The goal of the game is to make money. You make more money by giving some away, then charging for what stays scarce.

I’m at the second all-inclusive resort of my life. So why do I feel nickel-and-dimed?

(My family comes together for one of these every summer now, which is a lovely experience. I’m having a great time with great people. This feeling is not a particularly negative impact on my experience; I’m simply enjoying the process of analyzing it.)

It started at check-in, when the concierge handed me a coupon book. He flagged one asterisk: the $50-off coupon for the resort store needs a purchase of at least $100. I laughed and noted I wouldn’t wouldn’t be using that one.

A coupon book. At an all-inclusive. The whole premise of the place is that I already paid, so nothing else carries a price. A coupon is a price dressed up in a faux discount. The coupon book is a store smuggled into a building labeled “no stores allowed”.

* * *

Once I noticed the first coupon, I couldn’t stop. $50 off a single spa treatment, which made me wonder what a spa treatment costs. I found the menu advertised in the bar and scoffed: treatments start at $229. I can get an excellent massage in the US for half that, and that’s paying US labor prices, not whatever a masseuse earns in central america.

This is couponing the Bed Bath & Beyond way: float the sticker high, then hand back a slice, so the discount feels like a gift instead of a markup you sidestepped. It’s comparison control, the price game I keep coming back to. Anchor the number at $229 and $50 off reads as generous. Nobody mentions the seller number that should orient their side of the price: their marginal cost of providing the service.

And the asterisk gives that number away. The same way Chipotle running a 2-for-1 tells you a burrito nets more than 50%, this resort’s $50 off of $100 in the gift shop tells me the same. They’re not discounting into a loss on purpose. If they can afford to give it back, they were charging too much to begin with.

* * *

The second move is the paid upgrade, and it bothers me more, because it breaks the frame on purpose. (At this resort, that’s the “Star Class” upgrade: your room and food become slightly nicer, and you can book Star Class-exclusive dinner tables.) The whole reason to buy an all-inclusive is to delete the transaction. No prices on the menu, no small voice doing math at dinner. If I wanted the experience of paying for something nice, I would have booked a place where I pay for something nice. The upgrade sells me back the exact friction I paid to be rid of.

* * *

So why build it this way? Why sell “everything included,” then spend the week selling more?

My best guess: once everyone holds the same all-inclusive wristband, everyone wants the same scarce things. The 7pm table at the good restaurant. The shaded poolside chairs. Put a few hundred people on identical footing and they start competing, and anywhere people compete over something scarce, there’s money in tilting the field.

So the resort sells you a basic entry ticket. Then it sells weapons to both sides: the upgrade that jumps the dinner queue, the tier that reserves your chair before dawn. What you’re buying, on top of the vacation, is a position in a contest they built.

* * *

I don’t write any of this with a clenched jaw. I came here to stop running the numbers, and on a vacation the only points worth counting are relaxation, enjoyment, and connection. I’m racking those up, surrounded by people I love. I just can’t switch off the part of me that wants to see the machine.

And the machine is simpler than it looks. If something is free, someone finds the version of it that isn’t, and sells you that. If free, then freemium. Even here? Especially here.

The goal of the game is to make money. You make money by selling. You sell with a playbook, not a bigger funnel.

A person I met yesterday is looking for marketing help. I think he’s wrong.

He’d paid someone $25,000 to post constantly and drive traffic to his site. He was dissatisfied, given the large outlay (his whole company only makes a few hundred thousand dollars a year). I looked at his website. He doesn’t have a marketing problem. He has a sales problem.

What is marketing, and what is sales?

Marketing is not an intrinsic good.

To a company, money is an intrinsic good. One could reasonably argue that revenue and costs are therefore intrinsic. Even culture – which is incredibly impactful – is only instrumental, since for this particular game, the goal is money. Marketing is also instrumental: what you actually want is to sell.

Take sales and marketing to their logical extreme:

A pure salesperson with no marketing is a traveling salesman knocking on doors. It’s slow and expensive, but it works.
All marketing and no sales is the reverse: every eyeball on earth is on your company, but you have no way to take their money.

So what does a good salesperson actually do? Not just put the product in front of people. For something complex, like a SaaS tool, they’re handling objections, talking through integrations, working out which pain points it solves. They’re getting to the right person: is it the college IT guy, the professor, or the dean? The fundraiser, or the head of the university? Sometimes that means bouncing through a few people to get there.

Sales is also theatrical: taking someone on a journey that ends at the solution to their problems.

Sales is the funnel: wide at the top, narrowing as people move down, with customers at the bottom. People drop out at any stage; the good fits make it down, the bad fits fall away.

Marketing is different. Marketing sits above the funnel and feeds it: catching attention, nudging people toward interest.

And marketing is often much more wishy-washy (I say this as someone who’s worked in it most of my life). It’s about how we want to be perceived, how we want to relate.

Removing people from the equation:

Marketing is the ads you see on another site.
Sales is the checkout flow on the site.

A sales process is a repeatable playbook for getting someone to buy. It covers:

Which personas actually buy
What they find convincing
What they fear, and how you assuage it
The pricing

A salesperson also runs field research: selling in the wild, then coming back with data.

Back to my guy

Let’s say he sells IT software to universities, through what look like channel partners, and that has gotten him to reliable revenue. If you’re a go-getter CEO who was active at your own school, with a big-enough family wired into a few other alumni networks, you can probably close three or four deals on warm intros alone.

So you think: I just need more people in the funnel, then I’ll close them. But if your process is a handful of local channel partners (one runs hackathons, another chess clubs, another debate), more volume does nothing when your hackathon guy doesn’t know how to sell. He can’t expand his close past the set of folks who he understands. Enthusiasm can take you from 0 to 1, but you need a reliable process to go from 1 to N.

An ideal playbook, once you’ve stood up the sales team, looks like:

How to filter for the people worth talking to
Which stakeholders to reach
The objections you’ll hit
How to overcome them
Then the soft stuff: rapport, persuasion, all the convincing

So now, my question:

What happens when I tell this guy that he doesn’t need a marketer; he needs a salesperson?
Will he hire me to stand up his sales team?
I bet I could do it. I’m hungry for exactly this sort of role with exactly this sort of impact. The product is one I’m interested in. I’ve done all the pieces that this role has (sales, travel, small-team hustle, bushwhacking in a novel area, coaching); this role is just combining them in a new way.

I’ve already marketed to him. The question: Can I close the sale?

Games Played

I saw a play today about the House Un-American Activities Committee investigation of Hollywood. I did not expect the play to increase my sympathy toward the investigator’s position. But it did.

Before the play, my perception of the investigation can be summed up as “it was a witch-hunt”.

After the play, my new conclusion: Yes, it was a witch hunt. But – as made clear by the Korean War – there actually was witchcraft (Communism), and there actually were witches (people who wanted to replace the US constitutional government with communism). But these people (the Hollywood actors) were not the witches.

Tag: Marketing

The Coupon Book