School of Communication Arts 2.0

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Unit Purpose and Aims

The purpose of this unit is to;

This unit will give learners the skills to create an elevator pitch for a business idea. It will get them to examine different approaches to pitching and ask them to pitch the idea to an angel, VC or entrepreneur.

Learning Outcomes

Learners will;

1. Understand what elevator pitches are and how they work.

Learners can;
1.1 Create an elevator pitch for a business idea of their own. The pitch will be based on research, discussion, editing and visual presentation.

1.2 Present an elevator pitch to an entrepreneur or business specialist and request feedback.

1.3 Describe and create several different pitches for the  same business idea using different approaches.

1.4 Take part in peer assessment of these pitches.

Learning Tools, Resources & Links

Things that will help the learner develop understanding of this unit;

Mentors – please add your ideas, examples, case studies, links to articles, videos, etc. here.

Slides:

1) How to give a VC a hard-on ?  Very useful slides by Dave McClure, Founders Fund & author of Master of 500 hats blog

What is an elevator pitch?

The concept of the elevator pitch became famous during the so-called ‘dot-com bubble’. In those days there was something of a feeding frenzy going on. Investors were keen to find hot new internet businesses to throw money at. Entrepreneurs were equally keen to pitch their wild ideas at investors in the hope of becoming wildly rich, and retiring at the age of twenty-four to a big house on a tropical island to enjoy a life devoted to Tantric sex with supermodels. The theory was that anytime might be pitch time, and often it was. The idea of the elevator pitch is simply this; should you ever find yourself in an elevator with a potential investor, you would need to be able to have pitched him by the time you reach the top floor. In a large skyscraper, maybe a couple of minutes.

Today, you don’t even have to be in the elevator…

In the present day, we recently created an elevator pitch for our own company, and it was designed to run off an iPod. (In fact any gadget with a screen, because the formats can be tailored to work on mobile phones, Blackberry, and pretty much any other hand-held media player.) It combines imagery, narrative and soundtrack. We did it for similar reasons to the dot-commers. Any time could be pitch time. We meet people at conferences, in bars, even socially at parties. There’s nothing worse than finding out that one of your colleagues met a potential client by accident and didn’t take the opportunity to pitch. And there always is an opportunity to pitch, without you even having to volunteer it. Nine times out of ten it will be when the question is asked, “So what do you do then..?”

The upside of the iPod format is that anyone in the company can fire up the gadget and give an instant elevator pitch. This way it is absolutely consistent, every time. You don’t have to rely on somebody umming and aahing their way through some lame approximation of what your business does. Consistency is good. It means that every little enquiry can be met with an optimized pitch, from a senior Director to the person who answers the phones (they meet people too…) Mobile formats also deliver viral potential. It’s easy to swap the file from phone to phone, and we find it a useful recruitment tool as well as a new business tool. It also makes your staff feel good about the company and what you do. Most people would rather tell a good story about the company they work for than a bad one. It also had one other benefit; when we first started showing this to prospects they were blown away by it. (For a company called ‘ingenuity’ it seemed so obvious that we needed to be ingenious about the tools we used to sell ourselves).  Often we would use it in preference to the dreaded Powerpoint deck, because after two minutes of scene setting we could then get into what both parties really wanted to talk about – themselves, not us.

Think about benefits, not features.

The content is the tricky bit. It is by definition a non-tailored pitch, and so the benefits will be generic. But what it does do is deliver the core message. Political parties could benefit from this. They tend to have ‘policies’ for everything, but of course nobody ever reads them (including their own people, half of the time). What they generally lack is a simple, clear statement of what they stand for. This is usually assumed to be a ‘given’, and that people somehow automatically ‘get’ what they are about. Nothing could be further from the truth.

You should do an elevator pitch not only to acquire the benefits described above, but also because it will serve as a benchmark against which to judge any future pitch you may embark upon.

Doing an elevator pitch is not as easy as you might think. Coming up with a short summary has never been easy. As long ago as 1656 Blaise Pascal wrote (you can find it in his collection “Lettres Provinciales”) that he had only written such a long letter as he had not had the leisure to write a shorter one. However, you should not take this to mean that you should start long and whittle it down. The way to do it is to start short and write it up. This is, after all, a process by which you need to bring out the bare essentials of your proposition. Who are you and what do you do? How are you demonstrably new, different or better? Why should anyone care?

