This prospect was unpleasant. Not mildly difficult. Unpleasant. He kept reminding us that we were trying to win his business, and so we needed to get up on stage and show him what we have. Sing for our supper. He is accustomed to the more regular seller. The kind that does a song and dance with the hope that the prospect might bite.

But this is not the Power Listening way. We only go where we’re needed.

I asked him a simple question: do you have any issues with your current provider? He said he doesn’t, but he’s always open to seeing what else might be out there. So I politely reminded him that we have no intention of trying to win his business if he is currently happy where he is. In fact, we applaud that. We insist that he stays with his current provider. Should he ever run into a real problem in future, he is welcome to reach out and we can talk again then.

Unsurprisingly, he changed tack. He started telling us why he was interested in talking to us, but still on the basis that we needed to prove to him why we deserve to breathe oxygen. There was something in particular he wanted from us, something we do well. But when it came down to the nuts and bolts, he wanted it for nothing.

Now, while this call was on the extreme side of things, it highlighted something we all run into when we don’t qualify strictly for need. You wind up with window-shoppers who expect you to prove why you should pay to have them as your customer.

Subscribe now

The quiet killer

And while your prospect might have a touch more finesse than mine did, and so it might be a bit harder for you to see behind the veil of pleasantries exchanged during the call, the reality is always the same. There is no other option. It is always this way.

A prospect who doesn’t have real need will not agree to discovery. Not really. They might readily sign up to a discovery call. But when you’re on, they expect a show. “Prove to me why I should listen to you.” They will not comply with the discovery process. They will not cooperate.

As I wrote in Stop Begging Your Prospects, discovery is an intense affair. You have to work through a lot of questions. Unless the prospect is working with you toward the same goal of solving their need, the process becomes agonising for you both. And quite frankly, impossible.

Contrast this with a prospect who has real need. They’re a pleasure to work with. They know they have a problem that must be solved. They’re eager to cooperate to make it go away. The stakes are high for them. They’re willing to do what’s needed.

This is the heart and soul of the Power Listening methodology. You never recommend anything, ever, in the absence of genuine need. If a client doesn’t need your product, you leave them be. If they do, it is your duty to help them by getting them to procure the needful.

But weirdly, few people understand what need actually means. Many equate it to pain. I myself have started to talk more about value than I do about need. So let’s set the record straight, once and for all.

Need is not want

When we talk about need, we’re talking about something the prospect feels they must solve. It isn’t something nice to have. It is essential. Without it, there is a real consequence. Without this condition being met, we’re left with a want.

There’s nothing wrong with a want. People buy based on want all the time. The problem is that a want purchase is a lot more emotional than a need purchase. A person may want that cool t-shirt but may need to buy soap.

In B2B sales cycles, purchases tend to be less emotional and more intellectual. After all, the purchase has to be agreed to by more than one person, forcing the decision to be based on a legitimate business case. For this reason, it serves the B2B seller to accent more on need than want. While there will always be an emotional aspect to the purchase, it shows up to a lesser degree. It well behooves a seller to lay a foundation on need, as this will be the foundation you fall back on through the sales cycle.

Every time a deal stalls, every time a stakeholder pushes back, every time procurement asks you to justify the spend, you return to the need. If it was never there, you have nothing to return to.

Share

Pain and gain

Let’s decompose this further. In a lot of my sales training over the years, I would break the concept of need into two parts: pain and gain. This is another way of getting precise about the difference between needs and wants.

A pain is something the prospect is actively trying to solve right now. Left unattended, there is a current cost or risk that remains unsolved. If nothing changes, the prospect still has a real problem.

A pain could be a malfunctioning billing system resulting in millions of uncollected income each year. It is a leaking pipe that needs to be fixed. It is the car that won’t start. It is the dress with a hole in it.

Then there is a gain. A gain is something the prospect wants to achieve. Sure, one can argue that there is a cost to not having one, but nothing is broken right now. You don’t have a problem on your hands that needs fixing. It is aspirational.

