I’ve been facinated for some time now with the concept of “telling your story”.  My two favourite recent business books are “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds, and Made to Stick by Chip & Dan Heath.  One area of particular interest is the applications of their philosophies to the “elevator pitch”.  For those not familiar with this term, imagine you had 30 seconds to tell a prospect what your product or service is and why they should use it.  From my experience, it is extremely hard to do this.  Most people I know (myself included) have difficulty being able to consistently pull this off under time pressure, but I believe it can be mastered.   It requires 3 things:

1. The ability to distill your company/product/service message down to its essence;
2. So much practice delivering this message in 30 seconds that you could do it instinctively at any time of the day when confronted by a co-worker with a stopwatch;
3. The charisma or presence to be able to connect with your listener(s).

Although I don’t have any video example of Steve Jobs doing an elevator pitch, I’m sure he would be outstanding, given that he is the the zen master of Presentations.  See this post by Garr Reynolds or this video of Jobs announcing the iPhone. It’s not a stretch to imagine him giving the greatest elevator pitch of all time.  Yet so few people seem to get it right.  The following are some examples of ”elevator” pitches featured on the NY Times website this morning.  The clips are from the CTIA Wireless 2008 (the largest mobile phone industry trade show).

The first example, an exec talking about the new Samsung Instinct, lacks any passion, and seems to speak more to features than benefits.  A better example is this clip of the LG Vu, which is more passionate, more benefit-driven (and BTW is given by someone who is much more believable as a spokesperson… which one of these two people can you see tuning in and watching TV on their phone?)  Note that she actually showed what the experience of watching TV on the phone was like.

What would the video of YOUR elevator pitch look like?  Would you want it on YouTube?