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Elevator Pitch Part 5: Delivery

In the real world, you know your so-called elevator speech and you use it when appropriate. Every time you do it, you and it get better. I’d recommend taking time out and working on it, but you probably won’t; you’re too busy. Think about it in the shower. Think about it when you’re stuck in [...]

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Elevator Pitch Part 4: Finish Strong

(Note: this is taken with permission from Planning Startups Stories)
This fourth of five parts in this series depends on who you are, where you are, and what you want. If you’ve personalized in the first part, sold yourself and/or your organization in the second, and established the attractiveness or suitability of the business offering in [...]

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Elevator Pitch Part 3: What You Offer

(Note: this is taken with permission from Planning Startups Stories)
Now explain what that person or organization you’re selling to gets. You’ve personalized the need or want, identified your unique qualities to solve the problem, and now you have to put the need or want in concrete terms that anybody can see. For example:
For a Trunk [...]

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Elevator Pitch Part 2: Why You?

(Note: this is taken with permission from Planning Startups Stories)
In the next part of your elevator pitch address ‘why you’? Why your business? What’s special about you that makes your offering or solution interesting to the target person or organization you just identified (Part 1 of this series).
This is where you bring in your background, [...]

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Elevator Pitch Part 1: Personalize

(Reposted with permission from Planning Startups Stories)
If you can’t say it in 60 seconds, you have a problem. Your strategy isn’t clear enough. Nowadays we call it “the elevator pitch,” meaning a quick description of the business that you could do in the time you share with a stranger in an elevator. It’s becoming popular [...]

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Are You Pitching Your Business Naked?

You are if you don’t have a business plan first.
Seriously: how can you boil it down to the core if you don’t know your basic strategy such as your identity, market, and focus? How can you set a scale to it without some idea of reasonable expectations in sales? How can you possibly talk about [...]

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Researching the Competition

When creating a new business model, you don’t necessarily do it using financials from some other existing businesses. You can create your financial assumptions by estimating the specific details and adding them up. Your expenses are a finite list of estimable items such as rent, insurance, payroll, and so on. Your sales are the product [...]

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Business Research

Here is a list of resources for finding business information.

We recommend that you get in contact with your closest Small Business Development Center (SBDC). The SBDCs are funded by federal, state, and higher education funds, and they tend to offer valuable consulting and information at unusually low fee levels and often have several free resources.
In [...]

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