The next car question

Every salesman on a car lot is asking the same question when somebody walks on. How do I sell this person a car?

Rory Sutherland tells the story of one who asked something else. I heard it from Chris Dylan, a WhatsApp automation expert, on ItsKeaton's show. A salesman in America in the sixties, outselling everyone around him four to one. Asked why, he said that everyone he knew in the trade asks how to sell a car to the person in front of them. He asked himself what he could do today to guarantee they came back to him for their next one.

Then comes the part of the story that is easy to skip.

For his first three or four years, his numbers were average. Some of them slightly below average. He was turning away sales he could have closed, because closing them would have cost him the one after.

So for three or four years he looked like a man with a worse strategy than everybody else, and he would have had no way to prove otherwise.

Then people started needing their next car. They did not shop around. They asked what he had.

I am starting a business. I have spent months on foundations rather than on sales, and the honest description of where that leaves me today is the first part of his story, not the second.

So the question I keep coming back to is not how I sell somebody a website.

It is how I make certain I am the person they come back to for their whole web presence, in ten and in twenty years.

That changes what I build. It changes what I say in a first conversation. It changes what I tell someone not to buy.

A website I could sell today and a website still earning for someone in ten years are not the same website. Only one of those two questions tells you which one you are building.

It also tells you to expect a few quiet years first.