Pitching Good Works

…the wise makes his speech judicious

and adds persuasiveness to his lips…

 (Proverbs 16:23)

One of my new volunteer activities is working with future leaders in the community to help expand their business etiquette skills. Once a month, I am involved with a team who meets with a diverse group of young people and role play various experiences they should expect to have in a business or professional environment. This weekend, we engaged them in developing his or her individual elevator pitch.

An elevator pitch is a business tool for clearly articulating what you or your organization has to offer. I prefer to call it your 30 second commercial: If you only have a short amount of time, like an elevator ride, what would you say that makes a lasting impression that leads to a follow-up?

An elevator pitch is a prepared statement. When crafting one, consider the following steps to make sure that the message is interesting, memorable, and succinct:

1. Identify the goal or objective of the pitch.
2. Explain what you or your organization does by using examples of problems you have solved.
3. Communicate what makes you UNIQUE, your value proposition.
4. Engage with an open ended question.
5. Put it all together.
6. Practice, until you get the pitch into a natural sounding 30 second conversation.

I love working with creative young people because their imaginations are limitless. Even though it was role-play, one young man pretended he was trying to get an invitation to apply for an intern position and he wanted to share his concepts for the first commercially available teleporter. Based on his pitch, I would have invited him to go through the interview process!

Working through the process was a reminder that I had not updated my elevator pitch in awhile. Using the guide provided above, a revised statement to introduce our workforce readiness solution to potential community or industry influencers reads as: My company provides consulting services to industrial organizations looking to expand their operations or their workforce. From my experiences in both corporate American and as a consultant, one of the issues that I have seen time and again is that small to mid-sized companies have a difficult time finding qualified candidates who have the necessary soft skills to succeed in a manufacturing or industrial work environment. To address that need, we developed workforce readiness solution that aides our partners in hiring the right people with the potential to excel in manufacturing jobs. Who in your organization is responsible for the #Youarehired! activities of identifying the technical and interpersonal skills needed to be successful on day one in the workplace? Here’s our capability brochure with our contact information. (Of course, the spoken message would be tailored for the audience.)

http://www.latrobellc.com/industrial-people.php

In working with young people, we try to emphasize that you never know when you will have an opportunity to make a lasting impression. Developing an elevator pitch is one example of preparing future leaders for likely exchanges in the professional environment. What other tools would you suggest we introduce and role play with the next generation to equip them for success in the workplace? Feel free to comment or send me an email to latanyua.robinson@gmail.com. If you like this post and want to catch up on some of my previous discussions, please visit the full Purposed Work blog at http://ltr-latrobe-mfg.blogspot.com/.