At the World Cup final watch party at the Harlem Tavern, a woman waits in front of five bathroom doors. I ask: “Did you check them all?”
She says no.
I walk down the line, twisting each knob. At the third door, the knob turns. The door opens. I gesture to her to enter. She does.
What is wrong with people?
Hold that question.
On the screen, Argentina was busy demonstrating the opposite mistake. A ref draws a box, and you fill the box you’re given. Players will play as rough as you let them — and they should; that’s the correct way to play a game. Argentina filled its box and kept pushing at the sides: four yellow cards by my count, one of them on the coach, two of them on Enzo Fernández, who was sent off. They played the end of a World Cup final a man down. They did it to themselves. (For more on refs and the dark arts, see Drawing a Foul vs. Flopping.)
A bathroom line has no ref. That’s what makes it the purer game. Field notes:
The early exit. Leave before the hydration break is called, or the instant it’s called. This is playing within the rules. I left immediately and made the front of the line. Plenty of others made the same move; the line stacked up eight deep behind me.
The exit-door gambit. At the halftime of extra time, a man arrived, realized the line was a line, and was very much not into it. I watched him scan for a shortcut. Finding none, he circled around to the bathroom’s exit and went in from there. He checked whether any doors were open. He played off the visit by washing his hands — “I only came here to wash my hands, not to skip the line…” — and then stood inside, watching the doors, waiting for one to open. Cutting the line is breaking the rules, and watching it riled up a rule-enforcing Germanic part of me that wants to destroy him and everything he stands for. The rest of us waited in the line.
The empty stall. The line filed right past the accessible bathroom. On Partner’s previous bathroom visit, a dude next to her tried that door: empty. She immediately stood in front of that door, waiting for him to come out; someone else lined up behind her. Nobody had been using that bathroom, and somebody should be using the bathroom: seems like an efficient use of resources. But the second line forming back there was the wrong shape. It should be one line, feeding every door. (I have preached this queueing theology before, at Trader Joe’s.)
Which returns us to the woman and the five doors. Five doors, five knobs, all that information free for the twisting. She had checked none of them. Behind door number three: an empty room.
Soccer sucks. It mainly sucks because of its relationship to fouls: too many key moments of the game feel like a child overreacting in front of their parent so the parent will punish their sibling.
It could be my American sensibilities, but I don’t respect a game where so much is influenced by the authority figures. Yes, American football stops the clock. But we stop the clock in accordance with a very specific set of rules, and we review every touchdown to ensure the rules were followed. Over the three soccer games I watched this World Cup, however, I recall four or five spots where the announcers noted that a call was incorrect. (Most often these were questions of who touched the ball last before it went out of bounds — an easily answerable question via video review.)
So, back to flopping vs drawing a foul:
Flopping is pretending that someone else did something that they did not actually do (and from which you are mortally wounded).
Drawing a foul is behaving in such a way that the opponent actually does something to violate the rules of the game.
Flopping is, at least to my American ethics, anathema to sport. Sport is about strength, determination, and courage. It is a battlefield where iron sharpens iron, where the best of my group challenges the best of your group for honor and glory. It is, as Orwell said, “war minus the shooting.” (Orwell meant that as an indictment. I mean it as a compliment.)
We look up to athletes as the epitome of physical prowess. And athletic performance, as separated from theatrical performance, is real. Physical. Not subject to judgment calls — or as nearly not as humans can manage.
The difference between flopping and drawing a foul is the difference between truth and lies. In a flop, nothing happened. In a drawn foul, a rule really was violated.
While watching a soccer game with Partner’s sister last weekend, I asked how long it would be until all soccer plays are reviewed by video. She scoffed and said she was against using AI in this case.
Two thoughts:
I hadn’t mentioned AI; I had mentioned video review (lol)
When it comes to sport, shouldn’t we be in favor of every activity that makes the rules more accurately enforced? If a sport is merely the implementation of those rules accurately and universally, shouldn’t we all support their accurate and universal implementation?
If the rules truly are the rules, any hesitancy toward enforcing them is either 1) an argument against those rules actually being the rules, or 2) corruption. (I’ve argued before that the rules of a game are never quite the rules. FIFA is not making that argument.)
FIFA takes upwards of three minutes to video-review its plays. American football’s reviews stop the game too — but they’ve structured the game to make this experience dramatic and fair (every touchdown automatically reviewed, a fixed list of reviewable calls, coaches with a limited budget of challenges). The rules for reviewing the rules are themselves rules.
