Many years ago, a friend was getting certified in whitewater kayaking so she could compete in a televised multi-disciplinary, multi-day race called the Eco-Challenge. 

At her behest, my wife and I joined her on the water thinking, “how hard could this sport be?” 

Pretty hard, it turns out. I thought it would be like ocean kayaking, something I was familiar with.

It wasn’t.

I struggled to stay upright in the river. It was bad. Then the instructor shared with me the simple phrase that changed everything. She said, “kayaking is like skiing.”

In those four words, a massive amount of information immediately became available to me. I understood in a flash that current was slope, that I should quit leaning into the hill and I should fall forward down it, that I had been carving with the wrong edge. 

In four words I had a library of information and muscle memory that I could tap into instantly. I immediately understood something I had been struggling with and I began to improve quickly.

This is how metaphors rapidly communicate volumes of information. I’d essentially downloaded an entire model for how to think about something I’d never done before, with the words “this is like that.”

Selling Expertise is Like…

I can do the same for you with selling. I’ll give you four different ways to think about your second job (selling your expertise) with four simple metaphors. With each of them you will instantly have access to an entire playbook. 

“Selling is like dating” is the most common metaphor that I hear from participants in the Win Without Pitching workshop. While valid, I don’t find the dating metaphor particularly useful because there’s little surprise in it. (The more unexpected the metaphor, the more information it carries.)

Here are four less-obvious metaphors for selling expertise that I think you will find useful. 

1. Leading

In any sale of expertise, the sale is the sample of the engagement to follow. If you don’t lead in the sale, you won’t be allowed to lead in the engagement. 

You can read any good book on leadership and substitute the words “selling” for “leading” and “salesperson” for “leader” and you will have a good framework for how to improve your sales. 

If you’re already a good leader, just view the sale as a leadership moment. 

2. Change Management

Changing is a very good model for how people buy. Selling, therefore, is change management. 

Any change management model can be adapted to a sales model. Study how people change and you will learn secrets about buying and selling that you would never learn in any sales book. 

You will learn more about selling theory by studying change than all but a few of the world’s most successful salespeople. 

3. Parenting?

While some say selling is like dating, I think selling expertise is more like parenting. Sometimes the other party doesn’t know what they want, isn’t well behaved, or makes unreasonable demands. 

Someone needs to be the adult in the relationship. That someone is you. 

Channel your hard-earned parenting skills into the relationship to chart a path forward that’s good for the client in the long run. Do it without sounding like a bossypants. 

And yes, good parenting books are also good playbooks for selling expertise. 

4. Facilitating

Some advisors have to tell their clients what to do—it’s just the nature of some specific  jobs—but most of the time it’s the advisor’s job to lay out the options and explain the tradeoffs inherent in each option, then let the client make their choice. 

This is also how you should view selling. It’s not your job to tell your clients what to do. It’s not your job to convince them to hire you. 

Your job is to lay out options—different ways the client might engage you, at different price points—and then facilitate a discussion on the pros and cons of each option, leaving the decision to the client. 

No convincing, no coercion. 

Experts that facilitate a selection from multi-option proposals this way see an immediate increase in closing ratios and average proposal value. 

Each of these metaphors imparts all kinds of new information on what selling is, or could be, if you’re willing to let go of the old model of selling as an act of talking people into things. 

Maybe it’s time you thought about selling differently and adopted a new playbook.