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Elevator Pitching: Better than it Sounds

June 15th, 2010 | Small Business | No Comments »

We’ve been talking to a lot of folks about KikScore these days: potential partners, press, associations and investment types.  They all want two things: (a) a “deck” — i.e. Power Point presentation; and (b) and “Elevator Pitch”  that they can carry back to others.  I’ve already made clear my general dislike for Power Point, but I think the Elevator Pitch is a good thing.  Why?  Well let me list the reasons:

1.  It forces you to think differently about your product.  When you’re working on a service or product, it’s all about adding features.  You’re constantly expanding the functionality in an effort to be the “best” or provide a more bundled solution.  The goal is to make sure customers can’t live without you and won’t stray for some piece of functionality that they may want from another source.  The Elevator Pitch makes you get away from listing out features and functionality.  Instead it makes you describe what problem you’re actually solving.  And if you’re not solving a problem, and this problem isn’t evident from the short pitch, you probably don’t have a very compelling service or product.

2.  Helps you with Messaging.  You’ve got to describe your service in a way that is free from industry buzz words or meaningless technical jargon.  The Elevator Pitch requires a generalist message.  For it to work, you’ve got to be clear, concise and persuasive.  We’ve already thought of some new marketing hooks while putting together our 2 lines of description on our service.

3.  Makes you think of what’s important to others.  You’re so involved in creating the product and serving customers, you sometimes forget what’s important to others (e.g. “what’s your business model”, “is it scalable”).  The pitch makes you think of things that you normally don’t consdier day to day.

Now the only question is how long really is an elevator ride.  Do you have any advice on the Elevator Pitch?

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