Crossing the Square

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, on market day, where the same men stand in the same corner every week of their working lives.

Two chandlers work the market round,
Same farmers, same familiar ground.
One speaks when he has corn to shift,
One brings the news, and asks but seldom.
Both ask five times across the year.
Why did one get five yesses, one a fear?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two corn chandlers at the same market in the town I've never named, and their dealing, in the old chorus, was equally fair. Same prices, same measures, same corner of the same square every Wednesday.

The first spoke to his farmers when he had something to sell them. That was his whole system, and it is most people's: an approach is a thing you make when you want an order, and the rest of the time you leave a man in peace, which he considered a courtesy.

The effect on the farmers was not what he intended. They came to know that when he crossed the square towards them, he wanted something, and a man walking towards you who always wants something is a man you begin to avoid. Conversations grew shorter. One or two developed a sudden interest in the far end of the market. Nothing was said, and no offence was taken by anybody, and his approaches simply got a little harder every year.

He was asking perhaps five times a year, which is not excessive by any measure. The trouble was that five times a year was every time.

The second chandler crossed the same square most Wednesdays and usually wanted nothing at all.

He brought what he had heard: what corn had made at Norwich on Monday, that the mill at the weir was down for a fortnight so the queue would be at Ashby, that the frost had taken more of the late barley than anybody was admitting. He mentioned when a man's own field looked well. He said, more than once, that a farmer would do better selling next month than this, which cost him an order and was true.

He asked about five times a year, the same as his rival, and got a different answer nearly every time.

Because when he did ask, he was a man who came over most weeks with something worth hearing and occasionally had something to sell, rather than a man who only ever appeared with his hand out. The asking arrived inside a relationship instead of constituting the whole of it.

And there is a harder-edged part, which is worth being plain about. He was not doing it as a technique, and it would not have worked if he had been. He liked the news, he liked knowing things, and the farmers could tell, as people always can. But the effect was real whether he intended it or not: he had spent the year putting things in, and the five withdrawals cleared easily.

His rival, meanwhile, was drawing on an account he had never once paid into, and could not understand why the drawing got harder.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

It is not how often you ask. It is what proportion of your appearances are asks. Five requests a year is nothing at all if they sit among forty useful arrivals, and it is a great deal if they are the only five times anybody hears from you. Your customers are not keeping count of your requests. They are forming an impression of what you are for, and that impression is built from every contact rather than from the ones you consider important.

Which reframes the whole business of keeping in touch. Most trades treat contact as a cost to be spent carefully on the moments that might produce an order, and so every contact is an order attempt, and the whole channel acquires the smell of one. The alternative is to make most of your appearances worth receiving on their own account: the thing you heard, the warning, the price that moved, the answer to a question they have not asked yet. None of it is expensive, and all of it is what the stallholder was doing with his letters and the cheesemonger with his drumbeat.

Then the two things that keep it honest and make it work. It must be genuinely useful to them rather than useful to you: news about your own firm, your awards and your new premises are asks wearing a coat, and everyone reads them as such. And when you do ask, ask plainly and completely, with the price and the next step, since a request smuggled in at the bottom of something helpful is worse than an honest approach, and it teaches people to distrust the helpful parts too.

And be clear about what this is not. It is not the cart in the frost, which is a particular kindness at a moment of need. This is the ordinary rhythm of being in touch with people over years, and its whole power lies in being unremarkable and continual rather than generous and rare.

Three questions, and count rather than estimate:

1. Of your last ten contacts with customers, how many were asks? Go and look. If it is seven or more, your name has become a word that means somebody wants something, and every future request starts uphill.
2. What do you know that they would want to know? Prices, changes, a supplier gone bad, a rule that has altered, what you learned on a job last week. You are in your trade all day and they are not, which means you are sitting on useful news without noticing it is useful.
3. What is your Wednesday? The regular, cheap, unremarkable appearance that carries something worth having. Weekly, monthly, whatever you can hold in a bad month, and keep it separate from your asking so that neither poisons the other.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why did one get five yesses?

Because both men asked five times, and only one of them had spent the rest of the year being worth crossing a square for. Nothing in the corn differed, nor the price, nor the fairness of the measure. One had made himself a man who occasionally sells things, and the other had made himself a man who only sells things, and a farmer can tell the difference at forty paces, which is roughly the width of a market square.

The verse:

Come only when you want the sale,
And watch them find the other rail.
Bring news on nine, and ask on one,
And that one asking will be done.

Until next time. Go and count your last ten contacts, and if seven were asks, send something next week that asks for nothing at all.

P.S. Watch for the counterfeit, which is everywhere in your century: the useful thing composed entirely so that an offer can be attached to the end of it. Readers work it out in about three appearances, and the cure is straightforward, if slightly uncomfortable. Send several that have no offer at all and could not have one.

Also in the archive: The Stallholder's Letters, The Cart in the Frost and The Cheesemonger's Corner.