How to create a winning elevator pitch that hooks and sells?

An elevator pitch is an answer to the question "What you do?" which you can tell a person in an elevator so that he understands your business before you are parted away. It is essentially a 30 seconds pitch of your business. Whether you are having a conversation with an Investor, or a potential customer or with someone who is just interested to know about your business, it is the hook or the attention grabber. It is your opening.

Often we do not work scientifically towards this pitch. Explaining a business in 10 pages is easy, in 15 seconds is tough. For this 15 seconds, you may have to put a six month's work.

There are many tutorials and videos online and books, that talks about how to make good elevator's pitch. But while I started failing to answer "What you do?" in a way that attracts people's attention, I had to really dig very hard, refer several materials, learn a lot of tools, talk to a lot of people before getting this "somehow right".

In this article, I want to share with you a systematic approach for creating a winning elevator pitch.

Strategy for Elevator's pitch creation.

Elevator pitch or any other pitch about a business is always about stories. An elevator pitch is just the trailer of the story, like the plot of a script.

A business story is a hero's journey. You are not a hero. Your client is. It is a story that introduces your client as a hero and his problem as the villain. You help the hero to defeat the problem with your solution. Then there is a happy ending. And just like any other stories, a business story should not be logical. It should be emotional.

But to write a compelling business story, you have to gather every detail about the characters, the villain in particular. Remember,

A Great Villain Sells a Story like nothing else.

i) Write down the answer to the following problems.

1) What problem you are solving?

2) What is your solution?

3) Who are your customers? (Nailed down to their gender, age, profession, income, geography, vehicles they own, their qualification, everything that you can know)

4) Your customer's problem.

5) Where your product will take your customers, and how important the new position is for the customer. (this answer has to come from your customer only. So go out and meet them.)

6) How much your customer is ready to pay for your product(at least at a minimum level)

7) What are your competitors? (Well, read the question carefully. It is not WHO, what. So if you are trying to solve the problem of food delivery, your competitors may be cooking at home. If you are trying to solve the problem of patient EHR, google forms maybe your competitor). One unique thing that separates you from competitors.

8) Three unique knowledge about the business that you have discovered. (If you ask the problems of modern education, everyone can say, well teachers are not well trained like our times, schools loot money, blah blah. Everyone knows these. These are not unique. Unique is if you knew that most of the students bring Apples in their short break. Most nursery teachers also have their children studying in the same school)

9) Your current team, in a way that each member's experience and qualities weighs your pitch.

10) How much money you need, what you are going to do with that money, where will that money take you?

11) What drives you to work in the venture. (Not the vague story, but something at a deep spiritual level)

12) Write 3 stories from the historical perspective that can explain your venture.

13) Write 3 short stories from fiction that can explain your venture.

14) Gather some jokes, humor stories, on startup founders, your customers' problems.

ii) Evaluate and Iterate

But here is the catch.

None of the above answers can have more than one sentence and more than 15 words.

And here is how you know if you are prepared or not.

Find some kids between age of 4-10 and explain to them about your venture. If you can understand that they have understood, then anyone should understand. If not, you are not investment ready, keep iterating.

Having made sure that your Kid Audience understands the venture, make sure that other not so talented people also do. (Kids today are way too smarter than a typical IT professional. No offense here for IT professional though)

Book few Ola autos for short trip, explain auto drivers about your venture. Go to a coffee day, explain to the girl there about your venture. When you go to purchase your grocery or vegetables, pitch them your venture. Pitch to liftman, pitch to canteen boy, pitch to Swiggy delivery boy. If you are married, pitch to your mother in law. If you are not married, pitch to your grandmother. Pitch to your house maid.

Remember, people love giving an opinion. In their mind, they are a rational and wise person. So just say "Hey, my friend is starting a new business. I just want to know what you think about it?"

This will make your pitch so good and so polished that you would despise your earlier pitch. You would know a diverse group's understanding of the product. When you asses how much they understand, you would be surprised to know how this process makes your business stand out from 100s of others who are just polluting PPT with digital noise and talks with their imaginative noise.

Here is a model for you for the business pitch

For those ___(Your Customers)___ ,who were looking for a solution to____(the problem)___, Our product ____(ProductName)___ provides_______(your solution)_____, unlike our competitors like ______(one Competitor product)_______, which is _____(their drawback wrt your advantage), so that customer can_______(his gain after using the product)___.

Example:-

1. For those men in a relationship, who were looking to amaze their lover by proposing in a unique way, Our product GaanPeon provides a private artist performance platform Unlike the current way of proposing with a ring in a hotel, which is Outdated and doesn't impress the girls anymore due to lack of a memorable ambiance unlike one that we create So that the man can win the heart of the girl and have a happy relationship.

(Let's assume that GaanPeon is a B2B singer and artist booking platform for private parties. But instead of saying it that way, you are taking one use case and explaining the business).

2. For those mothers, who always cried for her son in the hostel while cooking great food, Our product, MotherBox is a unique tiffin box that can preserve the cooked food for 5 days and helps mothers to courier her cooked food to her son Unlike current situation where mothers do not cook special dishes as her son can't eat so as to make mothers happy and fathers happier.

3. For those lady PhD scholars, who are suffering to complete their research due to lack of time and support in college and at home, Our company Integrated Ideas offers a full research team and a platform for her so that she can easily complete her research, working alongside the team, unlike some of our competitors who unethically sell readymade work to her putting her degree at risk So as to make her happy by enabling her to spend more time with family and still completing a quality research faster.

So what you understand from this? Your pitch should be a business story that has to have a real problem and real character whom people can correlate themselves with. This is also your elevator's pitch, that triggers an emotional reaction to the listener, that has a deep problem people can identify with and a solution that people can understand. This is also your hook for conversation. Once you hook someone's attention, they will want to know more about it. The pitch should have extreme emotions in it, like Sorrow, Worried, Devastating, Angry, Smile, Laugh, Happy. Your pitch must and should not have technical jargon like AI, IoT, Machine Learning, Blockchain, Holographic Encryption, Virtual Reality. Not that technical terms in pitch can not win you an investment, but it can't certainly help you to win the respect of kids and your maid and your auto driver which in due time you will realize is a bad thing.

And, you can really make the listener seduced to your venture if you can follow the elevator's pitch with a one-line joke or humor story(after 5-10 sec pause), better if it involves a popular well known public figure.

Followup story example:-

1) Everyone is not as talented as Einstien who could himself play Violine while proposing his girlfriend.

2) Every mother is not as lucky as Edison's mother. She could focus on Edison because Edison never went to the hostel.

3) Everyone is not as lucky as Madam Curie to have a caring and knowledgable husband like Pierre Curie to support her.

IMPORTANT:- DO NOT USE 'YOU KNOW', 'UM','AHA','YOU SEE',

Take time between words, a pause is better than "You Know". Practice different voice tonality and modulation for pitching this pitch. Bring all your energy and passion into the pitch. Bring that passion reflected your eyes. Infect people with your energy, seduce them with your voice and make them want to know more about you.

Your expected outcome from this Elevator Pitch is that the listener should say "Oh, wow. Interesting. Tell me more about it." If you hear "Good", "Ok", etc without "tell me more about it", your pitch needs work.

All the best with your venture and pitching. Good Luck.

Disclaimer:

There are no right or wrong ways of pitching. This article is just another perspective(my perspective). You do not have to follow this. This is a mechanics I developed after countless failures and frustrations with my pitch. So shared, thinking this might help some of you to reduce the number of failures. This is my method, my perspective, and my mechanics. If you have better mechanics or suggestions, please do share.