Americans don’t like government. We rebel against authority. Maybe that’s why a game of cowering and groveling and performing in front of the king will never quite sit right with us. The last time we petitioned a king for fairer enforcement of the rules, it ended in war plus the shooting.
A high-quality game is one in which arbitrary referee decisions do not determine the outcome. Therefore, FIFA soccer is not a high-quality game.
Today, in the England versus Norway World Cup game, about 20 minutes before the end of regular time, I said to Partner: “Pickford’s getting jumpy. It’s time to take advantage of him.”
Pickford is the English goalie, and it’s understandable that he’s jumpy: in his regular occupation, he does not play for a particularly high-level team. But his jumpiness is still notable: to win in a sporting competition, it is often advantageous to note one’s opponents’ weaknesses. And Pickford being jumpy is very good for the Norwegian team.
The game was tied at the end of regulation time, so: extra time. In extra time with only a few minutes left, England led by 2-1 when Norway succeeded in bringing the ball all the way toward the English goal. Pickford punched it away… and ran into his own teammate. He fell to the ground, doubled over. The refs stopped the game.
The Norwegian players were irate. The announcers had to justify this decision. They said: it’s not very sporting to play the game with a goalie who’s doubled over on the ground.
That’s insane, and it’s what’s wrong with soccer. What is sporting is to follow the rules — not to make arbitrary referee decisions which have vast, overwhelming influences on the game. What’s not sporting is stopping the game when one team has made a giant mistake.
WHAT SPORTING ACTUALLY MEANS
Sporting as in “be a good sport” and “play with sportsmanship”: what does it mean? The clearest example that comes to my mind is one of an image associated with hunting animals “for sport”. It is not very “sporting” to tie up an animal and then just shoot it when it can’t get away. There’s a famous story about Teddy Roosevelt choosing not to do just this, in part owing to his belief in the morals and ethics of being a sportsman. Sportsmen have honor, fight fairly, and accept their defeats. A sportsman is not a cheat, nor are they a wimp.
In that definition, you might say it’s not very sporting to shoot the ball at the goal while the opposing goalie is down. And that’s perhaps a fair point… if the game of soccer were at all a sporting game…
FLOPPING, THE ANTITHESIS
But soccer is a game in which players fall on the ground, clutching themselves, pretending to be terribly injured, upwards of a dozen times per game. These are fully-grown, professional athletes who receive massive paychecks. And we want them flopping on the ground pretending injury?
I can think of no less-sporting (dishonorable, wimpy) activity than pretending injury in this deplorably weak way. What is sporting is to give the opportunity for success.
So when the opposing team makes a mistake, the only reasonable response is 1) assume he is faking (because more than 90% of the time, soccer players are faking), and 2) kick the ball in the goal.
YOU CAN’T FOUL YOUR OWN TEAM
When I was six or seven years old, my soccer coach stopped the scrimmage we were playing because one player had fouled another. He called the first player over and demanded that he apologize. Then, after demanding the apology, the coach said something like: Wait — you guys are on the same team. Never mind. He called off the apology and continued the scrimmage.
In a very real, fundamental way, it is impossible for a player to foul a member of their own team. The reasons behind this should be obvious. Most simply, a foul is a violation of the rules wherein one team harms another.
For over 20 minutes, I had been telling Partner that the English goalie was acting jumpy. This was the moment I had been predicting. Sure, I had expected him to make a mistake against his opponents, but running into your own teammate definitely qualifies as an outcome of someone’s jumpiness. He made his bed: now is his time to lie in it.
EVERY SIGNIFICANT EVENT MATTERS
Soccer games contain very few goals, and most moments of soccer do not lead to goals. Near the end of regulation time, an overlay appeared on the screen: each team had taken ten shots, of which four had been shots on goal. Eight shots on goal in a total of 90 minutes equates to fewer than one every 11 minutes.
The goalie being down for the count while the ball is near the goal matters. Stopping the game at the point where Pickford is on the ground — by his own doing, having made his own mistake, colliding with his own teammate — is unfair, both to the Norwegian team and any unaligned fans (such as myself) who simply want to watch a good match.
BAD INCENTIVES MADE WORSE
Flopping is already a scourge: when one player touches an opponent, you’ll often see both players fall to the floor, clutching their bodies in anguish disproportionate to the actual injury. And now you’re going to encourage players to do it in response to interactions with their own team? Not only will you encourage more flopping; you’ll also give even more power to the referees to make judgment calls based on theatrical performance.
