If you are an entrepreneur, or maybe an aspiring one, you would have already come across terms such as sales pitch and elevator pitch. While a sales pitch is a spoken description of a product or service intended to convince your customer to make a purchase, an elevator pitch is a brief description about yourself, your product, your idea, or even your business that succinctly explains the essence of it in a short period of time, which can be anywhere between thirty seconds and two minutes.
It is not simply not enough to have a business plan and a USP anymore in this competitive world that we live in; you need to be able to convert a person previously oblivious about your business, into someone who precisely understands what your business does and what it has to offer.
Here are three reasons that will convince you about why you need a stellar elevator pitch before you launch your business.
1. To explain your business: Let’s assume that you are a UX expert and you want to set up a business that offers social media services to brands. How easy or difficult would it be to explain what you do to septuagenarians and older people? For your explanation to be comprehensible, it has to be simple and brief. If you are not prepared to answer their questions, or if you are the sort of person who needs a lot of words to explain something thoroughly, you might get flustered, or your audience might get confused! Having an elevator pitch ready and practicing it out loud can help you breeze through countless such questions you may have to encounter once you launch your business.
2. To entice a potential investor: Business ideas come a dime a dozen. But you do not see every entrepreneur making it big in the business world, do you? It is because not everybody has the skill to sell to their customers or to their investors. For many a newbie entrepreneur, convincing a potential investor is one of the most-dreaded tasks out there.
True that it is possible to fund your own business, but the same cannot be said for more capital intensive businesses, which would require funding from venture capitalists or angel investors. Hence, the need to perfect that elevator pitch you can always rely on. Apple’s Steve Jobs was lauded for his extraordinary ability to pitch an idea and bring people on board effortlessly.
3. To convince an executive: In today’s fast-paced, e-comm-ruled world, it is easier for businesses to run smoothly by partnering up with other businesses. For example, if you have an online store, it would be easier for you to partner up with other businesses that offer payment gateways and logistics instead of setting up different departments within your small business. But then again, how do you convince big companies to partner up with small businesses? It is at times like these that an elevator pitch comes in handy. When you have the power to turn another business executive into a partner with a bunch of carefully-calculated words describing your business, put it to use!
Put in a different way, an elevator pitch is about getting straight to the point without beating-around the bush. You give the listener information that would strike a chord with them, making you, as well as your brand, memorable. Ideally, there should be no fumbling for words, or repetition of any sort; it should be concise, precise, and easily comprehensible for your listener.
