How Can I Create a Powerful and Effective Elevator Pitch?

Elevator pitch is often used to sell products, companies, or individuals with a short introduction. Many sales and start-ups prepare an elevator pitch to explain their experience, edges, and goals within 1 minute for their clients and investors.

Opportunities are reserved for well-prepared people. A short introduction in interviews, conferences, or even at car parks will decide whether you are a perfect candidate.

You can also summarize your experience and strengths on your resume to present yourself within 1 minute.

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What is an Elevator Pitch?

An elevator pitch is about using an attractive means to present your thoughts in a summary. An elevator pitch stresses a structured thought process, effective language, and a smooth and clear presentation.

Your elevator pitch should encourage your audience to build a long-standing relationship with you. It is a limited time for you to get across your project, idea, or personal story and experience memorably and attractively so that your target audience will wish to learn more about you and connect with you.

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Questions that your elevator pitch should focus on

1. Who are you?

Before you can sell yourself to others, you need to first understand more about yourself. Try to draw a mind map to answer the following questions:

• What are your characteristics?
• What experiences do you have?
• What is your plan?
• What are your top priorities?
• What value can you offer?

The SWOT analysis

An important tool that you can make use of when analyzing and understanding yourself would be adopting a SWOT analysis.

SWOT represents strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This will help you better evaluate yourself.

• Strengths: What are the current skillsets and characteristics that make me stand out?
• Opportunities: What are the potential opportunities that I can undertake to further my edges?
• Weaknesses: What are some of my shortcomings?
• Threats: What are some external factors that may affect my growth and performance?

In your elevator pitch, you should focus on maximizing your strengths and opportunities and minimizing your weaknesses and threats.

2. What are you looking for?

Before focusing on your speech, you should first know about your goal and what you want to achieve through your pitch. This will help your pitch to be more specific and effective in achieving the intended impact.

3. What do you do?

Now it’s time to review your experience, achievements, and skills. To find out what you should include in your elevator pitch, you should do the following steps:

• (1) Write your experience and skills down in bullet point
• (2) Cross out the experiences that are irrelevant to your intended goal
• (3) Merge similar experiences and skills
• (4) Extract 3 to 5 key information

Remember, your elevator pitch should make use of a short period to tell what your audience wants to know about you, not your entire life story.

4. Why you?

Why are your experience and skills beneficial to your intended goal and target audience? What are the reasons that the target audience should do what you suggest he/she do?

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Elements of your elevator pitch

Your elevator pitch should contain three main components:

• (1) Hook: an attractive first line
• (2) Mutual benefit: what you can offer to your target audience
• (3) Call to action: what do you want your target audience to do?

Hook: The first line of your elevator pitch

The first line of your elevator pitch should grab your audience’s attention and make them curious about you.

When designing the first line of your elevator pitch, think about:

• Whether this line will provoke your audience’s thoughts?
• Will this line differentiate me and other people?
• Will this line maximize my strengths or minimize my weaknesses?

Mutual benefit: Your audience is the priority

When designing your elevator pitch, think about what is in it for him/her. You can think about:

• What impact have you made in your previous experience?
• Have you resolved any problems with your previous employers?
• What you can offer to your audience?

In other words, your pitch should focus on your audience and their demands, not yours.

Call to action: Turn the last line into a follow-up action

To increase the effectiveness of your pitch, you should make it clear to your target audience what he/she should do next.

You can suggest connecting with them on social media platforms, exchange business cards, or even send a follow-up email after the pitch to show your sincerity.

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How you can brush up on the content of your elevator pitch

Make sure what you say aligns with your values

Everyone has different values. Once you have identified your values, you should express your values with your experience and stories. Ensuring that your values are consistent with your stories and experiences is important in enhancing your credibility and persuasiveness.

The language used in your elevator pitch

When you are preparing your elevator pitch, make sure it is easy to comprehend. Therefore, in your elevator pitch, you should bear in mind the following things:

• Avoid any filler words like “you know”, “well”, “like” and “em”.
• Use a clean and structured way of presenting your thoughts and core values
• Avoid using ambiguous words like “probably” and “maybe”
• Make use of numbers in presenting your values and achievements
• Avoid using technical terms and abbreviations

Try presenting your elevator pitch to your parents and friends. If they can understand your pitch, then you are good to go.

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Practice makes perfect!

Practice makes perfect. If you don’t want to bother people around you, try practicing in front of a mirror or camera. Film yourself and observe your speed, tone, emotion, and gestures.

You should ensure that your pitch sounds natural and attractive, but not forced and robotic. Demonstrate your passion and enthusiasm!

Present your speech repeatedly until you are confident enough to face your intended audience!