The Fourth Lever

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as ever. Your century today, and the subject is a lever most trades pull until it breaks, while three others sit untouched beside it.

Two fitters lose the selfsame sale,
Both hear the same reluctant tale.
One cuts the price and cuts again,
One shifts the waiting and the strain.
Same job, same cost, same words she said.
Which one was bought? And which one bled?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two firms in the same trade, and the work, all together now, was equally good. Both quoted the same customer, in the same week, at about the same figure, and both were told she would think about it.

The first knew exactly what to do, because there is only one thing most trades know how to do when a sale stalls. He took a hundred off. Then, a week later, another fifty and a thing thrown in for nothing.

She still did not buy, which puzzled him, and it should not have. Her hesitation had never been about the number. She was hesitating because the work would not start for six weeks, and would take another four, and during those four her business would be disrupted in ways nobody had explained to her; because she had been let down by somebody in the same trade two years earlier and had no way of knowing he was different; and because the whole thing required her to sort out three tedious matters at her end before anybody could begin, and she had not the faintest idea what they were.

Not one of those was addressed by a hundred pounds. He had discounted an objection she never had, and in doing so had told her that his prices were soft, which raised a fresh doubt about the rest of it.

The second firm quoted the same figure and never moved it. What she changed was everything around it.

She made the outcome specific, because the customer had been buying a job and needed to be buying a result: not the work, but the state of things afterwards, described in the customer's own terms, with a date on it.

She made it believable, with two photographs of the same job done for somebody in the same line of business, and a plain guarantee with a number in it, since a doubt about whether it will work is not answered by any price at all.

She shortened the wait, which cost her something to arrange: a first stage the following week, so that something visible happened in nine days rather than ten weeks.

And she took the tedious three things off the customer's hands entirely, having noticed that nobody had ever told her what they were, and that they were the real reason it had been sitting on a desk for a fortnight.

Same price. Same work. Bought within two days, and at full rate.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

An offer has four levers, and price is not one of them. What a buyer is weighing is how much they want the result, multiplied by how confident they are of getting it, set against how long they must wait and how much they must do themselves. Every stalled sale in your book is a failure in one of those four, and the discount is a fifth thing entirely: it does not improve the offer, it merely reduces what you are paid for the unimproved version.

Two of the four are easy and two are hard, and the ordering matters. Making the outcome vivid and making it believable are the first things everybody reaches for, and rightly, but they are also what every rival is doing, since anyone can make a promise and anyone can show a testimonial. The waiting and the effort are where the real advantage sits, precisely because they cost you something to change: rearranged work, a first stage brought forward, tedious things taken onto your own side of the table. That is why so few do it, and why doing it wins.

So when a sale stalls, the useful question is which of the four is stuck, and the only way to find out is to ask rather than guess. A person who says it is too dear is usually reporting one of the other three, as the letter on that particular sentence set out at length. And a doubt about whether it will work has one proper answer, which is the seedsman's: a promise with a number in it that covers what they actually stand to lose.

Mark also what the discount does that you cannot see. It teaches the buyer that your first figure was optimistic, which quietly weakens every other claim you have made, including the ones about quality and reliability. You have not made the offer better. You have made yourself less believable and poorer at the same time, which is a poor afternoon's work by any measure.

Three questions, and take a real stalled quote rather than a hypothetical one:

1. Which of the four is stopping them? Ask plainly: is it whether it is worth it, whether it will work, how long it takes, or what you have to do. Most buyers will tell you if the question is that specific, and almost nobody volunteers it if it is not.
2. How long until they see something? Not until completion: until the first visible sign that the money was well spent. If the answer is measured in months, find the thing you could show them in the first week and build the offer around it.
3. What are you making them do? Write the honest list of everything the customer must sort out, decide or prepare before you can begin. Then take two of those onto your own side. That is usually the cheapest improvement to an offer available to any trade, and the one almost nobody makes.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which one bled?

The one who answered a question she had not asked. She had told him she would think about it, which is what a person says when the trouble is the waiting, the doubting or the effort, and none of those has ever been cured by a hundred pounds. His rival left the price exactly where it stood and went to work on the other three, which cost her some inconvenience and no margin whatever. The job was identical. What differed was everything the customer had to carry in order to say yes.

The verse:

They did not say your price was high,
They said they'd think, and wondered why.
Shorten the wait, and prove the claim,
And do the parts that bear no name.

Until next time. Go and take your last stalled quote, work out which of the four is stuck, and change that one thing rather than the number.

P.S. There is a version of this that is merely dishonest, and it is worth naming so you avoid it. Promising a shorter wait you cannot keep, or an outcome you cannot deliver, improves the offer on paper and ruins it in practice, since the customer discovers the truth at the exact moment they are least forgiving. Change the thing, then say it. Never the other way about.

Also in the archive: The Knife Man's Wager, When They Say It Is Too Expensive and The Seedsman's Sentence.