The question that wins customers and ruins friendships

A few days ago a post went past on my feed. It was written for SaaS founders, and the gist was this: nobody gives you authority for having the best features. They give it to you when you make them care, and the way to make them care is to keep asking one question: “What’s in it for them?” It closed by asking readers how they were building authority in their niche (which, to be fair, is the advice in action).

I agreed before I got to the end. Twenty years of building software for other people will do that to you.

Then I thought about a few friends I don’t talk to anymore, and the same five words started to feel cold. I’ve been on the receiving end of that question, asked about me. It didn’t feel like being cared about. It felt like being weighed.

I think the post is right. I also think there’s a way of asking its question that ends friendships, and the difference between the two is what this essay is about.

The engine nobody could call

My first job out of university was in 2005. I wrote front-end code, and the project needed a calculation engine behind it. Another developer had spent three months building that engine.

I couldn’t use it. There was no interface to call and no web service, nothing a front end could talk to. Whatever it did, it did on the inside.

The VP (he was also the project manager) asked me what we should do. I said I’d rewrite it. He pointed out, fairly, that it had taken three months. I said I could do it in a day if he sat next to me and answered the functional questions.

He did. We started at 11 in the morning, and by 8 that evening the new engine was done and the UI was making its first calls to it.

The two engines differed in which side they were built from. The first was built from the inside out: here are the calculations. The second was built from the side of whoever had to call it, with the one person who knew the business answering every question as it came up.

After that day I was the superstar of the company, which is a title I couldn’t have given myself.

Why the post is right

Susan Fiske, Amy Cuddy and Peter Glick have spent years on how we size each other up. Their review found two questions under most first impressions: does this person mean well toward me, and can they act on it? Warmth and competence. The evidence they gathered says we answer the warmth question first, and it counts for more in how we react.

Features answer the second question. “What’s in it for them?” answers the first.

Aristotle got there about 2,300 years earlier. In the Rhetoric he says we believe a speaker for three reasons: practical wisdom, good character and eunoia, goodwill toward the people listening. Only one of those is about knowing things.

The anthropologists Joseph Henrich and Francisco Gil-White add the part I find most useful. They separate two routes to status. Dominance is taken, through force or fear. Prestige is given: people defer to you freely because you have knowledge or skill they want access to. You can’t award yourself prestige, any more than I could have made myself the superstar in 2005.

So the post has it right. Authority is something people hand you, and they hand it to whoever is clearly working for them.

Where it breaks

I had strong friendships. Over the years some of them picked up a business side. I’d make an introduction for a deal, and it was understood that the introduction came with a cut for them.

Then it became clear that I wasn’t useful for what they were going after next. The calls stopped, and the friendships weren’t what they had been.

In 1979 the psychologists Margaret Clark and Judson Mills split relationships into two kinds. In an exchange relationship (a shop, a client), keeping score is good manners: you get a benefit and you pay it back. In a communal relationship you give because the other person needs something.

In their experiments, when people wanted a communal relationship with someone, being paid back for a favor made them like the other person less, and a helper who then asked for something in return was liked less too. Settling up told them the relationship was a trade.

Aristotle has a name for what I lost. In the Nicomachean Ethics he describes friendships of utility, and says they end when the usefulness ends, because they were never about the person.

Those friends were asking what was in it for them, about me. When the answer changed, so did the friendship.

A better question

Some years later, at another company, we bid on a project against other firms. We could have answered the brief and stopped there. Instead we tried to work out where the project sat in the customer’s business.

It turned out they needed reassurance about other parts of the business more than about the project itself, so that’s what we gave them. Maybe we had information the other bidders didn’t. I don’t know. We won, and the customer never told us why.

The question we were really asking wasn’t “what’s in it for them?” It was closer to “what’s it like for them?”

That second question is the one the research on closeness keeps finding. Harry Reis calls it responsiveness: people feel close to someone when they feel understood, validated and cared for by them. It shows up in small things. In one set of studies, people who asked more questions, especially follow-up questions, were liked more by the people they talked to.

The difference matters with customers too. Marian Friestad and Peter Wright’s persuasion knowledge model describes what happens when people recognize something as a persuasion attempt: it changes meaning for them, and they respond to it differently, often with more skepticism.

Customers can usually tell the calculating version of “what’s in it for them” from the attentive one. They just forgive it more easily, because a sale is an exchange and everyone knows it. Friends don’t forgive it, because a friendship isn’t supposed to be one.

The three-month engine failed the same test. It was built around what the engine did, and nobody had asked what it was like to be the code calling it.

Text carries the features

Most of this happens in text now, and text is lopsided. It carries competence well: a fix, a spec, a well-argued post. It’s bad at warmth. In one study, people sending emails expected readers to tell their sarcastic lines from their serious ones 78% of the time. Readers got 56% right, close to a coin toss. Over voice, they got 73%.

That might be why founders lead with features. Features survive the trip. On a feed, about the only way to show goodwill is to do something useful for the reader, which is why the post’s advice works where I read it.

When it really counted, though, nobody wanted text. A customer of that same company once called because they had an urgent project and needed two of our engineers to drop everything and work at their site for a month. We sent them. The customer went on to give us more projects and referred us to others.

The research points the same way. When people reconnect with an old friend, they underestimate how much closer a phone call will make them feel and overestimate how awkward it will be, so most of them pick email. And friendships, more than family ties, lose their closeness when contact and shared activities fall away. The VP in 2005 could have sent me the functional spec. He sat next to me instead, for nine hours.

The old meaning

Authority comes from the Latin auctoritas, from auctor (author, originator, and literally “one who gives increase”), and that from augere, to increase. In the old sense, an authority is someone who makes things grow.

The VP didn’t write a line of that engine. He gave me a day and answered every question I had. By the old definition, he was the authority in that room.

Written by Hatim Rih

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