Developing your elevator pitch
You can break down networking events into two categories: those where you go looking for new customers (eg someone who is going to place an order or buy what you sell – such as your local vegan fair) and those where you are looking for connections that are going to benefit your business (eg a trade show or business networking group). But you should always be ready to encounter both kinds of people wherever you are, and already know what you are going to say to each when you do. You can overcome a lot of nervousness about meeting people face to face through preparation. When someone asks you ‘What do you do?’ you should just hit play and have your well-practiced answer come out. We call this an ‘elevator pitch’, which comes from the idea of being able to pitch your business in the time it takes to travel from one floor to another in an elevator. It’s a sentence or three that sums up what you do, what your mission is and why someone should use you.
Sometimes these elevator pitches can be purely factual such as “If you have a vegan business, or are thinking of starting one, then Vegan Business Tribe will support you, inspire you and help you make it a success” which I use myself. Or, they can be more intriguing and open up a conversation like “We make the world a better place, one slice at a time” as Mike Hill from One Planet Pizza signs off. Wow! I love Mike’s line, and aspire to one day have something as great as that. Because you could easily say “we make vegan frozen pizza” and then someone’s response might be “Oh, cool, I like Pizza”, or “Ew, I hate vegan food”. Instead, the response to Mike’s actual elevator pitch is normally “What do you mean? You’re changing the world with pizza? How does that work?”, which then allows Mike or his son Joe to explain to you about the multiple awards they have won for their pioneering pizzas and ethical approach to business – regardless of whether the person they are talking to is interested in veganism or not.
The question of “what do you do?” can fill you with dread if you haven’t practised and memorised your answer. But your answer should prompt people to ask a follow-on question, and you should have practised the answer to those possible follow-on questions too.
Spend time working out your response to the ‘what do you do’ question ell before you get asked it. Also, work out what follow-on questions people are likely to ask to your response, or how can you change your answer to make sure that they ask you the follow-on question that you want them to ask. Spend some time filling in the blanks:
- When someone asks me what I do, my short answer is..
- The question I want them to ask next is…
- My longer answer to that is…
- They might also ask…
- And my answer to that is…
Keep your elevator pitch with you, either written on a card or saved to your phone so that you can read it and practice it before you go into an event. After a while you won’t need to practice it – it will become second nature.
Once you have your answer worked out, go try it out on people. If it doesn’t get the follow-on question you want, tweak it until it does. When Lisa and I first launched our vegan agency, we went to events with different elevator pitches to try out. I remember sitting in a car park with scraps of paper trying out the ideas we’d been brainstorming on the two hour drive to the event. Lisa had a couple she was going to try and I had a couple I was going to use so that we could compare them at the end of the event and see what responses we got. Because we were talking mainly to large food brands we knew we would be at events where we would be meeting both vegan and non-vegan companies, so we needed a line that would work for both without knowing which they were. The one that won out that day when someone asked us “What do you do?” was “Vegans make amazing products but aren’t always great at making money; non-vegan businesses are great at making money, but don’t understand vegans. We’re the bridge between the two.” It’s a bit cumbersome, and nowhere near as elegant as One Planet Pizza’s making the world a better place one slice at a time, but in the networking situations we were finding ourselves in it worked perfectly. It worked as a sorting hat and we knew what follow-on comments and questions it would get. If someone was from a vegan company they would usually laugh and say they identify with not being great at making money, which allowed us to launch straight into talking about what business problems they face. If they were from a non-vegan brand they would agree about not being sure how to connect with vegans, and we could talk to them about how we help companies understand the vegan consumer.
This is why some people seem confident in face-to-face situations and others don’t. It’s not just something they are born with, it’s because they have their answers ready and they have learnt their lines. You can do the same.
