Developing an elevator pitch

April 2010

Can you describe your business in 60 seconds? Perhaps you can, but can you do it effectively?

You may have seen elevator pitches in Dragon’s Den-type TV programmes. An entrepreneur gets just one minute in which to convince business angels to invest in his or her idea, product or company. More often than not, these pitches go badly. Sometimes the idea is just plain crazy, but often the problem is that the pitch is too complicated and leaves the potential investors confused about what the company actually offers.

What is an elevator pitch?

A clear, concise and compelling elevator pitch will arouse interest in what you sell. Even if you’re not looking for funding, you may find yourself in lots of situations where you need to be able to tell someone what your business does...

in a differentiated way, and
succinctly enough to get your message across in the time it takes you to take the lift from one floor to the next. There’s no room for detail, jargon, explanation or elaboration: it has to be short, sharp and to the point.

Writing an elevator pitch

To be effective, your pitch must answer the following questions:

Who are you aiming your product at?
What problem does it solve?
What category of product is it?
What is the key differentiator?
What/who is the competition?

One nice thing about using this kind of approach is that it begins with focusing on your target audience, and not on your own business.

An effective elevator pitch

We recently had to take the elevator to the top floor of the Gherkin. It’s 42 floors to the top, so we thought it would be useful to adapt the elevator pitch for the occasion...

Our ground floor pitch: “For businesses who are looking for a way to sustain their sales activity, we provide marketing communications services that focus on getting business results. Unlike many traditional PR agencies, our services include research and strategic planning to help our clients make better marketing decisions, and high-quality copywriting to ensure that we deliver their campaigns on time.”

10th floor: “We have no vested interests in any particular media: we always choose the best media for the job.”

20th floor: “The National Business Awards people recently acknowledged the effectiveness of our work in achieving business results by shortlisting one of our campaigns for the Marketing Strategy of the Year award.”

30th floor: “A lot of our clients are local, but we also work with businesses in Oxford, Cambridge and even the US.”

Top floor: “Our offices are in Newbury, Berkshire. We’re only an hour from London and we don’t have the disadvantage of London marketing agency overheads. Drop in for a coffee – we’d love to see you.”

Share your elevator pitch and win

Once you’ve developed your elevator pitch, don’t keep it to yourself. Make sure everyone within your company is familiar with it. In fact, if you have a really great elevator pitch, why not share it with us? We’ll pick our favourite and publish it in the next issue of Stuff. And if you win, we’ll send you a bottle of champagne for your trouble.

Email your elevator pitch to elevator@resonates.com by Friday 14 May 2010.

Read more:

Back to stuff