Introducing The "Elevator Question" For Entrepreneurs
Michael Skok
Founding Partner at Underscore VC, Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School
Are you an entrepreneur who struggles with your "elevator pitch" ? (Click to Tweet)
You're not alone!
Most entrepreneurs start with an overly verbose attempt to cram every catchy buzzword they can think of into an insanely long sentence that requires them to draw an enormously long breath in advance, just to get it out!
(Yes, I just did the same to that sentence on purpose.)
Should you care?
Yes, you absolutely should. Most entrepreneurs find themselves needing to give their elevator pitch repeatedly, unexpectedly, and in the most unlikely circumstances. After all, we can engineer some pitch situations but we can't control them all (Click to Tweet). When chance affords itself we need to strike!
So what's the deal with the elevator?
It's an old metaphor, yet it also happens in reality. You're alone in an elevator. The doors open and in steps the person you've always dreamed of pitching. Your dream potential partner, co-founder, VC or ______ (you fill in the blank). Your heart pounds as you realize you've got just 3 floors to the ground. It's now or never. You take a deep breath and pounce.
3 . . .
2 . . .
1
The doors open.
What just happened ?!
I don't know, and neither will you if you try making a pitch in that fateful and time limited ride and that's the point. There are so many assumptions you're making before you even start. Is the person ready, willing, or even able to hear your pitch, let alone interested? Well, how about starting right there: "Hi! May I ask you a question?"
At least you have a 50/50 shot with this approach. And if you get a "yes", then of course you've got to have your real question ready.
Introducing the "ELEVATOR QUESTION" for entrepreneurs
Instead of an elevator pitch for your venture, think what "elevator question" you could ask that would be so compelling your recipient would just HAVE TO ask to hear your fuller pitch? (Click to Tweet) Now the tables are turned, they're asking you for time so they can listen. Get ready for a dramatically different response.
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Build your question(s) up in this way...
As you can tell this will lead you to being able to make an appointment if you've posed the right questions. In the process you've introduced the 4 key elements of any pitch that you will need to make at that follow on meeting: why, problem, how, who.
Why = what's your purpose
Problem = key to establish the need / opportunity / potential
How = explain how you solved the problem uniquely well
Who = who is on your team (that is passionate about your purpose, particularly advantaged to understand the problem, and how you have solved it uniquely well.)
This will all set you up for a perfect pitch - something you can read more about from my Harvard Innovation Lab workshop here.
If you still need more help, here are a few ideas for your opening elevator question:
You get the point. It's a simple concept. And it's applicable in many other ways in your startup, such as in sales or business development qualification. So ask your sales and BizDev people what's helping them qualify and then listen and adapt it for your Elevator Questions. As usual, practice makes perfect so try it on everyone you can until finally people are just begging to hear more.
What have you got to lose? A lot, actually. A lot of assumptions -- and a likely unwieldy rushed long elevator pitch that falls on deaf ears.
So go ahead, try figuring out your elevator questions - you might be surprised at the results ;-)
Share this if it works for you.?
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At Underscore VC, Michael and his team partner with daring entrepreneurs to invest in founders and build?from inception to market leaders. As a former entrepreneur turned VC, Michael has backed and built teams that have created billions of dollars of value focusing on large, market-changing technologies such as Cloud Computing, IoT and Big Data as well as disruptive business models such as Open Source and SaaS. Current representative investments include?Acquia, Cazena,?Demandware?(NYSE:DWRE),?Mautic and Salsify.
Follow Michael on?LinkedIn,?Twitter @mjskok, his?website,?and in his Harvard Innovation Lab class,?Startup Secrets. Follow Underscore VC on the web and Twitter @underscore.vc.
Strategy professional with experience in market research and engineering. I've partnered with executives and founders on growth, profitability, fundraising, due diligence, and transformation.
7 年Hey Michael Skok - thanks for referring to the article. It would be great if you can add a real / real-type example of whom you found did this right.
CEO DToSS Consulting & Director H2m AYUSH
7 年I have become your fan recently after listening a few of your videos. Do you care to look at some high impact innovative early stage startup to mentor and fund, outside of HBS community ?
