The elevator pitch: How to read the room and other avoidable faux pas
There are many ways to deliver a perfect, persuasive elevator pitch and just as many to mess it up. Get the pitch right, and the sky is the limit; botch it, and your aspirations, dreams and hopes plummet down the elevator shaft at 9.8 metres per second or so.
Pitch-perfect in two minutes or less
Wikipedia.org defines an elevator pitch as ‘a short description of an idea, product or company that explains the concept in a way such that any listener can understand it in a short period of time’. The idea, dear reader, is that should you bump into your CEO on the ground floor, you could sell him or her on your idea in the time it takes to ride the elevator up to the executive suites, the typical timeframe being from 30 seconds to about two minutes.
This writer started thinking about elevator pitches and other ways of selling business ideas after a frantic catch-up viewing session spanning episodes two through four of the popular reality-styled competition series, The Insurance Apprentice (TIA), now in its 10th year. Although aimed at the insurance and financial services industries, it offers excellent viewing for ambitious self-starters in any economic sector.
The most important pitch-related lesson from the aforementioned episodes is to ‘know your audience’ and / or ‘read the room’, both phrases that involve understanding the attitudes, dynamics and interests of the people you are pitching to. It is clear when a pitch falls short of this requirement, and the outcome can be somewhat cringeworthy. Case in point, during episode two of TIA 2024, a contestant opened her team’s pitch to an imaginary board by asking the panel to “close their eyes for a moment and imagine…” The pitch concluded with a similar “shut your eyes” plea that had this viewer shifting his gaze, uncomfortably. What went wrong?
Effective communication tool provisors
Storytelling and visualisation are highly effective communication tools, but the quick-fire presentation format followed in this series did not allow for their optimal deployment. Aside from the obvious time constraints, the presenting team did not have enough information about their audience, the judges masquerading as a company exco, to opt for creativity over professionalism. Put another way, if you are selling a make-belief board on the serous topic of diversity, equity and inclusion you are probably better-served by a formal approach.
Had the contestants taken the time to study previous TIA episodes, they may have stumbled across an earlier example of creativity-linked disaster. This writer recalls series six, episode three, in which a group of contestants play-acted a motor vehicle accident to support some-or-other aspect of their insurance product pitch, much to the judging panel’s and audience’s horror. One of the judges in that series offered the caustic remark: “A board of directors does not need the same presentation that a high school class might appreciate”. You can read more on that series in ‘Winner, winner chicken dinner’, also on FAnews.
The lesson here is that unless you are an excellent actor or orator, you are going to need a few hours to script and rehearse your storytelling-or visualisation-based pitch. So, in the context of having an hour-or-two to prepare; only one or two minutes to present; and being one person in a team of four that has to deliver a cohesive pitch, rather approach the challenge differently.
Everyone’s favourite conversational artificial intelligence (AI) language model, Chat GPT offered an excellent comment to close the ‘imagine if’ part of today’s discussion. “When used thoughtfully and strategically, storytelling and visualisation can be powerful tools for enhancing the impact of an executive-level business pitch; but it is important to assess the appropriateness and potential risks based on the specific context and audience preferences,” it wrote. Yes, the technique can work, but the risks far outweigh the benefits.
You said how much for that lemon?
The second important pitch-related lesson to crystalise from today’s binge-watching exercise is to be realistic, or more pointedly, to ensure that the facts and figures worked into your presentation are in line with real world expectations and experiences.
In the third episode of TIA 2024 contestants were asked to come up with a business pitch that would be interrogated in a similar fashion to the popular Shark Tank syndicated television series. The first team asked for R3.5 million or so for 15% of their business, which the judges pooh-poohed as being a trifle steep. But the second team steamrollered in, asking the venture capitalists for R175 million to match their combined, and imagined, investment, and thereby secure 50% of the business.
The R350 million ‘ask’ is way higher than the typical South African venture capital investment, and was somewhat reminiscent of the ‘one billion dollars’ scene from one of those Austin Powers movies. No wonder then, that the judges retorted, “how about you buy us out instead”. To place such a high valuation on an insurance start-up that had no discernible unique selling point (USP) showed a level of naivete that was out of place in a group being billed as ‘the cream’ of the country’s young insurance talent.
The demand also left this writer wondering whether the contestants stayed up-to-date with industry news, especially given how many wonderful Insurtech start-ups have popped up in South Africa over the years. Back in 2017, when Naked Insurance first started out, that business raised a mere R20 million in one of its early funding rounds. And Pineapple secured around R22.5 million when it won a United States start-up competition in 2019. These businesses raised larger sums in later funding rounds after proving their concepts.
‘Presenting to the board’ blues
It is not easy to transition from your day job in insurance operations to presenting at board level; but this is exactly what the TIA contestants are being challenged to do.
The third common sense observation that future contestants should onboard today is to read the brief. The starting point for any project is to identify the desired outcomes or requirements, and to ensure that these are satisfied by the solution that emerges from the ensuing brainstorming. Failing to do so is the stuff of comedy, as evidenced in the TIA judging panel’s instruction to design and price an insurance product yielding a solution that centred on government-funded, containerised re-housing units. Contestants, you have missed the brief.
Finally, you have to steer away from delivering robotic, theory-based pitches. As one judge complained: “I struggled to sit through that presentation; it was generic, it lacked context and it missed critical elements of what we asked you to deliberate upon”. PS, this was not a call to abandon formality. The judge also lambasted contestants for failing to integrate the lessons learned at their organisations into their pitches.
Value your work experience
You have to be able to apply your real-world experience to your problem solving skillset rather than simply attaching the results of your latest Google search to your preferred slideshow template.
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