Whether you’re introducing yourself at a networking event, telling new colleagues about your business, or pitching to another professional — you want to capture attention and get it fast.
In situations like these, you need a short and easy-to-grasp explanation of your company and its products, like an elevator pitch.
An elevator pitch — also known as elevator speech — can better introduce professionals to your company. In this post, we’ll discuss why you should use a pitch, discuss different types, learn how to write your own, and give you tips on how to make a memorable one.
After all, the person(s) you're speaking with might turn out to be a perfect fit for your business — or know someone who is.
What is an elevator pitch?
It's a short, memorable description of what you do and/or what you sell. The goal is to earn a second conversation, not to convince the person you're talking to they should hire you or buy your solution.
An elevator pitch is never an opportunity to close a deal. It's an opportunity to close more of your prospect's attention and time. It's a quick introduction to you, your company, and how you can help your prospect.
Pull it out at networking events, conferences, warm calls — and even job interviews or career fairs. Keep your elevator pitch goal-oriented (e.g., "I help companies like yours increase production by up to 30% without additional cost.") and always end with a business card or request to connect on LinkedIn.
Remember to be engaging and friendly, and practice your pitch, so it's clear, concise, and well-paced.
How long should an elevator pitch be?
An effective elevator pitch is meant to be no more than 30 seconds, just like the length of time you ride in an elevator. You want to keep your words easily digestible, so avoid trying to get too deep into specifics as it can drag on the conversation — and lose your prospect's attention.
You should have an effective elevator pitch prepared before you need it, since you have such a short time to deliver it.
To show your value in under a minute, your pitch needs purpose, flow, and a hook to reel in attention — all of which we’ll discuss as follows.
How to Write an Elevator Pitch
How do you create an effective elevator pitch? Let's take a look.
1. Introduce yourself.
Before jumping into your elevator pitch, you'll need to introduce yourself to the person you're talking to. Write a sentence about who you are and what your role is at the company (e.g., "I'm a sales rep at Better Than the Rest Cable."). This will help you start the conversation off on the right foot.
Remember not to ramble. Researcher Diana Tamir shows that when we talk about ourselves, our brains show activity in the areas linked to value and motivation. Our bodies are rewarded when we talk about ourselves, so, especially when we're in high-stress situations, we resort to what feels good.
Tamir says, "This helps to explain why people so obsessively engage in this behavior. It's because it provides them with some sort of subjective value: It feels good, basically."
The problem with rambling in an elevator pitch scenario is that you haven't earned the prospect's interest or attention yet. They don't care who you are yet, how long you've worked in your company, or what job you had before. Keep the information about yourself to a minimum and earn the right to share more later in the deal.
2. State your company’s mission.
Have a clear understanding of what your company does. What's the company's mission and goals for its product or service? Include a section in your pitch where you introduce the company. The more you know about the business, the easier it will be to cater your pitch to the person you're talking to.
For example, "I'm a sales rep at Better Than the Rest Cable. We help hotels across the U.S. pair with the perfect cable provider and plan for their region and needs."
This is a succinct description of what the company does — without getting into the weeds. If you were to be cut off after these two sentences, the prospect would still know exactly who you are and what your company does.
3. Explain the company value proposition.
What does your company do exceptionally well that sets its product or service apart from the rest? Write a brief, 1-2 sentence statement about the value the product or service provides to current customers.
You've introduced yourself and your company, now it's time to get to the goods. Let's see what that looks like:
"I'm a sales rep at Better Than the Rest Cable. We help hotels across the U.S. pair with the perfect cable provider and plan for their region and needs. With regional experts assigned to each account, we help hotels identify the most cost-effective and guest-delighting cable plan for them."
In one sentence, you've told the prospect what sets us apart and how you can bring them value. You've likely piqued their interest, but how can you really grab their attention? Read on.
4. Grab their attention with a hook.
Pull in your audience with an exciting story about a customer or the company founders. Or offer up a fascinating fact or statistic about the product. An attention-grabbing hook keeps people engaged with what you're saying. Let's finish up our pitch below with an attention-grabbing statistic.
"I'm a sales rep at Better Than the Rest Cable. We help hotels across the U.S. pair with the perfect cable provider and plan for their region and needs. With regional experts assigned to each account, we help hotels identify the most cost-effective and guest-delighting cable plan for them. On average, we're able to save hotels up to 25% on their annual cable bills."
