Ten Days After

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as ever. Your century today, and the subject is a fortnight most trades deliberately waste out of good manners.

Two firms both finish work in June,
Both leave the customer content, in tune.
One waits six months, so as not to press,
One writes in ten days, nothing less.
Same list, same offer, same fair price.
Why did one sell to half, one twice?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two firms in the same trade, and the work, all together now, was equally good. Both finished a run of jobs in June and both had something else worth selling to those same customers.

The first left them alone, on the sensible principle that a person who has just paid you a large sum should be allowed to enjoy it in peace. He would write to them in the winter, when the memory had settled and the money had recovered, and he considered this a courtesy. Most people would.

By the winter, several things had happened to that customer that he had not accounted for. The pleasure of the finished job had faded into the ordinary background of her life, as everything does. Two other trades had been to the house since. And the version of her that had felt warmly about him in June had quietly been replaced by a version who remembered him without any particular feeling at all.

So his winter letter arrived at a stranger, from a firm she had used once, and it did about as well as a letter to a stranger does.

The second firm wrote ten days after finishing, while the job was still the newest thing in the house.

The message was not a sales campaign. It asked whether everything was still behaving, mentioned one thing worth knowing about looking after it, and said that most people at this stage have the second part done in the spring, here is what it costs, and shall I pencil a date.

A third said yes. Not because they had been pressed, but because they were, at that moment, people in the middle of dealing with this: the decision was already open, the money already allocated in their minds, and the firm already trusted, all three of which decay steadily from the day the van leaves.

And the ones who said no said something useful, which the winter letter never produced, because a customer with a fresh job in her house has opinions and a customer six months on has forgotten she had any.

What separated the two firms was not the offer, the price or the quality of the writing. It was ten days against six months, and the fact that one of them understood that a customer is not a permanent asset sitting at a fixed value, but a thing that cools.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

The likeliest person to buy from you is the one who just did, and the likelihood falls every week you leave them alone. Direct sellers have known this for a century and small trades reliably get it backwards: they treat a fresh customer as somebody to be left in peace and a cold one as somebody to be pursued, when the correct order is precisely the reverse.

The reason is simple enough. The person who bought in June has already crossed every line that matters. She has decided you are competent, decided to spend money on this sort of thing, and has the subject in her mind rather than filed away under things to think about eventually. All three of those are at their strongest on the day the work is finished and weaker every week thereafter, which means your best prospect list is not your biggest list, it is your most recent one.

So order your attention by recency rather than by size. The customers of the last month first, then the last quarter, and the long-dormant ones last, which is where the letter on those who went quiet comes in as a separate and slower job. Both are worth doing. Only one of them is easy.

Two things keep this from becoming a nuisance, and they matter, since the fear of being a nuisance is the whole reason people wait. The early contact must be useful in its own right: a check that all is well, a thing worth knowing, a genuine piece of care, with the offer sitting inside it rather than being the whole of it, exactly as the chandler kept his ratio. And it must be easy to decline, plainly, so that no is a two-word answer rather than an awkward conversation.

And do not confuse leaving people alone with respecting them. A customer who has just spent money with you is not fragile. She is interested, and briefly, and the courtesy you are extending is mostly a courtesy to your own nerves.

Three questions, and go and look at your book:

1. Who finished with you in the last month? That list is your most valuable one and it is almost certainly the one you are not writing to. Put those names in front of the rest of your marketing effort this week.
2. What is worth saying ten days after? Write it once and keep it: the check, the piece of advice, the natural next stage with its price and a date. Written properly, it serves every customer you will ever finish with.
3. How long is your gap at present? Count the days between finishing a job and the next time a customer hears from you. If the honest answer is months, you have been spending money finding strangers while your warmest people cooled in the book.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why did one sell twice as much?

Because he asked while the answer was still yes. Both firms had the same offer and the same customers, and one of them posted it to people in the middle of caring about the subject, while the other waited politely until they had stopped. Nothing was lost through six months of silence except the only thing that was ever going to sell the second job, which was that the first one was still fresh in the house.

The verse:

The warmest hand is warm today,
And cools a little every week.
Write soon, be useful, name the day,
And leave the strangers till you speak.

Until next time. Go and write to everyone who finished with you in the last month, before you spend another pound looking for somebody new.

P.S. This is also the best moment to ask for the witness statement and the introduction, and for the same reason. The sentence you get on day ten is specific and warm; the one you get in March is that they were very good, which is worth almost nothing to anybody.

Also in the archive: The Ones Who Went Quiet, The Piano in the Parlour and Your Sister on the Lane.