The line I walked past

A corporate lawyer told me exactly what he sells, in seven words, in the middle of a sentence about something else. I said got it and moved on.

The short version

The best sentence a business owns is usually said out loud, once, in a sales call, by somebody who does not think it is important. It arrives as an aside. It is wrapped in a hedge, and it is often disowned by the person saying it before they finish the sentence. Listening harder does not catch it, because you are listening for something shaped like an answer. The tell is the hedge. When someone reaches for a picture and then apologises for it, write it down.

Read next: The referral you can't repeat · Grand Union, where the stated problem was the wrong problem · SLATT, positioned on the client's own description of their situation

The call

A corporate lawyer spent an hour telling me he did not want marketing, and somewhere in the middle of it he told me exactly what he sells.

He had come through a warm introduction. Neither of us could remember what had prompted it. He runs his own practice inside a larger firm, has his own P&L, and had been spending about $2K a month on Google ads that were bringing him the wrong people. His words: "95% of them were I want to sue Target." He is a corporate attorney. Google was serving his name to people with a grievance and a search bar.

So we were mostly talking about lead quality. Then I asked him what makes a client pick him over the other accomplished attorney they are also talking to.

He said he had never asked. Then he answered it anyway, straight through, without stopping:

"What I sell, I guess, is an experienced team with slightly off rack pricing. So we're cheaper than the big firms with the same quality. I don't sell it that way, but that's how, what I think people might think about. Responsiveness, hitting your budget, and sort of listening to what you really want, solving your problem, not like someone else's problem."

And then, a beat later, to make sure I had it:

"It's like the independent Porsche mechanic. Not taking it to the dealer, but you're getting good service."

That is his positioning. Complete, in seven words, with a picture attached. It is not on his website.

What I did with it

I said "got it," and asked my next question.

I was running a discovery call. I had a list. There were things I still needed to know about his firm, his budget, whether he had a CRM. So I filed the Porsche mechanic somewhere behind all of that and kept going, and the call ended, and I wrote him a proposal, and he did not buy.

I do not think missing it is why he did not buy. He wanted to be shown that any of this works, and that was a different conversation. But I would have written him a better proposal.

The hedge

He had disowned the line before he finished saying it.

Read the quote again and notice what surrounds the good part. It opens with "What I sell, I guess." It closes with "I don't sell it that way." Inside eleven seconds he hedged going in and disowned it coming out. The best sentence in the call was flagged as unimportant twice, by the man who said it, while he was saying it.

There is nothing unusual about him. Nobody announces their positioning. They apologize for it.

The second picture

It was the second picture he had made in twenty minutes.

Earlier in the same call he had explained the Google problem this way: "If you Googled toilet seat cover and you got a flusher, a plunger. It's another toilet part, it's just not the one you need."

That is a better description of a search intent mismatch than most people in my trade could write on purpose. It took him about four seconds.

Twenty minutes later he told me, in plain terms, "I have no desire to have a brand for its own sake."

He had by then invented two original, precise pictures for his own business, live, on a phone call with a stranger. He does not think of that as anything. To him it is just how you explain something to somebody who is not getting it.

Not a listening problem

The obvious lesson here is that I should have listened better. That is not what went wrong.

I was listening. For an hour, closely, and taking notes. The question that produced the Porsche line was mine, and it was a good question. If the failure had been inattention, the fix would be easy and this would not be worth writing down.

What actually happened is that I was listening for something shaped like an answer. Answers come with a little ceremony around them. People slow down, or start over, or say "the way I think about it is." This one arrived at conversational speed, inside a hedge, in the middle of him telling me about pricing. It did not have the shape.

The other drawer

To him it was not an answer.

He is not being modest and he is not hiding it. The Porsche mechanic line is a tool he built for a specific job. Somebody is comparing his rate to a big firm's rate, and he needs that person to understand, in the next ten seconds, that they are measuring the wrong thing. So he reached for a picture and found a good one. Then he used it again on the next call, and the next, and it got better, the way anything said a hundred times gets better.

Filed under: things I say when a client is being difficult about price. Not filed under: what makes us different. That is a different drawer, and nobody opens it looking for marketing copy.

The tell

The tell is the hedge.

You cannot catch this by paying more attention. You catch it by knowing what it sounds like on the way in.

Listen for the apology attached to the front of a sentence. "I guess." "It's kind of like." "This is probably a bad way to put it." "I don't sell it that way." That verbal shrug is somebody handing you something good while telling you it is not worth much, and they believe both halves.

The same goes for any picture that arrives unprompted. Nobody reaches for a metaphor to describe something they find boring. They reach for one when they are trying to move a person who is not moving, which is the same job the writing is supposed to do, done live, under pressure, by the person who knows the most.

So write down the thing they apologise for saying. Not tidied. The way it came out.

The client usually hands you the strategy in the first hour. It does not arrive announced, and it does not sound like strategy. It sounds like a man explaining why you should not take your Porsche to the dealer.