How Your Elevator Pitch is Your Best Business Friend (Saturday Morning Surfing)

(Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes)

You’re at a party, a get-together, some networking event, whatever, and someone well-meaning soul asks that dreaded question: “So, what do you do, exactly?”

What do you say?

While I can think of at least a dozen snappy responses to such inanity, none of those are suitable for said events. (Not really suitable for Website In A Weekend, either.)

Well, my online colleague Erica Douglass has it all figured out: give ‘em your elevator pitch!

Not just for prime time

Until I read Erica’s article, I always took “elevator pitch” way too literally. Like, if I’m not accosting a VC, in an elevator perhaps, there’s no reason to use it.

But that’s far too limiting.

Instead, Erica demonstrates a really cool pattern for creating elevator pitches.

Your 30-second pitch needs to contain these elements:

1. Compelling value
2. Social proof
3. A call to action

Here is Erica’s elevator pitch using the pattern:

My name is Erica Douglass and I run a popular business blog. I also run a service called Whoosh Traffic that helps you get more traffic to your website. I started this business after using my own service to rank my blog #1 in Google for the keyphrase how to make money blogging. If you would like to get more traffic to your website, please come find me. I’m happy to talk to you more about it!”

The social proof parts are in red, the call to action is in blue. Spiffy, right?

And so much more useful than advice you can read elsewhere. For example, check out this useless advice from Harvard Business Review. The author even admits his example is too long!

Website In A Weekend

Since “So, what do you do?” has always been a major pain for me, I decided to apply this handy formula for my own benefit.

After some thought, here’s what I came up with for Website In A Weekend:

My name is Dave Doolin. I publish a popular blog helping people create their own business website in one weekend. If you’re ready to get your business on the web, come find me and I’ll show you everything you need to get started on your website.

• Compelling value: create a business website in one weekend. (Good.)
• Social proof: popular! (A little weak.)
• Call to action: “…come find me and I’ll show you everything you need to get started on your website.” (Good.)

Alright. That settles that.

But it brings up a new question…

Do you have the right pitch?

Take the trouble to write out your elevator pitch (as a comment, of course), and think about how closely what you are actually doing matches what you think you’re doing.

We can use Website In A Weekend as an example. Let’s take it stepwise:

1. Compelling value: Yes and no. “Yes” for the reader or customer, because the website in a weekend material is all here. “No” because it’s too hard to find.
2. Social proof: Popularity is always good in the blogging web publishing industry. Traffic here is down from peak as a result of low (i.e., no) promotion for the last 3 months.

But traffic is still pretty good relative to 99.9% of all the other sites out there; and long time readers (bofem) are still hanging in there.

3. Call to action: Anyone who steps forward will certainly get their money’s worth!

Also, for me, not so much value at the moment. The mid-level “get a website market” (i.e., what I’m doing here) is being squeezed very hard between problogger course offerings at the high end, and free offerings from people leveraging insanely low cost of living. But the market is still growing fast; there’s still time find a niche.

Ok, your turn: 1. Compelling value; 2. Social proof; 3. Call to action. Let’s see something in the comments!