Trash Your Elevator Pitch
This piece shares why elevator pitches suck.
According to your standard career advice column ‘Team You’ needs to spruce up your elevator speech as the first step in building a successful career.
I’m here to tell you to take your best elevator speech, crumple it into a ball and bank it into the nearest trash can. It’s time to ditch your elevator pitch.
Before I tell you why, I’ll give a you a refresher on Elevator Pitch 101. According to one career blog (I’m not saying which one), your elevator pitch is used to introduce yourself at networking events and mixers and is “a great way to gain confidence in introducing yourself to hiring managers…”
By the way, the article says, your elevator pitch should be 30 to 60 seconds long. That’s right: 30 to 60 seconds. Since Thanksgiving was a week ago, let’s talk turkey. Really. Sixty seconds is a really long amount of time to get someone to listen to you.
I’m going to avoid my temptation to compare human attention span to that goldfish–because I’ve never had the chance to test it out.
But one thing is clear.
The standard elevator speech is really boring to listen to, and sounds like a Gregorian chant perverted by the Teletubbies before being translated into Esperanto by Sponge Bob Square Pants.
The real problem with the elevator speech — aside from its length — is that, more often than not, doesn’t really tell a story about you. Take the following elevator speech, for example:
“Hi, my name is Dan, and I’m from Arlington, Texas, not to be confused with Arlington Virginia. I went to College A to study biology, because I always enjoyed being around frogs as a kid. I then got my master’s degree in culinary arts from College B because I learned that what I really enjoy is eating frogs, and I wanted to share my taste bud for frogs with the entire world. I then felt sorry for what I did those poor frogs, and because I enjoyed listening to the frogs make croaking sounds, I got a doctorate in frog and toad linguistics from College C. Now that I got my doctorate in frog and toad linguistics, I’m looking for a new opportunity in …”
I’m pretty sure that I lost you sometime around the time that I mentioned how much I love eating frogs. Yet, you’ve learned nothing useful about what type of person I am, or what my values are.
I recommend that you instead try a ‘micro-intro’: something that you could share in five to 10 seconds that piques your audience’s interest. For example:
• “I’m an astronomer. I tell stories about stars.” • “I’m in health care. I help people understand how their hearts are doing.” • “I play with toys all day — so that parents know that their kids can play with them safely.”
The magic of the micro-intro is that it provides just enough information to pique your conversation partner’s interest. It means that if they would like to know more about you, they have an opportunity to ask more. Otherwise, if you’re giving a 60 second Elevator Speech, you’re hogging time and not providing any useful information to the person who is listening patiently to ‘Team You’ as you drone on. And that’s just plain rude.