Test the Strength of Your Agency’s Elevator Pitch

Lately, I’ve had the opportunity to go back to basics with a handful of agencies and help them figure out a foundational marketing tool: their elevator pitch. 

Despite its slanginess, I love the concept of an elevator pitch for a bunch of reasons.

1. It’s utilitarian.

Strategic positioning, value proposition, mission/vision/values — these are all important but they’re also problematic. Their definition changes depending on who you’re talking to and in my experience they tend to result in a lot of debate and navel gazing. Then, when you finally arrive at something everyone agrees on, does it actually get used?

An elevator pitch is designed to get used. Its purpose is to get your message across quickly and effectively to someone who might lead you to revenue. If it’s a good one, anyone on your team, from the intern to the CEO, can use it and understand it.

2. It packs a lot into a small parcel. 

There are numerous elevator pitch templates out there. The one that I rely on provides a framework for briefly explaining what your agency does, the clients it works with, and the outcomes those clients enjoy.

Basic, right? Of course, to arrive at the simplicity, you gotta answer some big questions. That’s not always the easy part, but doing that work today sets you up for success tomorrow. 

3. It’s a touchstone for almost all future decisions about marketing and sales.

Like I said, it packs a lot into a small parcel—your market, ideal client, your distinctive capabilities, and your expert point of view. And those are the basic building blocks of a sales and marketing strategy. 

Then, as you evolve your marketing, it’s a resource to return to and ask, “are we being true to who we say we are and who we serve?” You gotta build a strong foundation before you can win new business consistently and eventually scale your business development approach to support growth.

Figuring out your elevator pitch can also be a very emotional exercise. After all, this short phrase has the potential to shape future growth at your agency by asking you to commit to a path and eliminate options. 

For some of us, emotion tends to cloud our judgment and compromise our objectivity. 

When I’m working with an agency on their elevator pitch and I sense that happening, I’ll pause the action for a reality check and ask the group to rate what we have so far based on these criteria. Do we think the pitch is:

• Succinct?

• Targeted?

• Repeatable?

• Accurate?

• Flexible?

• Distinctive? 

Is it succinct? 

Can you communicate your pitch to anyone with clarity and brevity? 

When agencies fail to check this box it’s generally due to a lack of clarity. “We are a collective of thinkers and doers focused on finding innovative solutions to our clients’ toughest needs”* may get points for brevity, but it tells the prospective client little. 

Luckily the rest of the checklist offsets this tendency.

Is it targeted? 

One measure of a strong elevator pitch is whether your target audience sees themselves reflected in it. 

Does your elevator pitch get your prospects to say to themselves “wow, it’s like they’re reading my mind,” or “I want some of that”.

This is useful because it has the capacity to welcome in qualified prospects and weed out unqualified ones. It means that by the time a prospective client contacts you, they’ve sold themselves on you. 

And it means your pitch is working hard on your behalf, which is especially important for smaller agencies that have limited time and resources for proactive outreach.  

Is it repeatable? 

A lot of elevator pitches are way too complicated. A good one should be easy for anyone at your agency to understand and repeat. When you saddle your employees with a complicated, fussy pitch that’s hard to remember and awkward to say, it loses its utility and it rarely gets used.  

Test it before you put your seal of approval on it. Give the pitch to one of your team members (someone not involved in writing it) and ask them to repeat it back to you. How hard was it for them to do it? How much did they get right?

Is it accurate?

Why would an agency want an inaccurate elevator pitch? 

And yet I see it all the time, often in the form of statements that represent some impossible ideal. “Fiercely independent” is one of my favorites. Does this mean the team is trained to fight like hell if WPP or Accenture come knocking with an acquisition offer?

If your pitch isn’t accurate, it’ll fall apart once you start taking your prospective client through your credentials. Your prospects will be confused at best and peeved at worst.

Is it flexible?

This might seem like I’m reversing myself a bit, but having an element of flexibility in your elevator pitch can be a good thing. For example, it offers the ability to have a version of your pitch for one or more hyper-targeted audiences. 

Your elevator pitch should be flexible enough that it grows with you. However, know the difference between flexibility and stability. When it starts to feel like you’re asking your pitch to support something that it wasn’t designed to, it’s usually a signal to reevaluate and update it.

Is it distinctive?

I hate to break it to you, but an “obsession with getting business results” is not distinctive. 

With thousands of agencies in North America, setting your agency apart as unique from competitors feels like an impossible challenge. 

But I think uniqueness has less to do with a singular, own-able quality and more to do with how those qualities are arranged. It’s like DNA – we’re all made up of the same stuff, and yet none of us are the same.

That’s why I’ve recently started to use “distinction” instead of “differentiation”. Perhaps it’s just semantics, but I wonder if it takes that pressure of agencies to undergo an endless search for the unique so that they can actually get out there into the marketplace and promote themselves.

Most importantly, will it get used? 

Finding the right positioning for your agency can be emotional, soul-searching work. Try using this checklist and see if it helps you get out of your own way. Be honest about your answers and be willing to make hard choices to get to a better outcome.

And, most importantly, use it!