7 STEPS (AND 1 SECRET) TO A GREAT ELEVATOR PITCH THAT GETS RESULTS
No matter how great your business, however innovative your product, or superb your service, if you cannot convince others of its benefits, your business will not succeed.
(Download my Free Cheat Sheet here to get the full 7 Steps (&1 Secret) to a great Elevator Pitch).
We spend thousands on a website, hundreds on business cards and countless hours tweeting and posting on social media, and yet when it comes to speaking face to face with people about what you do, how effective are you at convincing people to buy into your business?
Your ability to communicate the benefits of your business with impact is critical to the overall success of your business, and your elevator pitch (a short summary about your product, service or idea) is the most important tool at your disposal when looking to convince an audience.
Whether you’re pursuing a prospective client, speaking at a networking breakfast, pitching to potential investors, or actually stuck in an elevator with that key contact you’ve been trying to get to a meeting for 2 years, you need a great pitch that presents your business in a compelling light.
There are many approaches to the art of persuasion, but this is the only approach that breaks the process down into the 7 key steps (& 1 Secret) to creating an effective Elevator Pitch that gets results, and that won’t make you sound like a sleazy salesperson. Every small businesses and entrepreneur needs a great one.
STEP 1: Brand the problem so they feel the pain.
“If I had 1 hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem, and then 5 minutes solving it” – Albert Einstein
The single biggest mistake that people make when pitching their business is to just launch straight into telling their audience what they do:
“Hi, I’m John from Company A, and we sell product B that does X, Y and Z. We’re the number 1 company in the UK in the industry blah blah blah…”
Question: Who cares?
Unless you give your audience a reason to care, they wont. The quickest method to get them to care is to set the context for your business by highlighting the problem (the great evil) that your business exists to solve. It is only you get your audience to understand the problem and the pain it causes (especially if this is a pain that they themselves have experienced), that they will then care that you have a product or service to solve that problem.
So, before you say anything about what you do, remember to first get them to feel the pain.
(Easier to have this as a Free PDF Download? You can get my Free Cheat Sheet by clicking here
Step 2: Define your Business as the hero
Now that you’ve made them care about the problem, you need to define your business as the hero of the hour, because if you don’t, no one else will. You need to have a go-to definition of your business that you can trot out whenever you need. This should be a short description that sums up your business in 20 words or less. But it must be more than just functional.
A good business description should satisfy 4 fundamental requirements. It should be:
clear – your audience should easily understand what your business is about
concise – keep it short and sweet so don’t exceed those 20 words
broad – a description that’s wide enough to cover everything you do without going into detail
precise – it should be specific to your business, not generalised
Step 3: Create your business villain
This next Step 3 is crucial but so often skipped over by entrepreneurs. And yet no pitch is complete without dealing with your competitors.
Even Steve Jobs in his 2007 keynote to unveil the iPhone (one of the greatest businesses pitches of all time) used this Step 3 method to devastating effect, when he
To find out how this Step 3 will transform the impact of your next pitch and to learn about Steps 4 , 5, 6, and 7 click the green button below to download my Free Elevator Pitch Cheat Sheet. You’ll also discover my final Secret Step to a great Elevator Pitch (hint – it’s the most effective, yet least used method to captivating your audience, and best of all…you already know how to do it because you’ve probably been doing it all your life).
click the button to get your Cheat Sheet
Kolarele Sonaike
Founder
The Power of Storytelling in Public Speaking – Part I
“The shortest distance between a human being and the truth is a story” Anthony de Mello
One day, a young manager was asked to give a presentation to the board of the company about a new prosthetic limb product his engineering team had developed. This product was set to revolutionise the industry, by radically improving the fit and comfort of wearing prosthetic limbs, which was one of the biggest problems for ordinary users.
It was a very personal project for him as he had grown up poor, seeing his disabled brother struggle everyday with an ill-fitting limb that his parents could not afford to replace.
Although he was an acknowledged genius when it came to product development, the young manager had always struggled with public speaking.
Determined to do a great job, he worked tirelessly on his PowerPoint presentation, slavishly creating detailed slides with impressive charts highlighting the complexity of the technology behind the new innovation, and the percentage performance improvements in efficiency of movement that his team had achieved.
He prepared comprehensive notes on cards for himself and practised daily in front of the mirror so that by the day of the presentation itself, he felt he was ready.
The board gathered, and the young manager got up to speak. But before he could put on his first slide, and say a word, the Company CEO (a formidable woman with an intolerance for waffle and a renowned ability to ask tough searching questions) interrupted him:
“So, how do we market this thing?”, she asked.
