Let Them Try It

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as ever. Your century today, and the subject is an argument you will never win by arguing.

Two sellers meet one doubting buyer,
Both know their work, both praise it higher.
One argues on for half an hour,
One hands the thing across, and sours
No word at all. Same doubt, same day.
Which doubt dissolved, and in what way?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two firms in the same trade, and the work, all together now, was equally good. Both sold something a customer cannot judge from the outside, which is most things worth buying, and both met the same wall: people who were interested, and could not tell whether it would work for them, and therefore did nothing.

The first answered the doubt with words, and answered it well. He explained the method, sent case studies, offered references, wrote longer and better each year. His material was genuinely excellent, and he could not understand why so many warm conversations ended in silence.

The reason is dull and total. Every claim he made was a claim, and the buyer had heard the same claim, in almost the same words, from three other firms that month, one of whom she had used and been disappointed by. There is no sentence you can write that gets past a person who has been let down before. She was not weighing his argument against his rival's. She was weighing all argument, from everybody, against her own memory, and argument loses that one every time.

The second firm did the thing that costs money and settles it. She let people try.

Not a demonstration, which is a performance, and not a promise. A real small piece of the actual work, done for them, on their own material, for nothing or nearly nothing. One room rather than the house. One report rather than the year. The first machine rather than the fleet. A week of it rather than a description of the week.

She made it small enough to be affordable to give and real enough to be worth having if she never heard from them again, which was the rule she applied to every version of it.

Three things followed. Doubt about whether it worked simply evaporated, since the customer had watched it work on her own problem, and nobody argues with a thing they have already seen happen. The conversation moved from whether to how much, which is the only conversation worth having. And a fair number of people felt they owed her something, which she never traded on and which arrived anyway, because that is what happens when somebody does you a real service before any money has changed hands.

It also sorted people faster than any conversation could. Those who took the trial and did nothing were never buyers, and she learned that in a fortnight instead of over four months of pleasant telephone calls.

And the failures taught her more than the successes. Twice the trial went badly, in ways she had not expected, on customers whose situation was stranger than she had understood. Both times she fixed something in the actual work, which no amount of testimonial gathering would have surfaced.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

You cannot argue somebody out of a doubt formed by experience. You can only give them a new experience. A customer who has been disappointed before is not short of reasons to believe you; she has plenty, and they are all words, and words are what she was given last time by the firm that let her down. Against that, the finest case study ever written is a stranger's account of a stranger's outcome, and she is quite right to discount it.

So the move is to stop describing and start demonstrating on their ground. That is a different thing entirely from a demonstration on yours, where everything works because you have arranged it to. The trial has to happen in the customer's own conditions, on the customer's own material, with all the mess that entails, because the mess is precisely what she is worried about.

Two rules keep this from becoming an expensive habit. It must be genuinely useful even if they never buy, or it is not a trial, it is a sales call wearing an apron, and everybody can tell. And it must be small enough that you can afford to give it away routinely, which usually means the first stage, the first room, the first week, rather than a diluted version of the whole.

Then guard the end of it, because this is where most sampling is wasted. The trial does not close anything by itself: the person who has just watched it work is at the peak of their willingness, and if you leave them with a warm feeling and no instruction, you have paid good money to be liked, exactly as the man at the fair did. Do the work, show the result, and name the next step and the price in the same breath.

Three questions, and be concrete rather than theoretical:

1. What is the doubt that actually stops people? Not the general worry: the specific one, in their words. Usually it is whether it will work in their particular circumstances, or whether you will be there in three months. Write it down before you design anything.
2. What is the smallest real piece you could do for nothing? One room, one report, one machine, one week. It must be real work with a real result, and it must cost you little enough that you would not resent giving it to somebody who then walked away.
3. What happens the moment it ends? Write the sentence now: here is what we found, here is what the whole thing costs, here is what happens if you say yes today. Say it while they are looking at the result, not three days later in writing.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which doubt dissolved?

The one that was never spoken, which is always the one that matters. The first seller spent half an hour answering the objection the buyer had voiced, and she left with the objection she had not: that she had heard all this before from somebody who then let her down. Words could not touch it, since words were the thing that had failed her. The second seller did not answer it either. She made it irrelevant, by arranging for the customer to watch the work happen on her own floor, after which there was nothing left to be doubtful about.

The verse:

You cannot talk a burnt hand cool,
Nor argue trust into a fool.
Do one small piece upon their ground,
And all your reasons will be found.

Until next time. Go and design the smallest real piece of your work you could give away, and offer it to the next person who says they need to think about it.

P.S. Watch for the version that goes wrong, since it is common. A trial designed to be impressive rather than useful, done in conditions you control, on a problem you chose. The customer notices, correctly, that it proves nothing about her own situation, and you have spent the money and bought yourself nothing but a pleasant afternoon.

Also in the archive: The Glazier's Hammer, A Fifth Off the First and The Knife Man's Wager.