Even great sales people sometimes fumble when trying to describe what their company does in just a sentence or two. As hard as it can be to nail down a company’s business concept, succinctly articulating that concept is yet another challenge according to author Brent Grover.

Although the strategic planning process isn’t always fun and games, Brent uses a variation of the popular missing-word game MadLibs in his recently-released The Little Black Book of Strategic Planning for Distributors to help distribution strategic planners draft an “elevator speech,” a short, memorable articulation of a company’s business concept.

To help strategic planning teams get something onto paper without agonizing over wording, Brent uses a fill-in-the-blank exercise like the one below:

To develop a truly meaningful elevator speech, planners must first define their company’s unique business concept, which describes the organization’s target market, product offerings and key differentiators. For more information on pinpointing a business concept, see Chapter 5 in The Little Black Book of Strategic Planning by ordering the book today.