Elevator pitch

Picture meeting someone important in an elevator: you have thirty seconds, no more, to explain what you do and make them want to know more. The elevator pitch is the prepared answer to that situation.

In practice it works anywhere attention is short: a trade show, a networking event, the start of a call, the question 'so what do you do?'. It also feeds everything else: your LinkedIn headline, the first line of your homepage, the opening of a discovery call.

Its purpose is not to sell. It should make the other person ask a question. A good pitch ends with the listener's curiosity, not with a signature.

A simple structure has three parts. Who it is for: a precise target, not 'companies'. What problem: what those people live with and what it costs them. What result: what changes for them thanks to you, ideally with a verifiable fact.

A sample pitch: 'I help accounting firms of 10 to 30 people hire without going through a recruitment agency. Most of them lose months on every opening. We introduce them to candidates who are already vetted.' Three sentences, one target, one problem, one result.

Add a question at the end when the moment allows: 'How is hiring going for you right now?' The pitch then becomes the start of a conversation instead of a monologue.

Talking about yourself instead of the customer. 'We are an innovative company founded in 2019 with a passionate team' tells the listener nothing about what you can do for them.

Aiming at everyone. 'I help businesses grow' makes nobody feel concerned. The more precise the target, the more easily the right person recognizes themselves.

Piling on jargon. 'An AI-powered omnichannel solution to optimize your funnel' forces the other person to translate, and they will not bother.

Reciting. A pitch learned by heart and delivered in one breath sounds fake. Know the structure, adapt the words to the person.

Say it out loud to someone outside your field, then ask them to rephrase it. If they cannot, your pitch is too complicated.

Watch the reaction. If the person asks about the problem or the result, the pitch works. If they nod politely and change the subject, it did not land.

Prepare a few versions depending on who you are talking to. An executive wants to hear the result, a practitioner wants to understand how it works. Keep the same structure, change the angle.

In writing, the pitch has to be even shorter. Nobody reads three paragraphs from a stranger. One or two sentences are enough, and sometimes the best written version does not present the offer at all: it asks a question about the problem.

Your LinkedIn headline is a one-line pitch. 'Director' says nothing. 'I help marketing agencies sign clients without prospecting themselves' says who you speak to and why.

Your homepage, email signature and profile can carry the same idea. Consistency reassures: a prospect who moves from your message to your profile finds the same message.

Not in the first message. A stranger who opens a LinkedIn message by introducing themselves rarely makes people want to reply: the prospect has not asked for anything yet. According to MimikFlow's 2026 LinkedIn Prospecting Observatory (published in French), first messages under 200 characters got a 50.5% reply rate, against 19.6% above 700 characters. A full pitch hardly fits in 200 characters.

The pitch belongs later, when the prospect asks 'what exactly do you do?' or describes a problem you solve. At that point, two precise sentences beat a presentation.

In MimikFlow, the first message starts by default from a fact about the prospect and asks a question, without presenting the offer. The AI that answers prospects only talks about your offer once it becomes useful in the conversation, and then says what changes for the person rather than what the offer contains. The offer you describe in the campaign is the material for those answers.