Righttrack Whispers:

Developing an Elevator Pitch

Righttrack's Colin Rote looks at how to get ideas over when you have very limited time to present.

In a recent series of The Apprentice, one of Lord Sugar’s assistants in the interview episode surprised each candidate by stopping them before they sat down and asking them to deliver their “Elevator Pitch”. You can see one example pitch from The Apprentice below.

For the uninitiated the term “elevator pitch” is derived from the idea that, if you met your potential customer or client as you were getting into a lift (elevator) you must be able to get your idea across (pitch it) in the time it takes for a lift to get from the ground floor to the top floor.

An elevator pitch is an essential part of any salesperson’s armoury. But it’s also a useful tool for anyone who is planning a presentation. Almost always when we are presenting we are “selling” something to our audience. It might be a product or a service, or it might be a new way of working, a solution to a problem or even the latest Health and Safety procedure. As a presenter you are selling your idea. (Ok, for those who are still wondering about the Health and Safety procedure – you are actually trying to sell the idea that people should LEARN AND USE the new procedure.)

The elevator pitch comes in handy because in effect it is your entire presentation boiled down into its most basic chunks.

If you are planning a presentation try this process, using an elevator pitch, to help you arrive very quickly at your presentation structure.

1. Write down the purpose of your presentation in a single sentence. Eg, to persuade my manager to re-structure the team.

2. Now think about what the most basic things are that you would say to your manager if you only had the time in the lift with him or her. Maybe that’s something like:
a. The way that the team is structured causes us X problem
b. This problem is costing us £Y
c. If we structured the team like Z, then we would save that money and the
team would operate more efficiently

Ok, so that’s your elevator pitch for this presentation.

3. Now, take each section a, b and c in turn and imagine that you have more than the time in the lift. What supporting information would you give which would lend weight and credibility to each stage? Be careful about this – only add points that support your elevator pitch, don’t start making new points that are off the main subject.

By the time you’ve added your supporting argument to each section you’ve probably got somewhere between a 15 and 20 minute presentation.

Coincidentally your elevator pitch, in this example, has 3 sections, which means it obeys another golden rule – the rule of 3… but that’s another story.