This quarter’s update focuses on a small but meaningful improvement to the Elevator Speech Framework that every training session is based on. I’ve called this most recent modification the “More Transition” because the word “more” plays an important role in it. Here is how it works: Almost at the end of your pitch, when you’re done explaining why the work you do is close to your heart, you insert a sentence using the following schema to segue to your call to action (CTA).

Please check out our new readability analyzer. You can paste any text into it, and the tool will color-code each sentence according to how easy it is to understand. You can spot potential problem sentences at a glance. Green means easy, and Red means difficult. If you see a red area and want to turn it green, shorten the sentence and shorten the words. The tool also includes a drop-down menu to display the Gettysburg Address, Obama’s farewell speech, or Trump’s presidential bid announcement, among others, to easily compare these texts’ readability. You might be surprised.

If you’re in the mood to read an interesting book on elevator speech making, I recommend “Pitch Anything” by Oren Klaff. If you watch some interviews with Klaff on Youtube, you can tell that he is a pretty alpha Wall Street type of guy. Sure enough, what makes his approach unique is the emphasis on the role of status during interactions in which we pitch something. I think he has a very valid point. Klaff strongly counsels against using deferential language, especially in the opening sequence of an interaction (for example, “thank you so much for taking a moment to see me today. I know how incredibly busy your schedule is,” and so on.).