The Art of the Elevator Pitch or Avoiding Long Elevator Rides

One of my interests is serving as a mentor to Boston College student entrepreneurs, who create technology start ups and then enter their ideas into the Boston College Venture Capital Competition (BCVC). It's fun and it's not insignificant - there's the $10,000 prize and access to a long list of prominent Boston College alumni venture capitalists and angel investors. We recently had the first round of our competition - Elevator Pitch Night. Twenty-seven teams competed, and in the interest of establishing some credibility on the topic, my team finished third.

Everyone knows the basics of the elevator pitch - what's the product or service; who is it for; why is it different; and how are you going to make and keep making money. It's art and science, and here's some tips on creating a really good pitch:

1. Crystallize your vision. There's a reason BCVC kicks off its year long competition with Elevator Pitch Night. The elevator pitch is core to your vision, and becomes the kernel for the product, strategy and business model. Create a great elevator pitch first, and the rest of the work is made easier and more effective.
2. Think of the elevator pitch as a progressive story, albeit a brief one. Start with something compelling that is grounded in fact. My team noted that 73% of all adults cite nutritious meals as key in their dining out experience. Then build the story with a simple definition of the product and who it's for, followed by what needs to be a powerful differentiator. None of these elements should be soft in tone, good stories maintain attention at every turn.
3. Simplicity, yet specificity, is critical. The winner of Elevator Pitch Night was a bricks and mortar product. It's for pre-adolescent girls who seek to express their individuality, fashionably, by accessorizing their shoes with collectible charms that make a statement about their interests, an occasion, a season or their mood. Think of it another way - complexity does not signify sophistication or value.
4. The powerful differentiator is key. If you don't have it, keep working on it till you do. Incremental enhancements to existing products and services are of little value, and won't get funded. My team's initial differentiator combined a location-based service with accessibility to nutritious dining at anytime and anyplace. 
5. Frame your business model around repeatable, sustainable and scalable, and make it integral to the product and strategy. If you've done a good job with the first part of the elevator pitch, the savvy investor will immediately get the business model.
6. Now you're ready to write the pitch, so work it hard. Cut out jargon and extraneous wording. Know the language of your audience. Transform it into something simple, and above all conversational, for your primary investor audience, and later, customers and partners.
7. Make it a living pitch. Continue to refine and evolve it, but most of all, stay true to its core. After all, it's your vision, and eventually it'll be your baby.

All entrepreneurs spend inordinate amounts of time on product, strategy and business model, as well they should. Think about how that time can be made more effective, by spending the right time up front on the embodiment of the kernel of your business - the elevator pitch.

The Social Media Payoff

The last year has especially seen an explosion in consumer marketers investing in social media, and the degree of sophistication continues to increase. Netbase provides a very sophisticated service designed to monitor, analyze and quantify social media conversations into consumer trends. Why shouldn't the same discipline apply to B2B and especially technology products?

B2B marketers are at the embryonic stage of leveraging social media, similar to where consumer marketers were years ago. We count our Twitter followers, create LinkedIn groups, comment on blogs or attempt to join the conversation of online technology communities. Maybe we use HubSpot to track the effectiveness of this from a lead perspective, but we need to do more to make social media strategic and that means using it to drive revenue in new and existing markets.

Social media is fertile ground to monitor how people use products and what they need from them. The opportunities are endless - from new product ideas to user application interaction to customer satisfaction. Monitoring and analyzing a particular market's trends and the pain points of users may yield an entirely different way to build a product that achieves much more rapid adoption. Good SaaS companies, for example, already have online communities to get feedback on their products from customers. But that's the point, the feedback is from the customer who wants a specific piece of functionality. It is feature-driven. Feedback from a far broader cross-section of a market is much more strategic with greater value implications. Plus, it provides a new way in which to engage that market. Think about all the content from this information that can then be created and used to market to that community.

It's time to move the use of social media in B2B beyond the concept of a market channel. Leverage it so you can become much more market centric as you go-to-market.

Positioning and Segmentation: What Product Marketers Have Forgotten

I am spending a lot of time right now talking to high tech marketing and business executives. Everyone, justifiably, is focused on their sales numbers, even to the extent of relegating product marketing toward a field marketing role. There's no doubt that any activity in this economy that more closely aligns marketing and sales is a good thing, and the more competitive, product and business information that the sales team has, the better.

However, some very valuable product marketing fundamentals are being lost in the process, the sophisticated use of positioning and segmentation. When product marketing is focused on field marketing, positioning becomes messaging and value proposition. That's great for an individual deal or even types of prospects, but it's not sufficient to move markets and increase market share.

Small is Beautiful and the Scalable Brand

Sitting on my bookshelf is an old paperback copy of Small is Beautiful, by E.F. Schumacher, a vestige of a long ago economics class that certainly entertained many points of view (wasn't that why we were there?). The political economics of it aside, it left an impression on me as a budding marketer - that the additive effects of small, purposeful things done really well, and in an integrated and focused way, could in effect move a market. Isn't that what social media is all about when done well, and Twitter specifically?

Turbulence Ahead? It's Really an Opportunity

There's always been a misconception that in bad times marketing just doesn't add to the topline. It was always counterintuitive to me because when you look at the investment world, there's always someone making money in any market. You just need to be strategic, understand the opportunities and apply sound principles.  The same goes for marketing.

Long-time Kellogg marketing guru, Phillip Kotler, shares this philosophy in his new book, Chaotics: The Business of Managing and Marketing in the Age of Turbulence. I haven't read the book yet, but Kotler shares his view in a recent BusinessWeek interview. Skip down to Kotler's three maxims - 1) out marketing innovate your competitors, e.g. don't just do social media, tie the content to a "must have" business value proposition that has customers, and their product use, being the proof points in that dialogue; 2) build an extensible brand promise, i.e. throughout an entire industry not just a target market (note: I love how our director of enterprise sales at Bullhorn says that everyone knows who we are); 3) innovate continuously in your produts, services and supply chain, i.e. marketing without innovative products, services, channels etc...is nothing more than marketing communications.

The last point brings me around to my original analogy about the investment world. No investor makes big money by being defensive and tactical. The real money is made by identifying and executing on strategic opportunities that other investors don't see. It's the same deal when applying marketing strategically. There are always customers in a market who need your product if you understand how to unlock the business value for them, reach them in innovative ways and coalesce an entire industry around your momentum, which you, the marketer creates.

Turbulence ahead? Embrace it!

It's Crunch Time

It just happens to be serendipitous that the name of my marketing blog and my first post coincides with what many believe to be "crunch time" in the U.S. economy. For a very good snap shot at why, check out this article on Business Insider.

I'm certainly not a fatalist though, but it does serve to make a larger point - in building a sustainable company, there will always be incredible challenges, even ones seemingly out of our control, or are they? Even in this circumstance, brand extension and demand expansion exist with the right marketing and sales strategy and execution, operating in what I refer to as a "crunch time" model. Yes, the two are very much intertwined and there needs to be total alignment between them from a strategic and operational perspective, including positioning, segmentation, campaign execution and measurement, with marketing adopting the sense of urgency found in great sales organizations.