The Mason's Witnesses

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition insists. Back in the old town, where the scaffolding is, and where a man's reputation is carried about in other people's mouths.

Two masons build the self-same wall,
And both are praised by one and all.
One gathers letters, warm and wide,
One gathers three plain facts beside.
One folder charms, one folder sells.
What's in the second? Answer tells.

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two stonemasons in the town I've never named, and their walls, in the old chorus, stood equally true. Both were well liked. Both, at the end of a job, asked their customers for a good word, which already puts them ahead of half your acquaintance.

The first mason asked the way most men ask: some weeks after the work, by note, in the vaguest terms available. "If you were happy with the job, might you write me a few lines?" And the customers, being decent people who were indeed happy, wrote him a few lines, and here is what a few lines looks like when a man is asked for praise in the abstract:

"The mason did a very good job. Very professional and hardworking. I would recommend him."

He kept them in a leather folder and showed the folder to every new customer, and the folder did approximately nothing, because every mason on that road had a folder exactly like it, and any of them could have written the contents themselves in an idle hour. You know from the bootmaker what happens to a page a rival could paste under his own name. It is wallpaper, however sincerely meant.

The second mason asked at a different moment and in a different way. He asked on the last day, on the site, with the dust still on him and the customer standing there pleased, which is the one hour in the whole affair when the feeling is at full strength and the details are still to hand. And he did not ask for praise. He asked three questions and wrote the answers in a notebook while the customer talked.

What were you worried about before you took me on? What actually happened? And what is different now?

Then he read the answers back, corrected what he'd misheard, and asked whether he might use them, with a name and a street on the end. Almost nobody said no. People rather like being quoted accurately.

So while the first mason's folder said "very professional," the second man's said this, in a widow's own words, with her name and the road she lived on underneath:

"I'd had two builders look at the chimney and both wanted to take the whole stack down. The mason said the top four courses would do it, and it cost me eleven pounds instead of forty. That was three winters ago and it has not moved."

Now put those two folders side by side in front of a nervous customer with a cracked chimney, and ask yourself which one is doing any work at all. The first is a man being praised. The second is a specific fear, met by a specific act, with a specific number, checkable by anyone who cares to walk down that road and knock. It is not a compliment. It is a witness statement, and the second mason had a folder of them, sorted by the worry each one answered.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A testimonial is not praise. It is a witness statement. Praise tells a stranger that you are nice, which they had no strong opinion about and cannot verify anyway. A witness statement tells them that somebody exactly like them, with exactly their doubt, took the risk and came out the other side, and it names the sum and the season. One is a feeling. The other is evidence, and evidence is the only form of persuasion that survives contact with a cautious buyer.

Which means the quality of what you collect is decided entirely by the quality of what you ask. "Any chance of a few lines?" is a request for adjectives, and adjectives are what you will get. The three questions get you the doubt, the act and the outcome, in the customer's own plain speech, and their plain speech will always outsell your best sentence, because you cannot buy the way a woman says eleven pounds instead of forty.

Two more things the second mason understood, and both are about timing and courage. Ask on the last day, not the last month, because gratitude has a short season and memory an even shorter one. And ask for the name and the street. The anonymous glowing word is worth less than the modest word with a person attached to it, for the reason you learned at the glazier's trestles: proof that cannot be checked is not proof, it is a claim in a nicer coat.

Three questions, and go and look at whatever you currently show to strangers before you answer them:

1. Do your testimonials name a doubt? Read every one you have and cross out any that could sit under a rival's name unaltered. What survives is your evidence; what doesn't was decoration. If nothing survives, you have not been collecting proof, you have been collecting manners.
2. What are your three questions, and when do you ask them? Write your trade's version of what were you worried about, what happened, what is different now. Then fix the moment: the last day, the handover, the delivery, the first result. Put it in the process so it happens without anybody feeling brave.
3. Which fear does each one answer? Sort what you have by the worry it settles: too dear, too slow, been let down before, doesn't understand my sort of job. The gaps in that list are the objections you are currently answering with your own voice, and your own voice, as every letter in this series has told you, is priced at nothing.

The Answer to the Riddle

What's in the second folder?

Facts, with names on them. A number, a season, a fear that came to nothing, and a woman on a named road who would tell you the same thing if you knocked. The first mason collected how his customers felt about him, which is his business and nobody else's. The second collected what happened to them, which is the only thing a stranger with a cracked chimney has ever wanted to know.

The verse:

A hundred kindly words are air,
They praise the man and leave him there.
But name the fear, the sum, the day,
And doubt has nothing left to say.

Until next time. Go and write your three questions tonight, and ask them of the next customer while the dust is still on you.

P.S. And should a customer give you a witness statement with a number in it, thank them properly and then use it everywhere: the page, the quote, the letter, the wall. Most trades collect fine proof and file it in a drawer, which is a folder doing what folders do best, which is nothing.

Also in the archive: The Glazier's Hammer, Four Doors Either Side and Your Sister on the Lane.