5. Read and edit the pitch.
Read your pitch aloud and make sure it sounds natural. If your pitch is overly formal, you could come off as stuffy and uptight. Instead, make your pitch conversational. This will keep your audience captivated and more likely to continue the conversation. The pitch we've been practicing with is 30 seconds long. This is a good length and gives you time to elaborate if your prospect
If you're looking for some inspiration, look no further. The following elevator pitch examples illustrate six different ways to describe what you can offer.
Featured Resource: 8 Free Elevator Pitch Templates
Download Free E-Pitch Templates
Now that you know elevator pitch best practices, download HubSpot's eight free elevator pitch templates to put your learnings into action. These templates can be used to make a sale, a networking connection, or a deal for business capital.
30 Second Elevator Pitch Examples
1. An Attention-Grabbing Question
Length of Pitch: 30 seconds
Has your boss ever asked you to "whip up a quick report before the end of the day"? You say yes with a sinking heart — because you know it'll be the opposite of quick. The founders of my company, AnswerASAP, constantly dealt with this problem in their roles as marketing executives. So they created a tool that puts all your data in one place and creates unique reports within 30 seconds or less.
This elevator pitch is effective because:
- It grabs your attention with a question.
- It reminds you of an annoying — and frequent — pain.
- It demonstrates empathy for your situation.
- It's straightforward and doesn't use jargon.
2. The Credibility Boost
Length of Pitch: 30 seconds
As an account executive for AnswerASAP, I talk to hundreds of marketers per month. And 99% of them hate creating reports. It's time-consuming, it's tedious, and it's usually not your highest priority. That's where our tool comes in — it pulls from all of your data to create any report you want in less than the time it takes to pour a cup of coffee.
This elevator pitch is effective because:
- It demonstrates the speaker's authority.
- It reinforces how strongly you hate making reports.
- It uses a common metaphor to highlight the tool's ease of use.
3. The Surprise Ending
Length of Pitch: 30 seconds
You want to know how many leads from your webinar campaign became customers versus leads from your trade show booth. But only customers who bought two products — and weren't already in your database.
How long would it take you to create that report?
If you had AnswerASAP, a data and reporting tool, you'd already know. It creates reports in a matter of seconds.
This elevator pitch is effective because:
- It has a "surprise ending."
- It illustrates how valuable the product is creatively.
- It forces you to compare your current situation to a better world.
4. An Outlandish Stat
Length of Pitch: 30 seconds
Your marketing team members will each spend approximately 8,730 minutes of their work year putting together reports. Across your teams and departments, how much money can you save if you took that chore off their to-do lists with AnswerASAP, the reporting tool that automatically pulls your data into an easy-to-read (and send) dashboard? We've saved companies thousands of dollars per year, and they're operating more efficiently than ever.
This elevator pitch is effective because:
- It grabs your attention with numbers while aggravating a pain.
- It makes you realize the true productivity cost of reporting.
- It sparks your frustration.
5. The Short and Sweet
Length of Pitch: 30 seconds
The founders of my company were originally marketers. The worst part of their day, by far, was … Want to take a guess? No, it wasn't arguing with Sales. They detested making reports. I don't blame them. You know what a pain in the neck it is. That's why they created AnswerASAP. You can create any report you want in a matter of seconds.
This elevator pitch is effective because:
- It's short and sweet.
- It explains the inspiration for the product.
- It includes the company's origin story — a move in keeping with seminal cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner's theory that people are 22 times more likely to remember a fact when it's presented as part of a story.
6. A Customer Story
Length of Pitch: 30 seconds
Siena Rosen, a marketer at Dunder Mifflin, used to spend 30 minutes per day manually creating reports. Now that she uses AnswerASAP, that's gone down to four minutes. She's making twice as many reports in less time. Our tool helps marketers like Siena answer any question on their mind (or their boss's) nearly instantly. If you're curious, I can explain more.
This elevator pitch is effective because:
- It uses a customer example to give the product credibility.
- It shows a clear and compelling "before and after."
- It demonstrates value.
- It gives you a chance to say,"Sure, tell me more," or"I'm good, thank you."
7. The Reality Check
Length of Pitch: 30 seconds
Every day, the average marketer spends half an hour putting together reports. Most of the time, these reports are barely glanced at — or worse, ignored altogether. AnswerASAP, which stores all of your data from every tool your business uses, is a game-changer here. Just type what report you want: For example, "A bar chart of revenue from every lead source in the past month."You'll get your report in 30 seconds.
This elevator pitch is effective because:
- It makes you realize the true productivity cost of reporting.
