Is it Time to Ditch the Elevator Pitch?

In the age of social media, it may be about time that we reassessed the elevator pitch, or even ditched it all together, so here are 6 alternatives that you can use instead.

The elevator pitch is a staple of networking master-classes and sales seminars. It originates from an era when senior managers and key influencers lived on the top floor in the c-suite. If you wanted to catch their ear, you only had only a few moments from when that elevator door closed, to when it opened again on the next floor in which to impress and deliver your message. But this was in an age before social media and email, when you were unlikely to have even met those people up on the c-suite, let alone been able to communicate with them.

The elevator pitch then evolved in the world of face-to-face networking to be your verbal business card when introducing yourself to the room and in this context it has some continuing relevance. It has to be fast, punchy, and concise, but also delivered in a confident and word-perfect fashion and maybe it's about time we reassessed it and evolved it into something that fits more with today's world and the many ways in which we communicate and receive information.

6 Alternatives to the Elevator Pitch

There are six alternatives identified by best-selling business writer, Dan Pink, in his excellent book about sales and selling, entitled, To Sell is Human. It's not to say that the elevator pitch is dead, instead you need to have greater variety to the way in which you deliver your message, so here's the 6 to consider:

#1: The Pixar Pitch

This is my personal favourite. Pixar is the successful animation studies in California, formed by George Lucas and turned around by Steve Jobs, which has gone on to make billions of dollars with successful animated films, such as Toy Story, WALL-Eand Up. The success of their animated movies was analyzed by a former Pixar story artist, Emma Coats, who developed a six-sentence structure that harnesses the power of storytelling in a concise and focused way:

Once upon a time ___________. Every day______________. One day____________. Because of that____________. Because of that_________. Until finally______.

This structure provides the framework for your Pixar pitch. So, using Windsor Training as an example:

Once upon a time companies struggled to get quality training from their training providers. Every day HR managers were inundated with calls and emails from trainers offering the same old thing. One day Windsor Training decided it was about time that training became more about what the client needed. Because of that training programmes were developed that blended delivery methods to suit the client and the specific needs of the learner, together with ongoing support. Because of that companies started to see a measurable improvement in the performance of their teams and the development of their people. Until finally businesses couldn't quite remember how they ever managed before Windsor Training came on the scene.

#2: The One-Word Pitch

Not as dumb as it sounds and bear in mind the many ways that we communicate a message to its intended recipients nowadays. If you think that it is not possible to be able to pitch your meaning in a solitary word, then I defy you to be told the word "search" and not think of Google, or "priceless" and not think of Mastercard. What one word do you feel embraces your brand and your values? For Windsor Training, I'd go with the word 'developed': embracing the tangible improvements in the team and the methods by which the training is delivered.

#3: The Twitter Pitch

The Twitter pitch is restricted to 140 characters or less - the length of a tweet. It encourages you to focus and summarize what you do, without too much extraneous babble. Research suggests that we rate more highly tweets that pose a question, so for example:

Would you like training that targeted your needs and delivered a return on investment through the development of your people?

#4: The Subject-Line Pitch

Email is still a ubiquitous part of our lives and the subject-line pitch needs to engage with our audience and encourage them into conversation. Subject-line pitches can either be intriguing, useful, but they also need to be specific. For example, if I was sending you an email about this post, I might entitle it, "6 Powerful Ways to Help You Update the Elevator Pitch".

#5: The Rhyming Pitch

Research suggest that we sub-consciously place greater reliance on statements that rhyme - aiding memory and understanding. In the trial of OJ Simpson, the defence lawyer, Johnnie L. Cochran, famously advised the jury, when considering the evidence of the gloves worn by the murderer, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit." The glove didn't fit and Simpson was acquitted. Haribo, the German confectionery company, has a slogan that rhymes in several languages: "Kids and grown-ups love it so - the happy world of Haribo."

#6: The Question Pitch

If I make a statement, such as, "training will deliver an improvement in the performance of your team," you can receive this information, but not feel the need to respond or acknowledge it in any particular way. A question, however, forces the listener to respond, whether openly or internally, but this also requires a greater degree of receptiveness to the content of the message. For example, "How can Windsor Training help enhance the development of your team today?"

The end of the elevator pitch?

Maybe not. The elevator pitch continues to have a place, largely because it has become a generic term to cover a range of different types of statement. But this article has hopefully opened your eyes to a range of alternatives and it might be worth thinking about how you might develop some of these for your own business.

