Practical Eloquence Blog

How to Select the Right Analogy

By Jack Malcolm / 5.16.2013 / No Comment

Don't take the first one off the top

It’s generally easy to come up with an analogy to describe or support a concept you’re presenting; our minds are steeped in analogies, which is why so many of them may easily come to the surface. But you can usually improve on the first analogy that comes to mind. Here are some suggestions for choosing just the right one:

Decide the main point
Find the right balance between familiarity and novelty
Test it for weaknesses

Decide the main point. Every situation can be superficially compared to others in different ways. If you want to find the analogy that gets your audience to see your point immediately, you must first be clear in your own mind what that essential point is. Once you do, it acts as a quality filter: just the process of distilling down to key words will activate your imagination and bring better analogies to mind.

Find the right balance between familiarity and novelty. Make it familiar to the audience, but not too familiar. The idea has to be something they will immediately recognize and pay attention to—if it’s familiar, they will recognize it, but if it’s too familiar they won’t pay much attention.

So many analogies are so commonly used that they become what Douglas Hofstadter calls “banalogies”—barely registering in our minds when we hear them.[1] It’s ironic that people who urge us to be more creative can’t think of a better analogy than “thinking outside the box”. Honestly, do you envision a box in your mind when you encounter that phrase?

You have to dig deep. In my own experience, it’s easy to come up with an adequate analogy quickly, but a really compelling or specific analogy takes time. Memory is like a t-shirt drawer: the ones you wear all the time always get put back in on the top, so you use them more often. The most common analogies are always at the top of your memory, and you have to dig down to the bottom to pull up one of the less common ones. The less common ones are more likely to capture the audience’s attention. Memory is also capricious: focusing hard on finding the right analogy doesn’t always work immediately, so if you prepare early by writing a rough draft and then set it aside, better ideas bubble up later—often when you’re thinking of something else.

At the other end, sometimes analogies fail because they don’t make sense to the audience. At the very least, they should be relevant to the culture and even the age of your listeners. Because so much of the training I do is overseas, I’ve developed an awareness of how much of what we say contains references to things in the US that others don’t relate to, especially our sports. Also, as time goes on I find that audience members are getting younger every year, and many of them don’t understand the references I make to TV shows or music that may have been popular before they were even born! I was once brought up short in a training class when I compared presentation structure to a newspaper article, only to be reminded by one of the younger attendees that many people under 30 never read a newspaper.

So what’s the best way to find the right balance? Make it personal, local and timely. You can make it familiar and unique by choosing an analogy that is special to them, perhaps from their own business environment. I knew a salesperson who was selling cellular service to the Michelin plant in South Carolina. When the purchaser said he did not see much difference between the various carriers, she said she understood because she had trouble distinguishing between brands of tires. She further went on to say that there are clear differences if you are willing to look beneath the surface. You can also compare the decision you are asking them to make to a similar one they already have made. Either of these require research, but it pays off many times over in credibility.

For added impact, try to find an analogy that will resonate emotionally as well as cognitively. If you compare it to something that they have strong feelings for, the emotions evoked will attach themselves to your idea as well. One of the best ways is to tap into how they see—or want to see—themselves. For example, at one of my clients, I train their engineers in selling techniques. Because some engineers find selling distasteful, I show how selling is like engineering in certain ways, especially when viewed as a problem-solving exercise.

You especially need to consider using an analogy when referring to numbers. Some numbers needed for business presentations are either so large (billions of dollars of revenue) or so small (Six Sigma quality means 3.4 defects per million), that they are difficult to put into human perspective.[2] Numbers also need to be placed in the proper context to be understood. Steve Jobs was once asked by a reporter how he felt about the fact that Apple’s market share was “stuck” at 5%. Jobs replied: “Our market share is greater than BMW or Mercedes in the car industry.”[3] With one analogy Jobs put the number into context and also compared apple favorably to two well-respected brands.

Test if for weaknesses. Because every situation is different, no analogy is perfect. You have to watch for unintended effects, which is important enough to consider in the next article of this series.

How Analogies Help Sell New Concepts

By Jack Malcolm / 5.14.2013 / No Comment

It's like a horse, only different

In Part 1 of this series, we saw how analogies can play a central role in persuasive business presentations. We’ll develop that thought further in this article by considering how analogies can make it easier for your audience to accept the change you are trying to sell.

In view of the constant change and relentless innovation of today’s economy, one would think that getting people to accept new ideas is easy, but in fact anyone trying to convince someone else to accept a new idea faces three tough obstacles to gaining acceptance. First, the more different something is, the harder it is to understand. Second, our minds prefer the comfort of the familiar and assign greater weight to risk in the risk/reward calculation. Finally, we don’t like being told what to do.

Any one of these obstacles can be poison for your presentation, but the antidote to all three is an apt analogy.

