What does a prospect decide when you don’t call back for two days? Not they’re busy. They decide you don’t want the business, or that you’ll be this slow once they’ve paid you. Anil Gupta, a relationship coach who goes by The Love Doctor, described the same reflex in marriage on Unscripted Small Business: “As human beings, we’re meaning making machines. Something happens, we make it mean something.” His fix is to change the language you use, and to respond instead of reacting. Both apply to how you talk to customers and clients.
He was talking about love, not marketing. But my day job is pattern-matching in search data, and I told him so on the episode. Listening back, half of what he said maps straight onto the client side of this work.
Watch the full episode on YouTube or listen on Castos.
Silence gets a meaning, and it’s rarely the one you meant
Anil’s example was his own. “My wife doesn’t call me back. I make it mean she doesn’t love me. She doesn’t care for me.” What actually happened? “All that happened was she ran out of battery on a phone.” He says we’re very good at catastrophizing.
Your customers are no different. The unanswered form fill, the quote that never arrived, the ticket nobody updated: each one gets a meaning in the buyer’s head, and you don’t get to choose it. That’s why speed to lead matters so much more than it looks on paper. Rich Thomas made the case with real numbers in AI sent the lead, speed to lead closed it.
Anil’s advice to the person doing the worrying is “Look at things as they are, not what they mean.” Your job as the marketer is the other half: leave less silence to fill. Auto-replies that set a real expectation, a status page, a one-line got it, here’s when you’ll hear from us. You can’t stop people making meaning. You can give them better material to make it from.
The labels you use for customers become the work
“So Jeremy, languaging is everything.” Anil said it twice in the episode. His coaching point is that a label you keep repeating starts running your behavior. “Keep away from labels.”
Think about the labels that float around an agency or a sales team. The difficult client. The tire-kicker. The low-budget lead. Once a customer has one, every email from them gets read through it, and you’ll find proof for it whether it’s there or not. Anil’s line about people applies here: “every time you say that, as human beings, we want to be right.”
The same goes for the words on your site. If your pages describe your service in your words instead of the customer’s, you’re labelling the problem for them, and usually wrong. Two ways to fix it: run the messaging audit that rewrites your marketing on the customer’s terms, and mine your reviews for the language customers actually use.
Everything we do, we do for a feeling
Anil put it plainly: “So see, everything that we do, we do for a feeling.” The nice car, the house, the money in the bank. “We have a nice car for the feeling it gives us.”
That’s the oldest rule in copywriting, and still the one most service pages skip. Your buyer isn’t purchasing a technical audit. They want to stop feeling exposed when the CEO asks why traffic dropped. If your page lists features and never names the feeling, you’ve left the actual reason to buy on the table. Neil Thubron’s version of this is logos, pathos and ethos read as a content brief, and pathos is the one most B2B pages are missing.
Respond, don’t react, when the review or the email stings
The idea that stuck with me most was what Anil calls the right shoulder rule. You’d never rip off your right shoulder and hand it over because someone asked. “What if you had the same rule for your happiness? Under no circumstances will I give my happiness away.”
Apply that to the one-star review, the client email in all caps, or the comment calling your work garbage. His version: “Something happens, I’m not gonna react. I’m gonna be this nonstick frying pan spray. Nothing’s gonna stick.” And later, more simply: “instead of reacting, respond.”
Reacting is the reply you write in the first five minutes. Responding is the one you write after you’ve asked what they actually meant. Anil’s snake story makes the same point from the other side. People saw him throw his wife to the ground and judged him, until they learned there was a snake about to bite her. “You can’t please all of the people all of the time. But it’s all about intent.” When a client is upset, check the intent behind your own work and theirs before you answer.
He also gave couples a repair script that adapts surprisingly well to a client you’ve let down: “I know I hurt you. It wasn’t my intent to do so. Please forgive me.” In a business email, that becomes: here’s what went wrong, here’s what we meant to do, here’s how we’ll fix it. No excuses, no paragraph about how busy you’ve been.
Acknowledge people before they ask for it
Anil’s advice for someone hungry for appreciation is to acknowledge them before they want the acknowledgement. It takes 30 seconds, he says, and it changes the relationship.
Clients are the same. The ones who escalate are usually the ones who felt unseen first. Send the win before they ask how things are going. Thank the in-house contact by name in the report their boss reads. If you’ve ever had a CEO decide SEO isn’t working after a month, Angelo Ponzi’s fix for setting SEO expectations with the CEO is the proactive version of this.
Be so amazing that you cannot be ignored
Asked for one sentence he’d give everyone in the world, Anil didn’t hesitate:
“Be so amazing that you cannot be ignored. And if you are ignored, it doesn’t matter because how you show up will be the best version of you.”
He backs it with a habit he calls the three-foot rule: “Anyone who comes within three feet of me, I’m gonna say something to them, compliment them, make a joke.” His reason: “We never know what other people are going through.”
Your version of three feet is your inbox, your DMs and your comment section. The person who replied to your newsletter, the prospect who asked a basic question in a forum, the junior marketer on the client side. Five seconds of real attention is cheap, and it’s the kind of thing people remember when they’re picking who to hire.
Questions to ask before you hit send
- What meaning will this customer give my silence, and can I leave less of it?
- Which labels am I using for this client, and are they shaping how I read their emails?
- Does my page name the feeling the buyer is after, or just the features?
- Am I reacting to this message, or responding to what they actually meant?
- Who on the client side deserves a thank-you before they ask for one?
The full episode recap is Anil Gupta on forgiveness, language and love on Unscripted Small Business, and my own take is on what Anil taught me about languaging. You can find Anil at meetanil.com, where his book Immediate Happiness is listed.
This episode is supported by our sponsors: uSERP, a GEO agency that helps brands get found in AI search, Oleno, which gives a whole team the same shared context so everyone uses AI the same way, and ClearLead Digital, a property management marketing agency.
Sponsor disclosure: uSERP, Oleno and ClearLead Digital are paid sponsors of the Unscripted podcast network. Links to them are marked as sponsored.