The Ironmonger's Second Question

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the postmark demands. The old town again, on the corner where the shop smells of oil and cut rope.

Two mongers sell the self-same spade,
At one same price, one bargain made.
One takes the coin and says no more,
One asks what work it's wanted for.
One basket's light, one's full and true.
What did the second question do?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two ironmongers in the town I've never named, and their stock, in the old chorus, was equally good. Same nails, same rope, same spades hanging in the same order by the door.

A man came into the first shop and asked for a spade. He got a spade. He paid for the spade, and the ironmonger wrapped nothing, because you don't wrap a spade, and said good day, and was rather proud of himself, if you'd pressed him, for not being one of those men who presses. "He asked for a spade," he'd have said. "I sold him a spade."

What the man was actually doing, though nobody in that shop asked, was planting two hundred feet of quickset hedge along the top of a field, for the first time in his life, in the second week of a wet November. And so: the ground was heavy clay, and the wrong spade for it, and by ten in the morning his hands were open blisters because he had no gloves. He had no line and pegs, so the hedge wandered like a drunk. He had nothing to sharpen with, so by afternoon he was pushing rather than cutting. He got it in, more or less, and over the winter a good half of it died, and he stood looking at the gappy remains the following spring feeling like a fool, which is what a man feels rather than saying it aloud.

He never once blamed the ironmonger. He blamed himself, the weather, and possibly the hedge. But he did not go back into that shop with any particular gladness ever again, and he certainly never told anybody it was the place to go.

The second ironmonger had a habit that took eleven seconds and made his shop the best-known on the road. When a customer asked for a thing, he asked back: what's the job?

Same man, same spade, in a version of this story that goes differently. The second man hears "quickset hedge, top field, two hundred feet," and his hands are already moving. That clay wants a different blade, and here is the thing that made the town trust him: the different blade was ninepence cheaper. Then twine and pegs, so the line stays honest. A whetstone, and thirty seconds of instruction on using it. Gloves, because two hundred feet is not twenty. And a word at the door about how deep the trench wants to be and why the roots must not be left in the wind while he digs.

The basket was three times the size of the other man's sale, and not one item in it was there to fatten the basket. Every single thing in it existed because the job required it, and the difference between those two facts is the difference between a shop people trust and a shop people leave.

And the town knew him for the other half of the habit too, which is the half that makes it real: he once sent a woman home with a washer costing tuppence after she came in prepared to buy a whole new pump. She told that story for years. Everyone she told it to came to that shop, some of them with pumps.

The man's hedge, by the way, lived. He bought everything from that shop for the next twenty years, and so did his brother.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Ask what the job is, not what the item is. The customer names a thing, because a thing is all they know how to ask for. You know the task. The gap between what they asked for and what the task actually needs is where their failure lives, and, not by coincidence, where most of your unearned income is sitting untouched.

This is why selling more has such a poor name in your century, and deserves it. Most of what passes for it is the seller's list, offered to whoever will hold still: the extra cover, the bigger tin, the thing with the best margin on it. The customer can smell that from the door. The honest version runs the other way and is not really selling at all; it is finishing the job, out loud, in the order the work requires. And the test of which one you are doing is simple and unforgiving: would you recommend this item if it earned you nothing? The ninepence discount and the tuppenny washer are the same question answered correctly twice, and they are the reason his other recommendations were believed.

Then there is the arithmetic, which you already know from the farrier. The one item sold bare earns you a morning. The completed job earns you a hedge that lives, a man who succeeds, a brother, and twenty years. Nobody ever came back with gratitude to the shop that sold them exactly what they asked for and let them fail with it.

Three questions, and take your last ten orders down before you answer:

1. What is the job behind the thing you sell? Rewrite those ten orders as tasks rather than items: not a spade, a hedge in wet clay. If you cannot write the task for most of them, you have been serving requests rather than customers, and you are guessing at the very thing your competitors cannot copy.
2. What will they need by Thursday that you never mention? Name the three things the job requires that go unasked for, every time, by people who don't know to ask. That list is your honest offer, and if it happens to be items you sell, so much the better; if it isn't, tell them anyway and watch what it does to your name.
3. Where is your tuppenny washer? The moment you can save a customer money, or talk them into the smaller thing, or tell them they don't need you yet. Do it deliberately and often. It costs a little and it buys the one thing no advertisement can: a buyer who believes your recommendations because they have watched one of them cost you.

The Answer to the Riddle

What did the second question do?

It sold nothing. That is the whole of it. It found out what was actually happening, and once the job was on the counter instead of the item, the rest of the basket was not persuasion but arithmetic. The first man sold a spade and lost a customer. The second man never sold a spade in his life; he planted hedges, and charged for the tools.

The verse:

The thing they asked for pays your rent,
And leaves the job half done, half spent.
So ask the work behind the ware,
And send them home with all that's there.

Until next time. Go and ask the next ten customers what the job is, before you take a penny, and count what ends up in the basket.

P.S. If you cannot name three things your customer will need by Thursday, you do not yet know the job, and that, friend, is a more urgent finding than anything in your marketing. Go and watch one of them do the work. Take a notebook and say very little.

Also in the archive: The Second Rung, Boots in the Same Ditch and The Shallow Keel.