Leadership

Not in Sales? You Still Need an Elevator Pitch

By Jessica Stillman

Updated on: October 13, 2009 / 9:05 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

The elevator pitch - the ability to sum up what you're selling in the thirty seconds it takes to travel a few floors - is usually thought to be the province of skilled salespeople and polished job seekers, but if a post by Jodi Glickman Brown on the HBR Conversation Starter blog is right, everyone who has a career and attends the occasional cocktail party needs one. That means you, Gen Y non-salespeople. She argues that:

Your personal 30-second spiel about who you are, how you're different, and why you're memorable is arguably more important once you've landed that great position or won the support of investors and now interact with senior colleagues and important clients regularly.

A managing director on Wall Street once told me of a summer associate who made an uncharacteristically strong impression on senior leadership during a welcoming cocktail party. Within days, the managing director received numerous calls from senior partners advising him to "make sure she gets the attention and resources she needs to succeed this summer." The young woman's career has been on the fast track ever since.

So how do you craft a pitch of equal caliber to that cocktail party wowing summer associate? First, figure out why you work where you do, how you managed to land your gig and what are the consistent threads running through your current and past experiences. Once you've figured out the answers to these key questions, you're ready to start crafting your pitch. Glickman Brown offers three pieces of advice on how to do it well:

Think relevant, not recent. There's no rule that says you must talk about your resume in reverse chronological order.
Focus on skills-based versus situation or industry-based qualifications. You don't have to have a background in finance to be good at finance.
Connect the dots. If you are a chemist turned finance professional or a marketing executive with experience in international sales, you should find a way to bring together the richness of your experiences and show how each one complements the other. For me, personally, I had a significant hurdle to clear with clients as a former Peace Corps volunteer turned investment banker. I explained away the dichotomy by emphasizing that I was big picture thinker by nature and a numbers person by training. Banking was a perfect combination of the two -- I liked looking at client's challenges and issues from 30,000 feet and then digging down into the details to come up with creative financing solutions.

Read More on BNET:

(Image of elevator by kio, CC 2.0)