An elevator pitch is a unique presentation form that is used to persuade an audience to take a specific action. It is concise, conversational, and unforgettable. The idea behind the term is that you should be able to present a clear idea or pitch within the length of time it takes to travel in an elevator. Ready, set, go.

Perfecting Your Elevator Pitch. As a young professional or college student, you must get comfortable with speaking about yourself and your accomplishments in a quick and concise manner. Your elevator pitch should get others excited about you by summing up your unique qualities in 30-60 seconds. Communicate Your USP. The USP, or “Unique Selling Proposition,” is perhaps the most important element of your elevator pitch. A USP is a statement that concisely outlines how you, your business, or your product is different from that of your competition— or “the kicker” in any good sales pitch, as we like to think of it.

Knowing how to present a meaningful elevator pitch is a crucial skill in the business world. The way your pitch is received could make or break the message that you want to deliver. The following suggestions can apply to any situation where you would be presenting information. Whether you work in sales, management or marketing in any industry, having the ability to pitch an idea succinctly and effectively will get you far.

In this post we’ve broken down the elevator pitch into three phases: Planning, presenting, and practicing. By focusing on each of these presentation phases you’ll be able to develop a well-rounded pitch that is sure to be memorable!

Plan

Planning your pitch prior to presenting not only allows for you to be and appear more comfortable, but also ensures that you’re getting the information that you need to convey. Just like a solid business plan or sales proposal, having a great sense of direction for your elevator pitch can put you one step ahead.

Understand Your Audience
Having a clear understanding of your audience is crucial when developing a presentation. Knowing what language to use and having the proper tone of voice can make or break how people receive the message you’re providing. Doing background research of who you’re talking to will help you know whether to keep your pitch casual or opt for a more formal approach.

Always consider how your audience will react. Will some light humor reach them better? Or maybe numbers and statistics will make more of an impact?

Have a Clear Objective
Before you even begin designing the pitch make sure you know what your main objective is. Are you requesting funding? Are you trying to get a client to book with you? Decide early so that you can clearly ask for what you need..

It’s important to have that objective be very concise and clear. It’s best to have one clear request, rather than trying to fit too many ideas into your pitch. This will help the presentation from wandering off topic and overwhelming your audience, or worse, causing confusion. The message your audience leaves with should be the message you intended!

Know Your Presentation Inside and Out
Be educated on what you’re discussing and stay flexible. Elevator pitches could happen at anytime anywhere. Prioritize your information and know your subject. You should never recite words right off a page, instead train yourself to be capable of discussing your pitch. This will exude confidence and prove that you know what you’re talking about. If you come across as awkward, unprepared or nervous, this may be misconstrued as unprofessional or amateur. A confident speaker breeds a comfortable and more-receptive audience.

Dare to Make It Personal
Somewhere within your pitch, be sure to add a personal component. You can do this be including a personal anecdote, relating a personal story, or just allowing yourself to be open and vulnerable to your audience. This is not easy to do! The best way to be relaxed, personal and emotional in a pitch environment is to practice, practice, practice. The more time you spend with the material, the less you have to worry about WHAT you will say, so you can relax and focus on the HOW and WHY of your pitch. Enthusiasm and inspiration are contagious!

Branding 101: Perfecting Your Elevator Pitch Sample

Present

Use Visuals
Having a visual component in your pitch will allow you to reserve a spot in your audience’s memory. This can be the item you’re selling, a prop, or a keynote. It can even be a hand gesture or a sound! Nancy Duarte calls these S.T.A.R. moments (Something They’ll Always Remember).

Want to give your audience something to play with? Try featuring your service or product using TrueTour®, and enjoy how easy it is to create the Wow Factor. You can even easily pull up your TrueTour on your mobile device (just in case your pitch takes place on an actual elevator or on the go).

Provide Data
During presentations providing hard data and facts can help your case tremendously. It gives your audience an idea of the proposal’s direction and how it can affect them. Make sure to also be able to support any ideas with statistics if questions come up!

Engage with the Audience
Give your audience your full attention so that they will give it back. You can do this by simply making eye contact, asking questions, or having them interact with an element in the presentation. Avoid boring them and keep them listening. Remember, your audience is the hero, not you.

Stay True to your Brand
This is a great tip for anywhere your brand is represented and definitely one to keep in mind when creating your elevator pitch. This can mean much more than simply arranging the design components to follow your branding guidelines. It also refers to how you communicate your points and engage with people. Use this as a way to show off your company’s personality and culture.

