By Nomathemba Pearl Dzinotyiwei

Imagine that you lead business unit. You are alone in the elevator with the Group Chief Executive. You have 30 seconds to make a good impression. You want to be brief, comprehensive yet memorable. What do you say? Why all the questions?

As Celeste Stewart of Bold Curiosity, a learning and development consultancy says, ‘The mind with the question is the mind with the answer’. Why we do things is a powerful motivator, albeit an unconscious one. You want to impress the CEO because perhaps you have a game-changing idea that will revolutionize the industry, change the way you do business forever and catapult the company to Fortune 500 status. Imagine the team that had to convince Steve Ballmer and Steve Jobs at Apple to start making the iPhone at a time when Steve Ballmer said there was no hope of Apple dominating the smartphone market. Perhaps you’re in a dying industry and you care about your employees and the looming fact of them losing their jobs keeps you up at night. You need the ear of the CEO to help you save the jobs of your employees because they are like family. Think about the Managing Director at Mercedes Benz who had to convince the Daimler Chrysler CEO and board of directors not to close the car assembly plant in East London in 2013 after the strike. Now it is one of the top vehicle assembly plants in the world.

Think of the flip side. Kodak shelved its plans to develop a digital camera to focus on film. The company eventually filed for bankruptcy. Had someone successfully advocated for that idea, that could have saved the company in the long run. Like all these people, you have a vision for your business that you want to bring to life. In the book of Hosea, it is written: ‘Without a vision, the people perish.’ What is the vision of your business? How will you express that vision, so that people buy into it and support you?

So now that we’ve established why it’s important, what do you say? It’s the answer to that simple invitation, “Tell me about yourself”. The question is who are you? What do you do? What makes you special? Why should I care enough to listen? The underlying question is what can you do for me? This seems so complicated, but human beings are wired for survival. We ask these questions silently to assess whether the person in front of us is a friend or a foe. Can they help or will they harm me. Can we co-operate or will we compete? Our exchanges with people are designed to help us maximize the benefit for ourselves. Your answer will make the CEO curious, excited, desire to know more and want to support you if what you say merits his or her attention. Your answer could also have the opposite effect, it could bore your CEO, annoy, or make him or her decide it’s not worth his or her time or attention. You don’t want that.

You don’t want that, because as a leader, there are people counting on you to sell the vision of this business and what it stands for daily, consistently with every exchange. Whether it’s a brief elevator pitch or a strategy presentation to the board of directors to get approval for funding. That consistency demands that at our core we know who we are, we know what we do and most importantly why we do it. Our identity and purpose are carried in the answers to those three questions.

1. What’s my name? That uniquely identifies me and my business and gives a hint of who we are.
2. What do I do? What is it that my business and I deliver that is of value, every day.
3. Why is what I do important? What would happen to the people that I serve if my business and I don’t deliver what they need or expect?

What is my elevator pitch? My name is Nomathemba Pearl Dzinotyiwei. I lead a team of Product Managers and Product Development Managers. Our business provides credit cards where we lend money to individual customers to pay for services or buy products online and in retail stores. Our team helps colleagues to solve problems for customers because when a customer cannot use their credit card, they can be stuck in a place when traveling, not be able to do their shopping or lose an opportunity to get a good deal. We want our credit card to be at the front of their wallet, the one they choose to use before any other card.

The elevator pitch is a powerful way to introduce yourself, excite people about who you are and what you do and make them want to support you. Whether you are an individual with a small business, a department head or the CEO of a listed company, your elevator pitch will make you memorable and open doors of opportunity. The more people know about you, the more they can connect you with the people you need to know to take your work and your business to the next level.

Think about your elevator pitch, write it down, practice it in front of the mirror and share it with anyone who you think needs to hear it.

Please share it in the comments when you’re ready. I would love to read it.