Sometimes it’s helpful to revisit old truisms – things we take for granted and then in a flash forget about. I’m thinking, for example, about the elevator pitch — that quick description of your business that grabs someone by the lapels before they step off the virtual elevator.

Yet, most of us I bet (and here I’m an all-out sinner) fail to have an effective pitch. I was reminded of all of this when I read a blog post by Diane Schwartz pointing to a Harvard Business Review blog post by Bill Taylor aptly titled, “What’s your company’s sentence?”

The HBR post makes the excellent point that you need to be able to sum up you business in one sentence that defines you as different and special.

Now don’t think for a minute that being able to do it in a sentence is enough. That’s just half the equation. It’s equally important that you be able describe your business so you stand out.

As Taylor says, “It’s not good enough to be pretty good at everything. You have to be the most of something: the most elegant, the most colorful, the most responsive, the most focused.”

The elevator pitch makes you realize that there is nothing like brevity to concentrate the mind. It also reminds you that if you struggle to easily differentiate your business, you’re probably not correctly positioned.

Think for a minute about the people you know who are most memorable. Don’t they have that extra oomph that means you won’t forget them? For me, it can be as simple as a person having an amazing smile that makes anyone who greets them feel cared about, or someone revealing a certain bigger-than-life persona that makes you feel you’re in the company of a person who’s of another order of being. Or it can be an individual who’s kind beyond belief.  All of these people have their own special “personality print” that makes them stand out.

Somehow this ability to be memorable in our personal lives vanishes, however, in the business world.

I find that’s because we’re so often immersed in our own worlds that we can’t get outside of the bubble and talk about our business in a way that’s accessible for many people. It’s what I call the Doctor Syndrome. Most of us have no idea what most medical terms mean – nor should we. And, we don’t often totally understand a doctor’s explanation, in terms of the biochemistry or physiology.  But in business, we need to insure that our language is inclusive – not exclusive

Instead, we’re bombarded with jargon like digital media optimization (huh?) or cliché-filled words like innovative and breakthrough and historic that are so over-used they mean nothing.

So now that you know what the end result should be, start creating or fine-tuning your elevator pitch. It’s easy to know if you’re on track — just try it out when you’re networking. If you get a look of interest, you know you’re doing something right.

One caveat. Today, of course, we not only have to have the memorable one-liner about our business,  but it also needs to be search-engine friendly. After all, you want people to find you in Google so you need to have the right “search words” in your description. A good starting point for that is Google Adwords where you can determine how popular particular search phrases are.

So what are you doing to describe your business? I’d love to hear your elevator pitch.