What They Did, Not Why

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as ever. Your century today, and the trouble in it is that everybody answered the question honestly and the answers were still wrong.

Two firms both ask their buyers why,
Both get an answer, neither lie.
One takes the reason as it's said,
One watches what they did instead.
Same customers, same words, same year.
Which one learned aught? And what, and where?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two firms in the same trade, and the work, all together now, was equally good. Both had the sense to ask their customers why they had been chosen, which already puts them ahead of most.

The first asked the question plainly and wrote down what came back. The answers were consistent and sensible: the price was reasonable, a friend had mentioned them, they seemed professional. Nobody was lying and nobody was being difficult.

So he acted on it. He trimmed his price, since price came up most, and he tidied his material to seem more professional still, and neither change made the slightest difference to how many people rang.

The trouble is that he had asked a question people cannot answer. A customer knows what she did and does not know why she did it, so when a tradesman asks, she does what anybody does: she constructs a sensible-sounding reason after the fact, from the materials available, and offers it in good faith. Price is always available. So is a recommendation. So is seeming professional, which means almost nothing and can be said of anybody.

The second firm asked the same question, wrote the answers down, and then did the useful part, which was to go and look at what people had actually done.

She had the dates. And what the record showed was that eleven of her last fifteen customers had made contact within a day of a particular sort of moment: not after seeing a price, but after somebody else's job had gone wrong, or after a neighbour's work had finished visibly on their street, or in the week they had a date of their own to meet.

She also noticed a thing none of them mentioned. The ones who rang had almost all done so in the evening, and her rival's telephone was not answered in the evening.

Not one customer had said any of that. Every one of them would have told you, sincerely, that they chose her because she seemed reliable.

So she left her price alone, made sure the evenings were covered, and started asking one extra question at the start of every job, which was what happened that made you get this sorted now. That question, unlike the other, has an answer a person actually holds, and the answers arrived in dates and events rather than in adjectives.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

People can tell you what they did with great accuracy and cannot tell you why, and they will answer the second question anyway. That is the whole trap. The reasons offered are not lies and they are not useless, but they are reconstructions, assembled after the decision by somebody being helpful, and they will always favour the tidy explanations: price, recommendation, professionalism. Act on those and you will spend a year adjusting the things your customers happen to have words for.

Nothing here contradicts the letter about going and finding out. Ask, always, and write down what they say word for word. The refinement is that you treat what they say as one witness rather than as the verdict, and you put it beside what they actually did, which is the second witness and the more reliable one. Where the two agree, you have something. Where they disagree, believe the behaviour.

And the behaviour is nearly always in your own records already. When did they first make contact, at what hour, on what day, and what had just happened to them. What did they read before ringing. Which job had finished on their street the fortnight before. None of that requires a survey; it requires somebody to lay the dates alongside each other, which is an afternoon's work and almost never done.

Then change the question you ask. Why did you choose us invites invention. What happened that made you get this sorted now asks about an event, and people remember events accurately, because the boiler failed on a Tuesday or the buyer's survey came back or the wet patch reached the skirting. Those answers tell you when your customers become customers, which is worth more than any amount of speculation about your professionalism.

Three questions, and the first is an afternoon rather than a thought:

1. What do your last fifteen customers have in common in the record? Lay out the dates, the hour of first contact, and what had happened to them just before. Look for the pattern nobody mentioned, since the mentioned ones you already know.
2. Where do the words and the behaviour disagree? If they say price and the record shows they never asked for a quote from anybody else, believe the record. That gap is the most valuable thing in this letter.
3. What is your event question? Write your trade's version of what happened that made you get this sorted now, and ask it at the start of every job from this week. In three months you will know your customers' triggers rather than their adjectives.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which one learned anything?

The one who treated the answers as evidence rather than as findings. Both were told price and reliability, honestly, by people doing their best to be helpful. One of them spent a year adjusting his price and his tone, and the other laid out fifteen dates on a table and discovered that her customers arrived in the evening after something had gone wrong on their own street, which no customer had said and every customer had done.

The verse:

They'll tell you price, they'll tell you trust,
And every word be said in good faith.
But look what hour they rang, and what
Had happened to them just before.

Until next time. Go and lay out the dates of your last fifteen customers, find what they did in common, and start asking what happened rather than why.

P.S. The same caution applies to what people say they will do, which is if anything less reliable than what they say they have done. A customer who tells you she would certainly pay more for a better version is describing the sort of person she would like to be, warmly and sincerely, and you should not order stock on the strength of it.

Also in the archive: Ninety Facts, Show It Rough and The Rebrand.