Take an objective look at your planned product offering and determine its highest and best possible benefit to your target customer. As suggested by this hierarchy, build your short-form elevator pitch around the highest benefit(s) that you deliver. The best approach is to start by first understanding the most valuable benefit you provide, and then to compose a series of short bullets covering your most impactful opening talking points.
Put this aside for a day or so, and then come back and determine the points that would be most likely to hook a potential investor in less than 60 seconds, starting with your most powerful points. Once that is done, you now not only have a good start on your long-form pitch, you also have developed an attention-grabbing introduction that can be an effective short-form pitch. Ironically, through the countless interactions with entrepreneurs in our workshops, we have seen that it is more difficult to compose a short-form elevator pitch than a longer one.
Once you have a compelling long-form pitch, determine the most compelling two points and you will be well on your way to a good short-form pitch. During our many workshops with entrepreneurs over the years, we found that the creation of a good elevator pitch was often surprisingly stressful and frequently produced heated disagreements among team members. One factor that contributed to differing approaches was a lack of understanding the pitch’s goal. The sole objective of this pitch—unlike those designed, perhaps, to land a job interview or to meet and impress a new social friend—is to create interest in learning more about your business and getting the listener to voluntarily commit the time to learn more about your firm as a potential investment.
