BRAND STORY: 08

Develop Your Brand Superpower: The Elevator Pitch

If an elevator pitch in the men’s room can launch a tech company — a three-minute pitch can boost your brand, too!

During the Gold Rush fever of Silicon Valley, everyone thought they could make vast sums of money on the Web.

It was the dawn of the Internet, circa 1999. All you needed were backers for your big idea. My buddy, Bill Green, caught the fever, sold his house in Atlanta and moved to the Bay Area to “get into tech.”

When Bill arrived in California, Silicon Valley legend and former Chief Evangelist of Apple, Guy Kawasaki, was staging “boot camps” to help wannabe tech entrepreneurs get into the game. Bill paid $1100 for the two-day Garage.com seminar and learned how to connect with venture capitalists — and hopefully pitch an idea.

At the “Boot Camp for Startups,” Kawasaki taught participants how to condense their business idea into a 10-slide deck and then distill the deck into a short elevator pitch. The purpose of the exercise was to prepare for the day when you bumped into a mover-shaker while riding to the top floor. The unspoken joke, of course, was that in real life, the elevator moment never ever happens.

During the breaks, the boot campers practiced their pitches, swapped business cards, and prepared to strike gold. In real life, gold pans from wannabes pitching each other only come up empty. During a break, Bill broke ranks and headed to the men’s room. Expecting an uneventful pit stop, Bill leaned over his shoulder. There was the guy leading the training, Guy Kawasaki’s Vice President of Entrepreneur Development, Mike Scanlin.

“I realized that I had come all this way and spent my money to get my foot in the door,” Bill recalled. “And now I had ten seconds at the urinal with someone who could change my life. He could give me access to one of the most storied angel investors of the era. My big problem was that I didn’t have a deal. My mind raced. Earlier that week, I had met with some people starting TeamFuel, a high-tech supply chain start-up that hoped to reduce fuel costs for utilities. So, I pitched their idea to Scanlin, right there in the men’s room, and he was highly receptive.

“The next day, I phoned TeamFuel and told them that I had a solid lead for Silicon Valley venture money. As it happened, TeamFuel needed a credible CEO. Boom! I became a player in the clean technology sector.”

Only Bill would have the chutzpah to pitch someone else’s project, unsolicited, off-the-cuff, to one of the most storied investors in Silicon Valley. And, unlike Bill, you probably won’t make the deal of your life in an elevator, let alone at the urinal. For this reason, I teach people not to prepare for a 30-second elevator speech, but to craft a longer pitch — three minutes — that distills your company’s reason for being.

In writing your 3-minute pitch, think of yourself as a trial lawyer preparing an opening argument. Does your case hold water? Will your customers follow a simple logic to understand what you are offering and why they need it? In this way, the Elevator Pitch is the long-form version of your positioning statement. It will form the backbone of your Web site, slide decks, collateral, advertising, and more.

Best of all, if you do meet Mr. Big in an elevator (or Ms. Big in the ladies’ room), you’ll be ready to go.

Preparing your pitch: Step-by-step

Step 1: Develop a voicemail pitch — Approaching Guy Kawasaki in the men’s room might be too confrontational, so pretend you just swapped cards and now want to leave a follow-up voice message. Imagine it's your only chance to get his attention.

• What three to five points would you leave in a plain-spoken message, free from jargon, over the phone, and without PowerPoint to support you?

Example: Here’s a three-minute voicemail pitch for TeamFuel:

1. Overview: [beep] Hi guy, this is Bill Green from TeamFuel — the startup that uses supply-chain technology for big users.
2. Problem: A little background: Fuel prices change every day, but unlike filling your car’s tank, big fuel users have hundreds of tanks to fill. They can’t choose to fill their tanks when prices are low.
3. Solution: That’s what we do. We analyze the fuel market, streamline procurement, and purchase fuel for our customers when prices are low. In effect, we serve as an “outsourced fuel department.”
4. Results: We guarantee millions of dollars in savings through scalable technology, market optimization, and volume purchasing. We manage the enormous volume of fuel that moves through the market every day. And we earn a fee on that volume by optimizing procurement.
5. Call to Action: I’d like to discuss opportunities to invest in TeamFuel.

