An elevator pitch should be 30-60 seconds and powerfully communicate who you are, your background, what your company does, and the problem it solves.
An elevator pitch should be 30-60 seconds and powerfully communicate who you are, your background, what your company does, and the problem it solves. It needs to excite people to learn more about your business, you, and the market.
So, at the end of the day, an elevator pitch is 30 to 60 seconds. You don’t want to go more than that. In those 30 to 60 seconds, you’ve got to make it so powerful that someone is going to be super excited to ask you more questions about the business, about you, about the market, whatever that is. So, let’s get to it. The first section is who you are. Here, when you’re talking about who you are, you want to talk about what your background is, perhaps the why behind, in first place, you got behind doing this business. I think this is something where you want to also talk about your track record in what you’ve done in the past, and how successful you were. Things like that are some of the areas where you want to highlight and bring it to life in that initial piece of the elevator pitch. The next part of the elevator pitch is what you do. Here, you want to get into detail into what you’re
doing with the business. Who are you serving? Who are your customers? What is the problem that you’re solving that your company is addressing a gap in the market? That is essentially the way that you are highlighting what you’re doing as part of your elevator pitch. The next part of your elevator pitch is understanding or showcasing that you understand the clients that you’re targeting. When it comes to the clients or customers that you’re targeting with your company, with your business, here you want to get into detail. You want to talk about data like what’s the age of that client? Is it female or male? What is the geographic location? Those are the different things that you want to cover so that whoever you’re telling the elevator pitch to, they get an understanding that you’ve done your homework, and you really understand who you’re trying to go after to be your own customers. The
next part of the elevator pitch is to explain what makes you different. Here, what you want to do is really set yourself apart. There may already be some direct competitors, some indirect competitors, but there is a certain value proposition, or a certain way in which you’re executing that is making you be better, faster, and quicker than any other solution out there. So, this is what you want to highlight here. The last part of the elevator pitch is to grab their attention — the attention grabber. Here, what you want to do is you want to finish it on a very high note and with the idea of triggering follow-up questions. You want to finish it on a high note, welcoming them to ask you any type of question on your business because the more questions they get to ask, the more excited that they’re going to be. With that being said, let’s throw in an example of what an elevator pitch could be.
In terms of examples, what you could say is, “Hi. My name is [your name]. I am the founder of [your company name]. What we’re offering is [your product or services] to address [your value proposition that you’re bringing to market].” Then, you go into talking about the competition, and you say, “Unlike [competition names], what we’re doing or what makes us really different is that we’ve recently accomplished [whatever milestones you want to throw in here].” Then, you go into the Call to Action, and you go with something like, “Right now, we’re in the process of raising [your capital amount], and we are welcoming the conversations with any strategic partners that could help us to get things to the next level.” That’s exactly how you close the elevator pitch.