Inventing what the world dearly needs
8 年@ Michael Skok: Let’s put this to a real-world test, not on an elevator, but on LinkedIn, which is precisely where investors should meet innovators such as myself. Earlier today, before I saw this article, I posted two comments in response to what you said about listening to customers. I wrote: “I also advocate listening to customers, but people in the 1800s weren’t beating Edison’s door down with requests for electric lights. The Next Big Thing typically arises elsewhere. True example: After a year of building prototypes and learning from them, I developed a way to replace horsepower and steel with ingenuity. My way is faster, much less expensive, virtually silent, has zero pollution, and requires almost no maintenance. To my knowledge, this is the first time in history that something without an engine or motor can outperform today’s best machinery costing thousands of dollars, typically with at least 35 horsepower. (Sorry I can’t yet say what it does, and how it does it, in a public forum.)” The video I took would quickly (within seconds) convince any investor that my idea works well, but after years on LinkedIn mentioning other innovations, I concluded that investors must think us ordinary users are so bereft of good ideas you’re wasting your time reading or replying to our comments; I don’t recall a single VC responding to a commenter. Based on the rarity of influencers or other big shots interacting with readers who take time out of their equally busy lives to comment, investors seemingly think their articles are one-way conduits of information, not potentially two-way dialogues that might benefit them. So who gets a chance to make a figurative elevator pitch? Now it gets interesting. I will preface the rest of my comment with two quotes from Peter Thiel: “The smartphones that distract us from our surroundings also distract us from the fact that our surroundings are strangely old: only computers and communications have improved dramatically since midcentury.” “We expected jetpacks, but we got 140 characters.” Consequently, when I turn my computer off, life is virtually the same as it was decades ago (other than inventions I conceived), but when I turn it on, life is worse: the net effect of the ‘Net is wasting time with nothing to show for it for almost everyone. Phenomenal amounts of time—gone! Not a penny of profit nor another year of life, with virtually no help making life in the real world markedly better. How many digital innovations transform life and fulfill Larry Page’s toothbrush test (a product or service people need and use frequently)? Many time-wasters are used, few are needed, and precisely none have transformed life in the real world. We’re awash in largely trivial innovation that add up to zero or worse, often enriching their innovators but impoverishing users who pay to fritter away their lives. I saw a list of 144 present tech leaders, all of whom combined haven’t made my life 1% better. Contrast this with an equal number of past innovators and the scant value of modern innovation becomes clear: subtract just one of them, such as Thomas Edison or James Harrison (refrigeration), and our lives would be nothing like they are today. Innovation once made lives demonstrably better in striking ways; now it’s often just fluff giving users new ways to waste time and squander their potential. I have some digital innovations (including one that Google would love to have) but focus primarily on improving the real world that Silicon Valley has largely ignored—thus we have millions of websites and apps but not even dozens of products that significantly improve everyday life (to anyone who disagrees: you and I have substantially different conceptions of what qualifies as significant). I’m determined to change that: my top twenty ideas alone would make the world a remarkably better place. After millions of apps and websites failed to significantly improve the world (thus explaining why we have problems our grandparents couldn’t have imagined), it isn’t realistic to expect the next million or two will amount to more than a hill of beans. Wise investors should fundamentally rethink their strategy to identify innovation talent, which is their foremost challenge and the one that really separates the men from the boys. As the famous Elbert Hubbard noted, “There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.” Let’s examine an actual example of how smart investors find innovators—is Google smart enough for you? They adore Silicon Valley’s infamously required “warm intros,” which Carlos Bueno pilloried in “The next thing Silicon Valley needs to disrupt big time: its own culture.” The presumption is that their old boys’ club can think of everything, and the rest of us think of nothing. This too often results in meritorious ideas going nowhere but wackadoodle ones being funded. Example: the Juicero: a $700 juicer that MotherJones.com called “a great way to make juice even more wasteful and expensive.” Doug Evans, the Juicero entrepreneur who “persuaded top investors [including Google Ventures] to throw their money at one of the most enigmatic start-ups in years,” implied that “what makes Juicero so special is not quantifiable by conventional science” by saying that “Not all juice is equal. How do you measure life force? How do you measure chi?” The burning question on the minds of innovators hoping to get their feet in a Silicon Valley door (that is often closed to everyone lacking a “warm intro”) is, ‘How did someone thinking of life force and chi do it?’ Evans “got an introduction to a partner at Kleiner Perkins [Amol Deshpande] through a vegan fashion designer who knew someone at the Humane Society who knew them.” I don’t have time to waste on such hit-or-miss networking. Neither does the world, which is burdened by a long list of problems I’ve solved or mitigated. Here’s one more: I discovered a safe way to quell hunger that enabled me to go from being so fat I couldn’t see my feet when I stood up to having a 30-inch waist. I offered to give Google technology to make its search vastly better; no response so far, but don’t hold your breath waiting for them to realize that idea meritocracies are better than insular networking any day. I have a working demo of my technology to improve search (general Web à la Google or shopping à la Amazon, which really needs it: their search is nails-on-a-chalkboard annoying and pathetically feeble). Common-sense principles of ethics and just plain doing the right thing suggest that innovation gatekeepers should listen to Mary Maxwell Gates, mother of Bill Gates. Speaking to Harvard University new grads in 2007, he said: “A few days before my wedding, she [my mother] hosted a bridal event, at which she read aloud a letter about marriage that she had written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer at the time, but she saw one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at the close of the letter she said: ‘From those to whom much is given, much is expected.’” That echoes what President Kennedy said at Vanderbilt University, which reflected the Bible’s Parable of the Faithful Servant: “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.” Those gatekeepers found time and money for Juicero, Theranos, and other questionable ideas, but don’t have time to watch a short demonstration of technologies that would make the world a better place. In medical school I was taught that if one can help but does not, it is an ethical transgression. Another dot to connect: a basic principle of economics: opportunity cost. By spending money on X, it can’t be spent on Y or Z; the fortune invested in harebrained ideas could have instead funded valuable innovations that tangibly improve lives. Until investors implement meritocratic screening for ideas, they inevitably won’t find the best ones as elevator pitches are crafted but die waiting for a receptive ear. Now how to utilize meritocratic screening without wasting your time on duds? I have a solution to that, too. (Contact me for links to the above quotes; LinkedIn automatically erases them.)
Founder and Co-CEO at Pangea.ai | I help companies hire top agency talent to build high-performing product & engineering teams ??Bootstrapped from 0 to $250m GMV | Investing in founders making impact ??
8 年Be simple, to the point and clear. The world moves too fast for unnecessary blabbering.
Transforming Sales, Services, Marketing & Customer Success for Large Enterprises | Revenue Acceleration practice at Accenture
8 年Michael, your post was very timely. I'll be leading a seminar today at my alma mater for graduating seniors, and the topic is ...'your personal elevator pitch.' I'll be incorporating these concepts. Thank you.