This activity is to help you not only create a 30 second elevator speech, but to better understand what you really do. It will define your USP (Unique selling proposition). This usually even changes my client's vision of who they are and what they do for their customers.

1. Column One ? Products, Services or Features

List your products/services, probably what you are currently telling me what you do or sell. Write down all of them.

2. Column Two ? Benefits

List the benefits that your products, services or features provide. Each benefit should be directly linked to the product identified in Column One. Look to answer the question ?Why? should someone buy the product, service or features.

3. Column Three ? Why Buy From Me?

Identify what makes you unique in the sea of sameness where you can find hundreds of businesses selling the same products, services or features. Avoid price as may become a losing strategy.

4. Column Four ? Measurable Results

This is where the rubber meets the road, where the real power statement will be found. Review the previous 3 columns and list the measurable results that your products of services deliver.

This will turn the benefits?the ?Why buy the product?? and ?Why buy it from me?? into a measurable result (make sure it is a result not an activity). This will do more than just improve your networking and marketing. It will make it so powerful that once you start using it you'll have people running up to you after a networking event??How do you do that???.?Can you REALLY do that?? And that IS what you're trying to do isn't it, Getting noticed?

For most of my clients there is someone just like you on every street corner. Imagine for a moment that you are standing on a street corner with hundreds of other people. They all are the same height, same hair color, same skin color, and even wearing the same clothes. Rather daunting to think someone could find you in that crowd isn't it?

Well?.that's your job. To be found on that street corner. And, for most of my clients, that is where they, and their businesses, are standing?.in that very crowd.

Our job from this point forward is two-fold:

1) Be the first person anyone sees when they walk up to that street corner.

2) And eventually, have people coming to THAT street corner just to find you. They know YOU are on that street corner so they come THERE just for you.

Does this your perception of the hundreds on the street corner?and your business? It does for those that find that measurable result from column 4 and start using it.

Most of your competitors talk about their products. Your job is to be different, to find what your prospect needs, what benefits and solutions your product provides to meet those needs, and then why buy the product from you. What are the products benefits, and YOUR benefits? And then turn that into something that is so visible, so powerful and grabbing but talking about measurable results that people can't help but come up to you to ask, "How do you do that?", or occasionally, "Nah! No way...Not really...Can You Really Do that?"

I want you to consider this worksheet as a work in progress. These questions and answers should generate thoughts that keep changing and getting better over time. For the first pass, get something down. Don't worry about perfection. Get it down. We'll come back after you've finished the entire sheet and probably change those answers. We will come back tomorrow, and weeks later with better and better answers. This exercise generates thoughts that will drive you to improve them and what you perceive as the deliverable to your customer.

Usually the first pass results in a weak, wishy-washy response to ?Why buy the product?? and ?Why buy it from me?? Once we are forced to put a measurable on it we start thinking differently.

More often than not my client says,

?You mean I've got to actually COMMIT to that?? or

?I don't have any control over that.?

YES committing to that IS what will make you stand out on that corner, and ultimately that IS what the client THINKS you are delivering. Up ?til now you've allowed the customer to come to his own conclusion about what results he'll get. People buy you on the value they perceive you deliver. So help them find your value and define clearly what you deliver. Your prospect will literally chase you to get that result.

Watch your networking and marketing results go through the roof!