How to create an elevator pitch
Today, I’m going to show you how to create your elevator pitch and I’m going to do it in four easy steps.
First thing you need to do is identify your goal; your reason for having an elevator pitch. Second, explain what you do. Three, put it all together. And last, you practice it and you practice it and you practice it. That’s all there is to it.
So, first step is identify your goal. Why do you want to create it? What do you need it for? Is it for your business, so that you can talk to prospective clients about what you do? Or maybe it’s for certain product that you have and that you’re talking about? Or maybe you’re an entrepreneur and you’re describing what you do as an entrepreneur; what kind of new products that you’re creating or ideas that you have or missions that you are attracted to. It could be anything. But you need to identify your reasons for creating it and who you’re going to give it to.
First step in creating an elevator pitch
Now, you can have multiple elevator pitches. You can have an elevator pitch that you use for friends and acquaintances. You can have another elevator pitch that you use for customers and business contacts, and you can have another elevator pitch when you’re interviewing for jobs. So, it just depends on what your reasons are and create multiple pitches.
Now, the next thing you need to do is you explain what you do. Now, that can vary. It depends on what your goal is. So, let’s say, for example, myself. If someone asks me, “So, tell me, Don, tell me about you” or whatever. You know, we’re in the elevator, I bump into somebody in a coffee shop. “Don, tell me about yourself. What do you do?” I would simply say, “I create online training programs for job seekers that help them ace any interview that they go on.
The key to creating your elevator pitch is to end it in a way that creates and invokes curiosity. So, you don’t want to just a flat elevator pitch that says, “I help job seekers get hired for jobs.” That’s kind of boring. But when I say it in a way that says, “I create online training programs that teach job seekers how to get hired for any job that they interview.”
Now, your first response is most likely going to be, “How do you do that?” That’s what you want anyone to think or say when you give your pitch. It needs to end in a way that invokes this curiosity and amazement of, “How do you do that?” Like, “I want to know.”
Delivering your elevator pitch
Now, the whole key to delivering your elevator pitch is to practice it and to deliver it with pure confidence, so that when people hear it, I mean, it’s not they’re just hearing the words, they’re hearing the way that you deliver it. “I create online training programs that help job seekers get hired for any job.”
Now, if I said, “I create online training programs that help job seekers get hired for any job they want.” It’d be like, “Oh, that’s nice.” But when I say it with enthusiasm and confidence and all those verbal overtones, you’d be like, “Wow, you’re serious about this? How do you do that?” That’s what you want people to think and feel when you deliver your pitch. And you’re going to need to practice this over and over, but that’s actually the first step.
So, to create your elevator pitch, I just gave you an example of mine, but you need to decide what elements that you want to put in your pitch; what are you really good at doing? What are you passionate about? What do you love?
Elevator pitch example
Let me give you another example. Let’s say you are in the finance industry and you help people invest their money. So, your pitch might be, “I help parents save for their kids’ college fund so they have a hundred thousand dollars at the end of 20 years, simply by putting away a dollar a day.”
Now, if you’re like me, I’d be like, “Wow, how do you do that? A dollar a day at $365 a year. Wow. How do you get a hundred thousand dollars?” That invokes curiosity and excitement. And that’s what you want your pitch to be. And I just made that up. It just depends on what your industry is and what you do.
So, for the finance example, I mean, assuming that you’re some type of financial adviser, which is more than likely what that is, you help people put away money to save for college.
Now, there’s a boring version of that; “I help parents save money for the kid’s college fund” and the response you’re going to get is, “Oh, that’s nice.” And if you get, “Oh, that’s nice”, that means they really don’t care is really what it means.
But when you say, “I teach parents how to put away a dollar a day, so at the end of 20 years they have a hundred thousand dollars for the kid’s college fund”, they’d be like, “Wow, how do you do that?” That’s the response that you want to invoke.
And that’s even – what is that? – probably seven seconds, it took me to say that if that. I mean, a lot of people say your elevator pitch needs to be 20 or 30 seconds. I disagree. I think your elevator pitch should probably be about five to seven seconds. And if you’re going on longer than that, that’s another story. That’s a follow up question.
Your elevator pitch needs to be fast. It needs to be quick. It needs to invoke excitement and curiosity and generate some feedback, some engagement from who you are delivering it to.
