Metaphorically Selling

Home
>
Book Reviews
>
Metaphorically Selling

Metaphorically Selling

The Big Idea

A lot of people consider selling a very difficult task. Unfortunately for them, selling is an activity that forms part of everyone's daily routine. It occurs not only at work, but also when you are at home with your family, or when you are enjoying a cup of coffee with a friend.

Types of selling include debating with your friend on what type of movie to watch, convincing your boss to adapt to a different way of management, and getting that top client to buy your company's products. You must remember that selling does not limit itself to cars, clothes or food.

In the book Metaphorically Selling, author Anne Miller explains that given time and the right method, anyone can learn how to sell, persuade and explain. By using simple metaphors and visually-enticing words, you can change your status from a poor loser to a topnotch scorer.

The Case for Metaphor

The Challenge: Getting Heard

You live in a world where people read newspapers and get bombarded by print advertisements every morning. You live in a world where large billboards fight for attention, and television commercials have become a way of life.

Since selling is an everyday occurrence, you must learn to accept that your udience has heard the very same pitch that you prepared countless times before. How then do you force a jaded audience to loosen their guard and listen to you?

First, you must learn to talk from your audience's point of view. Get your listeners to understand what it is you're selling by picking the right words. Speak their language and use words that they can relate to. Remember, you are not selling your product to yourself.

Second, don't bombard your audience with too much information. Keep in mind that you are only given a short time to make a sales pitch. It would be a fatal mistake to overwhelm your audience with too many facts and figures.

Lastly, to do justice to your product without boring your audience, it would be most helpful and advantageous to use visual words. Arming your presentation with visual words enable you to explain fully what your product is about without spoiling your audience's zeal.

What are Metaphors?

When you were a student, you were taught that a metaphor is a figure of speech. Your professor may have failed to tell you however; just how important a metaphor is when it comes to selling.

A metaphor is a way to communicate your message to any given audience in an

instant. You do this by using words that compare one thing to another. The brilliance of a metaphor is that you can easily come up with comparisons that are familiar to your audience. You can use metaphors that your audience can strongly associate with.

The best way to explain this further is to tell you what not to do. If you are speaking before a group of female activists, it is never a good idea to use metaphors extolling the triumph of men in sports.

When Do You Need Metaphors?

Without question, a metaphor is a powerful tool. In fact, metaphors will help you close a sale no matter what kind of audience you are interacting with. While you may not need to use metaphors all the time, be keen and alert when one is needed. You know you have to start firing a metaphor the moment your audience starts showing hostility. . .

This article is based on the following book:

Metaphorically Selling - A Book Summary
How to Use the Magic of Metaphors to Sell, Persuade & Explain Anything to Anyone
By Anne Miller
Chiron Associates, Inc., New York 2004
ISBN: 0-9762794-0-1
161 Page

By: Regine P. Azurin
Regine Azurin is the President of BusinessSummaries.com, a company that provides business book summaries of the latest bestsellers for busy executives and entrepreneurs.

http://www.bizsum.com "A Lot Of Great Books....Too Little Time To Read" Free Book Summaries Of Latest Bestsellers for Busy Executives and Entrepreneurs

Mailto: mailto:freearticle@bizsum.com
BusinessSummaries is a BusinessSummaries.com service.

In The News:

Transworld Surf
Spring Book Reviews
Transworld Surf
That's great and all but lately I've rediscovered the joy of reading a good book. Something about posting up somewhere (preferably in a hammock under a palm tree) nice and quiet and getting away from all the phone calls, emails, instagram updates, ...

Book review: The Watch
MSN India
His earlier book, The Storyteller of Marrakesh, received glowing reviews and established him as a literary heavyweight. The Watch, published by Random House, follows a desperate night-long battle; a group of beleaguered soldiers in an isolated base in ...

Book Review: Successful Partnering
Metropolitan Corporate Counsel
The new chapters added to this treatise in 2012 were discussed in book reviews in our April 2012 and May 2012 issues of The Metropolitan Corporate Counsel. In addition to the new chapters, existing chapters are revised and replaced each year when there ...

Lancashire Evening Post
Book review: Empire: The Leopard Sword by Anthony Riches
Lancashire Evening Post
His plots bristle with emotion, realism and electrifying tensions, his multi-layered characters open doors onto the fascinating everyday life of the Roman army and the sense of adventure that underpins the whole series makes each book a fresh source of ...

and more »

The Guardian (blog)
The battle of book reviews
DAWN.com
IS the professional book reviewer an anachronism? In a recent Harvard Business School study of nonfiction reviews, assessments in mainstream media outlets and amateur ratings on Amazon largely converged. Surely we could chuck the review section and ...
Amazon v newspaper: which is the more valuable review?The Guardian (blog)

all 2 news articles »

Book Review: Anatolian Days and Nights: A Love Affair with Turkey, Land of ...
TheCelebrityCafe.com
The setting of this rug shop was the perfect atmosphere to showcase the book. The Turkish food, music and poetry brought to life the land that the authors fell in love with and take us through. Anatolian Days and Nights is published by Wild River Books ...

New York Times (blog)
Book Review Podcast: Starkly Different Views of American Liberals
New York Times (blog)
By JOHN WILLIAMS In the New York Times Book Review, Joe Klein and Jeff Shesol review two very different books about American liberalism. Mr. Klein reviews Jonah Goldberg's “The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas,” an argument ...

and more »

Music review: Lighten up, Lady Gaga is just comic-book outlandish
GMA News
Last night at the MOA Arena, she opened her concert in an outfit that made her look like a comic book super villain. Her bra top looked like it was fashioned from Kevlar. We wouldn't have been surprised if Spider-man had suddenly fallen from the ...

and more »

Clayton Christensen and How Will You Measure Your Life?
Huffington Post (blog)
The book apparently came from a graduation speech at HBS in 2010 (there are similarities to Steve Jobs' graduation exhortation), which the Harvard Business Review turned into an article, and then Christensen and his co-authors -- Dillon was the editor ...

and more »

The One Book Review Robert Caro Cares About
Huffington Post (blog)
And that's not just because of what former President Bill Clinton wrote in the May 6 New York Times Book Review, but because Caro felt that Clinton understands better than anyone what he was writing about. "It was fantastic," Caro said when I asked ...

and more »

Google News