Probably the best way around applying a pejorative label to your clients like “troubled” or “broken” or “damaged” is by talking about a “family in trouble” or a “family with broken relationships”.

Beyond that, you could focus not just on your job description, but on what you specifically bring to the task. i.e. “When a family is in trouble, I try to listen harder and care more than anyone else about fixing the problem.”

But your pitch (and the rest of your brand package) needs something else if you’re going to grab people’s attention and memory. You need a hook beyond “relaxation DVDs” to get me focused on YOUR specific product. And that can come from the Content (e.g. a great musician or photographer) the specific audience (e.g. relaxation for home yoga enthusiasts or for working moms), and / or the branding (Baby Einstein repackaged synth versions of Beethoven).

What they’re not: guided meditation, yoga exercises.

No one seems to be doing anything quite like this at the moment so it’s a bit of a mouthful.

You’re right, it could be less in your face, but it’s always fun to see people’s eyebrows go up at cocktail parties in the UK.

“So . . . that’s not a local accent. What are you doing here?”

I’m in the UK to raise development capital for American oil companies.

What an opportunity! I get a chance to make my pitch, trade cards, and I try to make an effort to follow up the next day with a phone call.

And again, you are correct that people have mixed reactions. We make sure that part of our presentation includes addressing the ethical questions.

Have you imagined a world without oil? Tomorrow?

That usual brings it home. We all want a world without oil long-term, but we prefer to have a few decades to pull it off. And in the meantime, if you’re still ethically opposed to oil, how did you get to work this morning? Even if you biked, you drove on asphalt, an oil product. And how do you heat your home? And how did your groceries get to the store?

But I digress.

Yours is concise and hits the right basic points. Have you tried this at a London cocktail party yet? I think “development capital” could just be “money”, and maybe “from investors in the UK”. Is that right? Or is it Americans actually DRILLING off the UK?

However, just like Rebecca in pesticide management, yours is a field that most people have strong feelings about. So a relatively “neutral” pitch might be your best bet at a family picnic. But depending on how deeply you wanted to get into it, you could “drill” a bit farther into the conversational substrata here by being a bit less direct.

“I help find oil by paying for drills.”
“The world needs oil. But oil costs money. That’s where I come in.”
Or for a real question generator: “I help you get to the shop to buy your groceries.”

As an experienced salesman, you already know that.

And speaking of which, good start on the Spotlight Pitch. But apart from being a bit long (elevator length actually), the one thing I need in sentence 1 is the word “Sales” – and preferably an indication of where you fit in the sales universe: Training? Consulting? Outsourcing?

Your first is “Everything we do is about customers and clients” but Sears, IBM, and Monsanto can all say that.

Now, having done some work with your department, I’ll confess I’m not exactly unbiased. But if you really wanted to grab people, you could say something like: “I help people understand both sides of the pesticide story.” Which naturally leads to “there are two sides?” Or really simple and even more of a door opener: “I fight pesticide abuse.”