Working Notes

Adjacent material, published as it's ready - not a table of contents, not a pitch. Just what's interesting enough to write down.

One question runs under all of it: what is a sale, actually? If you are new here, these three are the door.

• What Is Sales?

  The naive question, asked seriously. What kind of thing is a sale, what kind of work is the selling of one, and why no field has ever answered it. The piece the whole site hangs from.
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• Nobody Asked You for an ROI

  No buyer ever asks for it, it insults the expert who already did the math, and you cannot compute a return on a use you cannot see. Start here.
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• Why Do Salespeople Exist?

  Coase asked why firms exist. Ask the same of the salesperson and you get the answer aimed the other way: they keep buy cheaper than make, the enzyme of the market.
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• TMI

  A job posting is a confession. When a sales role leads with data hygiene, CRM discipline, and value selling, the company has told you what it cannot do, and cannot bear.
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• The Finder

  The salesperson everyone pictures, the one on the floor who finds your size, is a different creature from the enterprise seller. Presence versus absence, and why the real estate agent will not go away.
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• The Use You Cannot See

  You never have the whole story of how a buyer will use what you sell. The uses that matter are secret, unformed, or spread across the org. The license even confesses it, which is why a return calculation was never a measurement.
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• They Never Make the Call

  Hand an executive the name, the number, the script, and the revenue, ask only for a voicemail, and it never comes. The documentation flows one way, up, and only a firing comes back. The people who run companies now come from the functions you can write down.
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• Documentation Is Not the Deal

  Force an expert to log every step of a tacit craft and you either wreck the performance or invent a fiction after. The CRM is not a document, it is surveillance, and the deal was closed by the one faculty the form cannot hold.
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• The Face

  A company has no face of its own, so it borrows yours. Trust is a face-to-face human instrument and a corporation is an abstraction, so the rep lends it their own. The uglier the company, the more it asks you to wear its sins.
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• Why Do Salespeople Exist?

  Coase asked why firms exist. Ask the same of the salesperson and you get the same answer, aimed the other way: they lower the cost of the transaction, keep buy cheaper than make, and are the enzyme of the market.
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• Send Them Karamazov

  The whitepaper talks down to a reader who self-selected as an expert. Surprise them instead with a great public-domain book, and the surprise engineers the inbound call. The medium is the message.
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• There Is No Such Thing as a Marketing Qualified Lead

  A score built from a prospect’s clicks measures browsing, not intent. Real qualification lives in the trained eye of a rep, hearing claims and landing on foreclosure data, and it takes years to grow.
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• It’s Not a Kill

  Selling is not a hunt and the prey is not prey. The stag hunt was always about cooperation, the hard part is the find not the kill, and the buyer who reaches you was routed by someone who vouched.
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• Nobody Asked You for an ROI

  No buyer ever asks what the ROI is or where the value is. Value selling insults the expert who already did the math. The real obstacle is never the value. It is the predicament.
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• What Do You Mean, “Value”?

  The most over-used word in sales is the one nobody can define. Drop it, and name the two real jobs it hides: compression, translating the unfamiliar into the understood, and fit, whether the thing solves this buyer’s problem.
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• The Naked Price

  Retail spent a century and a half engineering the human ask out of commerce, and the price tag was the anesthetic. Enterprise selling is the one corner where the number still comes off a person’s tongue, live and accountable, and that exposure is the job.
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• You Were the Buy Phase

  When a giant platform courts your small company, you are not the partner. You are the buy in a make-or-buy decision, and every move lowers the cost of the day they build their own and no longer need you.
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• They Will Never Do the Press Release

  Companies call themselves revenue-obsessed, then drop the number for a logo the moment they choose a partner. Brand is worth a fortune, and it stays on the brand owner’s balance sheet: they will never do the press release.
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• Don’t Blame the Messenger

  The oldest customer complaint on Earth is 3,700 years old. Anger is a recalibration signal about a thwarted goal, and the satisfaction survey asks about the messenger instead of the goal.
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• Better Is a Lie

  The honest word is fit. The word "better" is a scalar stapled onto a vector, and the staple is where the selling goes wrong.
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• The Assembly Line Came for Sales

  Adam Smith's pin factory works beautifully, on one condition almost nobody checks. Complex selling fails that condition, and we industrialized it anyway.
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• Why Nobody Sweats the Spread

  A shopper haggles a dime over lettuce; an enterprise buyer shrugs at a $200K spread. Why enterprise data is priced as a rent, not a price - and why the negotiation is cooperative, not a fight.
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• How to Go Wrong Buying Data

  A field guide from the other side of the table: the avoidable ways buyers overpay - empty fields, the wrong license scope, the bake-off, and going over the rep's head.
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• The Exoskeleton Problem

  MEDDIC, CRM stage-gates, and scaffolding built for a spec that never existed - why imposed structure and discovered structure are not the same thing.
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• The Deal

  From coral and algae to cuneiform contracts - why an agreement only needs paperwork once the parties can no longer enforce it by staying close.
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• They Paid For Your Cost, Not Your Margin

  The "you're gouging me" objection is a real, well-documented fairness heuristic - built for the wrong kind of good.
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• The Class Effect

  Most enterprise ROI calculations are secretly arguments for an entire category, not for the vendor making them - and deals actually get won on terms, not products.
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• The Evolution of Sales

  A global history - Old Assyrian trade agents, the Sogdians, the Islamic Indian Ocean trade, Chinese merchant guilds, and the invention of the door-to-door salesman.

  Coming soon
• Three Lineages

  Recognition, exchange, and the deal - three interactive timelines from the origin of life to the modern sale.
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• The Fork Was Scandalous

  A four-tine table fork, once condemned as a tool of the devil, is the whole of W. Brian Arthur's argument in one hand. If you can see the fork as technology, you can see all of it.
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• The Fork Will Not Make Your Hands Fall Off

  The overbite came from the fork; the fear that AI will hollow out your mind is the fear that the fork would wither your hands. A technology extends a faculty - it does not replace the organ.
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• Steal From the Old Firm

  Biology has run the R&D lab for four billion years. Its division of labor is better than ours, and it is not close. This is theft, not reverence.
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• The Oldest New Thing

  Language is the oldest technology we own, made of nothing but breath - infinite in reach, forever evolving, and hiding in plain sight.
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• The Costco Parking Lot

  Sitting still in a parking lot, watching myself compute - on predictive machines, compression, and the staggering ordinary work of being an information processor.
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• The Provincial Fortress

  The most valuable layer of an industry is usually the one nobody can see. Why public-record data - a commodity with a moat of three thousand courthouses - stays invisible, and where the margin really hides.
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• Data Hygiene Is a Myth

  The phrase is on every job posting and no one can define it. There is no clean state to return a dataset to - only fidelity to a source and fitness for a use.
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• The Field Population Report

  The one warehouse report every data buyer must demand - and the products that derail when they skip it. The absence of information is itself information.

  Coming soon