Have you developed a pitch, based upon the alternatives above? Why don't you pitch them to us in the comments below?

Will Trevor is the Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training. Please click 'Follow' if you would like to hear more from Will in the future. Feel free to also connect via his Linkedin page, or via Twitter and Facebook or email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Other recent and popular posts by Will:

Steve Wozniak: Apple's Other Steve

Job Interviews: Don't take it personally

Mentoring: 5 Things I Have Learned From Being A Mentor

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Search Engine Optimisation: impact and visibility (Part 1)

Search Engine Optimization: impact and visibility (Part 1)

Best practice in SEO as part of a search engine marketing strategy

By Koushikchakraborty13 (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process and practice of ensuring that the listing and link to your website is placed in the optimum position within search engine rankings, such that it appears at the top, or near to the top, when a search is made using a specific set of words or key search phrases in Google or Bing, for example.  This is often referred to as ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ search - because it does not require any direct payment to the search engine company in order achieve the ranking - to distinguish it from ‘paid search’,  which is usually classified as any search for which a payment has been made. Examples of paid search include: sponsored links, search engine advertisements, pay per click (PPC), cost per impression (CPM).  The focus of this article is on the principles of successful and legitimate SEO, an approach that is often referred to as ‘white hat’ techniques. That is, techniques that ensure that the main focus of SEO activity is on ensuring that the customer is able to search for what they require and receive search results that provide them with exactly the listings that they need, rather than an approach that seeks to manipulate those results to maximise the possibility that the search engines will rank the page highly, regardless of the relevance of the content to the customer.  The best way to think about this is in terms of a cowboy movie: the good guys usually sport the typical white Stetson, whereas the bad guys are usually in the black ones. Needless to say, in order to achieve the right results, the Stetson on your head should be white!

The basic premise behind SEO is that the more highly a website is ranked in the natural search listings, then the greater the amount of web traffic it receives and the higher the number of visitors accessing the site. In an age where Internet use is ubiquitous and business needs to ensure that it is accessible to its customers online, this obviously has significant consequences for the visibility of an organisation and the corresponding level of business and profit that it is likely to achieve.  Not surprisingly, with such high stakes, a number of websites sought to improve their rankings, not by making the content more relevant to the user, but through the adoption of various techniques that enhanced the sites rankings in the face of the algorithms, or programmes, by which the search engines ranked and listed websites.  These so-called ‘black hat’ techniques included such practices as ‘keyword stuffing’: placing so many key words within sentence, such that they render the words completely unintelligible, but manipulate the search engine into believing that the website is of greater relevance than it really is.

In the first paragraph, I mentioned that SEO is a process, by that I mean that you will not enjoy the benefits of an optimized site if you merely engage in optimization when you first develop the site.  Instead, it should be something that you engage with on a regular and incremental way, with the accumulated impact of a large number of changes delivering an improved user experience to your customers and a payoff in terms of higher rankings within those organic or natural search rankings. By adopting the best 'white hat' techniques, you will be able to develop SEO practices, which will ensure that your website benefits your users and customers.

The common mistake that most people make when they first approach SEO is to believe that the primary target of their activities is in satisfying the rapacious needs of an impersonal and electronic brain called a search engine: this is something that I term the ‘black hat fallacy’. Some of the leading search engines, and particularly Google, have taken pains to reinforce the message that the primary focus needs to be the consumer, or the user of your site, rather than viewing the search engine s the target of your activities. So let us get this straight from the very outset, you are optimising your website for the benefit of your users and not the search engine itself.

SEO may form part of your broader search engine marketing (SEM) strategy, which may itself be an element of your overall marketing strategy.  Whilst you will remember that we are not intending to treat the search engine as the customer of our optimization activities, we do need to have some understanding of how they work and also how people use them to facilitate their searches.  From our market research, we should have a good idea of who the target audience for our product or service is and so we can then develop a clearer picture of the type of search keywords or key-phrases that they are using to find products or services such as ours.  Think for a moment about how you search for something using a search engine, such as Google. How often do you input just a single word (keywords) or how often do you string together a number of words into a set of keyphrases? The next time you search for something, think about what it is that you are looking for and then consider why you selected those specific words. This will help us in the next article when we consider further the practices of SEO.

Written by Will Trevor, Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training
Email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net