Hello and welcome to this lecture on the elevator pitch. By the end of this video, you should be able to deliver an effective elevator pitch. And the goal here is to basically introduce you to a good outline that you should follow when you're trying to organize a pitch. One of the first things, of course, that you should always do is brainstorm. You should really think about what it is that you're trying to do. Is it an opportunity that you want to convince somebody about? Or is it a problem that you think you have a solution for. So brainstorm, think of everything that you can, all the players that are involved, the context, the business situation. Get that out on paper and that should be able to lead you to define the problem or the opportunity. Basically, you want to make sure that you're as precise as you can be. Quite often elevator pitches are short. They can range from 30 seconds up to 2 minutes, maybe a little bit more. So you don't have a lot of time. You want to be able to introduce yourself, identify a problem or an opportunity, show them that you have the solution, and then also convince them that they should be able to do something. Whether that's to take some sort of action or invest in your company. So, plan. That's what you need to do. Once you've identified the focus of your pitch, including the possible problems or opportunities, you should review how you could describe or maybe analyze and solve the problems. Or at least show how the circumstances of your solution will benefit the people that you're trying to persuade. Now remember, that people involved in your business situation may look at things from different perspectives. So should always be aware of what they may feel, what are their values, what are their beliefs, what are they wanting to do, okay? So once you've done this, think about how you'll introduce yourself, think about what you're going to put in the body of your pitch, and then think about how you're going to conclude. What is it that you want them to do? Now, that's a very vague outline. So what I want to do is I want to go into more detail. What should a good outline about elevator pitch look like? Well, I would argue that there should be five steps. The first step is your introduction, and the next step is background, followed by identifying a problem, and then how your company, or your idea can solve that problem, and then you should ask your audience to do something. So that's your basic steps that you should follow in any elevator pitch. Let's go in detail now about each step. So step one is Introduction. This is where you introduce yourself and your company and your position. You want to be precise and concise here. You don't want to waste a lot of time. So this is probably the shortest part of your pitch. Get in there, let them know who you are, who you work for, and what your position is. The next two steps are really all about setting the context. You don't want to waste a lot of time here, but you want to be as precise as you can. Why is this important? How is this relevant to your audience? And how does this lead into a problem that needs a solution? Or how does it lead into an opportunity that your company can address? So this is all about setting the context, why is it relevant? And how does that lead into describing the problem or opportunity. Okay, once you've established the background and the context of the situation and you've shown the audience how it's relevant to them, you present your argument and you need to support this. You can support this by appealing to logic, to emotion, to authority. You can use different strategies such as comparisons, contrasts. You can use evidence, you can use examples or refer to data. The important thing is that you are concise. You get to your argument, you show them why your solution or your opportunity or your idea is the right one. And you may have to make sure of that as you move from point to point, that you use clear discourse markers. And what I mean by that is you use sign posts, words like okay, now that you've heard about the situation. Phrases that connects your ideas basically. Finally, you make a call for action. You let your audience know what it is that you want them to do. This should be again very brief and precise. You've introduced yourself already. You've given background and context to show why the situation is relevant to the audience. You've shown how you have the capability to solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity. Now this is where you ask your audience to do something, whether it's for investment in your company or some sort of partnership agreement. It really depends on your situation. But this is where you have to be very clear. What is it that you want your audience to do? Remind them of why the ideas, the key ideas and the key points that you brought up earlier are important to them, and tell them what it is that you would like them to do. So let's review the five steps again. You introduce yourself and the company. You set the context of the situation, give background so that your audience understands the relevance of the content that you're going to talk about. You identify what the problem is, or the opportunity. You show how you can solve that problem, or how you can take advantage of that opportunity. And then you ask the audience to do something by reminding them that their actions can benefit them and also their actions can help solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity. So that's basically the outline of an elevator pitch. It's very simple, five steps. You can follow that outline and plan it for a 30 second elevator pitch. You can plan it for a two minute elevator pitch. It's really up to you and your situation. The important thing is it needs to follow a logical process. It needs to be convincing, you need to draw on your persuasive skills, appealing to the audience, appealing to emotion, appealing to logic. You need to be able to use support in your argument, examples, data, comparisons, contrasts. Rehearse your pitch, make sure that you do it a few times before you actually deliver it. Record yourself doing it, that's an excellent way. By watching yourself deliver a pitch, can show whether or not you're being effective. You might notice something that you're missing. You might notice that your language is too vague or you might notice that your organization isn't exactly logical, okay. So there you have it. Now you should have an idea on how to deliver an elevator pitch. Thank you very much for watching.