Don’t forget to Present Yourself
This will entirely depend on the situation, but always remember to present yourself appropriately, including how you are dressed and your brand-appropriate tone of voice and language. Use your best judgement here. If you’re not sure, it’s always safe to dress semi or business formal for a scheduled meeting.

Practice

We mentioned this briefly above, but this is so important, it warrants repeating! As with anything in life, you only get better with practice! Even if you’re extremely skilled at “winging it,” it never hurts to review your presentation ahead of time. The practice phase is one that should always be ongoing as well. Always seek out ways that you can improve and try to stay present in what’s currently happening in the world.

Practice Aloud
Practice your speech to yourself a few times, especially out loud so you can get the hang of your tone and flow. Try not to memorize it word by word because you might get caught off guard and you could easily find yourself flustered or struggling to get back on track.

Ask for Constructive Criticism
Present in front of colleagues or family. By practicing in front of someone you’re comfortable with, you can ease into it and they can offer constructive criticism that you might not have caught yourself.

Be Prepared for Questions
Create a list of possible questions that could arise from your audience and prepare your answers. A good way to do this is to review your pitch outline and put yourself in your audience’s shoes. You can also gently spin answers into messages you control, when you are well-prepared with potential talking points and follow-up questions.
For a bit of elevator pitch inspiration we’ve embedded this episode from “Get Off The Couch” by theSkimm. We love how each episode surprises the presenters and keeps them on their toes! Do you think you would be able to deliver your elevator pitch to theSkimm?

We hope our suggestions offer you a good foundation to design your elevator pitch. Do you have any additional tips that have made a positive impact on the way you present content? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

Imagine a mosquito buzzing incessantly near your ear. Your instinctive reaction would be to snap your hands at it. To silence it. Contrast it to the sweet rendition of a Mockingbird. You would pause to hear it.

As an entrepreneur, your elevator pitch needs to take the mockingbird route. An effectively delivered elevator pitch could make you an overnight millionaire. During your pitches, you are selling your great idea to a bunch of investors who would willingly part with their money for the next great startup idea.

Most fledgling struggling startups, which later became unicorns, roared their way to success banking on two factors – a great product idea and a persuasive elevator pitch. Both are indispensable for each other’s survival.

Yet, plenty of founders are unable to master this crucial art linked to the survival of their startups. They melt into background noise as other better crafter pitches make their mark.

Not all great startup pitches result in funding, but it sure increases chances of catching the attention of investors. It helps build networks, it helps your product gain awareness and traction.

Here are a few simple steps to consistently deliver the perfect elevator pitch!

Branding 101: Perfecting Your Elevator Pitch Examples

1. Creating the perfect pitch deck

Simply put your pitch deck is your prop. It complements your elevator pitch speech. It is used to make your message more impactful to the audience and aids in memory retention. It is a well-known fact that visual memory sticks far longer than the auditory memory in humans. Our brains are wired to let information flow in from one ear and throw it out of another. But visuals stick, especially the good ones and leave a lasting impact of your brand.

Which would be more impactful? Someone saying that 95% of the Indian population does not have Electronic Health Record or someone showing you the same in a visual.

The number of slides in a pitch deck depends entirely on the length of the elevator pitch. Ideally, for a 2-minute pitch, there should not be more than 3 or 4 slides on your deck.

The information on it should be clean, simple, to-the-point and add value to your brand. The slide on the screen should resonate with the content of the elevator speech.

A startup pitch deck is only as good as the elevator speech you have prepared. Else it will just be a set of beautifully designed slides with no lasting impact.

2. Writing The Perfect Elevator Pitch Speech

There are many components in preparing the Elevator pitch:

I.The Opening Statement

“The new Tesla Roadster is faster than a Ferarri and more efficient than a Prius.” – Elon Musk, Founder of Tesla Inc.

This kind of opening statement by Elon Musk while pitching the Tesla Roadster is designed to pique the interest of the audience immediately. Remember, generally, elevator pitches do not last more than a couple of minutes. Thus, it is essential to reign in the audience’s attention immediately.

Nothing better than a provocative statement to cause the audience to sit up. You might not have Musk’s profile, but a stirring opening statement will induce curiosity, most likely skepticism, and some eye rolling. But, your statement has done its job. It has awakened even the most droopy-eyed investor in the room.

II. Back up Your Opening Statement

Now it is your job to back up what you have said in your provocative opening statement to avoid embarrassing yourself and looking like a fool.

