How to Craft Your Pitch Perfect Elevator Pitch in Just 30 Seconds

If you are like a lot of business owners, you  struggle with creating a truly engaging and effective elevator pitch. As you move around the room at a lunch or networking event, do you find yourself tuning out because everyone sounds the same no matter what their business is? Check out the formula I describe here as I experienced it at a recent event and it is the only pitch that stood out among 50 attendees.  In fact, it didn’t sound like a pitch but instead like an expert ready to help you, how refreshing!

You probably know the old school formula “I work with NAME YOUR TARGET MARKET, with NAME THE PROBLEM THEY HAVE, and I solve it with NAME YOUR PROCESS.” In fact, the approach for your elevator pitch that I’m sharing here is far more engaging and actually provides a 30 second self assessment so you know quickly if you want to explore this business owner’s services or not.

A female business owner stood up and asked us the question:
“If someone were to go to your closet right now and pull anything out of the closet, would you a)like it enough to wear it, b)know what to wear it with, c)would it fit?”

We all pictured ourselves in front of our closet and ran through her questions mentally. (This really got us all feeling the challenge of a potentially disorganized closet, keeping clothes that don’t fit or are out of date, and knowing we have too many that we don’t know how to wear well.)

Then she said if your answer is less than 80% for all questions, we need to have a conversation, my name is Julie Smith and I’m an image consultant who shows women how to look their best and claim their confidence.

She did all of this in just 30 SECONDS!

Now, you do not need to be an image consultant to make this work. You could apply this to insurance, financial advisory services, accounting, interior design, business coaching, marketing and a lot more.

Asking a question is key because scientifically, we as humans are predisposed to want the answer so we’ll either figure it out or listen more closely to get it.

What can you ASK that will get a potential client focused and suddenly realizing they need you?

The beauty of this approach is that if you were a fit for Julie, you knew it in just 30 seconds, if not, you knew that too and wouldn’t waste her time or yours.

Imagine not having your time wasted by poor fits?

One of the reasons you may get frustrated by not having enough leads is a lack of the right leads, and what Julie did, totally simplified that.

Your “elevator pitch” (and personally I am not a fan of that language, I prefer “conversation starter”) is ideally a way for those who hear it to make a quick decision about whether your services are a possible fit and worth a conversation or not.

We are in the age of client choice and seller beware, instead of where we used to be with “caveat emptor” (buyer beware.) Every communication with your market needs to educate and invite them to explore doing business with you.

Questions educate. Questions create an opportunity to assess the fit. The right questions will build your business.

Can’t wait to hear how you leverage this fresh approach!