Build a better elevator pitch

We all know what an elevator pitch is, right? You’ve got 20 seconds to sell something as the elevator goes from the lobby to the 8th floor. What do you say?

Sales pros, entrepreneurs looking for venture capital, chamber of commerce networkers scrounging for customers (even though every one of them is there to sell, not buy)–an elevator pitch is an absolute requirement.

What’s not required is that it be awful.

Elevator pitches that should get you thrown off the top of the building
Here’s a widely distributed formula. Everyone has heard it. For most purposes, it sucks.

For target customers who are dissatisfied with the current alternative, our magnificent product is a breathtaking new category that provides kickass problem-solving opportunity. Unlike lameass competitor, we have assembled mind-blowing product features. We will initially target the specific victims, since they unique problem they couldn’t resolve if you plated it with titanium and sent it to them FedEx. Our freakishly excellent solution solves this problem by vaporizing the problem into infinitesimal molecules of solved-ness.

What do you think your victim will be doing 15 seconds into this? Trying to puncture his eardrums with his Montblanc? Jamming the 8th floor button again and again trying to make the elevator go faster? How fast do your eyes glaze over when someone pulls this on you? This is not a conversation.

Let me be clear–the classic elevator pitch is a superb device for analysis. You have to understand these variables and the way they fit together. But spewing it verbatim (after having rehearsed it to your cat until he horked a hairball to shut you up), in 99 cases out of 100, is highly unhelpful.

Why the elevator pitch doesn’t work
Remember the great scene in The Music Man, where the con man delivers his dog-and-pony show with great fanfare and sells all the rubes?

That approach was highly effective for sideshow carnival barkers and vendors of premium snake oil. In 1917. You could probably find some pockets of innocence where it continued to work until as late as 1950. After that point, you’re pitching to a naive audience that doesn’t exist any more.

The problem with a rehearsed, made-to-formula elevator pitch is that it completely fails to take audience into account.

(Yes, there is an audience for this particular style of pitch. Here’s how you know–if someone says, Give me your elevator pitch, this is what you give them. In that situation, the audience is there to be sold, they want the bullet points, and they have an exaggerated sense of how busy they are.)

But for the most part, human beings in the 21st century hate to be sold. We still have problems that we want solutions for. And god knows we still love to buy. But we don’t want to be sold.

This is even more true of the new social media crowd, many of whom think selling should be punishable by stoning. With very small rocks so it takes longer and hurts more.

Things almost everyone likes

• Talking about their problems
• Feeling smart
• Indulging their whims
• Rewarding themselves
• Talking about their problems
• Avoiding conflict
• Avoiding pain
• Avoiding social abandonment
• Talking about their problems

Things almost everyone hates

• Salespeople

Conversations go two ways
In the brave new world, marketing communication isn’t a one-way vehicle. It isn’t a speech or a pitch or an ad. It’s a conversation.

The best step-by-step outline I’ve seen for replacing the highly rehearsed elevator pitch with a human conversation is in Michael Port’s Book Yourself Solid. He essentially walks you through the classic pitch and gets you to expand and clarify your thinking on each individual point.

What problem do you solve? Who do you solve it for? Who are some people who have had that problem? How did you solve it for them? What is it about your offering that solves that problem in a neat way?

It doesn’t matter if you’re networking at a conference or developing a new landing page on your Web site. You take the steps of the buyer/seller dance and you create a conversation around each one.

You build opportunities for dialogue. You tell stories that show how it works. You ask more questions than you answer. You shut the hell up once in awhile.

Conversations, not pitches. Your audience won’t stand for anything less.