How To Perfect Your Elevator Pitch

Whether you’re looking to start your first career, next career, even if you’re content with your current career but are looking for new clients, you should always keep a current ‘elevator pitch’ memorized. You never know when your path may cross with a huge opportunity that you’ll wish you had been more prepared for.

A true story can account for the importance of being prepared. Paul Hosch can personally account for the importance of being prepared in his story, ‘How I Blew an Opportunity to Help Brian Chesky’ where he met the CEO and Founder of AirBnB and learned a valuable lesson. Mr. Hosch said that if he could redo his meeting with Brian Chesky that he would do these three things:

1. Express how you can help, authentically, large or small with a need or a challenge (you’re) uniquely qualified to address.
2. Have your elevator speech ready to illustrate your credibility
3. After connecting 1 and 2 above, present an immediate call to action

So what makes a great elevator pitch? How can you spruce up an old one you already have?

First and foremost, you’re going to want to prepare your pitch before you need it. Just take a couple minutes to gather your thoughts and write down some ideas of topics about yourself. Think about things that you have accomplished in the recent past, projects you’re currently working on, and goals you have for the future.

Keep your pitch to quick topics that allow for the person you’re speaking with to ask questions or give them a chance to talk about themselves. Your elevator pitch should also be easy for you to change up, depending on your audience. Kat Boogaard says to think about, “who are you speaking to, and what are you hoping to gain from this exchange,” to help guide your speech. You should spend a considerable amount of time focusing on how you can serve your potential clients — truly serve authentically.

Your elevator pitch is not just to try to sell yourself and your experience, it’s about what you have to offer that will benefit that person. There has to be a good reason for this person to want to do any type of business with you. This goes for if you’re trying to nail a new job or to gain a new client.

This exchange should consist of about 80% of you discussing their challenges and needs and about 20% of you offering to fill the need — focus on servicing them and not yourself. Allow room for there to be an open conversation so that the person you are speaking to can ask you more specific questions depending on what they’re needing or interested in hearing more about. This is also a good indicator whether or not the person is even interested or not.

You should not try and force the conversation — it should flow naturally and organically so much so it should almost seem as though it’s a ‘chance’ happening. The other person should feel like they really gained something from meeting you. This is why you end with a specific ‘call to action’. Samuel Edwards in ‘The Fundamental Guide to Better Elevator Pitches’ gives some examples of a call to action as, “an email address or telephone number,” and the reason that the person should give you this information is based on the value that you gave earlier in your speech.

The Takeaway

Regardless of where you currently stand as far as your career, it should be a priority to have an elevator speech on hand and ready. Taking just a few minutes out of your day could really make a change later in your life when you come to an amazing opportunity. Start out with something to grab the other person’s attention and hopefully you end up getting their information for a future contact!

When has having an elevator speech been helpful for you? Tell us, what do you plan on doing to improve your elevator speech?

Going live the end of February 2017!