The 97 › Strategy 68 › Week 5
The point
I am going to spend a section on something that does not look like a business strategy at all, and that quietly decides whether everything else I teach you will work or fail.
The joint venture partner has to want to take your call. The dormant client has to feel safe enough to tell you the truth about why he stopped. The supplier has to like you enough to offer you the unsold inventory before he offers it elsewhere. The employee has to care enough to notice the thing nobody asked them to notice. Not one of those is a marketing problem. Every one is a relationship problem wearing a marketing costume.
Here is what I have watched for thirty years. Two businesses receive identical advice from me — identical strategies, identical sequence, identical materials. One executes and the market opens. The other executes and nothing moves. The difference is almost never the strategy. It is that the first is somebody people want to do business with and the second is somebody people do business with reluctantly, while looking for an alternative.
The homebuilder I use as the example did not change his product, his price or his market. He changed what he understood the job to be — and the same houses, at the same cost, became something people queued for.
The mistake almost everyone makes
Treating the question as a technique. The moment you ask what somebody is trying to accomplish in order to move them toward what you want, they can feel it, and careful people do not tell you the useful thing.
The test: After the conversation, write down one thing they told you that you did not already know. If there is nothing, you were listening for openings rather than for information.
| Who | What happened |
|---|---|
| The homebuilder | Redefined what he was actually selling. Same houses, same cost, an entirely different relationship with the buyer. |
| 'What are you trying to accomplish?' | Jay's own opening question in advisory work — then silence, held through the discomfort, until they fill it. |
| A supplier relationship | The firm that got offered the remnant inventory first was not the biggest buyer. It was the easiest to deal with. |
| A dormant-buyer reactivation | The replies that stung — you got expensive, you stopped calling — only arrive for people the buyer feels safe being honest with. |
| A joint venture that failed | Perfect economic fit, and one party who could not stop talking. The partner walked and took the audience with them. |
| A professional practice | Referrals rose when the partners started remembering clients' history without making them recite it. |
| An acquisition conversation | The seller chose a lower offer from the buyer who asked what he wanted for his staff. |
| A team meeting | Counting who talks most is the cheapest diagnostic in business, and almost nobody has ever done it. |
This week
In every business conversation this week, notice one thing only: who did most of the talking? Do not try to change it. Just count.
Then, three times — to a client, a supplier and somebody on your own team — ask what they are trying to accomplish.
And say nothing at all until they have finished, including through the uncomfortable pause. That is where the useful sentence lives.