Asking the Nod: How can I create an elevator pitch about myself?
Here's a thought experiment that might help you work through summarizing your experience (or other content) to an unfamiliar audience.
Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash
I was recently the guest host for an event thrown by UVA's Alumni Career Services centered on the theme of crafting your own professional narrative. The event wasn't recorded but I wanted to share some of my favorite questions and reply to them for those that couldn't attend.
What are some best practices for crafting a 30-second elevator pitch? I'm having some trouble distilling down a broad project portfolio into a succinct but impactful intro.
Hi,
Great question. When I started Getting the Nod one of the hardest things for me to do was just this, creating an elevator pitch, or any pitch for that matter. What am I selling, to whom am I selling it, and why should they buy it? As someone that can be overly literal and incredibly pedantic (how's that for a sales pitch?), the exercise of whittling down my experience and desired audience felt like trying to build a sandcastle one grain of sand at a time. The more I "figured out" with my message, the less it felt like it meant anything.
My last company was client services primarily centered around digital product development and we had similar difficulties. Building software and gathering insights are things that were increasingly commoditized over my tenure, so our list of "competitors" included everyone from internal teams to armies of offshore freelancers to giant digital consultancies. Trying to narrow down a message to simultaneously tackle each one of those other options was never straightforward.
Why is this so hard? You've (probably) spent hours thinking about your business, your work, and their value. You could probably ramble about a number of aspects of those things until you were blue in the face. And yet this challenge remains. The reason I'll focus on here is precisely because you've done all that thinking. You're overflowing with things to say, points to make, and arguments to debunk, and in trying to deal with that flood of potential statements your circuits overload a bit. Maybe you need to instead think of it as how little you *must* include rather than how much you *could* include. A sand hut rather than a sand castle, a conversational minimum viable product, verbal "design by subtraction." But how do you focus on saying less?
Here's a thought experiment one of my own coaches shared with me that I've found helpful. What if you talked about yourself from a different perspective? What would your best friend, your spouse/partner, or parent say? How would they talk about you?
My brain screamed with reasons why that wouldn't work:
But they don't know all the details!
But they won't use the right industry jargon!
But any explanation they give is going to be surface-level at best!
But they're going to miss something!
That is list is valid but all of those things they're leaving out are exactly the point. Even if you tell your partner about your workday every night over dinner, they still won't know all of the details. They won't know the KPIs, every angle of the problem, or all of the nuance in how you approach your craft. Instead, they'll have their own internal summary of what you do and enthusiasm about you that colors their presentation. They'll be incomplete but they'll answer with gusto! Perhaps that's enough.
Let's take the original question into consideration. They mention having a "broad project portfolio" they're trying to summarize. If someone asked their best friend they might say something like "they've been both a contributor and a leader on a lot projects big and small, some for companies I've heard of others I wouldn't recognize if you showed me their name right now." Not bad. Is there a lot unsaid there? Yes. However, that answer is very understandable. This is a pitch, not a dissertation.
From there maybe you could add something about team structures, size, industries, and levels of authority. Something like saying you've been "a freelancer in automotive, a team lead for an ed-tech startup, and an executive sponsor in finance." Alternately, maybe you'd want to emphasize common impact across all of those projects like being early, under budget, or well-reviewed. The point is that you're giving a bird's eye view, not trying to detail every project. Say enough to be understood and then leave room for questions.
Sometimes you need to get out of your own head and remember the problem you're trying to solve. If you're trying to talk about yourself to someone that doesn't know you, the "outsider" perspective can be a great starting point and shortcut. Take their "incomplete, shallow, jargon-free" response and build from there. Err on the side of maintaining that outsider perspective and not needing to include everything. The best way to convey what's in your head might be to do it by way of someone else's.
Pitching or selling yourself is hard. If you need outside perspective or other support in creating this message for yourself, please reach out. I'd love to help.