Why do this? Your sales sheets, headlines, digital ads, and web banners will all follow the basic points of your pitch:

Step 2: The three-minute elevator speech — If the voicemail message creates some headlines, a long-form elevator pitch tells the entire story — in three minutes! It will guide your Web site, slide deck, and more.

Let’s review TeamFuel’s brand positioning statement (aimed at the industrial fuel user, not the investor):

Positioning Statement

For fleets and other volume fuel users that don’t have full-time fuel professionals to make effective procurement decisions in a volatile market, only TeamFuel employs supply-chain technology, forecasting tools, and procurement expertise to reduce fuel costs. As your outsourced fuel department, TeamFuel leverages our volume purchasing and scale of operations to deliver guaranteed fuel savings.

The Three-Minute Template

Follow this template to craft your 3-minute message. It will become the most valuable tool in your marketing toolbox!!!

(It‘s an expanded version of the Positioning Statement you created in Chapter 4 — The Brand Story Workshop.)

1. Attention Grabber — Ask a provocative question that dramatizes how what you do matters to the prospect.

2. The Customer’s Problem — Detail the pain points your customer's face.

3. Our Solution — Explain your unique approach or secret sauce and how it solves the customer’s needs.

4. How it Works — Describe the features, methods, and processes. Break it down into 3–5 step-by-step points.

5. Results — Offer proof that it works; show documented metrics or savings. Share customer satisfaction.

That was easy. Here’s a three-minute example pitch built out for TeamFuel:

Attention Grabber:

• If you invest $100,000 in stocks, do you time your investment when prices are low? Of course!
• How about $100,000 worth of fuel? Do you fill your tanks when prices go down? If you think that’s impossible, you’re wrong.
• TeamFuel has developed technology to help you take command of your entire fuel picture. We act as your outsourced “fuel department” to get the best prices from the marketplace.

The Customer’s Problem:

• You’ve probably found ways to streamline costs throughout your organization — in HR, IT, employee benefits — everywhere except where it hurts most: purchasing fuel.
• Large fleets and airlines employ full-time fuel professionals to manage procurement. Smaller users, like you, must deal with old fuel technology, non-expert buyers, and rising administrative costs.
• More importantly, price volatility makes it difficult for you to make effective refill decisions.

Our Solution:

• TeamFuel has developed the industry’s first end-to-end solution that manages fuel needs throughout the supply chain. Our value proposition is simple: “We study your fuel operations to optimize your supply chain; we implement intelligent fuel technology to streamline procurement, and you enjoy guaranteed savings when you let TeamFuel serve as your outsourced “fuel department.”

How it Works:

• Fuel IQ™: First, TeamFuel studies your enterprise-wide fuel operations to develop a 14-point fuel profile to guide fuel procurement throughout your organization.
• ThinkTank™ — Next, we network every tank in your system and integrate them into our national storage picture. We optimize procurement decisions at a tremendous scale, system-wide.
• PriceQuery™ — Finally, our system searches for market trends and spot opportunities and delivers the best fuel price every day through demand aggregation, market timing, freight cost consolidation, and contract leveraging.

Results:

• Starting with a baseline assessment of your current costs, we build a cost-reduction model that tracks your actual savings in ten key areas.
• Total cost savings are guaranteed. Save up to 65% in operations and 35% in fuel costs when you outsource your fuel operations to TeamFuel.

Step 3: Practice Your Pitch
Read through your pitch a few times, then fit your entire speech onto a 5x8-inch card using high-level bullets. Memorize the bullets (not the speech), then just wing it without concern for mistakes.

With high-level bullets, you can adapt to the people, the setting, and the time available. With the outline set, your elevator pitch always comes off fresh and alive!

Read Next: Brand Story 09 | How to Create a Credible Brand on a Shoestring Budget

How to Create a Credible Brand on a Shoestring Budget