In creating an elevator speech, I think that I realized that it can be difficult to come up with the perfect statement. In order to be short and memorable, you might have to skip some details. These details might be what the customer needs to determine if you are the right person for them. However, if you give the details, you may go over a person’s head and they will easily forget about you.

Maybe it would be better to have a couple of different elevator speeches ready. Then you can adjust and use one that seems more appropriate for the situation. Or, you can start with the basic one and them move to one of the advanced ones based on a person’s reaction.

In creating my own speech, I found that I wrestled with this issue. I didn’t want to leave out anything that would describe what I can do. Since I was creating a speech for a fictitious web design consultant firm (using the name of my real web design business), I knew how fickle the web design field is. Some people get a certain buzz word in their head (Web 2.0, RSS, XML, etc) and discount you as inexperienced if you don’t throw it out. But them again, some people get lost and feel you are irrelevant if you throw out something they have never heard of before. So I decided to skip a lot of the details and describe the general feel of the sites that can be designed. That way, anyone that I am talking to can throw out something like “what is all this about wikis that I keep hearing?”