Forget your Elevator Pitch (most of them suck anyways)

How do you distill the essence of your Value Proposition into something short, meaningful, and effective?

What do you do if you have only a few seconds to communicate the essence of your business? What are the most important messages for you to deliver? Most entrepreneurs resort to their elevator pitch; sixty seconds of fast, highly condensed techie-talk that is intended to tempt an investor to ask for more. But most of the how-to blogs and workshops offered on elevator pitches have probably done as much damage as good. Almost every guide to developing an elevator pitch suggests that you compress the six to seven key points of your 80 page business plan into 125 words. The result is usually an unintelligible gibberish of technobabble embedded in a cloud of fancy adjectives.

Most entrepreneurs should just throw out their elevator pitches and start over!

What are the three or four sentences that can be spoken by a normal human, that can be understood by a normal human, that really capture the essence of what makes your company so interesting? The goal of a pitch is to connect with your audience and to generate interest. How can you do that in an authentic yet impactful way? It is a lot easier than you realise. I have designed an amazing program to help you learn fast… not only WHAT to say, but HOW to say it. Let me show you pitch structures that work and ways of pitching that will get people curious and interested in your business ideas.

Edited Comment: Reader Arthur Van Eeckhout kindly pointed out that this was “Clickbait”. As the author, perhaps I agree, although that was not my intention. So here is the formula I use to make my elevator pitches more interesting:

1. Name your target audience
2. What (known) problem do they have?
3. What does this mean for their business? (i.e. loss of $$, time, hassle, etc.)
4. What does this really mean? (i.e. risk of bankruptcy, loss of face, etc.)
5. What do you deliver to solve the problem? (note: not How, but What)
6. What does this mean for the customer? (effect of your solution)
7. Call to action (just give them something simple to do)

I hope this helps… and I still hope you attend my webinar so we can discuss this in full detail. :-)

• Rick Salmon :-)

Join me on a live web class on The Art of Pitching Your Ideas on Wednesday, Feb 20th at 13:00 (CET-Oslo)

Register at: http://www.GetVoiceable.com/webinar