Aspirin and Vitamins

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as ever. Your century today, and the whole lesson can be had from a chemist's shelf, if you look at which end of it people are standing.

Two sellers own the selfsame skill,
Both do fine work, both mean you well.
One offers health in years to come,
One stops the ache you woke up from.
By spring, one's booked, one's waiting yet.
Which one was wanted? Which was met?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two firms with the same skill to sell, and the skill, all together now, was equally good. Genuinely the same competence, held by two people who described it differently, which is the whole of the story and rather more than most people believe possible.

The first described it as improvement. Grow your business. Work more efficiently. Get your systems in order. All of it true, all of it worth having, and every conversation he had went beautifully: people nodded, said it was exactly what they knew they should be doing, and told him they would come back to him once things had calmed down.

Things never calm down. That is not a fact about his customers, it is a fact about running a business, and he had built his entire proposition on a week that does not arrive.

He did make sales, mind, and this is the part that kept him going for three years: they came at unpredictable times, in unpredictable months, from people who had just had a fright. He could not have told you when the next one was coming, because it depended not on his selling but on whether somebody else's roof had recently fallen in.

The second seller had exactly the same skill and asked a different question. Not what would make these people better off, which is a question about the future, but what went wrong for them last month, which is a question about a Tuesday they can still remember.

The answers were dull and specific, as they always are. The invoices are going out three weeks late and the customers are paying later still. We lost two jobs because nobody rang back before Friday. The one who knows how the ordering works is off sick and nothing can go out. My accountant wants the figures in eleven days and they are in a shoebox.

So that is what he sold. The same work he had been doing all along, described as the ending of a specific ache that a specific person had felt, and could date, and had already lost money to.

People bought it in the week they heard about it, because a headache does not wait for things to calm down. And once he was inside a business with the ache gone, the improvement work sold itself as a second rung, quietly, to somebody who had already watched him fix something. He had not changed his trade. He had changed which end of it he led with.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

People pay to stop a pain. They only mean to pay to prevent one. That gap between paying and meaning to pay is where most decent businesses spend their whole lives, collecting warm agreement and very little money, and mistaking one for the other because they arrive in the same tone of voice.

The test is a date. A headache has one: it started last month, it cost us two jobs in June, the accountant wants it in eleven days. Improvement has no date at all, which is why it loses every single week to whatever is actually on fire, forever, in every business on earth including your own. Look at your own list of things you know you should get round to, and notice that it is a list of vitamins, and notice how long some of them have been on it.

Which is why the ache must be found rather than invented, and the finding is done with one question asked of real customers: what went wrong last month. Not what would you like to improve, which produces polite fiction, but what broke, what did it cost, when. Three answers to that question will tell you more about what to sell than a year of thinking about your positioning.

Two things follow, both practical. Lead with the pain and keep the improvement for later, because the vitamin sells beautifully to a customer who has just watched you cure something, and hardly at all to a stranger. And keep yourself out of the opening: nobody has ever bought anything because of your years in the trade, your process or your certifications, exactly as the about page letter told you. They buy because you named the thing that has been costing them money since March.

Three questions, and answer the first with real customers rather than imagined ones:

1. What broke for your last three customers in the month before they called you? Write the actual incident, with the month and the cost. That is your aspirin, in their words, and it is almost never the phrase you currently use on your website.
2. Does your opening line name a pain or promise a benefit? Read the first sentence a stranger sees. If it offers growth, efficiency or better results, you are selling the vitamin and waiting for someone else's roof to fall in. Rewrite it as the ache, with the consequence attached.
3. Where does your improvement work belong? Not thrown away: moved. Decide which of your offers is the cure and which is the prevention, then sell the cure to strangers and the prevention to people you have already helped. The order is the entire difference, and it costs nothing to change.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which one was wanted?

Both, in truth, and only one was bought. The improvement was more valuable, taken over ten years, and everybody the first seller met agreed with him about that, warmly, and then went back to the thing that was on fire. He was not selling the wrong service. He was selling it against a rival nobody ever names, which is the ordinary urgency of a Tuesday, and against that rival nothing wins except a pain with a date on it.

The verse:

A thing that's good for you can wait.
A thing that hurts will not sit late.
So find the ache, and name it plain,
And sell the ending of the pain.

Until next time. Go and ask your next three enquiries what went wrong last month, and write your opening line out of their answer.

P.S. If your trade is genuinely preventative, and some honourable ones are, then your job is to find the moment the pain becomes present: the inspection, the renewal, the neighbour who has just had the flood. You are not selling prevention then. You are selling relief from a fright that has already arrived, which is the same trade under a politer name.

Also in the archive: The Riddle of the Two Pie Men, The Hay in the Field and The Crowded End.