Presenting ideas with the Elevator Pitch – sounds simple and familiar, but is quite tricky to implement. Imagine you have a groundbreaking idea and you happen to meet the potential decision maker or a key stakeholder in the elevator. You now have a unique chance to convince him of the idea during the elevator ride. Only, unfortunately, the trip does not take two hours, but only one or two minutes.
The challenge of this method is to precisely elaborate all essential features and present them in a short and crisp way. Therefore, the Elevator Pitch is usually described as a presentation method.
As a creativity method, it is very helpful because it forces the participants to focus on the most important points and thus find answers especially to the difficult questions. In this way, weak points and open questions can also be identified and answered, which are otherwise easily swept under the table, as they are often dismissed as purely a marketing problem. But it is precisely this aspect that must also be intensively considered.
In an elevator pitch, the core ideas of an initiative or concept are formulated and convincingly presented in the shortest possible time – literally during an elevator ride.
Due to the short attention span, the core arguments must be presented in such a condensed way that the addressee recognizes what is special and unique about the idea and becomes interested in more.
The form can be classically chosen either verbal only, meanwhile presentation slides or videos are also common for these short presentations.
Despite the short presentation time, several key elements are included in a good elevator pitch: – Striking introduction – Credible short presentation – Comprehensible language – Focus on the essentials – Include addressee as target group.
In terms of content, the following topics are touched upon in the short presentation and, depending on a dramaturgy, packed into a story. – Relevance – History of the idea/ problem – Problem to be solved – Competition/ competition – Vision, mission, motto – Potential of the idea – Business model
For companies and teams, conducting internal elevator pitches is a great way to bring to light a variety of suggestions for improvement or new ideas. Based on the given framework, these ideas can be concretized or plausibilized in further steps in order to develop concrete products from them.
The type of presentation requires the participants to focus on the essential content so that the problem to be solved and the idea are not diluted.
Advantages – Focus on relevant content – Short preparation and execution time – Multiple presentation rounds possible – Fast feedback and high learning curve
Disadvantages – Complex problems cannot be explained comprehensively
