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 are the door.

• Why Any of This Matters

  The fair objection, answered: unless it makes someone sell more, what is it for? The reverse is true. Every decision a company makes about selling rests on a model of what a sale is, most run an unexamined wrong one, and the error compounds in hiring, measurement, risk, and whether the capability can be reproduced at all. Read this first.
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• 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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• What Is a Buyer?

  Sales studies the seller and forgets to ask what sits across the table. The buyer is not the hunter on the trail; it is the rooted plant that cannot make its own phosphorus, running a market with the partners that feed it. Companion to The Finder.
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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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• The License Ate the Sale

  Most of what the economy now calls a sale never leaves the seller’s hands, so it was never a sale. It was a license. Once a good is non-rival, the outright sale is the rare exception, and even the tractor you own is a shell around software you only rent.
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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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• 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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• What Is a Buyer?

  Sales studies the seller and forgets to ask what sits across the table. The buyer is not the hunter on the trail; it is the rooted plant that cannot make its own phosphorus, running a market with the partners that feed it. Companion to The Finder.
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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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• Paper Begins Where Proximity Ends

  A contract is not the deal. It is what a deal needs once the two sides are too far apart to enforce it by staying close: why we write it down, from coral and cuneiform to indemnification and the grant of license.
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• The Price the Company Cannot Set

  Job postings ask the VP of Sales to set pricing, and mean it. A company outsources the one number it cannot set itself, because it does not hold the price and will not own the judgment, so it hands the act to the person it trusts least.
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• Price Is Information

  A price is not cost plus margin. It is information about the seller. Hayek showed a price signals the market; the operator learns it signals the seller's strategy. Costco's unmoved hot dog, AI priced below cost, and a high margin in a market of few suppliers.
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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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• 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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• Which AI Is Best? Wrong Question.

  Every buyer wants the best model, and an industry has grown up to score them. The mortgage business already ran this exact bake-off, with outside judges and whole internal teams, and it did not see 2007. What quality actually is in software, and why fit is the only part that decides.
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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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• 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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• 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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• 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 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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• When the Giant Calls

  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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• 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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• 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 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

• 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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• Lineages

  Recognition, exchange, the deal, signaling, and the salesperson - interactive timelines from the origin of life to the modern sale.
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