Your content should address:

• What your product does
  

• What is the existent problem your product/service is going to solve
  

• Why your product is different from other existing solutions (current market scenario)

Branding 101: Perfecting Your Elevator Pitch Example

• What impact has your product already made in the market (Data and metrics related to revenue, number of clients, number of units sold etc.)
  

• The goal, specific targets, and vision of the company going forward

• The ballpark figure as to how much funds you hope to raise from investors and what you are going to do with the money
  

3. The Deck should be a Complement, not a Distraction

This is where your props or slides help you a lot. The slides should illustrate all the above points in sync with your speech. But remember do not embed too much textual information on the slides. Have the numbers, data, and images on the screen.

At all times, you need to ensure that you are the subject and not the slides. You need to guide the audience’s attention to the slides when you want them to go there. At all times, their attention should be focussed on you.You, your product, and your vision are the heroes of your story here, not your slides. You need to make the investors believe in you. For that, they need to hear what you have to say and their attention should be solely focussed on you.

Branding 101: Perfecting Your Elevator Pitch Template

Have a look at one of the Airbnb slides from its pitch deck illustrating this perfectly:

4. Perfect Your Delivery

What do all the best speeches have in common? Apart from great content, the speaker’s delivery flow appears to be natural, unflustered, and unhurried with pauses at the correct time. The pause is important because it gives the audience the time to digest all the information that you are throwing at them. Especially, if your audience is a room full of investors whom you are trying to pitch, you better give them that time to digest your great idea.

Elevator pitches are short 1-2 minutes affairs. Yes, time is a premium so you need to speak fast to get all your content across. But there is a difference between speaking fast and hurrying through the content.

When you hurry through the content you sound incoherent, expressionless, you will definitely miss out on certain words and your sentences sound incomplete. Your body language goes for a toss, you sound flustered and do not evoke any confidence in your audience who are now bored. No investor is going to part funds for your idea.

However, you can still speak fast and be crystal clear about your goals and ideas and keep your audience invested.

Check out this investor pitch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6O98o2FRHw

This is in many ways the perfect elevator pitch. He does not have a pitch deck because he does not need it. Instead, he uses a prop, the coffee cup on which they help clients advertise. He speaks at a rapid rate but at no point does he seem to lack coherency or flow. Overall, he speaks fast, but there are moments when he slows down to emphasize for impact.

For example when he especially emphasizes that their client’s advertisements are exposed to their customers for “ Two Thousand (short pause) .. Two Hundred (short pause) and 20 seconds on an average.” The bait has been laid successfully. The audience is eager to know what kind of advertisement gives such massive exposure to a prospective customer base.

He effectively plays around with his choice of words as well. He could have used 37 minutes instead of “Two Thousand Two Hundred and Twenty Seconds”. However, the latter is way more impactful because it allows him to emphasize with pauses, driving home his point further. His follow-up statement, “We put your brand in their hands” is the powerful pivotal moment of any great speech which emphasizes that he is in total control mode at the moment. The speech is a winner already. He uses the words “37 minutes” later in his elevator speech when his audience is lapping up every word that he says.

5. Practice Practice Practice

The way you construct and deliver the elevator speech is vital to the success of getting funding for your great idea or product.

Every entrepreneur has to furnish and hone his/her public speaking skills. While some people might take to it naturally and have a flair for it, most have to deal with stage fright and nerves. How do you overcome this? We all know the answer. There is only one way. The time and tested trusted method since the birth of civilization – Practice Practice Practice!

The fear of public speaking is fairly common. In fact, it would be abnormal not to have it. Most people fear public speaking even more than death! So you are not alone.

The only magic solution is to practice your elevator pitches in front of the mirror, in front of your friends, your co-founders, and record yourself to see if you are improving on a daily basis.

Maybe you are pressed for time and you might feel that daily practice is an awful waste of time. Think again because you might be loosing out on a great deal of funding capital!

Think of the elevator pitch in dollar terms. Every time you practice, you increase your chances of delivering a perfect elevator pitch on the D-Day resulting in huge investment rounds. This could be the launchpad for the next unicorn in the making. And all it takes is a bit of daily discipline and freeing up your calendar a bit for public speaking practice.

So great cracking now and follow these 5 steps to craft your perfect pitch and win more business and investment for your brand. Are there other strategies that have worked for you when it comes to designing and delivering the perfect elevator pitch? Feel free to pitch it to us at [email protected]