The Seedsman's Sentence

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, in February, when the sacks are stacked by the door and nothing has been planted yet.

Two seedsmen fill the selfsame sack,
Both swear their seed will not hold back.
One prints "our quality assured",
One names the loss he'll pay you for.
By spring, one's counter keeps a queue.
Whose promise cost him? Whose was true?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two seedsmen in the town I've never named, and their seed, in the old chorus, was equally good. Same growers, same sacks, prices within a penny of one another.

A man came in to buy seed for eleven acres, and here is what he was actually risking, which is the thing both seedsmen needed to understand before they wrote a word. Not the eight shillings for the sack. He was risking the ploughing already done, the labour to sow it, the rent on the eleven acres, the wage bill from March to August, and a growing season that does not come round again until next year. Set the eight shillings against that and it is a rounding error. He was not buying seed. He was buying the year.

The first seedsman had a handsome sign: Quality Assured. Satisfaction Guaranteed. Consider what that promises. Nobody can say what would breach it, nobody can say what would happen if it were breached, and every other seedsman on the road had painted something similar. It is not a promise at all. It is a mood, painted on wood, and the buyer read it exactly as he read the paintwork, which is to say not at all.

The second seedsman had one sentence, printed on every sack and said aloud at the counter:

If fewer than eight seeds in ten come up, bring me back the sacking and I will replace the seed and pay for the sowing.

Read it again for what it does. It names the thing the buyer is frightened of, in a number both of them can count. It says what happens, without a word about reasonableness or discretion. And it stretches past the eight shillings into the labour, which is where the customer's real loss begins, and which no seedsman on that road had ever offered to touch.

Four things followed, and only one of them was the obvious one.

Very few claimed. About one in forty, over the years, which is roughly what everybody discovers who has the nerve to try this and does not tell anybody in advance how frightened they were.

The claims that did come were worth more than they cost, because they told him which lot had gone wrong, which is intelligence no complaint form ever produced. He paid them without a single question asked, which is the whole of it: a guarantee argued over is worse than none, since it takes a disappointed customer and turns him into an enemy with a story to tell at market.

It changed how he worked. A man who has promised to pay for the sowing starts testing his own lots on a damp cloth by the stove in January, and so the failures grew rarer, and the promise cost him less every year that he kept it.

And he charged more than the other man. Of course he did. He was selling seed with the year underwritten, and his rival was selling seed with a mood painted above it.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A guarantee that returns the price refunds the smallest part of what the buyer stands to lose. Your money back is the polite minimum, and it addresses almost none of the actual fear, which is the wasted season, the second contractor's fee, the three months lost, the awkward conversation with whoever approved the spend. Cover only the invoice and you have told the customer, quite precisely, that you do not understand what they are risking.

So build the promise around what genuinely frightens them, and hold it to four tests. Name the specific bad outcome rather than dissatisfaction in general. Make it measurable, so that both parties can tell whether it happened without a debate. Make claiming easy and unarguable, with no receipt hunt, no panel, no discretion. And put it where the doubt lives, which is beside the price at the moment of deciding, not on a terms page nobody has ever opened.

Now the fear that stops most trades, and it deserves a straight answer rather than reassurance. Yes, a few will take advantage. Do the arithmetic rather than the worrying: count what the cheats would cost against the extra trade the promise brings, and in nearly every business the cheats are the smaller number by a distance. What you must not do is defend against those few by writing conditions, because every condition you add is read by the honest majority as evidence that you expect to wriggle. A guarantee with three exclusions is not safer, it is simply not believed.

And mark the part that outlasts the marketing. A promise you must honour changes how you work, because no one who has agreed to pay for the sowing stays careless about the seed. That is the honest reason this is not a trick: it is the glazier's hammer again, a claim you cannot make unless it is true, and the making of it forces it to stay true.

Three questions, and answer the first one about your customer rather than yourself:

1. What do they actually stand to lose if you are wrong? Write the full list: the time, the season, the second attempt, the reputation with whoever signed it off. Your fee will usually be the smallest item on it, and the gap between your fee and that list is the exact size of the fear you are currently asking them to carry alone.
2. What would breach your guarantee, in words you could both check? Write the sentence with a number in it. If you cannot, you do not have a guarantee, you have an adjective, and adjectives are what your competitors are already painting on their own signs.
3. How does a person claim, and how long does it take? Walk it through as though you were the unhappy customer on a Tuesday morning. If it needs an email, a form and a fortnight, the promise is decorative. Make it one sentence to one person, answered the same day, and pay without arguing.

The Answer to the Riddle

Whose promise cost him?

The first man's, and he never paid out a penny in his life. He simply lost eleven acres of trade every February to a rival whose sign could be counted, because a promise nobody can enforce costs nothing to make and is therefore worth nothing to receive. The second man paid out perhaps one time in forty and was paid for it forty times over, in higher prices, in a queue at the counter, and in the seed testing he would never otherwise have bothered to do.

The verse:

The words that cannot be enforced
Are wind, however nobly voiced.
So name the loss, and name the sum,
And half their fear is overcome.

Until next time. Go and write your one sentence, with a number in it, and put it beside your price rather than in your terms.

P.S. Before you print it anywhere, make one claim against yourself. Sit down as the unhappy customer and go through the whole business of asking. Whatever irritates you in that ten minutes is what would have irritated them, and you have just saved yourself a story told at market.

Also in the archive: The Knife Man's Wager, The Fourth Lever and The Name Above the Door.