Your Elevator Pitch Needs an Elevator

By Jaci Russo | CEO & Co-Founder, brandRUSSO

There are few questions in business that sound easier than, “What does your company do?” It should be a softball. You know the company. You work there. In some cases, you built the thing. Surely we can get through this without visual aids.

And yet, ask that question at a networking event and watch what happens. Someone takes a deep breath, looks toward the ceiling, and begins a journey. There’s the company history, a rundown of services, a brief detour into the industries served, several words ending in “solutions,” and somewhere around minute four you begin wondering exactly how tall this elevator is supposed to be.

The problem isn’t that the company doesn’t know what it does. Usually, it knows far too much about what it does, and that knowledge has somehow found its way into every version of the explanation.

A good elevator pitch isn’t supposed to tell someone everything about your business. It’s supposed to tell them enough to make them want to know more.

Your Elevator Pitch Is Not a Tiny Capabilities Deck 

One of the easiest ways to ruin an elevator pitch is to treat it like a compressed version of your website. Companies try to squeeze every service, capability, market, differentiator, and impressive credential into thirty seconds because leaving anything out feels risky.

I understand the concern. What if the one thing you don’t mention happens to be the exact thing this person needs? Surely the safest option is to mention all seventeen services at record speed and hope something sticks. Except that’s not how people listen.

When someone asks what you do, they’re trying to put your company into a mental category. They’re looking for enough information to understand where you fit, who you help, and why your work matters. If you give them too much information at once, you’re not helping them understand more. You’re giving them more things to forget.

The goal isn’t completeness. It’s clarity.

If Everyone Explains It Differently, You Have a Bigger Problem

Here’s an exercise that can get uncomfortable quickly. Ask five people inside your company to explain what the business does without preparing them first.

You may get five completely different companies.

The CEO talks about the vision. Sales talks about the services. Operations talks about the process. Marketing repeats something from the website, and the person who’s been there for twenty years gives you an answer that hasn’t changed since 2009.

None of them are necessarily wrong. That’s what makes this problem tricky. They’re simply describing the company from their individual perspective instead of communicating one shared brand position.

When your own people can’t explain the company consistently, your market doesn’t stand much of a chance. The problem isn’t really the elevator pitch at that point. The pitch is just exposing a lack of clarity underneath it.

Start With the Person on the Other Side of the Conversation

Most bad elevator pitches have one thing in common: they’re entirely about the company giving them.

“We are a full-service provider of comprehensive, integrated solutions leveraging decades of industry expertise to deliver exceptional outcomes across multiple verticals.” Somewhere, a conference room just gave that sentence a standing ovation.

A buyer, on the other hand, is probably wondering what any of it means.

A stronger explanation starts with relevance. Who do you help? What problem do you solve? What changes because your company is involved? You don’t have to literally answer those questions in that order, but your pitch should give the listener enough context to understand why the conversation matters to them.

That shift sounds small, but it changes everything. Instead of asking someone to memorize what you sell, you’re helping them recognize when they might need you.

A Good Pitch Creates the Next Question

This is where people sometimes misunderstand simplicity. They assume a short elevator pitch needs to somehow contain the entire sales argument, which is exactly how we ended up needing that unusually tall elevator in the first place.

The purpose of a good pitch is not to close the deal between floors three and seven. It’s to create curiosity.

If someone responds with, “How do you do that?” or “What do you mean by that?” you’ve done your job. You now have a conversation instead of a monologue, which is generally a much nicer experience for everyone involved.

Think about the difference between giving someone a map and giving them the entire history of transportation. They asked where you’re going. Let’s start there.

Your Pitch Should Sound Like Something a Human Would Say

Another common problem is that companies develop an elevator pitch that looks perfectly respectable in a strategy document and sounds completely ridiculous when spoken aloud.

People don’t talk in mission statements.

If your employees have to memorize the pitch word for word because nobody would naturally construct those sentences in conversation, that’s usually a clue. Strong messaging gives people language they can actually use. It creates consistency without turning your sales team into a group of actors trying to remember their lines.

Try saying your elevator pitch out loud. Better yet, say it to someone who doesn’t work in your industry. If you feel yourself slipping into presentation voice or they respond with the polite smile people use when they have absolutely no idea what you just said, keep working.

Clarity should feel natural.

This Is Really a Positioning Exercise

The funny thing about creating a short elevator pitch is that the writing isn’t usually the hardest part. The hard part is deciding what deserves to be included.

That’s a positioning question.

Through our Razor Branding™ process, we spend a lot of time getting companies focused on who they’re trying to reach, what they can credibly promise, and what position they want to own in the marketplace. Once those decisions are clear, explaining the business becomes much easier because you’re no longer trying to give every possible answer at once.

A strong elevator pitch is really the visible result of decisions that happened much earlier. You know who matters. You know what problem you’re solving. You know why your approach is different. Now you can communicate those things without requiring an elevator ride to the 87th floor.

The Takeaway 

If your elevator pitch keeps getting longer, the solution probably isn’t speaking faster. It’s figuring out what you’re actually trying to communicate.

Your audience doesn’t need your entire company history during the first conversation. They don’t need every service you provide or every industry you’ve ever worked in. They need a clear reason to understand where your company fits and why it might matter to them.

The strongest elevator pitches leave room for curiosity because they aren’t trying to finish the conversation. They’re trying to start one.

So the next time someone asks what your company does, pay attention to how long it takes you to answer. If you’re still explaining when the imaginary elevator doors should have opened several floors ago, your pitch may need more than editing.

It may need a better strategy.

Let’s change the conversation. 

Learn more about our Razor Branding™ process
https://brandrusso.com/razor-branding/

Or complete the market perception scorecard to get a clear read on how your market views you
https://brandrusso.com/mp-scorecard/

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brandRUSSO was established in 2001 by Jaci and Michael Russo, representing a global portfolio of B2B clients in the professional services and manufacturing industries. As a strategic branding agency, we believe in the promise behind the brand, and that by changing the conversation we can inspire and motivate consumer behavior.