Further, what about the concept of psychological warfare? In sport in general, it is a completely legitimate strategy to play in such a manner that causes one’s player to make mistakes. In soccer, if a player develops the skill of causing his opponents to run into each other, are you really suggesting we outlaw that skill?
SOCCER STILL SUCKS
Would Norway have scored? Probably not – most soccer shots miss, which is part of why it’s such a terribly boring game best seen in four-minute post-game highlight videos – but that doesn’t matter. This question is one of fairness, and stopping the game was unacceptably unfair.
“Who won?” you may be asking. Does it even matter, if the game is a sham?
P.S. My problem is not with soccer itself: the game “put the ball into the opponent’s net without using your hands” is a beautiful game. My gripe is with the current implementation as run by FIFA, including the poor power structure and abysmal incentives.
I never understood weightlifting. Lots of pain, no obvious gain.
Partner loves weightlifting. Her spirit animal is the ant. In graduate school, she could bench press more than her bodyweight, a particularly impressive feat for an estrogen-powered life form. (Among non-professional female powerlifting competitions, benching one’s bodyweight is generally enough to medal.)
Earlier today, I benched 155lbs for 5 reps. A new personal record. Not very impressive for anyone who has lifted weights for a while. Still, I yipped with glee. I remember the day when I broke 135lbs (one 45lb plate on each side of the 45lb bar). Now, I crank out 4 sets of 145lbs with no trouble.
“I remember the day when X was hard. Now, X is easy.” ← a wonderful lesson of weightlifting.
A coaching client of mine has felt incredibly stressed this week. He tells me he wishes not to feel this way every week. I told him he won’t, for two key reasons:
If he truly wants to feel less stress, he can grow slower. It’s a real option. (One he’s not taking 😉)
As you improve, the former difficulty feels easy.
I’ve promised Partner that, when I can bench press my bodyweight, I will bench press her. We might be six months or a year away from that day. But one beautiful trait of the gym: if you show up and do the work, you will see the results.
Lots of pain, no obvious gain? After a few months every day, the gain is unmistakable. Once I learned to breathe properly, the whole experience became enjoyable.
And the pain? You mean the intense difficulty that only lasts for a few seconds? You call that pain? I call it fun.
To make a game mean something, make it fair. To make it fair, make it sport, not art.
On the 4th of July, this sleepy beach town south of Santa Cruz, triples in size: Children, grandchildren, aunts and uncles all come into town for hot dogs, sack races, and sand castle competitions.
The children compete first, in the classic Americana races: a diaper derby (baby race, stratified by crawling and walking), then a three-legged race, balloon-between-the-knees race, and peanut-on-a-spoon race. Even before I fell during the wheelbarrow race and hurt my knee, I was not having a good time. In the evening, when I mentioned this to Partner, she expressed surprise. She said something like, “I would have thought you enjoyed these silly games”.
I do like silly games. I just don’t like this implementation of silly games. Here’s why:
1. The judges aren’t performing their solemn duty.
a. After the peanut race, Partner commented that one child appeared to have held onto the peanut with their thumb. The stated rule was you could only use one hand on the spoon. The judges are insufficient and the rules aren’t clearly defined.
b. The sandcastle competition was similarly poorly adjudicated: The judge at sign up told us we could only use items we found on the beach. We used seaweed, sand, sand dollars, sticks, and one large log. When the judges swung by later, they told us they could only judge sand. Well, that’s a whole different competition! We would have only used sand!
2. The starting positions aren’t really fair.
a. For the balloon-between-the-knees race, pre-blown balloons are passed out willy-nilly. Some are full enough to pop when dropped; others are nearly empty so they bounce on the grass instead of popping. The size of your balloon determines the angle of your legs. This trait matters.
b. For the three-legged race, some contestants’ legs are tied at the knee, others at the ankle, and in varying stages of looseness. A loose-tie three-legged race? Oof!
c. For the bubble-gum-blowing competition:
i. The gum is not simultaneously distributed. The real work in this competition is to chew the gum for long enough and vigorously enough to make it malleable (and perhaps chewing decreases the sugar content, which impacts the bubbles, etc.). The blowing is much less important than the chewing. Ergo, the competition includes stratified and arbitrary head starts.
ii. The measurements are inconsistent. Obviously, one should measure bubble size through the center of the bubble. But the bubbles are not perfect spheres: do you measure the longest distance through the center, or the shortest distance? The judges seem to have no consistency at all, the worst option!
iii. (A small gripe: they announced the competition was open – not age-capped – and then ultimately did age-cap it to only children 10 – 12 years old. I mention this not because it’s as big of a fairness issue, but because it demonstrates the general lackadaisical relationship that the town of La Selva Beach – home to Partner’s grandmother – has to its games.)
