IABC Freelancers Forum

I’m the director of the Independent Communicators’ Roundtable group for the San Francisco chapter, and at our lunch last week the topic was elevator pitches.

It was a great conversation and I just wanted to share some of the points that came up:

• Elevator pitches should not be about closing a sale but about making an introduction and starting a conversation. Overt selling at this stage is a turn-off.
• Given that, how creative is too creative? Can we use analogies and metaphors? The general consensus was that short illustrative stories worked - You know when this happens, I help people to deal with it by doing X.
• This was a stepping stone into a conversation that got right to the heart of elevator speeches and marketing ourselves– how do we define what we do? Can we differentiate what we offer from other people or companies?
• Deciding to focus on a defined area, and offering that with confidence seem to be key. We all have the tendency to not want to boast but we also agreed we shouldn’t apologize for wanting to specialize or for not offering everything to everyone. Although choosing to focus sometimes means turning away work (scary!) it does open up your schedule to take on the work you really want to do.
• Having a clear elevator pitch is one way to provide a focused definition of what you do, and backing that up with concrete examples and questions to ask will encourage conversation – which is the objective.

I also found a couple of useful sites when I was researching the topic:

·         15 second pitch : this site has a pitch wizard which got me started

·         A posting on Freelance Switch about improving pitches

·         A piece from the Guerrilla Consultant site about what’s wrong with most pitches

Enjoy!