cavity, and paranasal sinuses. The combination gives you the particular and distinctive sound of your voice. That sound changes when you have a sinus infection and your nasal cavity and paranasal sinuses are filled with mucus rather than air.
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Frederic H. Martini (Fundamentals of Anatomy & Physiology)
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Late adopters—a much bigger area under the bell curve—are motivated by minimizing risk as well as costs. They have no interest in being the first kid on the block with some cool new technology. The definition of crossing the chasm is building a beachhead of satisfied early adopters, who can then be used as examples to reassure late adopters. You have to make an irrefutable case that your new solution is both safe and cost‐effective. That's when the broader market will become accessible to your pitch.
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Frank Slootman (Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity)
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The point is this: if you don’t tell somebody how you can help them survive, they will set you aside—or worse, discard you. When it comes to marketing, the header on your website, the subject line of your email, the opening statement of your proposal, the title of your lead generator, your entire elevator pitch, the first line of your keynote address, and a thousand other things need to succinctly express one of the ways you help people survive. If they don’t, people will not listen.
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Donald Miller (Marketing Made Simple: A Step-By-Step Storybrand Guide for Any Business)
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Your elevator pitch is not an opportunity for you to sell your products and services, rather an opportunity to sell yourself.
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Isaac Mashman (Personal Branding: A Manifesto on Fame and Influence)
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Like your elevator pitch, you need a one-paragraph description of the business. The paragraph contains no more than four sentences explaining the problem, solution, and a few highlights about the business. The paragraph is a great tool to initiate a conversation or use as a follow-up when an investor asks for a brief description of the company. If using the paragraph to initiate a conversation, you can link to the One Pager to give more context about the investment.
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Tim Cooley (The Pitch Deck Book: How To Present Your Business And Secure Investors)
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No matter where you are on the pathway of your life, please don’t let the pain of an imperfect past hinder the glory of your fabulous future. You are so much more powerful than you may currently understand. Splendid victories—and outright blessings—are coming your way. And you’re exactly where you need to be to receive the growth necessary for you to lead the unusually productive, extremely prodigious and exceptionally influential life that you’ve earned through your harshest trials. Nothing is wrong at this moment, even if it feels like everything’s falling apart. If you sense your life’s a mess right now, this is simply because your fears are just a little stronger than your faith. With practice, you can turn down the volume of the voice of your scared self. And increase the tone of your most triumphant side. The truth is that every challenging event you’ve experienced, each toxic person that you’ve encountered and all the trials you’ve endured have been perfect preparation to make you into the person that you now are. You needed these lessons to activate the treasures, talents and powers that are now awakening within you. Nothing was an accident. Zero was a waste. You’re definitely exactly where you need to be to begin the life of your most supreme desires. One that can make you an empire-builder along with a world-changer. And perhaps even a history-maker.” “This all sounds easy but it’s a lot harder in reality,” shouted a man in a red baseball cap, seated in the fifth row. He sported a gray t-shirt and ripped jeans, the type you can buy torn at your local shopping mall. Though this outburst could have seemed disrespectful, the pitch of the participant’s voice and his body language displayed genuine admiration for The Spellbinder. “I agree with you, you wonderful human being,” responded The Spellbinder, his grace influencing all participants and his voice sounding somewhat stronger, as he stood up from his chair. “Ideas are worth nothing unless backed by application. The smallest of implementations is always worth more than the grandest of intentions. And if being an amazing person and developing a legendary life was easy, everyone would be doing it. Know what I mean?
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Robin S. Sharma (The 5AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life.)
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When it comes to marketing, the header on your website, the subject line of your email, the opening statement of your proposal, the title of your lead generator, your entire elevator pitch, the first line of your keynote address, and a thousand other things need to succinctly express one of the ways you help people survive.
