Crafting your speech is one of the hardest parts of creating a fabulous pitch. Google elevator speech and you will find 324,000 links. Google elevator speech templates and you will find even more. Your speech should be unique and compelling, hard to do in 30 or 60 seconds.

This is an old article but it has tons of great tips. Check it out and see if any of the unique tips help you.

Do you have a great resource you could share on crafting your speech?

There is a site http://www.15secondpitch.com that I heard about. I have an elevator speech but I need to improve on it. Mine is kind of generic and I want to make it my own.

Thanks Lee for this resource, looks like it could help me!

JoCarole,
When I first started trying to write an elevator speech I was told not to get to technical and specific. The point is to get them want to know more about your business.

I have found that if I have an idea of a scenario to present with a cheat sheet of key point to touch on I do better than if I try to memorize a ‘speech’.

Since marketing is not my strong point, I have a friend helping me that is really good in the marketing area. She suggested I needed a visual to go along with my ‘speech’. One of the visuals we came up with is a box/bag/basket full of business card & scraps of paper with contact info written on it. After a brief introduction of name & company I ask ‘Is this what your contact list looks like?’ (indicating container of business cards) ‘I can take you from this to this’ (hold up a spreadsheet). The first time I did it someone announced that I was her new best friend. I did it at another event about a month ago and while I was at a networking event this week someone came over to talk and told his friend that I had had the best 30 second presentation he had seen.

Hope some of these are helpful.

I've started something new in some of my speeches. This technique isn't the best strategy for a new group, where you might need the entire 30-60 seconds to educate them what a VA is. However, if you belong to a group that meets regularly, & they all know you & what you do, this is a great way to have a fresh speech each week.

I share keyboard shortcuts with them! The idea came to me when my mouse started acting up. Oh the frustration of using MS Office 2007 ribbon bar when your mouse isn't working properly! So I went online & found some great shortcut keystrokes for Office 2007.

Some times my speech focuses on how to be more efficient on the computer & sometimes it's totally unrelated to computers, but I try to share one new keystroke with my group each week.

I've gotten great feed back on this!! One man told me that as soon as he walks through the door his secretary asks him what the keystroke of the week was.

Patsy, what a great idea and very creative. I think it is worth a try