Ah, the elevator pitch. Also known as the elevator speech. Perhaps the most well known version of a pitch. But what’s the deal with the elevator? It seems that there is some disagreement on how the elevator pitch came to be, or at least the actual term ‘elevator pitch’. To make it easier for you, I’ve bundled together the three possible origins of the elevator pitch into this article.
Well, I say ‘the three’, but there may be more. These are just the ones, I stumble upon the most, so these are the ones, I’ll go with. If you’ve got other origin stories, please comment on the article or reach out to us – we love getting smarter!
Philip Crosby
You can read the full version at The Confidant but I’ll sum it up here. Philip Crosby was well versed in the corporate structure in America in the 1970’s and 80’s, and he was pretty good at his job as a quality technician. He was so good, that he trained others in his field to get better and eventually moved on to being a consultant.
On the side he wrote books, and in one of his books he used the phrase ‘elevator speech’ – a phrase he supposedly used a lot when training others. The idea was, that whatever your job was in corporate America, there was always going to be a lot of people above you in the hierarchy, that you needed to sell your ideas to, if you wanted your ideas to materialize. He used to say to his trainees, that they should have an ‘elevator speech’ prepared, if they had an idea to present, so whenever you’d meet your boss in the elevator (think Manhattan, huge buildings), you’d be able to articulate your idea in a good way and within the time it took to reach the end of the elevator trip.
Screen writers of yore
Well, maybe it’s not that long ago, but when Hollywood was booming, it was attracting a lot of people with great ideas for movies. This theory and the next is summed up pretty well by Million Dollar Pitches by the way. People were so determined to get to producers and influencers in the movie business, that the important people would be chased around town – more or less.
If you were one of the hopeful people with a great movie idea, and you managed to corner some producer in the elevator, you only had until the elevator doors opened, until the producer would escape, so you had to wow him/her by then. So people prepared a speech or a pitch that would sum up their movie and why the producer should make that particular movie.
Elisha Otis
Million Dollar Pitches credit Tom Tunguz for this one, but I’ve heard it a couple of places – still it’s a good story. Good ol’ Elisha thought it was a good idea to put emergency brakes on elevators. Before they came, when the main cable on an elevator snapped, the cart would just plummet to the ground. People inside? Too bad. Elisha made an emergency brake system, but had some trouble selling his idea. So in 1852 he constructed an elevator in the middle of a conference hall, hoisted himself up and cut the cable. Of course he had installed his brakes, so he was unharmed, but he got to show off his idea – he got to do a sales pitch for his brakes – to all the people in attendance at the conference. The elevator pitch was born.
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