Create a winning intranet elevator pitch

The elevator pitch: a short prepared speech that can be given in the time it takes to go up in an elevator.  Picture it, you are in the elevator and in walks the one person who you need to ‘get on board’ with your idea or provide the go ahead for your big project.  You have around thirty seconds to give all the information they need to hear. Where do you start and what do you sell?

Creating your elevator pitch for your current or future intranet, or even your current or future intranet role, is hugely important as you’ll never know when your next opportunity with the bigwig will come. We look at how you can create your elevator pitch for your intranet.

How to create your pitch

Gamestorming provides a quick and fun process to create an elevator pitch.  It suggests that your pitch should follow a formula:

FOR (target customer), WHO HAS (customer need), (product name) IS A (market category) THAT (one key benefit) UNLIKE (competition), THE PRODUCT (unique differentiator)

So, for example you might create something like:

FOR well paying Bristol based companies, WHO HAVE crappy Intranets and want to make them awesome, Jon Phillips IS AN award-winning intranet über guru THAT knows his shizzle. UNLIKE anyone else, JON wins glass trophies.

To help you get your pitch right, here are a few Intranetizen tips to let you know where you might be going wrong.

Who is the target customer?

Please, don’t say your target customer is “everyone”. It’s not. That’s the wrong answer — saying it’s ‘everyone’ is the same as ‘nobody’. You need to be able to articulate who it will help, who will benefit and when.

What is the customer need?

Helping them do their job isn’t enough here. What bit of their job and how, specifically, will it help?  Avoid well-meaning but non-specific phrases like ‘Collaborate better’ : Who will they be working better with and what kind of work will be done more effectively.

What is the product name?

This should be easy. What’s your intranet called? If it doesn’t have a name, consider applying one.

What is its market category?

Communications tool? Collaboration platform? Website? This has to be something that the person you are pitching too will understand well so that they can compare easily. Be mentally nimble and put this in their terms and not yours.

What is its key benefit?

This is tricky. Remember this whole pitch is 30 seconds long. Be really specific. If you can, put this benefit in terms that will tap into the work of the person you’re meeting, so talk about communication benefits to a comms professional, cost savings to a finance leader.

Who or what is the competition?

Email? Paper? Call Centres? There may be other ways in which this work could be done but if your pitch is to be successful, these alternatives are unlikely to be as good.

What is the product’s unique differentiator?

Quicker, faster, cheaper maybe, but do be specific.

Now it’s time to create yours

Have a go at your intranet elevator pitch, either below in the comments, on twitter with the #intranet hashtag or just by yourself.