Turn The Audience
Into Your Salesforce

Your primary goal when creating and delivering your Elevator Pitch is to get a potential investor, partner, or customer to want to hear more. However, successful innovators also keep in mind a second -- but nearly as important -- goal.

Creating salespeople for your Solution.

When you are just starting out, the one thing you don’t have are a lot of are resources. That’s why you’re trying to raise money.

As a result, you have to use your resources extremely efficiently. One of the best ways to do that is to take advantage of the principle of leverage. Just as a leverage can help you move an object that too large to be moved by hand, leverage can help your message have an impact that is disproportionate to the money you spend spreading it.

How do you do that?

The best way to do that is to turn anyone (and everyone) who hears your message into a salesperson for your idea. Whenever you talk to someone, your goal should be to turn them into some-one who is able to tell someone else about your idea.

For that to work, you must ensure that when you infect them with your message they are able to then infect others. That means your message cannot be too complicated. Instead, when that person is asked, “What are those guys up to?” they can reply with one or two words that accurately describe your idea.

The need to infect others with a message that they can then pass on to others is the reason why your Summary Sentence is so important. In many ways, your Summary Sentence is the container for your idea.

If it does its job, then people will become infected with your idea and will start infecting others.

If not, then they won’t.

If you want to learn more about this topic, there are a number of books that discuss how to harness the power of word of mouth to help spread your message. These include Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, Seth Godin’s Unleashing The Ideavirus, and Guy Kawasaki’s Selling The Dream.