Analogies make things easier to understand. You can’t persuade others if they don’t understand what you’re saying. The mind learns by relating new information to existing information structures, and if you’re presenting highly technical information or introducing a new product that is different from anything the audience is used to, you can save a lot of explanation by building off what they already know. How would you describe a zebra to someone who has never seen a horse?

Analogies also make concepts easier to understand by helping the audience filter out all the relevant information and get to the heart of the matter.

Finally even when your audience totally gets it, the success of your implementation will likely depend on their being able to get additional buy-in from others in their organization. A compelling analogy will arm them with an easy-to-remember message to take to their internal stakeholders.

Analogies reduce perceived risk by making new things seem more familiar. The old saying that familiarity breeds contempt is usually not true. We gravitate toward, and prefer, what is familiar to us. The decision to try something new always involves a mental struggle between risk and reward. Any time we consider something new, whether it’s a product or an idea, we have to contemplate leaving the safety of the familiar for the opportunity of the unfamiliar. If the concept is too different, it’s likely to be dismissed without even giving equal time to considering its benefits.

Evolution is easier for most of us to handle than revolution. Analogies, by definition, work by comparing a new situation to something more familiar. When Apple first came out with a graphical user interface, they could have gone in virtually an infinite number of directions, but they chose to make something completely different seem like something very old and familiar by giving us a “desktop” with which to work.

An analogy lets the decision maker have their cake and eat it too. It provides a safe base in their mind from which they can explore new opportunity.

Analogies lower resistance to your message. As kids, anytime my mother told me something was good for me, I would automatically determine not to like it. Most adults haven’t outgrown that tendency toward reactance, which is why sometimes trying to teach or to sell the benefits of a new idea can backfire if you try too hard. As Churchill said, “I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like being taught.”

As I mentioned in my previous post, analogies, once implanted, work below the level of consciousness to guide the search for information and to bend the stream of thought into a certain direction. The analogy plants itself in the mind and the audience member’s mind does the rest. In fact, it has been demonstrated that the target audience has a better comprehension of product benefits when the detailed information is left out.[1] It’s like a joke: if you have to explain it, it’s not funny.

[1] Less Is More When Learning by Analogy: The Disruptive Impact of Attribute Information on Consumers’ Benefit Comprehension of Really New Products.

Persuasive communication - Presentations

Analogies Are Powerful

By Jack Malcolm / 5.2.2013 / 3 Comments

Analogies can be fruitful

I’ve written before about how useful analogies can be to make your presentation memorable, but if you want to build a powerful presentation, analogies are useful for much more than decoration—they can serve as its very foundation, and make your presentation much stronger as a result.

In fact, while stories are getting all the press nowadays, analogies are really doing most of the work. They’re far more common and more effective in getting your points across. Most stories are actually vehicles for conveying an analogy.

Analogies are inevitable. They influence what we perceive and what we remember. They are useful mental shortcuts that we take when we encounter new and unfamiliar situations that require a judgment or decision. Instead of starting from scratch when we encounter an unfamiliar situation that requires a judgment or decision, prescription we search our experience for similar situations. Analogies help us understand, organize and make sense of incoming information.

In fact, analogy is the foundation of learning from experience. People with more experience have a richer store of analogies to draw from, which is what enables them to rapid right decisions without having to agonize over every detail.

We always see more—and less—in a situation than is there. Our minds see more because we look for patterns and then fill in the gaps with what’s not there. We also see less because we filter out information we consider irrelevant. Analogies

Once we choose an analogy, it leads us to focus on certain aspects of the situation and ignore others. Actually, we often don’t consciously choose analogies—sometimes they choose us, implanting themselves stealthily without our knowledge. Research indicates that “resistance is futile”: implanted analogies can affect our memories so that we may remember things in the presentation that were not actually there.[1]

Business is full of examples of how a powerful analogy can make the difference in important decisions. In 1997, Intel was opposed to developing a low-end chip for PCs because they thought it would cheapen the brand. But in a training seminar, Harvard professor Clayton Christensen explained how established steel companies ignored low-end products like rebar, providing an opening for minimills. By establishing themselves on the low end, they were then able to move up the value chain and seize the high end. That analogy turned Andy Grove’s thinking around, and it began promoting its Celeron processor.[2]

Analogies carry special weight in business presentations because the senior decision makers you want to influence cut their teeth on them—the case study method used in business schools is nothing but analogical thinking on a large scale. As they gain experience in their careers, they are stuffing their minds with analogies that they draw on when they make judgments about new situations.

If you can find the right analogy that resonates with them, you can short-cut a tremendous amount of detail and context and have the inside track on a favorable decision.

