What do you do?

At a business women’s lunch yesterday both key speakers opened with the comment “it is important to know your customers’ needs and wants”.  After the presentation someone asked me “What do you do?”.

Now, I’m in a reflective period at the moment, so my answer to the question was not as polished as my usual 10 second elevator response that starts “I…”. Instead, I talked about technology and training, and stumbled my way through to a reasonable reply.

So here is the thing:  I’ve always been in technology.  My initial university study was in technology. I graduated and worked with punch cards and mainframes, then moved into Personal Computers (yes, I was around when the first PC was introduced!), and my focus has always been helping customers to learn how to get the best out of their technology investment.

So I have always, and still answer with “I …”, as in “I’m a technology trainer”.  But when people hear this now, they look at me and walk away.  Thus I have to question – is it my deodorant?  Bad breath?  Or, is the potential customer not interested in what I do?  But the realisation suddenly came to me that people may not understand what I am saying, or what I do.

So here is the tip:  a colleague (Tim Eldridge) suggested that I go to Pinterest and type in what I think I am and see what the audience thinks of this.

This was an eye opener:

Search on “Technology”	Search on “Productivity”
Lexus Hover Board	Productivity Excel
I don’t think so!	More like it!

 

What I learnt was that I’m about productivity. So here is my new elevator pitch (thanks to Pinterest) “I do productivity training with apps”.

Let me know what you think!