I know these games have a purpose that diverges from my approach to them. I know that the purpose is something like “Tradition”, and “Nostalgia”, and “Town spirit”, and “Afternoon activities for a National Holiday”.
For those purposes, I take no issue. July 4th is a great opportunity to eat hot dogs and jump in bouncy castles and host a parade and enlist local teenagers to paint children’s faces to raise money for some small town charity like the library or the fire department or that weird hippie dance group that for some unknown reason had a larger and more populous section in the parade than even the fire department.
The part I take issue with is the games. What are we teaching with them? That judging can be arbitrary and capricious? That you can make every move perfectly using the tools you were given and still lose to some corrupt official or other competitor who was given a head start? Yes, those are true. We know, and we experience those all the time. The beauty of games – of children’s games – is that for a moment life can be fair:
“Who can run fastest to that tree?” is at once modified by the child’s genetics, by the shoes their family can afford, by the amount of free time their parents have to let the kid play outside, by the child’s nutrition, and by a host of other unfair discriminations.
But it is also a terrifically fair question: Who can run fastest to that tree?
Obviously, these games are made for children. They’re age-capped and time-bound and some kids receive ribbons on a podium. But they’re also, fundamentally, not made for children. To create something for children means to make something that helps them be better adults. These games do not do that. These games create short-term whimsy with long-term hollowness. And for babies who cannot walk, watching them maybe trudge toward their parents but mainly just sit, confused, while the announcer jokes that “this race is time-capped at 20 minutes”, is funny in the same way that a snail race is funny. It’s joyful because babies are adorable even when they simply sit like an uncooperative blob, and watching them allows us to laugh at the meaninglessness of this endeavor: like herding cats, only cuter.
But the older kids’ games – the ones where the competition is real, where a child might gain pride from their friends and family for decades for winning the bubble blowing competition (as multiple members of Partner’s family informed me that Partner’s sister won ~2 decades ago) – these rules matter.
These games are not made for me. They’re made for children. And they’re not even made for children. That’s sad.
Games are a struggle against entropy. If you haven’t planned for the tide, your sandcastle will wash away to sea. Bet against the fundamental traits of existence at your peril: gravity pulls mass to mass, tides come and go, time ticks on, and wet sand packs better.
When every other activity washes away to a sea of chaos, games build a wall against the ocean, with referees’ fingers blocking leaks.
The traits of the footrace – which tree was chosen, where the starting line for the race begins, when the race starts – these are controllable. In the game, these are sacred. To have an uneven race is to have a meaningless race. It’s to transform games from games into the mere performance of games. I love theater. Keep it separate.
—
My team’s sand sculpture received glowing reviews from passers-by. I enjoyed the process of making it: the conceptualizing, the strategizing, the digging, and the polishing. I enjoyed the creativity when our plans hit reality. I enjoyed the passing-off of tasks from teammate to teammate. I enjoyed the fact that we created art that prompted many people to snap pictures and comment, “Way to go!” and “I’m tired of seeing flags; this one’s great!”
I didn’t join the sandcastle competition to win. I joined it to build a work of art. We did, we succeeded, and I’m overjoyed.
Now the only honest thing to do is to tell all the children in the sack race that they were actually participating in art, not sport.
The machine in the San Jose airport will forever spark rich feelings of joy.
When I was a child, I watched for hours as the balls rolled, spun, twisted, and jumped, pinging the bells and conking on the wooden blocks. Seven balls – nine in the box, but always with two of them fallen to the bottom, having missed the jump or, more likely, the bounce-pass. For hours and hours, I would watch these balls. And never would I see a ball miss.
I remember the rhythm; the conk-CAH-cohnk of the green one that spins.
A while ago I considered the idea of buying up old dormant brands, then relaunching them for a new generation. But here’s the kicker: focus on the same people, not the same product. Instead of Hush Puppies shoes for a new generation of young folk, it’s Hush Puppies slippers for older people. The name was always the pitch: barking dogs meant aching feet, and the 1958 shoes promised to hush them. The slippers keep that promise at 75. It’s not Lunchables for a new generation of school kids; it’s Lunchables for yuppies.
