The #ElevatorPitch for Your Business
Here’s an excerpt from my new book, on how to deliver your best elevator speech, ever. Featuring insights from folks who pitch for a living….
Gabriella Draney is explaining her pitch strategy, called Elevator Pitch Mad Libs ®, from her top-floor office inside a converted church in downtown Dallas. She says it’s a simple way to explain and differentiate your business, in a short pitch. Mad Libs®, in case you’re not familiar, are word games, where certain words are left out of a story. Now, with the New Elevator Pitch, you can fill in the blanks to fill in your listener. What could be simpler?
Gabriella is a mom, a marathon runner – and the Managing Partner and co-founder of Tech Wildcatters, Dallas’ premiere corporate incubator. So, Gabriella’s business is helping others to explain their business – in a way that helps investors to take action.
The MAD LIBS® Pitch goes like this:
( Company Name ) is
( Descriptive phrase for your organization – what is your business? ) that
( Verb – what your company does for Your Customer(s) ) and unlike
( Competitor #1 ), ( Competitor #2 ) , or ( Competitor #3 )
is
( Differentiator ),
( Differentiator ), and
( Differentiator ).
“Basically,” Gabriella says, “this is everything you need to have someone say, ‘that’s interesting to me.’”
Here’s how her own company lines up – the Mad Libs® Elevator Pitch, from Gabriella:
Tech Wildcatters is a
Seed accelerator (helping start-up businesses to find investment capital, also called ‘seed money’) that
Invests in early-stage companies and puts them through a 12-week process for
Early-stage software/web/mobile kinds of startups and unlike
Incubators of the past, it is
a very defined program. It includes funding, a high-profile ‘pitch day’, and our companies come out and raise additional capital from a variety of investment sources.
When she finished, I had several “tell me more…” moments; how about you?
The first one: Is it really all that simple? “Well, no – that’s why ours is a twelve-week program. Our team of experts and investors takes three months, to teach companies how to pitch,” Gabriella says. “Mad Libs® is just a starting point.” You can find out more at techwildcatters.com
Simple and clear, the Mad Libs® Pitch is a great way to quickly describe your company’s solution, in a way that makes your listener say, “Tell me more…”
What’s your story? Can you fill in the blanks in your elevator pitch, so that your listener is filled in as well?
