An elevator pitch, or elevator speech, is a short, powerful description of what you do and why it’s important to customers or investors. Here’s how to write an elevator pitch that gets attention.
You’ve just encountered a potential customer or someone you’d like to have invested in your business. You’ve got less than a minute to introduce yourself and get their attention. How do you do it?
The answer is to have a well-rehearsed elevator pitch ready for situations like this.
What is an elevator pitch?
An elevator pitch, also called an elevator speech, is a short statement designed to get the attention and interest of investors, potential customers, and other people important to your business. It explains in simple terms what you do, why you do it, how you’re unique, and why it’s important to the listener. The elevator speech should do all of that in 30 seconds or less — typically the time an elevator ride takes or the time people have at networking meetings to introduce themselves.
Your elevator speech shouldn’t be a sales pitch, nor should it be a recital of all your company’s capabilities. A laundry list of your business capabilities squeezed into 30 seconds will be about as appealing as all the disclaimers that announcers race through at the end of advertisements.
Instead, an elevator pitch for entrepreneurs should present your business or project in a way that gets attention and makes a listener interested enough to say, “Tell me more.”
How to Write an Elevator Pitch
The first step to write an elevator pitch or speech is to know what questions your elevator pitch must answer to be successful. The questions and information you’ll provide will differ depending on the situation you’re in and the reason for your pitch.
To focus your thoughts, write out the answers to questions below. Don’t worry about the length of your answers at this point. Your goal here is to collect facts that you can draw from to create pitches for different audiences. Remember, though, that your answers should play to your listeners’ self-interests, not yours.
Who are you?
Whether you’re pitching to investors or potential customers, the first thing they’re going to want to know is who you are and what your involvement is with what you’re about to pitch. Write down not only your name and title, but also pertinent details such as years of experience in the industry, your accomplishments, or anything else you think is appropriate.
What problem do you solve?
Explain what the problem is that you solve, who has the problem, and why it matters. Use easy-to-understand terms. Leave out the corporate jargon about “end-to-end solutions” and “groundbreaking transformative technology.” Buzzwords and jargon don’t explain what you do and make listeners tune you out.
“It’s important to give the audience some context for your pitch,” explains Dan Murray, an entrepreneur and investor from Colorado. “If you jump right into describing how your ‘redesigned XJ-9 Valve improves the eco-efficiency of blah blah,’ you will have lost 98% of the crowd right off the bat. Remember, you’ve been living in the narrow world and domain of your startup, but the rest of us haven’t. We don’t know an XJ-9 Valve from a Jaguar XJ sports car, so set the stage and give us some appreciation for why this is an important issue to the marketplace.”
Why is solving this problem so important?
What difference does your product or service make for people who use it? How does using it have a positive effect on their lives, businesses, or the environment? What or how you do something won’t have much appeal unless you draw attention to the significance of the problem and the relief your product provides.
One effective way to do this is with storytelling, says Precious L. Williams, a 13-time elevator pitch champion and CEO of Perfect Pitches by Precious LLC. A story “paints a picture” of using your product, explains Williams. She says stories should be used to build engagement and elicit an emotional response.
Murray agrees. “The best pitches I’ve heard have a big dose of personal experience and heart in them,” he explains. One was by a woman suffering from Parkinson’s disease who is reinventing clothing options for those with limited dexterity. Her pitch was so personal and so heartfelt that it immediately connected with almost every person in the room, and she even took home a cash prize for the best pitch based on audience votes.”
“Open up a bit,” he adds. “Go beyond the left brain, logical elements to describe how this is personal for you. Try to show how incredibly passionate you are about your topic, which increases your odds of success in the eyes of a backer.”
How big is the market for your product or service?
What specific niche do you fill in your industry, and how big is that niche? If you’ve developed a new tool for appliance repair service businesses, investors aren’t going to want to hear that the appliance repair business is a $5 billion industry. They’re going to want to know how they’ll make money when and if they invest in your company. They’ll want to know how many appliance repair businesses there are, how many of this tool they’ll buy, how often they’ll buy, and how they (the investor) will profit.
If your elevator speech is targeted at getting new customers, not investors, your market size won’t matter to your listeners. What will matter to customers is how your product or service will help them reach a bigger market, service more clients, cut costs, improve safety, or accomplish other important goals.