We’re wrong when we say that old habits die hard. In reality, they don’t die. They simply go dormant, waiting for the trigger to reignite those same neurons.
But the same sound, the same rhythm, the same habits of mind: the same rolling ball machine still scratches that same itch.
The airport has moved the machine to a new location. They’ve rotated it so I now watch from the other side. Still, the sounds and the rhythm are the same. It’s nice, it’s comfortable, like an old warm coat passed down from a parent that still smells like them even after it’s washed. I found it in an old box in the back of a closet. How nice it is to feel the spark return to my eyes.
To win, keep the game going. To keep the game going, drink what you’re given.
At 11:15am this morning, I asked my brother-in-law to set a 30-minute timer. I then sunscreened the tops of my feet and I entered the kiddie pool. My nephew (just shy of 2 years old) was playing squirt with my father. Squirt is played as follows:
One player (the toddler) hangs on the water squirter in the kiddie pool. Sometimes he moves.
That’s it. That’s the game. If you think that’s not a game, you’ve probably never played with a toddler.
Our next game was more active. My nephew rotated the water squirter to hit me. I flapped my arms up in the air and emitted a “wah!” noise reminiscent of Waluigi from the Nintendo games.
After water-squirter-based games, my nephew wrapped his arms around a beach ball, then tried to pelt me with it. He failed. He cackled. He chased it down. He repeated.
It was around this time that my sister (Nephew’s mother) said something to me from outside the pool. I asked her to repeat it. She said, “We’re not watching him”, implying I was in charge of this tiny tot’s life, surrounded by 9 inches of murder-liquid.
Whoa. Big responsibility.
Nephew found a truck. His truck. His dumptruck. He filled it with a green cup. He dumped it out. He repeated the cycle.
Finally, we struck upon the game of the day: Nephew fills the green cup with water, then holds it out for Funcle (me) to drink. Funcle mimes drinking the cup, using only his mouth (no hands!). Nephew cackles. Nephew fills the cup again. This time, Funcle grips the cup using his lips. He drops the cup with a “blah!” sound, imitating the sound of a blub-blub fish.
Repeat this game for 15 minutes.
You might think this game gets boring.
It does not.
At 11:45am, my brother-in-law told me my alarm had gone off, prompting me to check on Partner. I tagged in Oma to ensure the Nephew stayed safe, checked on Partner, and returned to the kiddie pool after learning Partner was on her way down.
The games continued.
Have you ever reminisced about something from a mere 9 hours ago?
A spoken-and-transcribed guest-post courtesy of Partner, who caught upwards of seven hermit crabs today:
Hermit Crab Homes
Hermit crabs grow, but their shells don’t, because hermit crabs don’t grow their shells but find them. When a hermit crab grows too big for a shell, it will find a bigger one. If the bigger one is too big for that hermit crab, it will just hang out near the shell, in the hope that some other hermit crab will come take that bigger shell and leave behind its shell. Because of this, you can get a whole line of hermit crabs: several smaller hermit crabs are waiting to size up their shell. As soon as a bigger hermit crab comes and takes that too-big shell, it will free up a slightly smaller shell, and then another hermit crab could take that slightly smaller shell, etc., trickling down.
It’s like the kidney donation chain.
The Kidney Donation Chain
If I wanted to give you my kidney, but you and I are not a match, we’d be out of luck unless there were two other people, one of whom wanted to donate and the other to receive, and we were a reciprocal match so could swap. But generally, there are so many factors required for a kidney to fit that a direct swap is improbable. And they only let something like two or three people form a loop because they want to operate all at once. They’re afraid that, if they do them sequentially, the buddy of the first person to get a kidney will renege on his donation at the end of the loop because his incentive to give is gone.
Because of this structure, someone donating the kidney without needing a kidney for a friend or family member can change that loop from a loop into a line, which is really mathematically beneficial. And the altruistic donor is just giving away the kidney, no one’s on the hook for getting a kidney back to them, so there’s no risk of someone chickening out. If you choose to donate your kidney, you can kick off a chain that doesn’t just help the one person you are donating your kidney to, but can actually help all the people who exist in that chain, which can be a dozen people or more.
Info on starting a kidney donation chain, including a way to get 5 loved ones to the top of the donation line if they ever need a kidney but you already gave yours away: https://www.kidneyregistry.com/for-donors/start-a-chain/
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 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.
Julian Wise 