What To Say Instead Of An Elevator Pitch

I enjoy networking far more than most people expect, and I have never once enjoyed an elevator pitch, my own included.

You’ve heard this one, or something close enough that the difference doesn’t matter.

“Good morning, my name is John, and I’m a partner at ABC; solicitors, accountants, marketing, training, whatever it happens to be. We are based in Richmond, and we have been in business for thirty years. Not only do we provide excellent customer service, but we also offer great value.”

And on it goes, delivered with the particular brightness of somebody who has said it two hundred times, to a person whose face has already begun the slow retreat of someone working out how to leave politely.

But honestly, who cares.

The world is full of solicitors, accountants and training companies, and the suggestion that each of them has arrived at a genuinely unique selling point is one we have all agreed to accept for about eighty years now. What the person in front of you actually wants to know is whether you can make their life better, easier, happier or different in some way they can put their finger on. That conversation has never once taken place in a lift.

The Elevator Pitch Concept

The phrase was meant to be a discipline rather than a format. The idea was that if you could not explain what you did in the time it takes to travel a few floors, you had not thought about it hard enough, which is fair enough as far as it goes.

Daniel Pink put the purpose of it rather better than most, in To Sell Is Human: “The purpose of a pitch isn’t necessarily to move others immediately to adopt your idea. The purpose is to offer something so compelling that it begins a conversation, brings the other person in as a participant, and eventually arrives at an outcome that appeals to both of you.”

Read that last part again, because it is the part everybody skips. Brings the other person in as a participant, not an audience; a participant. Almost nothing anybody says at a networking event does that, because almost nothing anybody says at a networking event leaves the other person anywhere to go.

The Problem With Everybody’s USP

The idea arrived in the early nineteen forties, out of Rosser Reeves and the Ted Bates agency in New York, and for a long while it did exactly what it was supposed to do. Reeves coined the term, though, as the unique selling proposition. Somewhere along the way, the proposition quietly became a point, and that single word tells you most of what went wrong. A proposition is something you offer another person. A point is just a fact you happen to possess.

Excellence. Quality. Customer service. Speed. Value. Passion. Tailored. Bespoke. Every one of those words has been used so many times by so many people about so many things that they have stopped carrying information altogether, and a sentence built out of them tells a listener precisely nothing except that you have read your own website recently.

The frameworks have not helped either. There is a well-known checklist which insists that a good pitch must be concise, clear, compelling, credible, conceptual, concrete, customised, consistent and conversational, and I would gently point out that any model requiring nine adjectives, all beginning with the same letter, has rather drifted from the problem it was invented to solve. Nobody has ever stood in a crowded room running down a list of nine C’s. They have stood there wishing they had something true to say.

What I Actually Want From Somebody

When I am looking for someone to do a piece of work for me, I am listening for five things, and not one of them appears in anybody’s pitch.

• That they love the work. You can hear it within about a minute, and you can hear its absence just as quickly.
• That they are genuinely good at it, which is a different thing from being confident about it.
• That they can make some measurable difference to my situation, rather than to my feelings about my situation.
• That I can trust them, which mostly comes down to whether they tell me the inconvenient thing.
• That the price and the value are in roughly the same postcode.

Look down that list and notice what is missing. How long you have been in business. Where your offices are. Your commitment to excellence. None of it is on there, and none of it has ever been on anybody’s.

Nobody Makes A Speech In A Lift

Here is the thing I keep coming back to about the metaphor, which I think everybody has had the wrong way round for decades.

Think about what actually happens in a lift. Nobody delivers anything. Somebody nearest the panel turns round, asks which floor you want, and presses the button for you. It takes two seconds; it is a small act of usefulness performed for a stranger, and it is the exact opposite of a speech.

That is the move. Forget the pitch and press the button. Find out where the other person is trying to get to, and then be of some use to them in getting there.

In practice, that means you say one short, true thing about what you do, then ask them something and genuinely listen to the answer.

What That Sounds Like

For years we had a paragraph on our website about transforming the way people communicate, and I am slightly embarrassed by it now, because it was exactly the sort of thing this whole article objects to. It was seventy words long, and nobody could have said it out loud without sounding like a brochure.

What I say now, when somebody asks what I do, is closer to this.

“You know when somebody is presenting, and you stopped listening about ten minutes ago, but you are still nodding? I work with people so that they are not that person.”

It is one sentence. It describes something that has happened to everybody in the room, which means they are already in it with me rather than waiting for me to finish. It nearly always comes back with a story of their own, usually about a meeting they sat through last Thursday, and by then we are talking rather than pitching, and I have not had to sell anything at all.

Yours will not sound like mine, and it shouldn’t, but it should be one sentence; it should describe something the other person has lived through, and it should leave them somewhere to go.

Opening The Conversation

Then you stop talking, which is the part most people find hardest and which does more work than everything that came before it.

Ask them what they do, then ask a second question about the answer, because the second question is what tells them you were listening to the first. People remember almost nothing of what you said about yourself and very nearly everything about how it felt to talk to you.

If you have been dreading all of this because of the room itself rather than the sentence, that is a different problem with a kinder answer, and I have written about what to do when you hate networking.

If any of this was useful, please pass it on. Somebody you know has an event in the diary and has been quietly rehearsing thirty seconds about their commitment to excellence, and nobody has yet told them they are allowed to simply ask the other person which floor they want.

If you would like to learn how to press the button:

– Book yourself onto a powerful public speaking course.

– Invest in some really good one to one public speaking coaching.

– Get yourself some excellent presentation skills training.

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