Your Career Reinvention Elevator Pitch

What is an ‘elevator pitch’? (It’s also referred to as an ‘elevator story or ‘elevator speech’.) It is a 30-second story that tells people who you are and what you do (30-seconds being the approximate amount of time you have to impress a hot prospect while riding in an elevator, hence the name).

The goal of an elevator pitch is to provoke interest so that your target (potential client, hiring company, prospect, etc.) will keep talking to you. For a career reinvention elevator pitch, you must craft a story for where you want to go (your new career) rather than where you’ve been!

An elevator pitch is usually one to three sentences. It always contains the following four elements:

1. What you do: A quick summary of yourself as a candidate
2. Who you do it for: The types of firms or individuals that would find your services helpful; your target
3. What value you bring: The benefit a potential firm would experience by hiring you
4. How you want to be perceived by the target: The qualities you want to be known for

Any elevator pitch you craft must be able to pass what’s called the “So what?” test. This means that your story must be interesting, compelling and useful enough that your target prospect cannot say ‘so what?’ in response to your pitch.

Coaching Action Steps

Step 1: Take a moment to brainstorm the components of your elevator pitch to your target market

What I do? ____________________________________________________________________
Who do I do this for? ________________________________________________________
What value do I bring? ______________________________________________________
How do I want to be perceived? ___________________________________________

Step 2: Craft your own career reinvention elevator pitch

Here’s an example of an elevator pitch for a consultant: I provide sophisticated business analysis to fast-growing technology companies in that helps them increase revenues by 50% (other results could be decrease their technology spending by 20%, or launch new product lines in half the time, or identify lucrative overseas markets, etc.).