The Second Purchase

The eleventh fear in the book is the quietest commercial pain there is, because nobody announces it: "They buy once, and then I never hear from them again."

The maths of it is well known and still underfelt. A business that only ever makes first sales is a business that must manufacture its entire revenue from strangers, every month, forever, at stranger prices of acquisition. Every operator knows the repeat customer is worth multiples of the new one. And yet the fear persists in businesses with genuinely good products, run by people who check the metrics weekly and cannot say why the second purchase does not come. The product was good, the delivery was clean and the invoice was fair, and then there was silence.

The chapter that answers this is the shortest in the book, because it contains one idea, and the idea is the closest thing the book has to a trade secret. It is the principle I have most often seen operating, unnamed, behind quietly unstoppable businesses. Here it is. Every human being goes through life seeking increase: more life, more capability, more possibility, for themselves and the people they love. Wattles calls it the desire of life itself for fuller expression, and it is the deepest drive there is. Therefore, let every act, word and interaction of your business convey the impression of increase. Let everyone who deals with you leave the encounter feeling somehow advanced by it.

Everyone is the radical word, and it is where the fear's answer actually lives. He does not mean everyone who converts, or everyone above a spend threshold. He means the prospect who does not buy today, the applicant you do not hire, and the small customer who will never become a large one. Each of them walks away from your business feeling either bigger or smaller for the dealing, and each of them talks. The business that reserves its care for the moment of sale has told everybody, including its buyers, exactly what the relationship was, and nobody goes back to a business that felt like a checkout. The transaction the fear describes, bought once, never heard from again, is not a mystery. It is a receipt for an encounter that delivered the product and conveyed nothing.

You have felt the opposite from the customer's side, and your own behaviour is the proof I always point people to. There is some adviser, doctor, accountant, some provider of something, that you have followed through a change of firm, a price rise, an inconvenient postcode, without a second thought. Ask yourself what they actually did, because it was rarely anything heroic. They made you feel, in every dealing, that you and your situation had been taken seriously and left larger: more understood, more capable, more possible. The relationship was never with the firm or the product. It was with the increase, and you went where it went. I have watched the same mechanism at every scale of business, from inside one of the biggest names in finance to a tiny company I backed with no name at all, which kept clients that household-name rivals were actively courting. The sizes were different, the principle was identical, and in both cases it was built deliberately.

So the practice this week is the principle made boringly specific. Choose the three kinds of encounter your business has most often: the enquiry, the delivery, the invoice, the no, whichever three are yours. For each, decide the one line or act that leaves the other person measurably advanced: the useful pointer in the polite decline, the insight included with the invoice, the question in the delivery email that shows their situation was actually thought about. Keep it small and repeatable, and run it every time, for everyone. Then watch the silence change. The second purchase, it turns out, is not bought with follow-up sequences. It was always being decided during the first one, in the gap between what you delivered and what they felt they became.

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The book: The Science of Getting Rich and How to Apply It →