The elevator pitch is one of the most important assets your business will ever have, but one of the most difficult to define. You need to explain who you are, what you offer and why it’s good, all while going from the ground floor to the 20th (executive suite if you are lucky) – hence the elevator pitch.
When starting a business, it’s one of the first things you will need, particularly if you are looking for backers. They will want you to be ‘to the point’ but with enough detail to give your offer substance. Every Dragon’s Den will want you to be confident without sounding cocky. You have to assume they know nothing about you, so you need to quickly build context, but be equally quick to move on if they know your sector. A good pitch needs to be dynamic and responsive.
It should come before you register your name and URL and certainly before you design your brand as it’s central to all these briefings. I recall working with one of our clients, The English Tea Shop, on their identity. We helped them hone their pitch in the morning. In the afternoon off they went to a retailer meeting and confidently used their freshly baked pitch to increase their distribution, even before we had a chance to put pen to paper on their identity.
A good pitch is something you can have right from the start without having to spend any precious seed capital. You will have certainly talked around it when you were developing your business idea down the pub with your collaborators. So that’s the time to write it down, hone it and try it out for size by vocalising it with your friends and family. Saying it out loud should feel exciting, natural and fresh every time you say it. If you can capture your offer in one concise paragraph that the listener gets, the up-hill struggle to start a business will get a whole lot easier. From backers to banks, retailers to customers, consultants to suppliers they will all want to hear it before they give you more of their time. You will never get to the point of sharing your presentation deck unless you’ve got past the verbal or emailed pitch stage. Hopefully, you won’t even need to resort to death by Powerpoint as you will have won them over in the corridor.
I have had the privilege being one of the judges on the Elite Business Awards again this year. I had a long list of amazing submissions to read, digest, assess and score. Their offers were strong and unique and their leaders passionate, driven and altruistic, but it took a lot of digging to find that out. An award submission is not dissimilar to marketing in terms of its goal. You want the recipient to get who you are in the shortest possible time. Judges are invested in you, but just as time pressured as your customers, so you need to be clear and concise, but often this wasn’t the case.
The first error I see in award submissions, client briefings and even our competitors’ websites is the assumption that the recipient knows who you are. You live and breathe your world – nobody else does. If you are selling cakes we get it, it’s simple and everyday. If you are selling complex fintech solutions, you have to assume that most people will not have a clue what you are talking about. Try and explain your business to your grandma, if she gets it, your customers will.
The second thing I see are offers shrouded in fluff and jargon. A big ask but write it in words a child would understand – the exercise will be beneficial, even if your 10 year old still gives you a puzzled look when you’ve finished. Oh, and absolutely no acronyms!
The third thing I see is a lack of confidence in the need to bolster the central offer with lots of added benefits which in reality only dilute the central proposition. Your business idea should stand strongly on its own and if it can’t, maybe you should go back to the drawing board.
The final bit of advice is to make your pitch memorable and repeatable. If you do, everyone you tell it to will then become your sales rep.
I say all this from experience as I have spent decades trying to capture the essence of our business, Echo. Every time I had a go at redefining it I would overcomplicate it. We had so much to say, so much to offer. We do strategy, innovation, future visioning, identity, structural design, and so on and so on. In the end, we surveyed our clients and they told us we were a strategic design consultancy. It seemed so obvious, but design is what our clients need in an everchanging world and that’s what we give them. That core idea kept our pitch simple and sweet.
