How do you pitch your business in six minutes?

Great photo by ThisIsEngineering

​Everyone’s heard of the 30-second elevator speech. But sometimes, it’s a much taller building. 
 
We were recently asked—and this will happen to you, too, soon, if it hasn’t already, so brace yourself—to present our pitch before a business group, with a six-minute time allotment. 
 
Quick: How do you present your business, to a target-rich environment like that, in six minutes? 
 
Follow-on question: How do you carve up those six minutes? Do you spend all of them, well, presenting? 
 
Audience first
 
If you’ve read any articles from us here at Copel Communications, you’ll know that we take a near-religious approach to taking a customer-back approach to everything we do. Start with the customer. What do they want and/or need? Then work back from there, i.e., “customer-back” approach. 
 
Same thing applies for your six-minute preso slot. Know who’s in that audience, in advance. Do your homework. Are they like-minded businesspeople in a similar or adjacent vertical? Or—as was the case for us—are they perhaps members of a networking group, looking to lubricate the two-way process of referrals? 
 
Get your best possible grasp on who they are. What they need. How many will be in the room. The type of room: real or virtual. How much time will there be for Q&A? Is that baked into the six-minutes? Or is it additional? And if so, how much? 
 
Rule of thumb: The more annoying you can be with preliminary questions like these, the more you’ll succeed. 
 
Working backward
 
So. We were going to be facing a business networking group—a common venue. What kinds of businesses? All kinds, with the distinction that they, like us, all operated in the B2B space. 
 
How did they differ from us? 
 
Oooh. That’s a good question you should ask yourself. In other words, how can you differentiate yourself and your offerings? That’s how you’ll cut through the clutter, make your presentation interesting and engaging, and increase your odds of successful business development. 
 
For us, fortunately, the answer to the “how do they differ” question was easy. While we toil in marketing, and many of the others in the audience either do, too, or certainly have exposure to it, we were unique in that our background is 100-percent based in creative services. So that made for a neat way in. 
 
Outline, outline, outline
 
Turns out, for us, the six-minute allotment included the time for the Q&A. That’s a huge detail. So our outline went something like this: 

• Quick personal background. Knowing we were unique, among this crowd, to have worked in creative services, we were able to do some cool “show and tell” with pencil sketches, layouts, and stories. 

 

• Add credibility. You can—and should—do this, too. Don’t be obnoxious, and don’t belabor it, but don’t miss this opportunity. For example, we’ve served as a judge of the Clio Awards. Even from the beginning, our earliest clients included big names such as Warner Bros. and Taco Bell. 

 

• Who we serve. This, you shouldn’t be shocked, was custom-tailored to the audience and their clientele, too. The point here isn’t to be academic. It’s to build business. 

 

• Teaser on how we work. We have a unique—and, frankly, cool—methodology here at Copel Communications. So we quickly walked through this, as if each audience member were a new client of ours. We went slow. Wanted each cool point to sink in. Get them excited about the process and its possibilities for them.

 

• A referral “in.” Since we were fishing for referrals here, we prepared a list of “Questions you can ask your clients,” the answers to which would likely steer them our way. 

 

• Q&A. Given our six-minute total, we allotted about 2.5 minutes to this—with the obvious invitation for subsequent one-on-one’s with whomever wanted/needed more time. 

 
Close, close, close
 
Odds are, your business doesn’t do anything like what we do here at Copel Communications. Yet we’ll bet that that outline above is easily 90-percent useful to you. Some things are just universal. 
 
A speaking opportunity like this, is just that: An opportunity. Seize it. Work the room. Book meetings and calls. Send follow-up emails. 
 
Need help prepping for a six-minute presentation, or other similar opportunity? Contact us. We help our clients with challenges like these all the time. 

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