Your analogies don't work anymore, use these 4 instead

The island analogy. The ice cream truck analogy. Usain Bolt running toward a gold medal. I don't care how good these used to be. Every closer and their mother uses them now, and the second you say one, you get put in the salesperson box. Prospects stop listening the moment they recognize the script.

I've closed $9M+ in sales and I had to retire half my old analogies because prospects heard them on three other calls before mine. So today I'm giving you 4 analogies I actually use right now. The last one is my favorite and it's saved me more deals than almost anything else in my playbook.

What an analogy actually does

An analogy is just a story or a comparison between two things. In a sales call, its only job is to shift a belief.

Here's the thing about objections. An objection isn't some wall you have to smash through. It's just a limiting belief that's stopping someone from moving forward. So an analogy is a tool to shift that belief.

Why do stories work so much better than just stating a point? Because people think in stories. When you tell someone a story, they put themselves in it. They become the main character. That means you can take a complicated idea and hand it to them in a way that's instantly easy to understand.

And here's the real power move. If you just tell someone a belief straight up, they might agree, they might not. But if you wrap that belief in a story and they agree with the story, they're far more likely to buy into the belief you're actually selling. Analogies make it hard to disagree with you, because they're not arguing with you, they're agreeing with a story that already made sense to them.

The success bias analogy

This one attacks a specific belief. Someone thinks they're going to succeed no matter what, with or without your help. If that's true in their head, they don't need you. They don't need your program. They'll "figure it out."

This usually shows up when you ask a cost of inaction question and they say something like "I'll get there no matter what" or "I'm not going to let that happen."

Here's how I run it.

Okay, now I can see where you're coming from. Can I make a suggestion? Have you ever heard of the success bias?

Then I explain it. We only ever see the people who succeeded. If you start a business and make zero money, you don't stay in business very long. So the only people you see on social media are the ones who made it long enough to post about it. For every one success story you see, there are thousands who tried, didn't make it, and quietly disappeared.

Then I re-ask the cost of inaction question. The whole point is simple. Success is not guaranteed. One out of a thousand people make it. You're giving them a different lens than the highlight reel they've been consuming.

The Super Bowl analogy

This one is for when a prospect minimizes their own pain. You ask "how is that impacting you" and they shrug it off with "eh, it's not that bad."

That's a problem, because the way someone talks to you is the way they talk to themselves. If they're telling themselves it's not a big deal, their urgency at the end of the call is going to be low. You have to get them to see that minimizing their pain is part of the problem.

If you're in the Super Bowl and you had a teammate who didn't care whether they won or lost, would you want that person as a teammate?

Obviously not. Why? Because they don't have the emotion behind what they're doing. Swap the Super Bowl for soccer, football, whatever sport works for your prospect. The point stays the same. People who win have emotion attached to the outcome. If there's no emotion, there's no motivation to change.

After that, re-ask the question. "What happens if nothing changes?" This breaks them out of minimizing and gets them to actually feel the real pain, which gives you a much deeper conversation to work with.

The gym analogy

Some prospects give themselves too much credit just for hopping on your call. They think the research and the call itself counts as "doing the work." It doesn't, and if they believe it does, they've already given themselves an emotional out before the call even ends.

You'll hear it when you ask what's held them back in the past and they say something like "well, I'm here now, isn't that enough?"

Going in and taking a look at the gym versus going in every single day with a personal trainer, eating right, and working out rigorously are two wildly different things.

I use gym and sports analogies a lot because they're dead simple. Everyone already knows looking at a gym doesn't get you ripped. Showing up and doing the work does. Then I re-ask, "so be real with me, because I'm on your team, what actually held you back from getting hands on help in the past?" That takes away the free pass they gave themselves and gets them to admit they haven't actually done anything yet.

The lottery ticket analogy, my favorite

This is the sneaky one. It addresses the belief that costs more deals than almost anything else, the "I've just been lazy" or "I haven't been motivated" line.

When you hear that, it feels like gold. You think you found the real belief. But here's the trap. If laziness is the belief you build your leverage on, the second you say "it's $10,000," they can talk themselves right out of it. "For that much money, I'll just stop being lazy." They don't think they need you. They think they just need to try harder.

Often times it's not really laziness that holds people back.

Here's how I reframe it, a line I picked up watching Dan Henry work a stage.

If you had a winning lottery ticket and you knew that cashing it in would get you a million dollars, would you be lazy about cashing it in? No, of course not. But if you didn't know it was a winner, or you thought there was basically no chance, would you be lazy about cashing it in? Yeah, probably.

The difference isn't laziness. It's whether they believe the payoff is real. So I ask, "would you agree it's often not that people are lazy, it's that they don't have the winning lottery ticket, the knowledge to know they'll get the result?" Once they agree, I ask what's actually kept them from getting that knowledge.

This shifts the whole conversation from "I'm lazy" to "I haven't had the right information or the right help." That's a belief you can actually work with. Early in my career I let "I'm lazy" sit as the leverage and lost deals because of it. Building this analogy fixed that fast.

The bottom line

Recycled analogies get you filed under salesperson and ignored. These four work because they're built around real beliefs that kill deals: thinking success is guaranteed, minimizing pain, giving yourself credit for showing up, and blaming laziness instead of a lack of knowledge. Use them where they fit, adjust the sport or the setting to your prospect, and watch how much easier it gets to shift a belief instead of fighting it head on.