How Can The Pitching Pyramid Help You Pitch Smarter?
A lot of accelerators preach the need to have an elevator pitch licked, just in case you ever need it, but I don’t really buy into that. At best it can seem soulless, and worst totally lacking in authenticity.
I’ve seen great presenters crushed by this idea, that you should be able to reel off the same pitch verbatim on demand.
I’m a bigger believer in having a pitching pyramid – a version of your intro and story which can scale down to ten seconds, and up to sixty seconds or five minutes based on how much time you have and how well you keep their attention.
There’s a great piece of software called Accordion, created by Andy, a former Radio 1 producer, which cleverly cuts down podcasts and content to fit in all of the important information into as much time as you have available on your drive, commute or how long it takes to cook your dinner. I think this is a much better way to think about you pitch than having a generic 30-second elevator ride.
If you’ve got ten seconds, what’s the most important thing someone needs to know? What works well in capturing peoples’ attention and prompting questions?
How do you know if it’s working? Do people have any follow up questions? And preferably not questions like “I don’t get it, can you say that again?”.
What reaction do you want to stir up in people? How do you pique their interest just long enough to earn an opportunity to do the longer pitch?
One exercise we do on our Startup Club and Accelerator programmes is get people to spend 5 mins explaining what they do to each other and then have the partner do the elevator pitch. It can feel really awkward, but it is super useful to understand what has stuck from your intro and what resonates. Different people will take different things from your spiel and that’s ok, but you need to work out what sticks more often than not. It’s even better if it is someone you’ve never met before, who knows nothing about what you do.
Once you’ve got a sense of what mental models your idea sticks to, it’s easier to scale it up or down. Sometimes these are simple mechanisms like “it’s like Airbnb but for…” or “it’s like the Uber for…” which can help you get there quicker, but might not feel too authentic. I’ll talk more about this in a future #50things post.
A very important factor in this is adapting and adjusting to your audience. I’ll again talk about this more in a future #50things post but I’d always recommend you let the person opposite you speak first. You can always learn more interesting stuff that way, but also understand better what it is you might have to say which is interesting to them. If you don’t know what’s interesting to them then you don’t know what they want to hear about your idea. Do they care about the impact? The potential to scale? The existing traction?
Honing your pitches towards the sharper end of the pyramid usually means thinking more about what you leave out than what goes in. I’ll talk a lot more about opportunity cost in the future, but some things people can find out later and still stay interested. Don’t let vanity get in the way of a succinct pitch.
Another topic I’ll go into more in the future is optimism/positivity, but no matter what happens, your pyramid needs to include a sense that you’re going somewhere good and they will want to come with you. That energy is significant.
Let me know how you choose what goes into your sharper end pitches and any examples you have of when it’s gone well/badly.
I hope you find some value in me putting these down. I’d love to hear your perspectives on the topics, Twitter is the best place to find me: @GarethTSq
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