Metaphor is one of the most powerful tools available to tell a story. People love metaphors. It’s the language of image and similarity that connects what we know with other images that we also know. Metaphor makes sense.
Being a life-long Star Trek fan, it makes me think of the Next Generation episode where Captain Picard, the next-in-line captain to the starship Enterprise after Captain Kirk, is marooned on a planet with another captain from an alien species. This species communicates with a language that uses full metaphor to communicate. Stores and images rather than logical sentences are the “language.” In fact, this society would not exist without metaphor.
Below is a good definition of metaphor:
A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison, as in ‘a sea of troubles’ or ‘All the world’s a stage’”(Shakespeare).[i]
For example, I once worked for the world’s largest 3rd party manufacturer of memory for personal computers and digital devices, Kingston Technology. I was asked to speak at one of our national sales meetings to give an overview of the memory market and how it impacts sales representatives.
I decided to us the game of golf as my metaphor. With golf, life business, we need to “drive” sales. Business, like golf, also has “hazards” such as sand traps, rough or high grass, water, and trees. If you don’t avoid those hazards you get penalized. In the memory industry, pricing was a major hazard in the game of selling memory. I then closed the presentation with a brief story of John Daly. I told the classic story when John Daly played in the 1991 PGA at Crooked Stick in Indianapolis (my hometown as a kid), he received a last minute exemption and drove all night in his BMW from Arkansas to Indianapolis. He teed off the next day without playing a practice round and the press asked him, “John, what will it take to win here.” His response was, “I don’t know—I’ve never played here before!” Well, the rest is PGA history. He went on to win the PGA!
I told the 50 sales reps that story and then said, “The memory market is like John at the PGA—we often don’t know what it takes to win in this market. However, what we do know is that…” You get the point. The simple metaphor was the connection of golf to the memory market. Most of the reps played golf and all of them sold memory. The connection was instant and they remember both the point and the metaphorical story.
Case in point. Think of the images, stories and connections that capture your customer’s attention. Use those as you tell your story. You won’t be disappointed with the results…
By Stuart Atkins
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