Marketing? What did he know about marketing. Surely that was down to the marketing guys with their big budgets. He was just an engineer.
But he saw from the expectant look on the faces of the CEO and the rest of the board that they were expecting an answer. He froze. Panic began to set in. What could he say? He vaguely remembered some stuff about marketing from the week they covered it during his engineering degree. Something about “satisfying customer utility” and “leveraging familiar price points”, but he hadn’t taken any interest in it then and couldn’t remember much about it now.
He decided to tell the truth.
He was sorry, he told them, but he really didn’t know anything about advertising, he was just trying to trying to solve a problem. He told them about his brother and how he had lost his arm in a car accident at a young age; how the prosthetic limb he had worn all his life was so painful and uncomfortable that it was almost worse than having no arm; that as a kid his brother would cry as he put it on everyday, but never once complained; how it broke his parents hearts that they could not afford to do anything about it.
Fighting off the tears, he told them how he had made it his life’s mission to develop something for his brother, who was one of life’s heroes; that he was proud to be working in a company that had helped him achieve his goal because the new limb was years ahead of anything else ever produced.
He showed them how the limb work, its key features and why it was such a great innovation.
“So, I’m sorry I don’t really know much about marketing”, he ended. “I’m just an engineer trying to make life better for people like my brother”.
And with that he walked out of the room, leaving behind a stunned board and CEO that hadn’t interrupted or said a word throughout his entire presentation.
Stories work. They capture the hearts and minds of your audience in a much deeper and more meaningful way than facts, figures and PowerPoint slides. Best of all, stories are far easier to deliver than straightforward presentations, but also far more effective.
For instance, did you not find yourself reading to the end of the story of the young manager because you just had to know what happened?
Find out why in the next blog post.
Coming next:
Part II – Why Storytelling Works
Part III – The Anatomy of a Great Story
‘I have a dream’ – The Greatest Speech almost never given: 50 Years On
“Tell ’em about the dream, Martin” – Mahalia Jackson
It was a perfect speech.
Almost every technique in the book was used, from anaphora (repetition of a word or phrase for emphasis), to references to the Bible and Shakespeare.
It was delivered to an audience of 250,000, which included such figures as Charlton Heston, Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr, Burt Lancaster, James Garner and Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Josephine Baker and Paul Newman, and thousands more on television.
Following the speech, Martin Luther King was marked out by the FBI, who observed that “…in the light of King’s powerful demagogic speech yesterday he stands head and shoulders above all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negroes. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security”
And yet for all of that, the single most remarkable fact about the greatest speech in modern history is that the words for which it is most famous, were not meant to be part of it at all.
King had written the speech the night before apparently (and uninspiringly) titled: ‘Normalcy, Never Again”. Significantly, the draft did not include the now iconic “I have a dream” passage, and was by all accounts a good, but not brilliant, and definitely not his best ever speech.
Certainly, the text of the draft he had written had some wonderful elements to it: “Five score years ago” reflecting the opening of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; incredibly vivid turns of phrase like “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt”; politically explosive concepts like “the fierce urgency of now”.
To those who knew him well and had seen him sermonise previously, King’s manner of delivery was somewhat formal to reflect his somewhat formal text.
But then it happened. Knowing that he had more to give and that the audience was not being captivated as it should be, his friend Mahalia Jackson, standing behind him in the group of other speakers and performers, prompted him as congregations often prompt baptist ministers.
“Tell ’em about the dream, Martin!” she shouted out. Martin heard, set aside his text, grabbed the lectern and proceeded to “go to church”.
The speech burst to life and the rest of course is very well known history:
“Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends. And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today!”
It was a passage he had used a few times before, but in the moment, in that place, on that day, it was as if he had created and given America a new sense of purpose and destiny.
He continued, fully warmed to his theme:
“And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.”
The power of his incredible oratory and ability to invest his words with deep sincerity were so moving, they still resonate powerfully 50 years on.
His ending, my personal favourite passage, was classic in its use of the technique of closing with a meaningful and apt quotation:
“… when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
At just over 1,600 words, spoken by a man without even the right to drink from the same water fountain as a 5 year old white child, the impact of this speech was electrifying and tectonic.
It was the greatest speech in modern history. Appreciated both in its time, and probably for all time.
And yet, for all the many great things that have been and will be said and done to mark that watershed moment, we should all spare a thought for Mahalia Jackson and her presence of mind to prompt her friend to rise to greatness.
But for her, we might still be living in a world without great dreams!
The Great Speech Consultancy
www.greatspeech.co
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