- It sparks your frustration.
- It helps you understand exactly how the product works with a simple example.
8. The Joke
Length of Pitch: 20 seconds
How many marketers does it take to do monthly reporting? None if they've automated the process with AnswerASAP. Each employee that uses this tool saves 30 minutes per day on average, which is time they can spend on marketing tasks more worthy of their time such as improving performance on campaigns and increasing ROI across the board.
This elevator pitch is effective because:
- It engages the audience (at least, if you use a joke that's actually funny).
- It provides instant relatability.
- It draws on a known truth about the industry and positions an unexpected solution.
9. The Emotional Appeal
Length of Pitch: 30 seconds
When I started my career in marketing, I thought I would be making a difference for my organization right away, but as the junior member of the team, all the reporting and administrative tasks were pushed onto me. I was spending so much time creating reports for key stakeholders that could've been diverted to more important revenue-generating activities. If you're not using AnswerASAP, you're spending too much of the organization's time, money, and talent on something that can be generated by our tool on-demand in 30 seconds.
This elevator pitch is effective because:
- It evokes emotion and empathy through storytelling.
- It establishes a pain or problem you can relate to.
- It draws a hard-hitting conclusion as a natural "moral of the story."
10. The One-Liner
Length of Pitch: 10 seconds
AnswerASAP saves marketers time by eliminating the tediousness of data-gathering and formatting to create beautiful marketing reports in less than 30 seconds.
This elevator pitch is effective because:
- It demonstrates the company's value proposition.
- It is short and sweet if you need to get to the point.
11. The Mutual Connection
Length of Pitch: 30 Seconds
As I understand it, we have a mutual connection — Zachary Koch. He's actually a customer of ours. His company was able to cut its software development lifecycle in half by leveraging our solution. You two are industry partners of a similar scale, so you would likely see similar results. Would you like to hear more about what we did for him and could do for you?
This elevator pitch is effective because:
- It immediately builds trust.
- It references easily verifiable results.
12. The Advisor
Length of Pitch: 30 Seconds
In working with other budding B2B SaaS companies, we've found that one of the key issues they struggle with is content marketing. This past year we helped a number of your industry peers to create, publish, and promote blog content to support their inbound marketing efforts, resulting in an average 20% increase in leads generated. Would you like to hear more?
This elevator pitch is effective because:
- It demonstrates familiarity with a prospect's work.
- It provides actionable insight with hard results.
Now that we've seen some great elevator pitch examples, let's discuss what you should try to avoid.
What Not to Do in an Elevator Pitch
Before we look at some good examples, let's look at what not to do.
1. Don’t ramble.
Length of Pitch: 45 seconds
I've been a rep at Sales-R-Us for five years now. They're the best company I've ever worked for. I've loved my time there. I started as a BDR and have worked my way up to a senior position. I've never looked back. I also love the services we sell. I can't wait to tell you about them. Sales-R-Us help companies become more efficient with their sales through training, evaluation, leadership management, and that's just to name a few. We have a unique approach that's been honed by lots of sales experts over the years, and I've seen our solution really help a lot of companies and teams. I've had many clients whose businesses have been saved because of our genius solution. I know we can do the same for you. Would you be interested in learning more?
This elevator pitch is not effective because:
- It's way too long.
- The rep spends way too much time talking about themself.
- It never gets specific or actionable.
- It never provides actual examples or attention-grabbing facts.
2. Don’t use too much jargon.
Length of Pitch: 30 Second
At Stratosphere Solutions, our OS-level virtualization delivers software in containers, all of which share the system of a lone operating system kernel. These containers are isolated but can communicate with one another through well-defined channels. Ultimately, this lets you use fewer resources than traditional virtual machines.
This elevator pitch is not effective because:
- It's inaccessible to someone without relevant technical knowledge.
- It features too much jargon.
- It tries to condense an extremely complicated topic into 30 seconds.
- Its value proposition isn't clear-cut.
Remember, an elevator pitch should only come at someone else's prompting. If you're spontaneously reciting it to random people, you're not doing yourself any favors. But if they ask, you want to be prepared with an interesting, well-crafted pitch.
Reel in Clients with an Effective Elevator Pitch
While a short speech may seem insignificant, those first conversations can hold some weight. With a well-crafted pitch, you can turn a single conversation with a prospect into a long-lasting customer, or even into a business partner. We hope you found these examples helpful and are inspired to craft your own effective elevator pitch.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in August 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.