60 Second Pitch Tips to help you at your next networking event

As a business owner, you’re frequently in scenarios where you need to concisely showcase why your business is amazing at what you do. For example, this could be at a networking event, finding a mentor or pitching for funding or investment. Or if you happen to get in the same lift as Richard Branson and you quickly want to let him know about your business (I’m sure it’s happened before).

What’s a 60 second pitch?

A 60 second pitch is a distilled way of explaining why your business is awesome in less than a minute. Pretty easy right? Wrong. The problem is that many business owners could talk for hours about why their business is amazing. They could describe all the different facets of the business and how they painstakingly build their business up from nothing.

Only having 1 minute to describe your whole business effectively is a real challenge for most business owners. I hope these 60 second pitch tips help you to quickly wow your audience next time you need to.

Why you need a 60 second pitch

First off, there are a certain amount of business owners who refuse to make a 60 second pitch. “My work speaks for itself” or “Well, isn’t it obvious what we do? Why would we need to tell someone about our business?”

Having met a fair amount of these types of business owners, they usually don’t have ambitions to achieve high rates of growth or they are in fact nervous about pitching and are just masking their nervousness with complacency.

Long story short, to grow quickly you need to pull together a lot of different parties (a customer, an investor, a member of staff, etc). As such, you need to make it as easy as possible for someone to know why you do what you. Check out this blog on why storytelling is so effective for conveying a message.

What makes a good 60 second pitch?

A great 60 second pitch needs to be 3 things:

1. Something that really conveys your passion for the business
2. Written in your words e.g. how you’d normally say it
3. Shaped to a structure to make sure you get in all the right points

The 3rd one might sound daunting but it’s okay. Think of the below as a ‘conversational skeleton’ that generally guides what you want to say, but fundamentally it still conveys your passion and is in your own words. The first 2 make it easier to remember and come across more authentic.

• Hook – 1 sentence which engages the audience through an interesting fact, a bit of humour or something shocking
• Problem – 1 sentence that shows the impact that the problem has on your businesses’ intended audience
• Solution – 1 sentence that effectively shows how your product solves that problem for the intended audience
• Traction – 1/2 sentences which give proof that this works e.g. % improvement, % satisfied customers, current customer base, how quickly you’re growing etc
• Ask – 1 sentence where you ask for what you want from the audience you’re pitching to

Here’s a link to a good video which explains and gives more 60 second pitch tips. Here’s a video we made of our 60 second pitch for our website;

How do I make my 60 second pitch concise enough?

You might have noticed how in the above section I mentioned ‘1 sentence’ of this, ‘1 sentence’ of that, etc. Because that’s how concise you need to be. 1 sentence that explains your solution, 1 sentence that proves your solution works. That’s no easy task!!

As part of the 60 second pitch tips, here’s a good way to help distill a punchy pitch;

1. As much as you like – Get a word document/A4 sheet of paper and write as much as you like on each of the 5 sections (hook, problem, solution, traction, ask)
2. 3 sentences per section – Next, can you distill each section into 3 sentences?
3. 2 sentences per section – Here’s where you need to start joining up sentences and removing unnecessary areas
4. 1 sentence per section – Can you distill into 1 sentence per section?

Always bring it back to your Ask. At the end of the day, you’re pitching because you want the audience to do something as a result. The other sections of the pitch help to explain and justify why they should do that. When distilling your pitch, always consider;

Does this line/sentence support my Ask as much as it could?

I recently wrote another blog about making Linkedin Messages in under 50 words. After you’re done reading these 60 second pitch tips, check it out here.

Nervous? Don’t worry

I pitch on a weekly basis to crowds at networking events. I get told ‘no’ a lot when pitching to clients. I still get nervous. Anyone who tells you that they don’t feel nervous is lying to you or is inhuman.

It’s okay to be nervous. Do you know the best solution? Do the pitch anyway. I wrote a book a few years ago which covered this but in more of a dating context. In our modern society, the idea of ‘social pain’ (e.g. putting yourself out there and looking foolish) is frequently seen as worse than physical pain.

“Putting yourself out there and asking for what you want is the first step to getting what you want.”

It’s this instinct to protect ourselves from looking silly which can frequently inhibit us in certain situations. The best way to overcome this and feel more comfortable pitching is to ‘show yourself’ that it is okay to put yourself out there, regardless of the outcome.

How do you ‘show yourself’ it’s okay to put yourself out there? By pitching, by asking for what you want, by openly requesting to the world ‘I have this great idea, who would like to join in?’ I tell you, that bit where you put yourself out there is uncomfortable. But by being comfortable with being uncomfortable, you are dramatically increasing your chances of success.

Say yes to any opportunity to pitch. Why? Because one of 3 things will happen:

1. You’ll get what you’re asking for from some/all of your audience directly
2. Someone from your audience will be inspired to give you support by way of connections, advice, etc
3. At the very least, you’ll have another experience which proves that it’s okay to put yourself out there and ask for what you want

Did you find these 60 second pitch tips useful?

We’d love to get your feedback on how useful you found these 60 second pitch tips. You can find more sales tips on our sales blog. If you’d like to see how we can help grow your business with pay-per-lead high value appointment setting, then you can find out more here