Elevator pitch for sales
So, let’s say you’re a salesperson in the medical devices industry. Your pitch could simply be, “I save people’s lives by giving them the medical devices that they need to monitor their condition.” They’d be like, “Wow, how do you do that?” or it could be anything like that. Something that creates curiosity and excitement is the key to creating your elevator pitch.
So, the first step was identify your goal. Second step. Explain what you do. Third step. Put it all together; polish it. Fourth step is practice it over and over and over again, so that you don’t have to think about it.
When someone asks you, “So, what do you do?” you want to be quick with your answer. If you have to sit there and think about it, “Well, I teach job seekers. I help – I help job seekers get hired” or “I help people save, save, save for college.”
Now, that doesn’t work. That doesn’t create any curiosity, no excitement, no engagement. That’s a dud of an answer. You need to rehearse it and practice it over and over and over, so it’s just second nature. It’s like breathing to you. That’s how you want to get your answer. That’s how you need to develop it.
Now, are you going to do that in a day? No. What you need to do is create the root, the core of what your response is going to be. And then you think about it and you refine it over and over and over again. And it’s not going to be perfect the first time, second time, third time. It may take you 20 or 30 revisions to polish it so that you can just deliver it effortlessly.
Like if someone were to wake you up in the middle of the night and say, “So, what do you do, Don?” “I teach job seekers how to get hired for any job that they want with the best online training programs.” Yeah, something like that. Or “I teach parents how to save for college by putting away a dollar a day. So, at the end of 20 years, they have a hundred thousand dollars for the kid’s college fund.” Something like that.
And if you notice, every time I gave the college fund example, which is a little bit different, I might have put the “Save a hundred thousand dollars” I might put that first. I might put the “dollar” first. You change it up a lot of different ways, so that you can deliver it any different way.
Never memorize your elevator pitch
You see, if you memorize your pitch, so that you can only say it one way, you’re going to get stuck. It’s going to be a lot harder to deliver your pitch once it’s memorized. Because if it’s memorized, that means you can only deliver it one specific way and each word must follow the next. And if you have a little a brain fog or something where you forgot one of the words, you’re going to get stuck and you’re not going to be able to deliver your pitch.
So, the key is to be able to deliver that pitch a variety of different ways, so that maybe the end part of your pitch, you say it first or maybe put that in the middle; whatever it is. But you need to change it up and say that.
And that’s what I mean by practicing. Don’t just practice it one way, because if you just keep practicing it one way over and over and over, that’s memorizing. That’s not practicing. You want to rehearse it so that you can deliver it one way, this way, that way, you can have a slightly longer version, if need be, but ideally five to seven seconds and be able to say it different every way.
Practice your elevator pitch every day
And key, really, to practicing this is to do it every day. Do it when you’re driving in your car, do it when you’re taking a walk, do it before you go to bed. But do it multiple times a day, do it a variety of different ways, so that it is just part of you. So, that when you are out at Starbucks getting your coffee and you bump into somebody and they’re like, “Oh, you know. So, Don, I haven’t seen you for a while. What do you do?” Oh we’ll, boom. There you go.
You don’t even have to think about it. You just deliver it. It’s second nature. That’s the key to building a solid elevator pitch.
Now, you can have multiple pitches. Most people just seem to have one that’s professional that talks about what they do or what they sell or the value, the benefit that they offer somebody. That’s really the most common type of elevator pitch.
You should always have more than one elevator pitch
But you can have a variety of them. I mean, if somebody already knows you and they already know those things. I mean, let’s say you bump into an old friend that you haven’t seen for a while and they happen to know what business you’re in and what you do. They might say, “So, bring me up to speed, Don. What do you do?” or “What are you been doing lately?” Maybe have a slightly different version of your elevator pitch that brings people up to speed on you personally and maybe not professionally.
So, that’s really it; four easy steps to creating your elevator pitch. First step is identify your goal. Why are you doing it? Number two, explain what you do. Three, put it all together and four, practice and practice it and practice it all kinds of different ways. That’s all there is to it, my friend.
So, that’s all I have for you today in this video. And if you like what we’re doing here, if you like this channel and you like the kinds of things that I’m teaching you, please leave me a comment. Let me know. Subscribe to my channel and I’ll see you in the next video.
