Wasn’t This Supposed To Be About Metaphors In Sales?
I’m sitting in my office, it’s 6:15 PM, PDT, June 30th and I’m stumped.
For those of you that don’t know the inner workings of the team that writes articles for Sales Bloggers Union, each month we choose a topic. I’ ve committed to write a post on that topic somewhere between the 16th of the month and the end of the month.
It’s 6:17PM, PDT, June 30th, I’m stumped….so you can see my problem.
I don’t want to let you, our loyal readers down, I don’t want to let my colleagues down, I don’t want to fail to meet a commitment.
It’s all very odd to me, as a person who is never at a loss for a metaphor, analogy, tale, or pun, not being able to write about it makes me very uncomfortable. When I’m uncomfortable, I tend to try to figure out why and fix it. If you don’t mind, I’ll reckon out loud about this topic.
I know metaphors are critical, they help us connect with our customers, the people we work with, our families and friends. They enable us to take complex thoughts and thoughts, and translate them into things people know. They help us place meaning to what we are doing. They help us connect–not only intellectually, but emotionally with others. In some way it seems metaphors make us more comfortable, they’re safe—otherwise, why would we use them so often.
Fantastic metaphors get people excited. They can help people envision something new–something that solves their problems–something that makes them pleased. Fantastic metaphors also seem to engage and inspire people, they can help people imagine themselves in a situation, they can help people seize ownership and charge forward.
Another weird business about metaphors is while they are tales, they are not real, in some way the right metaphor makes it what we are talking about more real to the person we are talking to.
But why do we need them so much–not just in selling, but in our work and community lives? Sales is not about facts and data–those are vital and can never be overlooked. Sales is about finding problems you can solve and helping customers solve them (and for that privilege, they pay you for the solution). But unless you are Mr. Spock in Star Trek, these are insufficient for our success. At it’s core, I reckon metaphors are about connection and imagination. It’s our ability to use metaphors that have meaning to our customers that enables them and us to be successful.
I don’t know how to talk about metaphors in sales, I just know that we can’t be effective unless we use metaphors in sales.
It’s 6:53 PM PDT, June 30th, I’m looking for the right metaphor to end this article. My excellent friend, Daniel Waldschmidt gave me an thought about “adding extra icing to a sweet sufficient cake…” It’s a small obscure and a small surrounded by, I reckon I’ll stop here and be grateful you for let me reckon out loud.