The Words She Typed

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as ever. Your century today, and the whole lesson concerns a woman at eleven at night, typing the wrong words into a box.

Two firms both write about their trade,
Both careful, both well-made, well-paid.
One writes the words their trade would use,
One writes the words a stranger'd choose.
Both pages sit there, year on year.
Which one was found? And found by whom?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two firms in the same trade, and the knowledge, all together now, was equally good. Both decided to write about their work, and both did it properly, over months, with real effort.

The first wrote about his services, in the language of his trade, with the correct terms used correctly. A man in the same business reading it would have nodded at every line.

The trouble is that the person looking for him was not in the same business. She was a woman with a problem at eleven at night, and she did not know the correct term for it, and if she had known it she would probably not have needed him. So she typed what she actually had, which was a description of a symptom in ordinary words, phrased as a question, with too many words in it and one detail that mattered to her.

His pages did not contain that sentence anywhere, so she never saw them, and he never knew she had looked. That is the peculiar cruelty of the thing: the customer who fails to find you leaves no trace at all, and a man can conclude quite reasonably that nobody is out there.

The second firm wrote the questions down first.

Not the topics she thought were important: the actual sentences customers said on the telephone, in their words, including the clumsy ones. Why does mine do this in cold weather. Can it be repaired or does it all have to come out. How much does it cost to put right and how long does it take. What happens if I leave it another year.

Then she wrote a plain page answering each one, one question to a page, with the question at the top in the way a customer would say it, and the answer given straight away rather than after four paragraphs about the firm.

The pages were not clever and nobody admired them. They simply sat there, and the woman at eleven at night found the one that matched what she had typed, and read it, and got her answer, and formed the view that whoever wrote this knew what they were talking about.

Two years later those pages were still being read by people the firm had never heard of, having been written once. Some weeks they brought two enquiries and some weeks none, and the ones that came arrived already halfway persuaded, because the reader had been helped before any conversation began.

And there was a second use nobody expects. When a customer asked the same question on the telephone, she had the answer already written and could send it, which saved her the explaining and made her look prepared.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Your customers do not search for what you sell. They describe what is wrong. And they describe it in the words of somebody who does not know your trade, at length, as a question, often at an hour when nobody is answering telephones. Which means the material that finds them is not a description of your services in professional language. It is the plain answer to a badly phrased question, written by somebody who has bothered to notice how people actually put things.

So the work begins with collection rather than composition. Keep a list of the questions you are asked, verbatim, over a month: on the telephone, on the doorstep, in the awkward pause before somebody commits. That list is the most valuable document in your business, and you already own it, and it is currently scattered across your memory where it does nobody any good.

Then answer one question per page, with the question stated at the top as they say it and the answer immediately underneath. Not a preamble about your firm, not a history of the trade, and not a paragraph designed to keep them reading: the answer, plainly, and the honest caveats. A page that answers the question fully is the one that persuades, since the reader concludes that a firm willing to tell them this much for nothing probably knows the rest.

Two things worth knowing before you start. This is slow, and every one of these pages does nothing for months, which is the apple tree again and wants judging by the same patience. And the specific, awkward, six-word question is worth more than the broad one, because the person typing a long precise sentence has a problem today, while the person typing two words is browsing.

And keep them alive. A page written four years ago that still says the old price or the old rule tells a reader you have stopped paying attention, which undoes the good the page was doing.

Three questions, and start collecting rather than writing:

1. What did your last twenty customers ask, word for word? Write the sentences as they said them, clumsiness included. Your instinct will be to tidy them into proper terms, and tidying them is precisely what makes them findable by nobody.
2. Which of those questions has no page? Go through the list and mark the ones your material does not answer anywhere. Each gap is somebody typing at eleven at night and finding a rival, or finding nothing.
3. Does your answer come first? Look at what you already have and count how far down the page the actual answer appears. If a reader must pass your history to reach it, they will not, and the page might as well not exist.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which one was found?

The one written in the language of the person who needed it rather than the language of the person providing it. Both firms wrote well and both wrote truthfully, and one of them wrote for an audience of his own colleagues without meaning to. His pages were more accurate than hers, and accuracy in the wrong vocabulary is a locked door with the key on the inside.

The verse:

They do not know the name for it,
They only know it's gone amiss.
Write down their words, and answer plain,
And they will find you in the rain.

Until next time. Go and write down the last twenty questions you were asked, in the asker's own words, and answer the three commonest ones on three plain pages this month.

P.S. A worry I hear often: that answering the question fully means nobody will need to hire you. In practice the reverse holds. The person who wanted only the answer was never going to pay you for it, and the person who wanted the work done now believes you can do it. You have lost a reader who was never a customer and gained a customer who was merely a reader.

Also in the archive: The Bootmaker's Handbill, The Free Guide and Four Sides at the Horse Fair.