I continue to focus on how to more simply communicate what it is that we do and what it is that MVaaS solutions provide.
Tonight was another opportunity to experiment for me as I was at an awards ceremony mingling with the leading technology companies in the Boulder/Denver corridor at the Boulder County Business Reports’ Innovation Quotient (IQ) Awards. We were up for the most innovative award in the Business Services category. The reason that this was a great chance to experiment for me was the diversity of the group that was at the event. There were companies there that provide waste management services, a ton of social media internet companies, and even a company that “has created and patented a process for manufacturing agglutinate, a material that makes up 40 percent of the moon’s surface”. How cool is that?
I had a group of highly charged and diverse entreprenuers at my disposal all of whom were politely asking what every person that they met did as we awaited the actual awards ceremony. None of them had any idea about the state of the video surveillance market and what the challenges are and why one solution would be better than others. I abandoned any use of the term MVaaS, I tried to use only language that the average person (although these people were certainly more technical than the average bear) would understand. I would occasionally sprinkle in the Software as a Service buzzword as most of them got that, although probably had no idea how it related to video in this context and why that is a big deal.
When I started the evening and there weren’t as many folks (they had a pre-event for award nominees) I tended to give what I call the extended elevator pitch. It is the 2 minute description of our business that I usually give after I try my one sentence version to provide more context if they are either interested or didn’t get it at first. As the night went on and the conversations increased in frequency and shortened in length I reverted to the single sentence version.
I probably used more than one variation of this, but it usually went something like “we let businesses with multiple locations easily and remotely access live and recorded video of their sites so they can understand what’s happening and run their businesses better without crushing their IT infrastructure or people” I know that I’ve written about this on more than one occasion, but it is still something that I keep thinking I could do a better job on. I want a short, punchy description that both communicates what we do to pretty much anyone and is clear enough about why we are different that we don’t sound just like every other video company to people that know the video segment. Not sure I got there tonight but I’m getting closer.
The one thing I can say is that the bar has definitely been raised based on one of the elevator pitches I heard at the ceremony. No it wasn’t the “fake plastic moon dust” guys (that is my elevator pitch for them, so they don’t get credit for it) The winner in simplest elevator pitch goes to Tensegrity Prosthetics. Their official blurb (probably akin to my second level elevator pitch) is “[We make] a prosthetic foot that closely matches the function of the human foot and ankle, designed to relieve an amputee’s metabolic stress associated with most other foot prosthetics, allowing them to be more efficient and subsequently more energetic.” Not just a great product (they won the Medical Innovations Category award) but a very well articulated product description. It communicates what it is, how it is different from the competition, and how it benefits the customer. Good stuff. Even better was how the CEO boiled their company down - “Better fake feet”. While he said it rather tongue in cheek. It pretty much communicates exactly what they are all about. 3 words. That will be hard to top. I’ll have to keep working on it…
By the way, Envysion won our category and received an IQ award for most innovative business service. Congrats to the whole Envysion team on another recognitition of the power of our MVaaS service.