I will write much more about analogies in future posts, but for now here is a list of all the benefits that analogies can provide for persuasive communicators:

Focus attention on certain aspects over others—influence belief
Transfer emotion—improve motivation
Make things easier to understand—improve understanding; make things more concise
Make the message more vivid—improve memory
Make the message more interesting—improve attention
Lower resistance to your message
Lower perceived risk by making new things seem more familiar

[1] Resistance is futile: The Unwitting insertion of analogical references in memory. Perrott, Gentner, Bodenhausen (2005).

[2] How Strategists Really Think: Tapping the Power of Analogy, Gavetti and Rivkin, (2005).

Presentations - Sales

Presentation Approaches for Sustainable Agreements

By Jack Malcolm / 4.29.2013 / 1 Comment

The recommendations in this post will challenge your cherished instincts as a salesperson and presenter, so if you’re uncomfortable with doubt, don’t read any further.

Our instincts—and our compensation plans—pressure us to make the most persuasive and confident arguments that we can devise, get from Point A to B as surely and efficiently as possible, and shorten that sales cycle. We focus on the key decision maker in the room, marshal all the facts on our side, and prepare carefully to crush any objections from any potential blockers.

We want to make the sale, we want to be right, and we want to “win”. Books that teach presentation skills (including my own) emphasize this.

But the problem with this “Always Be Closing” approach is that even if your proposal is absolutely perfect in every way for the client, there is a high probability that it may lead to an unsustainable agreement, one that will be implemented improperly or incompletely. That can lead to a lot of value being left on the table for the client, customer dissatisfaction, and big demands on your time down the road.

In my own sales experience, I can admit to deals I sold because I won over the decision maker, but then had to contend with lower level people who were less than enthusiastic in their efforts to support the training, if not downright hostile in some cases. And I’m not alone: In his book, Why Decisions Fail, management professor Paul Nutt documents a study of more than 400 important corporate decisions over 20 years, in which he found that over half failed, mostly because of errors in the early process—errors tied to settling too fast on the first acceptable quick fix.

The process of decision making is often more important than the content of the contending arguments. Processes that widen the search for alternative early in the process, take into account political factors, and think realistically about implementation challenges are much more likely to succeed. In short, they will be sustainable. Paying attention to the process is especially important when you’re dealing with complex projects that carry important results for the client and have a wide span of impact within the organization.

What makes for a sustainable agreement?

People will buy into an agreement for two broad reasons: either it aligns with their self-interest or it is perceived as fair.

Integrative proposals. Any time a company makes an investment decision it is allocating resources, and causing more work or risk for various parties within the organization, so objectively there are winners and losers. But with a little imagination, it’s sometimes possible to make the pie a bit larger and give more to all concerned.

Sense of fairness. People are realistic and are team players, so they will get behind agreements that hurt their individual interests—as long as they perceive that the process to reach that agreement was fair. It’s called procedural fairness: did the process allow them to voice their disagreement and be heard, or did they feel like they were railroaded into it? Was there serious attention paid to diverse points of view? Were all reasonable alternatives given a fair hearing?

How do you adapt your presentation preparation, content and style to achieve it?

During the preparation phase:

Spend time truly understanding all points of view; reach out to potential blockers as well as your allies and champions. Strategically, you run the risk of tipping them off and giving them time to organize opposition, but here’s what you get in return:

You make people feel included in the decision, which increases the chance for shared ownership.
You give people time to grow used to the idea.
You might actually learn something that will help you improve your proposal. As Nutt says, at this stage “Doubt can be a powerful force pushing you to think more clearly about what is needed.”

During the presentation:

Show both sides. Intelligent audiences are more swayed by two-sided arguments that demonstrate that you’ve thought about more than just your own interests. Acknowledge different concerns and interests.

Be prepared to show your thinking. I often warn people away from providing too much context, because it takes a lot of time. But sometimes you have to show the background, context and how you arrived at your ideas, especially when you have a lot of analyticals in the audience. (Or at least be prepared with backup material in case you sense it’s necessary.)

Make it more interactive. People need to feel that they’ve been heard to perceive the process as fair, so encourage questions from the audience. Ask a lot of questions—in fact, if you sense that someone is holding back, you can call on them by name. Of course, this means that you have to pay close attention to audience response. By showing that you’re not afraid of dissenting points of view, you’re setting an example of open-mindedness, and they may return the favor.

During Q&A:

If you haven’t already done so in an interactive presentation, build plenty of time into the agenda for discussion so that everyone who wants to comment can feel that they’ve had a fair shake.

Don’t be afraid of getting disagreement. In fact, you should be more afraid if no one disagrees, because it may mean that they’re just biding their time to sabotage you later. If there is going to be opposition, it’s best to get it out in the open.

Be prepared to “negotiate”. Ideally, you would like to be able to integrate opposing viewpoints into a perfect solution for everyone, but this is not always realistic. If you think ahead, you can have some minor modifications or concessions in your proposal in your back pocket that you can trade for agreement.

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