As an entrepreneur, you are constantly practicing your pitch. Every time you explain to a friend or family member what you’re trying to achieve you are pitching your idea. When you develop website content or create a logo, you are working to convey the essence of your venture in a succinct way. Have you ever been in a bookstore or a grocery store and someone asks you, “What do you do?” Of course you have gotten that question. Do you get the blank stare? Do they ask you for a business card? Forming a 30 second pitch takes a lot of trial and error and what works for one person might not work for another.
Try this: I go to the bookstore every weekend and go up to five random people. You may say, ok, that’s weird. However, let me explain. I practice holding a conversation and then telling them what I do. Most of the time I get “oh, that’s nice”, or the conversation just ends. But, there is always one person that responds and says “I wish I could do that” or “tell me more.” Then I know what I can do to improve my pitch. It’s like having a focus group every weekend.
Often we don’t recognize that kind of “pitching” as a rehearsal for the real thing. That’s because it doesn’t feel like the real thing – no pressure, no serious time constraint, no money on the line. But an entrepreneur who is serious about using a pitch to generate funding and business must be equally serious about getting their pitch down. Consumption and calls to action are often driven by effective story-telling, and your pitch is the hook. You need the opportunity to tell your whole story, and to do so, you must captivate your audience right off the bat.
An effective pitch should be designed, built, and delivered with purpose. And unlike Rome, a great pitch can be built in a day.
The Blueprint
Have you created a mini version of your business plan? If not, you should. Condense the main points of your plan down to give potential investors, lenders, employees, mentors, and contractors a taste of your grander idea. If they bite, you can follow-up with the more comprehensive version. This mini business plan performs double duty as the backbone of your 30-second, or elevator, pitch.
The Foundation
An opportunity to pitch your business will lay the foundation for future contacts and dealings. Make it strong, and make it count! Take time to anticipate what questions your pitch will raise and include the following:
- A single sentence explaining your product, service, or cause. Include accurate (read: not exaggerated) but memorable adjectives – if you are or strive to be the largest, fastest, or most creative at what you do, state that.
- Your business should offer a unique solution to an existing problem, or provide a service or product that fulfills an otherwise unmet demand. If it doesn’t…you might want to go back to your business plan, because it doesn’t have much chance of standing out in a crowd and getting noticed. Succinctly state the problem you aim to solve (a fact or statistic can be useful here) and why your fix is different.
- Make it clear how your product or service will improve something – cost, quality, well-being – for the person on the other end of your pitch. You must make them care. Otherwise, you may end up with an impressed listener who has no inspiration to act on your pitch. It helps to provide an example of someone you recently helped and how they benefited.
- Don’t forget to include yourself! Elevator pitches fail when they are delivered in a jumbled rush, especially when there is no personal touch. To make your pitch resonate, you must connect with the other person. This involves sharing who you are and something about yourself and delivering your pitch with passion, not urgency.
Avoid a Setback
You now have a good base for your pitch. To build upon it successfully, avoid the following:
- Too much information – you may often have longer than thirty seconds to make your point, but you should be prepared to introduce your company, problem, and solution in that amount of time anyways. The first thirty seconds are most likely to be remembered.
- Too much you – remember the guidance to connect with whoever you’re speaking with. Maintain good manners and ask questions of your audience – if you don’t listen, you might miss an opportunity to really understand their needs and problems.
- Too little follow-up – don’t expect to hand over a business card and let them do the rest. In today’s environment, contact information for many professionals is available online. Find it and put the onus on yourself to get back in touch.
Location, Location, Location!
Don’t think of your elevator pitch strictly as a short speech you give when meeting new contacts. Your pitch can and should also be available to share electronically, via email and social media.
Choice real estate for your online pitch includes:
- Facebook – create a profile that clearly describes what you do, but don’t try to include everything about your business here. A link to your website will suffice for that. Use your wall to generate buzz by offering deals, highlight and link to any media coverage you receive, invite people to events geared to generate business, and spotlight new products.
- Twitter – don’t underestimate the value of getting into the tweeting game. Twitter must be used regularly to keep your followers interested but you shouldn’t post excessively. Keep in mind that your followers have already expressed an interest in what you offer, so your tweets can be less pitchy and more oriented toward providing content, background, or news about your product or industry. Because you have to work with a small word count, the exercise of using Twitter forces you to think about what your customer might want to know most on a given day.
- LinkedIn – this is your chance to focus on the “you” part of your pitch. Because it is a professional, career-oriented tool, it is not considered bragging to list out your accomplishments and awards – things that might come off as arrogant to say in person – on this site.
Use Your Resources
Building a pitch isn’t a one-woman operation. Take full advantage of the resources available to get you started and consistently refine your pitch as your business grows.
- SmallBizU offers an inexpensive course targeted to growth-stage and existing businesses that focuses on creating buzz.
- The Small Business Administration offers online courses on marketing, which can help pare down your marketing ideas to those which will attract your target audience best.
- Buzzuka.com offers a “web-based discovery tool” that helps anyone looking to sell an idea, product, or place create their 30-second pitch. After a quick registration process, users have access to the Buzzuka Pitch Studio, which takes you step by step through creation of a person pitch, a place pitch (company or location), and a thing pitch (blog, service, or product). The studio will ask you relevant questions, then combine your thoughts into a paragraph that you can edit, refine, and practice for face-to-face pitches, and even publish with a photo of your product to social media sites. Because most entrepreneurs don’t just have one idea, the site allows you to create multiple pitches and save them to your portfolio.
- Buzzuka.com also offers sample pitches to users. To see some pitches in the flesh, go to You Tube and use “elevator pitch” as your search term. You’ll see some good things you want to replicate and some bad things you’ll instinctively know to avoid. The more you watch, the more you’ll hone your ability to identify what works – what you find yourself responding to or taking an interest in – and what doesn’t work.
What ways have you improved your “pitch?”
