Like a hot knife slicing through butter

When Lisa Yarnell, founder of Inline Strategies, LLC, a management consulting firm, was asked what she did, she replied metaphorically: “I fix sick companies by moving them to healthy profitability.” Lisa made her questioner visualize her clients as ailing patients whom she nurses back to health, thus giving much more emotional color to her services.

With her reply, Lisa emulated some of our best business and political communicators: Jack Welch, Bill Clinton and Steve Jobs. They all have the ability to make the abstract meaningful and the meaningful simple by using metaphors and stories. In today’s information-saturated society, it’s critical to make the complexities of your products, services and ideas simple and your points meaningful to your clients/listeners.

Metaphors are the imaginative tools of poets (who can forget that “Juliet is the sun”?), but they are also the sharpest strategic tools used by persuaders everywhere, from presidents to savvy salespeople. Why? Because we remember what we “see” more than what we just hear, and we have a raft of associations with what we have seen and experienced. These associations move us to act. As Einstein said, “If I can’t see it, I don’t understand it.” Compare the following information with the image that follows it, and you’ll see why metaphors are powerful weapons of mass understanding.

When a media buyer asked an advertising sales rep for a women’s magazine to describe the magazine’s reader, the rep scored instant understanding with his concluding imagery: “Our reader has a household income of $63,000, 3.4 years of college education, 2.1 children, a median house worth $267,000, and 2.2. cars. In short, we’re talking about the Bloomingdale’s shopper and not the K-Mart lady.”

What an impact that last sentence has! We “see” the two shoppers. We have associations with each of these stores that speak volumes about the likely buying habits of each shopper. We “get” the stronger buying power of this magazine’s reader because of the image that passes through our right brain, rather than through the cold numerical facts processed by our left brain.

Imagery peppers the news

When the White House needed to respond to the heat generated by Michael Moore’s movie Fahrenheit 9/11, they distanced themselves from the film by saying, “The eagle does not talk to the fly.”

When Google, the hugely successful search engine, announced its plans to go public, the investment community started frothing at the mouth. But those on Wall Street hungry for quarterly earnings were less than thrilled by certain remarks made in the company’s public offering statement. In very clear terms, Google said it was not going to offer quarterly earnings, which is the mother’s milk of Wall Street. Google expected to make unprofitable short-term investments and expected investors to accept that without question. The company justified its position with this simile (metaphor’s cousin): “A management team distracted by a series of short-term targets is as pointless as a dieter stepping on a scale every half hour.”

Imagery is everywhere

Creating imagery is not unnatural. You hear it every day in conversation:

• Brick-and-mortar companies need to become clicks-and-mortar businesses to survive in the new millennium.
• Bulls and bears invest in stock markets that crash, tank and take off.
• We avoid putting all our eggs in one basket, and try to build a nest egg and save for a rainy day.
• Some of us are road warriors working in a dog-eat-dog world.
• Is your company the 800-pound gorilla of its category, or is it only a blip on your customer’s radar screen?
• Analogies are extended metaphors that drive points home:
• Minds are like parachutes. They work best when open.
• Reagan was the Teflon president. Nothing ever stuck to him.
• “A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water.” (Eleanor Roosevelt)

When do you need a metaphor?

Look at the recent election. President Bush could have used a metaphor in his first debate with John Kerry. Kerry had the president on the ropes, and all Bush could say several times was that the war in Iraq was “hard work; it’s hard; it’s very hard,” etc. A well-crafted metaphor comparing our efforts in Iraq, for example, with another historical effort-like the ending of the Cold War-would have proved handy in driving his point home, rather than employing language that came across as a series of weak claims.

Similarly, the Kerry campaign suffered for most of 2004 for lack of a strong image and was seriously compromised when the Republicans used Kerry’s famous wind-surfing picture against him. In a Republican TV commercial showing Kerry surfing in one direction from one viewpoint and then in another from the opposing perspective, the voiceover said, “Any way the wind blows.” In an effort to characterize Kerry as a flip-flopper, this image was used very effectively and hurt the candidate in the polls.

You needn’t be running for president to make your point with a metaphor. Do you encounter any of the following with clients and audiences: Resistance? Negativity? Indifference? Confusion? Hostility? Skepticism? Fear? Controversy? Then you need a winning metaphor!

An investment banker was talking to the CEO of a company willingly targeted for takeover by the biggest company in their industry. The CEO feared that once word got out about the proposed takeover, his company would be put “in play,” which would trigger unwanted hostile takeover activity. The investment banker won over this CEO, who earlier had made a comment about his high school days, when he said: “Bill, remember when you were in high school? Remember when the star football player-let’s call him Big Joe-had a girlfriend? Remember how no one else would dare to date Joe’s girlfriend? Don’t worry. This company is Big Joe. If they want you, no one else is going to step in and go against Joe.” Reassured, the client went ahead with the deal.

In one of the largest sales on record, Lee Iacocca went to Congress in 1980 to get $1.2 billion in loan guarantees for the failing Chrysler Corporation. Congress was not interested in a bailout, which is how it perceived the loan. Iacocca cleverly changed that perception by substituting the image of “safety net” for “bailout.” He argued successfully that the government provided all kinds of safety nets for its citizens and that Chrysler, with all its employees, represented a large group of citizens. Chrysler’s problems were America’s problems. Chrysler’s bankruptcy would be America’s loss. No congressperson wanted to be accused of denying hardworking Americans a safety net, so Iacocca got his money.

Four steps to metaphor power

1. Identify your listener’s blind spot. Is he not sure you can do the job? Is she uncomfortable that you have no experience in her industry? Are they skeptical your plan won’t work?
2. Snapshot your listener. Since metaphors work only when they tap into your listener’s experience, consider what you know about your listener’s world: business life? Personal life? General common experience?
3. Create the metaphor. Based on your snapshot, carefully select your metaphor. Snow means something very different to someone in the Midwest than to someone who lives in Hawaii. Your final metaphor must be familiar to your listener and appropriate in tone, and must work!
4. Relate the metaphor back to the situation at hand, just as our investment banker and Lee Iacocca did in the earlier examples.

Become a “metaphorian”

Outstanding salespeople use carefully thought out, hard-hitting imagery to achieve emotional, visceral understanding:

• To position their products and services vs. the competition
• To neutralize objections, resistance, fears, skepticism and negativity
• To help buyers or any other audience “get” the story

They know that the toughest sale is frequently won not just with the tools of a logician, but with the techniques of a poet.

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Anne Miller (amiller@annemiller.com, www.annemiller.com) is a sales and presentation consultant and author of Metaphorically Selling: How to Use the Magic of Metaphors to Sell, Persuade & Explain Anything to Anyone. Email Anne at editor@executivetravelmag.com.