Two Answers Out of Nine

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, where two nurserymen raised their apples on the same loam, and both sent their estimates out in August for planting that could not wait past November.

Two nurserymen in one town, the same stock beds and the same autumn.
Both sent out nine written estimates in the last week of August.
Both wanted the ground settled before the trees came up in November.
One of them had two answers by Michaelmas, and the other had eight.
Neither had written a lower price, and neither had written a longer letter.
Which, and what had he put at the foot of the page that the other would not?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two nurserymen, in a town I have never named. Four acres apiece of the same brown loam and the same grafted stock. A fruit tree is not a thing a man sells off a cart. It goes into the ground asleep, which in that country meant the second week of November, and whoever waits until November to decide finds the trees he wanted standing in the rows with another man's name chalked on the lath. So both wrote in August, nine estimates apiece that year, the trees priced by the dozen.

The first nurseryman then did the only thing he could think of, which was to wait. In September he wrote again to the seven he had not heard from, hoping his figures had been found satisfactory. Nothing. At the end of the month he wrote a third time, shorter, and heard in it a note he did not care for. By Michaelmas he had two answers, both of them orders, and seven men who said nothing whatever. He did not write a fourth time, a man not caring to be thought a nuisance in a town that small. The seven names stayed on the laths. When a farmer came up the lane in October wanting four dozen standards for a paddock, he sent him off to the next county, two of the seven being still, as he saw it, undecided. In November he lifted trees nobody had asked him to lift and heeled a hundred back into the trench for another year.

The second nurseryman sent the same estimate on the same paper, at the same prices within a shilling, and added four lines at the foot in his own hand. You are under no obligation of any kind, and I shall think none the worse of a man who plants elsewhere or plants nothing at all this season. But I must lift in the second week of November, and a tree held in your name is a tree I cannot offer to anybody else. So if it is not to be, send me the one word, no, and I shall take your name off the laths and trouble you no further.

He had eight answers by Michaelmas. Three were orders. Five were refusals, two of them a single line, which was all he had asked for. One had his drainage to do first; one had been quoted cheaper in the next county, on stock that would not have suited his soil. The farmer in the lane got his standards in October, and two of the five wrote again the following August, unasked, as a man will when he has refused you cleanly and has nothing to avoid.

Be fair to the first nurseryman, whose error was a decent one. He had worked out, correctly, that nobody likes to be pressed, and his answer was to press gently and then stop. Two of his seven had simply not decided. But they had still not decided in October, and that is the part worth looking at.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A customer who cannot refuse you cheaply will not refuse you at all; he will go quiet instead, and a silence is worth less to you than the plainest no. Every trade knows the enquiry that simply stops, and most read it as a verdict on the price. It is usually nothing of the sort. It is a man stepping round a small unpleasantness that you arranged for him and could as easily take away.

Consider what you ask of him. He must tell a civil stranger who spent an evening on his figures that he does not want them. That costs him a minute, some awkwardness, and the risk that you will argue and he will have to refuse twice. Saying nothing costs him nothing, and may be reconsidered at any time, which is to say never. You have offered your customer a choice between an awkward minute and an easy nothing, and then been surprised at his choice.

There is a second thing at work, and it is what makes the chasing letter so poor an instrument. A man who holds a decision will defend his hold on it before he weighs the thing itself. Your second letter adds no fact to your first. It adds weight, and weight is the one part of a letter a reader can push against without any thinking. Pushing against it feels, to him, remarkably like having decided.

Now see what the four lines do. They hand the decision back, in writing, before he has had to take it, so there is nothing left to push against but the offer. In your own century somebody has counted it: one request put to two sets of people, the second set told plainly that they were free to refuse, and that second set agreeing more often, not less. Believe it for the mechanism rather than the counting: a man handed his freedom has nothing left to spend on defending it.

And a refusal pays you in the only coin on offer. A trade that knows how many enquiries it must have to fill one pot can do arithmetic with a no and nothing whatever with a silence. Better, a plain no is a dated piece of information rather than a judgment on you, and the man who gave it will answer you again next year, because he is not hiding.

Two cautions. The permission must be real. If a man sends his one word and gets another letter a fortnight later, he has learned that your line at the foot of the page was furniture, and he will not answer you again. And leave to refuse is not a substitute for the asking. It belongs at the end of a clear proposal, said once, plainly. Said three times it stops being leave and becomes pleading, which is pressure in a borrowed coat.

Three questions, and the first is the one most trades never ask:

1. What does a no cost the person who must give it? Count it in minutes and in awkwardness, then take that cost away. Name the refusal, welcome it, and say what it is good for.
2. What would you do on Monday if your four silences were four refusals? If the answer is a great deal, your week is arranged around men who have already gone.
3. Where in your asking does the customer feel pushed? Read your last follow-up aloud, find the sentence that takes the decision out of his hands, and strike it out.

The Answer to the Riddle

One of them had two answers by Michaelmas, and the other had eight. Which, and what had he put at the foot of the page that the other would not?

The second nurseryman, who gave every customer his leave to refuse and asked for a single word. He won no order by any trick, three against the other man's two. What he gained were five refusals, which were the making of his October, while the first man spent an autumn holding trees for people who had decided against him in August.

The verse:

The man who cannot answer no
Will answer you with none.
Hand him leave to shut the gate
And half your waiting's done.

Until next time. Go and write to the three oldest enquiries you have heard nothing from, and give each of them, in one sentence, your leave to say no.

P.S. A refusal comes easier when it has a form to go into, and composing the letter is most of what your customer is avoiding. Ask him for one word, and take it when it comes without a syllable of persuasion after it. The shortest no you are willing to accept decides how long you wait.

Also in the archive: Ten Days After, Nine Pounds and Then Nothing and Unless I Hear Otherwise.