These are the kind of questions you will have to address. In the case of the dot-com elevator pitch the process is made easier by the fact that the audience definition is clear. Out of that fall the requirements of this particular audience, and out of that falls the content of the pitch. When it is more general, make some decisions. Select a likely target audience. I assume this will be potential customers, but it might easily be potential investors. You can therefore make some good assumptions about what their priorities are, based on your knowledge of your current customers. The elevator pitch should match your features and benefits to their needs and requirements. As ever, stories can be a good way of communicating multiple messages in a memorable and impactful format. What are your stories – and what is your story? When you have matched what you offer to the usual requirements of most of your prospects, hopefully illustrated by a story or two, you will also need to consider the other dimension to your business; personality.

Avoid the corporate ‘personality bypass’ operation.

The ‘people buy people’ maxim is every bit as valid here as elsewhere in the pitch process. You have a personality (you do, don’t you?) so let’s communicate that. It is an asset. Some prospects will find it engaging and attractive. Others may be repelled by it. Trust me, both outcomes are valuable. Not everyone is a good match for everyone else; life simply isn’t like that. Given the importance of personal chemistry in the buying process, it is as useful to find out that a prospect does not like you as to find out that they do. Companies have wasted endless amounts of time and money on pitches over the years that have failed due to simple lack of chemistry. If only they’d known that up front they could have simply chosen not to pitch at all in many instances. Your elevator pitch should tell it like it is, because the worst case scenario is you might avoid wasting lots of effort on a pitch which will ultimately go nowhere. That’s a pretty good worst case. By being up front with your personality you may also attract buyers that might previously not have considered you, generating a new pitch opportunity in unexpected circumstances. By incorporating the personality of your business into the elevator pitch you will end up with something unique, rather than the kind of thing any of your competitors might have come up with. It will be a unique blueprint, the DNA of your own business.

Telling a good story.

So what should be in your elevator pitch? This is impossible to answer without knowing a lot about your company – each one should be unique. As a general rule of thumb, it again starts with putting yourself in the shoes of your audience. Assume they know nothing about you. You now have two minute to get them from ground zero to being interested. What would turn you on? You’d need to know the basics about the company (facts and figures, how long established, turnover, employees, key skills, even small things like the location). You don’t need to start with this however. I would suggest you end with it.

Start instead where the prospect would like to start. And that’s probably going to be focused on his or her challenge areas. So kick off with what you have achieved, and for who – make the success stories short and prominent, the customer endorsements loud and clear. Make it a brief and rapid sweep through a raft of successes (you may hopefully prompt further enquiry on the back of one of them – and then you are already armed with a clue as to what their needs are). Also talk about how you have achieved these successes – is there some process which underlies it, some methodology? Maybe it is a product-led pitch so make them your heroes, but still focused on the benefits to the buyers. Prospects will want to know not just the generic benefits of what you do, but most importantly they will want to know why you? Do you have better people? Do you have better processes? Do you have a better product, a killer application, a fabulous customer service record, are you more environmentally friendly, have you won awards for what you do? All of this is material that should make the cut. Be shameless, be proud of yourselves. And remember that your own staff are a significant part of the target audience for the output. Yes they will want to hear that their own company is great, but they may be on the front line in that very first encounter so they had better believe that what you’ve come up with is true! Any slight sign of skepticism will not go unnoticed.

What we end up with is a recipe that includes content, tone and style, and all of these must be as finely tuned to what you know about your audience as you can make them. If your elevator pitch is true to your business, it may help you better understand what attracted your customers to you in the first place. This is where the ‘benchmarking’ comes in. Your elevator pitch will have forced you to be very clear about your benefit story. It will have forced you to prioritise, and maybe exclude some of the more peripheral bits and pieces entirely. It will also force you to be clear about your audience and where they’re coming from. This is a spectacularly useful exercise.

Decide what you do (and what you don’t do).

We have worked with creative agencies on many occasions where we have asked them to give us their elevator pitch. Often they can’t. The worst examples are where an agency says, “Well, we can help in lots of different areas”. This creates a pitching problem for us. Buyers are seldom in the market for a company that can do a range of things; usually they are looking around because there is one thing which they need, and they cannot get it from their incumbent. It’s easy to sell a specialist service, but much harder to sell a generalist. This discipline forces you to make decisions, identify priorities, and strip out the non-essentials. More importantly it focuses you on your customers. We then advise these businesses to go back and re-think what they really do. Often they will be thinking in terms of their own discipline – we do media, or digital, or PR, for example.

In another market an agency I once worked for advised a maker of DIY tools, mainly drills, to consider what business they were really in. Their view was that they were in the business of making drills. Not unreasonable you might presume. The agency’s suggestion was that maybe they were in the business of making holes. The impact of that shift in perspective was dramatic. From a point of view that was self-centric, which completely came from them, they had moved to a customer-centric view of why they existed.

(Extract from Brilliant Pitch, by Shaun Varga, (c) Pearson Prentice Hall 2009)