Monthly Archives: April 2013

Sharpening the elevator speech

Posted on by

Elevator-128 One of the benefits of attending a weekly networking group is that I get to do a 50 second speech each and every week. Typically I’ll talk about something different each week, accomplishments, highlighting a service I offer, discussing a particular referral I’m looking for, ETC. After doing it for almost 3 years, I have gotten pretty good at doing my 50 second speeches. Public speaking has become second nature, and the days of being nervous are long since passed. But this week we have a visiting day. Will we will have several new people coming to learn about our BNI group. So for this new audience I will need to go back to my original elevator speech [*click for definition], and try to sharpen that up a bit. As these people don’t know what I do, I’m going to try to in 50 seconds to let them know everything I do and who I do it for.

Ok, here is my elevator speech draft

“Good morning I’m Barry Roos of RooSites Web Development. My company designs, develops and manages small business websites. This includes social media management as well as search engine optimization and web marketing, these services we offer for free with every support plan.

People always ask us what types of businesses do you work with.

Among the sites we manage are for a Hollywood production company, the largest retailer in Puerto Rico, A famous Florida Plastic Surgeon, nonprofits like the Samaritans, A thoroughbred racehorse consignor from Kentucky, as well as lawyers, doctors, dentists, tradespeople, real estate developers and just about anything you can name.

So if you or anyone you know needs help with anything web related, contact me, Barry Roos, RooSites Web Development.”

Not too bad, right? You quickly know what I do and what type of clients I have. So far this is it just a shade under 50 seconds if I talk slowly. (something I generally don’t do). I’ll take a look at it over the next couple days and hopefully by Wednesday I will have this down pat and really nail it.

Elevator speeches are something you should always think about because you never know when you’re going to meet someone and have just an instant in which to grab them. If you are working on a new website design, this is also important. Why? Because you generally don’t have that much time to get someone’s attention before they are jumping to a different website. Within moments of your website loading, visitors better quickly see your value proposition and call to action. Many times, this is the difference between success and failure for a website.

*An elevator pitch, elevator speech, or elevator statement is a short summary used to quickly and simply define a person, profession, product, service, organization or event and its value proposition.

 

The true meaning of being a solutions provider

Posted on by

You hear the term “solutions provider” tossed around quite often these days. It sounds great, right? A company will study your unique problems and goals and come up with a solution that meets your needs.  Sounds great, sign me up.

Not so fast.   In reality, typically web development firms will not create a solution that is necessarily best for you, but rather best for them.  If you have a meeting to discuss whether to tweak your website or to build a new one, 99% of the time you will receive the recommendation to build a new site. If you tell them you have a $5,000 budget, you will receive an estimate very close to that amount. And if they are a shop that focuses on Microsoft Technologies, they will steer you in that direction, knowing full well that many not be the best for you.

I am always amazed at the short sightedness of companies, going for short term profits rather than taking a longer view. For RooSites, we want you to be a customer for years to come. We know if we do the right thing by you, that you in turn will have us manage your website and refer us to others.

In the past couple of weeks we had examples of “doing the right thing”.  I wrote about the first example in a blog post about this on April 2nd, entitled: Sometimes having a client NOT spend money is best. Read Post → It was a perfect example of how we could have pushed the client to build a new site, which would have made us money. BUT he does very well in searches, and his website looks ok and certainly professional. Also he had gained several new patients from his appointment request form in the past few months. So I advised holding off a year or so. Again from a purely profit standpoint, not a great move, but in the long run it should pay off with a happy client and referrals.

The other example was concerning a company’s website where they had a Drupal content management system and a separate WordPress blog hosted elsewhere. One of their biggest issues is that their blog content isn’t being indexed with his main site. As blogging is very important to the company, my first thought was to bring everything into WordPress. (Drupal is a great CMS but if blogging is important I favor WordPress) But after further investigation, the cost seemed too great. So, I came up with a plan to install WordPress directly onto their server, create a custom theme to match his Drupal site, and then import the posts. This would save him 50% or more and achieve everything he wanted to do from an SEO perspective. This was a good example of being a solutions provider, not just shoehorning in a solution that is easy for me or more profitable.

Bottom Line: If you’re dealing with a company that seems to provide solutions which are best for them, and not you, contact us today. We are a true solutions provider.