I've been in a situation this week where I've had to give my elevator pitch about my research quite a few times to quite a few people. Now, I have the standard spiel that I give, with various tweaks depending on how tech-savvy my audience is, that has evolved over time. But as I was repeating and repeating and repeating myself, I realized that it's time for an overhaul.
I'm not talking a complete overhaul---the fundamentals of what I do haven't changed. But my story is much different now. Or, at least the way I need to frame it is much different. Because I've had a lot of really good research luck lately, which means that I've gotten some really excellent results. We're talking results that move us way past the "gee, I think this might work" to "gee, we really have something pretty darn fabulous here that works!". The story itself is much more solid and compelling---a lot of what was "we hope to" is now "we've shown that", and the "we hope to"s are much more far-reaching.
This got me wondering...and so I have some questions for you, my readers!
- How often do you change your elevator pitch? Are you a constant tweaker, or do you use the same spiel pretty much all the time?
- How do you determine that it's time for an overhaul? And if you've ever overhauled your pitch substantially, how did you go about it?
- How many versions, approximately, of your elevator pitch do you use regularly or semi-regularly?
- Do you practice/try out new pitches, and if so, what's your favorite strategy?
My answers:
- I'm a tweaker. I probably only do major changes every couple of years, depending on my results. But the pieces of the story---I mess with those a lot.
- I know it's time for an overhaul when I find myself thinking, as I'm giving the spiel, "hm, that's not so true anymore" or "hm, we actually already solved that/ruled that out". I don't think I could articulate my process, since as I mentioned, I'm constantly tweaking anyway.
- I probably have 4 versions of my pitch that I give on a regular basis.
- I don't practice---I'll usually just try out something new and see how it goes over in the moment. Earlier in my career, though, I had some great mentors who insisted on having me talk about my research *a lot* under all sorts of circumstances: short pitches to visitors, informal talks on work-in-progress, etc. So early on, I did get quite a bit of practice honing my message, to the point where I'm fairly comfortable giving it.
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