Your Elevator Pitch Isn’t Just For The Sales Team
BY Kaitlin Loyal
February 22, 2019

If you had 30 seconds to explain your company to someone, what would you tell them? If you find yourself stumbling over an explanation of what your company does—say, explaining how benefits consulting firms help employers with health insurance or introducing someone to the concept of enterprise resource planning software—you probably need an elevator pitch.

An elevator pitch is a short description of what your company does and how it helps its customers. While many people think of it as a short sales pitch and therefore “Sales’ job,” it’s appropriate—even vital—for everyone in your company to understand what the company elevator pitch is.

An elevator pitch is relevant to far more than just your sales team, it’s important for anyone representing the company to be able to convey what you do and how you help your audience in a few seconds.

Your Elevator Pitch Connects to Your Brand Story

Just like virtually every other message about your brand, an elevator pitch is an extension of your brand story, and your employees are ambassadors of that brand. If the message comes across fuzzy or garbled, it could eventually impact your brand and how your audience feels about it. 

How to Build an Elevator Pitch

Before you pull a few lines of copy from your company’s boilerplate or About Us page, consider the importance of your elevator pitch. It should be a reflection of your brand that grabs someone’s attention, is easy enough for people across your organization to remember, and is action-oriented and interesting.

Here at Scribewise, we develop elevator pitches for our clients as part of a larger branding process that involves competitor and market research, a branding boot camp and interviews with employees and customers. From that background work, we create a bunch of foundational elements of a brand, including:

  • Mission, vision and values
  • What You Stand For
  • Brand story
  • Brand personality
  • Customer benefits
  • Customer insight.

The elevator pitch becomes a short version of the brand story that’s built with some of the same language we develop in the brand personality, What You Stand For and customer benefits. We start with the problem our audience has, then explain our solution.

Here’s Scribewise’s elevator pitch:

When you can’t find the words, we’re here to help. Storytelling has become a marketing buzzword, but we bring two differentiators to the equation. First, we’ve solved content. Our team excels at efficiently creating high-quality content that helps your customers meet their challenges. Secondly, we give a damn. We want you to succeed, and we’ll stop at nothing to help you get there—we call it clientcentricity and it means that we always put your marketing needs first.

This elevator pitch provides enough information so a potential client, partner or future employee has an idea of what we do but is interested enough to ask more questions. The pitch also brings in language that we use across our brand story and What You Stand For, and in copy across our website, marketing emails, sales proposals and blogs. This helps to create message discipline. If we start a conversation with a prospect at a networking event, that person will see some of the same language if they want to learn more about us online.

Once you’ve developed your elevator pitch, incorporate it into your internal communications program to spread it across the organization.

If you need more tips on how to put your brand in motion, download our eBook, “Actionable Branding: How to Turn Your Story into Marketing That Works.”

 

Let’s talk about growing your company.

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