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Donald Miller (Marketing Made Simple: A Step-By-Step Storybrand Guide for Any Business)
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James Edward Garcia spent 3 nights in the hotel after Elisa’s death, bringing with him an EVP recorder. He believes the spirit of Elisa came through to him, while in his hotel bedroom. He asks, “Who killed you?” A voice replies, on the EVP recording, “They did.” In the elevator, the same one Elisa was last seen in, he captures a voice saying; “You better keep out! Keep out!” He says, “The creepy whispering voices sound p…d. They are either warning me – or threatening me.” Down in the lobby, a whispered female voice says, “James” several times. Back in his room, his recording equipment picks up what seems to be many voices; a cacophony of them. A female voice comes through, “Save me, please save me!” A man’s voice says, “She died.” A male voice says, “Yeah, blood.” “Killing” the voice says. The female voice returns, “Please save me,” to which James shouts, “Who are you?” A very deep voice replies, “They killed her,” followed by a higher pitch voice saying, “A demon seed.” One night he also slept in the room serial killer Richard Ramirez called his home while on his killing spree. ‘I returned to the room only to find the TV Remote on the floor with the battery cover off and a Tylenol bottle on its side on the table between the beds. I thought that Hotel Security must have been rummaging through my room. I setup a static camera to film my night. I was not aware that my Night Shot Infrared camera picked up a skull face that had bled through the paint on the wall behind me. You can clearly see it and it is pretty scary. At one point my face seems to have morphed into some type of demon possessed creature while I was asleep. It sounds outrageous but watch the footage and you will see what I’m talking about.” Is the Cecil Hotel imbued with demons who play with those who stay there; who get inside their heads? Newsblaze reporter John Kays asks, ‘Isn’t it logical to postulate that whoever killed Elisa Lam (if that’s what happened) was in the throes of the same evil spirit that Jack Unterweger was possessed with?’ Or the spirit of serial killer Richard Ramirez? He is referring to the two serial killers who called this hotel their home. Perhaps Elisa’s death had been part of a serial killer’s quest; but it could just as easily have been a crime of opportunism, by a random, solitary and as yet uncaptured killer; indeed, an un-sought-after-killer too at this
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Steph Young (Tales of Unexplained Mystery)
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Noise is the primary hurdle we must overcome. We're always one click away from being ignored.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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We live in an interconnected world of exploding information density where a million things are clamoring for our attention all the time
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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You need to have a differentiating message. If you are new, different, and proposing to solve a real pain or fulfill a cherished hope, you have a chance to be heard.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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Clarity is that 20/20 focus that cuts through the fog and lets you stand our from the noise. Clarity fuels effective marketing and selling.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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Whatever size the business, getting attention in a crowded marketplace demands, above all, a clear and focused message: a signal that rises above the noise.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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You don't fly to another country and expect the residents to speak your language. You have to communicate with speech they understand. Winning business involves speaking human, not spewing jargon.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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Clarity is an act of courage to say "yes" to the best business - and therefore to decisively say "no" to work that isn't a good fit.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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Not all business is good business, and not every customer is a good customer.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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To win, you have to be clear about your superpower, and you make that differentiation clear to your customers. Otherwise, you remain part of the noise.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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If you've earned the trust of people I already trust, their referral of you to me is worth more than any other form of marketing.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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There's plenty of money in any niche where you're scratching a genuine business niche.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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Trend currents (as opposed to current trends) are big-picture, unstoppable, inexorable forces that are shaping the world we live in.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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There are ten thousand opportunities on the horizon. The pie keeps growing and, in a rapidly evolving marketplace, white spaces and blue oceans will continue to surround us.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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No great deed was ever accomplished without focus - a defined direction and purpose. Olympic athletes win by focusing on one sport, not several.
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Steve Woodruff (Clarity Wins: Get Heard. Get Referred.)
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What is hate speech, exactly? It's hate speech when you don't like something I've said. But when you attack me for what I've said, can't your words also be defined as hateful?
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Linwood Barclay (Elevator Pitch)
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THE ELEVATOR PITCH When I first started my consulting practice, I began networking at conferences to find potential clients. It was not unusual to be the only doctor in the room. I quickly learned the importance of the elevator pitch. The elevator pitch is where you explain what your business is all about concisely in the span of no more than a few minutes (or the length of the ride up an elevator). Here are a few approaches to developing your elevator pitch. THE WHAT, WHY, HOW TEMPLATE: The first is by answering these three questions: What do you do? Why should somebody listen to you? How can you help them? Here are my answers: I am a physician business consultant. I have run many successful six- and seven-figure companies. I can help them by identifying additional streams of income outside their medical career. THE FILL IN THE BLANKS ELEVATOR PITCH Another approach is by filling in the following sentence: “I help _________ so they can have ___________
by __________.” The first blank refers to your target market. The second blank refers to what your target market wants, and the third blank refers to the method they will use to achieve it. Here is my elevator pitch: I help doctors, so they can have a better quality of life by teaching them to build additional streams of income. Why the elevator pitch works is because the focus is on the prospect. A big mistake when networking conferences is people love to talk about themselves. Use that to your advantage, and keep the focus on what you can do for them. There is a radio station that we all tune into that is known as WII-FM, which stands for What’s In It For Me? If they have a problem that you can solve, you will have people beating down your door. Your elevator pitch is what is also known as your unique selling proposition (USP). What do you have that makes you special, that really out distances you away from the competition? This is what led me to gain new clients when attending business and marketing conferences. Create and memorize a 30-second elevator pitch that resonates with
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Michael Woo-Ming (The Positioned Physician [Updated Edition]: Earn More, Work Smart, and Love Medicine Again)
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If you had twenty seconds on an elevator to pitch your YouTube channel to a stranger, how would you pitch it?
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Sean Cannell (YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following and Making Money as a Video Influencer)
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You’ll be able to use your one-liner on your website, in emails, keynotes, and elevator pitches. Your one-liner will be the central component to your entire messaging campaign.
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Donald Miller (Marketing Made Simple: A Step-By-Step Storybrand Guide for Any Business)