The elevator ride to the 86th floor of the Empire State Building takes just about 60 seconds.
Slow by modern elevator standards, that nowadays can cover the same distance in close to 30 seconds.
The Empire State Building is perfect for our little challenge though, because 60 seconds is a fair amount of time in which to deliver an ‘elevator pitch’.
So, could you win the ultimate ‘elevator pitch challenge’?
If you found yourself in the Empire State Building elevator with an absolutely perfect prospect for your product or service …
On a scale of 0 – 10, as CEO how confident are you that you could ‘close the sale’ by the end of that elevator ride?
And what about your CMO – are you confident they could win the business?
Or your salespeople – again on a scale of 0 – 10, how confident are you that they could do it?
(And by the way, just to switch things up a little here … I forgot to mention that the prospect doesn’t actually have to decide if they’re buying at the top because they are going to take the elevator back down with your #1 competitor so they can hear their pitch too, before deciding on who to go with.)
Okay … 3 … 2 … 1 … and you’re back in the room!
If you’re glad that was just an imaginary game, then maybe it’s time to put some work into your elevator pitch.
Get everyone involved in sales and marketing to give you their best elevator pitch and score them out of 10.
Anything less than an average score of 10(!) really needs improving.
Because I’ve found that a company’s average elevator pitch score is an excellent indicator of how well ALL of their other marketing efforts are performing.
Because …
If your marketing message on a one-to-one basis isn’t simple enough to be delivered in 60 seconds … AND persuasive enough to win the sale … then it’s highly unlikely that your one-to-many sales messaging is going to be effective either.