What Does Your Space Company Do? Four Ways to Improve Your Space Company Elevator Pitch
Whenever I go to a tradeshow, I try to look for patterns.
Sometimes they’re industry trends. Sometimes they’re marketing trends. Sometimes it’s something as simple as what everyone suddenly seems to be putting on their booth walls.
At SmallSat this year, there wasn’t one huge thing that immediately jumped out at me.
But after a few days of walking the floor and talking to companies, I realized I kept having the same conversation.
I’d ask someone a pretty straightforward question:
“What does your company do?”
What should have been a 15- or 30-second answer often turned into several minutes about what they originally built, how the technology worked, what they’re developing now, and how they got there. There were acronyms I didn’t know, technical terminology, and deep dives into materials, systems and processes.
There was rarely a clear elevator pitch.
And in an industry full of incredibly smart people building incredibly complex things, that is a problem.
Being Technical Isn’t the Same as Being Clear
Space is technical. There’s no getting around that.
At SmallSat, you’re surrounded by engineers, scientists and founders who have spent years (sometimes decades) developing expertise in propulsion, satellite buses, payloads, ground systems, materials, communications, data processing and dozens of other specialties.
They know their technology inside and out. But your audience might not.
I’m a marketer. I know the space industry-ish, but I’m not an engineer. I understand many of these technologies at a high level, but if you immediately start explaining the intricacies of materials, propulsion systems or spacecraft architecture, there’s a point (and it’s likely pretty early on) where you’re going to lose me.
And I’m certainly not the only one.
Your audience at a tradeshow might be an investor. A potential partner. A CEO. A procurement lead. A marketer. A salesperson. An engineer from an entirely different discipline. A future employee.
You don’t know what they know.
That’s why starting with the deepest technical explanation of your product is risky. If someone gets lost trying to understand what you do in the first 30 seconds, it’s incredibly difficult to get them back.
They can’t listen to the rest of your story because they’re still trying to make sense of the thing you said 30 seconds ago.
So how do you fix it?
After dozens of these conversations at SmallSat, I kept coming back to four things space companies can do to make their elevator pitches - and really, their sales conversations overall - more effective.
1. Make Your Elevator Pitch Shorter and Start With the Problem
The first and most obvious issue I saw was simply too much talking.
Someone would start explaining what the company did, then tell me how the company started, then explain what they built, then what they’re building now, then how the technology works...
There was no natural stopping point. Not even one for me to ask a question or tell them what I was actually interested in knowing.
A good elevator pitch isn’t supposed to explain everything your company does.
Its job is to give me enough information to understand what you do, why it matters and whether I want to know more.
For most companies, that means quickly communicating three things:
The Problem: Name the specific pain point your customer faces.
The Solution: Explain your product or service clearly and simply as the way you solve that problem.
Life After: What changes for the customer after you solve it? What can they now do better, faster, cheaper or more effectively?
For those who have worked with me, you know I’m a massive fan of Donald Miller’s StoryBrand framework. One way I use it to simplify company messaging is:
We help [Customer] who struggle with [Problem] by providing [Solution] so they can [Life After/Success].
Sounds simple, right? It’s deceptively difficult to write.
Distilling years of engineering, product development and company history into one or two sentences can be much harder than explaining it all in 10 minutes.
But that’s exactly why messaging matters.
You aren’t dumbing down the technology. You’re bringing your audience into the conversation. Once they understand the big picture, then you can go deeper.
2. Qualify Your Audience Before You Get Technical
This was probably the bigger missed opportunity I noticed.
People would launch directly into their company or product explanation without learning anything about the person they were talking to.
Instead, after your elevator pitch, stop.
Ask a question.
“What does your company do?”
“What’s your role?”
“What brings you to SmallSat?”
“Are you familiar with this type of system?”
“What are you currently using?”
“What challenges is your company facing when it comes to [insert your solution here]?”
Now you have context.
If I’m an engineer who has spent 15 years working on propulsion systems, your conversation with me should sound very different than if I’m an investor evaluating propulsion companies.
The technology hasn’t changed. The way you explain it should.
And asking questions doesn’t make you sound less knowledgeable. It’s quite the opposite.
One thing I noticed at SmallSat was the tendency to keep talking, almost as if stopping would somehow diminish the person’s expertise. It doesn’t.
Smart people don’t need to prove they’re smart by using every technical term they know. You’re probably really smart already.
Be curious about the person standing in front of you. Figure out what they know, what they care about and why they’re talking to you.
Then decide how deep to go.
3. Diagnose Before You Demo
The same issue showed up in product demos. I watched people jump almost immediately into:
“Let me show you what we built.”
And off they went. But they hadn’t asked what the person cared about yet.
Before you launch into a demo, find out:
What problem are they trying to solve?
What are they currently using?
Where are they getting stuck?
What types of partners are they looking for?
What would make this conversation useful to them?
Otherwise, you’re essentially giving the same demo to everyone and hoping something resonates. A good demo isn’t a tour of every feature you’ve built. It’s an explanation of the parts that matter most to the person standing in front of you.
And that goes back to the same principle as your elevator pitch: start with what matters to them, not everything you want to tell them about you.
4. Lead With Why It Matters, Then Prove How Smart the Technology Is
This isn’t just a booth problem. The same thing happens in pitches to investors, customers, partners and just about anyone else.
I heard a similar observation about some of the startup pitches at SmallSat. A friend who attended told me several companies went extremely technical, filling their presentations with terminology that demonstrated how sophisticated the technology was but made the actual business difficult to understand.
And this is where I think technical companies sometimes get the order wrong.
Your audience doesn’t care how technically sophisticated your solution is if they’re still trying to figure out why it matters.
They’re trying to answer much more basic questions:
What problem exists?
Why does it matter?
What have you built to solve it?
Why is your approach different?
Why should I care?
Answer those questions first.
Then we can decide if I need to know about the technical architecture, materials, APIs, flight heritage, thermal properties, thrusters, or whatever highly technical thing you’ve spent years becoming an expert in.
Clear Messaging Is a Competitive Advantage
One of my favorite ideas from Donald Miller’s Building a StoryBrand is that people don’t buy th best product, they buy the product they can understand the fastest. At a tradeshow like SmallSat, people are being bombarded with hundreds of companies, technologies, acronyms, sales pitches and conversations.
The company that can explain what it does—and why it matters—in 30 seconds has an advantage.
Clear messaging doesn’t mean stripping away the technical sophistication of what you’ve built. It means creating a hierarchy for the conversation.
Start here:
1. What problem do you solve?
2. How do you solve it?
3. What changes for the customer because you exist?
Then stop talking. Let the other person respond. Ask them questions. And then decide whether it’s time to go deeper.
Because the goal of an elevator pitch isn’t to prove how much you know. It’s to make the other person want to know more.
After a week of asking people at SmallSat, “What does your company do?” I’d argue that learning how to answer that question clearly may be one of the biggest marketing opportunities in the space industry right now.
And Yes, This Is Hard Work
I don’t want to make it sound like writing a great elevator pitch is easy. It isn’t.
I’ve worked at brands that have paid tens of thousands of dollars for messaging work, and I’ve personally been involved in messaging projects in the $80K+ range. There’s a reason companies invest that kind of money in it. Taking something incredibly technical and making it incredibly clear is hard.
The Space Marketers, has developed a set of messaging exercises and a repeatable framework to help technical companies work through their problem, solution, differentiation and “life after” and turn it into language their customers, investors, partners and even future employees can actually understand.
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