Your Elevator Pitch

by Jaimie Abbott

The idea behind an elevator pitch is to pretend you are stuck in an elevator, and the doors close and someone inside the elevator turns to you and says: “So what do you do? Or tell me about yourself.” And you’ve got, what? 20 seconds, maybe 45 seconds before you guys get to the floor that you want to get to and the doors are going to open.

So you need to get straight to the point. Who, what, when, where, why and how what you do in that short amount of time before the elevator reaches the floor.

First of all, it’s really important to have one in your back pocket. So I have one that I can pull out at any time, in case someone turns to me and says, “what do you do?”

It’s really important to have these elevator pitches ready because they are opportunities, the opportunities to connect with people and perhaps it could lead to something like a sale or a new client or even a new job opportunity.

So you can be really confident and have this ready to go, then you are going to have your best chance of that connection actually working out for you.

If someone turns to me and says: “what do you do?” if I’m at a networking event I will say: “I teach people how to be better public speakers,” and if that person tells me they are an accountant for example, I may then tell them that I’ve worked with a lot of accountants and provided them with training to feel more confident when they’re dealing one on one with a client or perhaps when presenting in front of a large audience.

This is an example of shaping my elevator pitch towards that particular person because people want to know what’s in it for them, what can you do to help them. Use this as an opportunity to perhaps pitch to a person one-on-one.

So you might just want to say who you are, what value you perhaps offer people, and give a short little example of what you do. You can always put a call to action in there, depending on how long you’ve got. You might have a couple of minutes to chat to this person. But you don’t want to talk too much about yourself either and you don’t want to go on and on either because that person will walk away thinking  you talk way too much.

So you really need to probably get it all out ideally in 60 seconds.

What I would say to you is to rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, have your elevator pitch ready to go. So you can pull that out at any time and use it to your advantage.