Polish your elevator pitch because it is more needed today than ever before.
How often do you talk to peers who just can’t tell you what their project exists to do. They can only tell you what they do on the project.
A friend of mine took on a new role at a finance company. When he started there were 40,000 defects in Jira.
When he left 2 years later….there were 40,000 defects in Jira..
He couldn’t tell what his project actually did.
So what was their team actually meant to do?
If you don’t know the Pitch then why is your company funding your project?
A good pitch is a way of telling your story that rolls together:
- Problem statements
- Solution Statements
- A Hypothesis
- Future state/vision
It does this in a No-Nonsense, Plain English manner.
So how do I create this magical Pitch you speak of
There are lots of ways to create a Pitch, but one that has never failed me in workshops is the Pixar Pitch. This is the structure that ALL Pixar movies use and to date they have raked in over 15 BILLION DOLLARS. So obviously not a bad approach to story telling.
The key elements are:
- Once upon a time (This is the context)
- Every Day (This is the problem)
- One Day (This is the solution)
- Because of that (This is the outcome)
- Until Finally (This is the future state)
I use a fun Pitch Canvas that looks like this:
Is that not a bit childish?
Yes & No, but that is it’s strength
It avoids a lot of “group think style jargonistic language” and makes people think in more simplistic ways. Your inner child also has a massive bullshit filter.
It makes you “Say what it does on the tin” (Please don’t sue me Ronseal)
So here is your homework 🙂
- Fill in the canvas for one of your projects.
- Then read out the words to someone else (but only the words inside the box)
- Reflect
If you don’t believe me then here is one I prepared earlier
Step1: Read out the Prompts as well as the writing as if talking to a 3 year old.
Step 2: Now read out just the text, as if you were telling someone in a lift about your project.
- Companies wasted lots of time, searching dozens of government websites, to find help to grow their business
- They would not be doing normal business activities, because of all the time spent searching for help. instead of growing, some companies were shrinking.
- The government listed all business support on a single website:
- Companies could find help in minutes and without having to ignore day to day tasks.
- Companies started to grow again and the country’s economy was good
With a couple of minor tweaks, mostly around tense, this is a pretty solid Pitch for our FindBusinessSupport website.
You are now a Pitch Ninja.