“I want a new CRM with that cool new dashboard feature.” Yes, it is true that your sellers may be less productive without a good CRM. But you don’t have something broken that is resulting in real cost or risk right now. Or consider: “I want a shiny black Porsche even though my current car works.” The new Porsche may give you some stature and possibly even have you fraternise in circles you ordinarily don’t. But the purchase doesn’t solve an actual problem.

This is the trick with a gain. The seller and prospect have to work really hard to find out why it is in fact necessary to move ahead, as nothing is fundamentally bleeding. What is this new CRM going to be able to do that Excel does not do right now? What specific problem does the CEO actually need those real-time dashboards to solve? There is usually a pain lurking somewhere underneath a gain. But you have to do real work to find it.

The expert seller sees through the gain

The expert seller hears an announcement like, “Our CEO is really excited by those new dashboards that let you slice the numbers in real time,” and treats it as a massive clue. Not as a buying signal. A clue.

What problem is that CEO really trying to solve? What is breaking right now that makes real-time data feel urgent? So a gain becomes the gateway to a pain. And when you get to the pain, you treat it the same way as you’d treat any pain in the sales process. It just showed up wearing different clothes, and you had to do some real work to undress it.

And say, despite best efforts, there is still no way to get to a pain underneath a gain. When it is genuinely whimsical, you leave it right there. Don’t pursue it. Don’t get caught up in whims. This is not about contriving a pain when there is none. “Oh, you absolutely deserve a new Tesla wall charger when you don’t even have an EV.”

Tell the prospect they don’t need it.

You might think I’m crazy for suggesting that you drop a sale. But you’ll thank me later, when your prospect has bought from you four times over. Because you were the one person who told them the truth. As I explored in Selling Without the Slime, the sellers who build real practices are the ones who would rather lose a deal than lose their integrity.

Subscribe now

The error my team made

To circle back to what happened the other day. My team confused gain for pain. They had added a checkpoint to the pre-discovery call script that tested for gain instead of pain. And because “not having the new thing” can look like a pain, they didn’t catch it. The prospect said something like, “We’d love to explore how we can improve X.” That sounds like need. It even feels like need. But it was a want dressed up as a need.

The problem with testing for gain at pre-discovery is that your net will also catch the window-shoppers. The ones who want you to do a song and dance for them. They have no real impetus to solve anything, so it becomes your job to prove to them that you are worth their time. You are now on stage, performing, hoping they’ll clap.

This is the exact opposite of what Power Listening is designed to do.

Qualify for pain

For this reason, I strongly suggest qualifying for pain at pre-discovery. Not need in the general sense. Pain, specifically.

When your pre-discovery script tests for pain, you are asking: is there something broken right now? Is there a current cost or risk? Is there a consequence that is already being felt?

If yes, you have a prospect you can work with. Someone who will cooperate in discovery because they have a real stake in the outcome. Someone who will answer the hard questions because the answers matter to them too.

If no, if all you have is a gain, an aspiration, a “nice to have,” then you politely acknowledge their interest and move on. You don’t chase. You don’t convince. You don’t sing.

Sure, you will have fewer prospects to work with. But this is a case of quality over quantity. The prospects who remain are the ones you can actually help. And helping, not selling, is the whole point.

The litmus test

Here is a simple test you can apply at pre-discovery. After the prospect tells you what they’re interested in, ask yourself one question: if this prospect does absolutely nothing, what happens?

If the answer is “nothing much, they carry on as before,” you’re looking at a gain. Move on.

If the answer is “they continue to lose money, or miss deadlines, or face regulatory risk, or bleed customers,” you’re looking at a pain. That’s a prospect worth your time. And theirs.

I hope I have been able to demystify this confusing subject of prospect need. The distinction between pain and gain is not academic. It is the difference between spending your days on stage, performing for audiences who never intended to buy a ticket, and spending them with people who need what you have and are grateful that you showed up.

If there is no real need, don’t touch it with a ten foot barge pole.

Make it rAIn, KG

I flew up and presented a structured plan. It covered how to take everything they knew about their market and their product, and turn it into content that would attract the right audience, build trust, and eventually convert that trust into revenue. I had done the work properly. The plan was clear.

After the first meeting, his marketing team looked bewildered. These were smart, experienced people who had been marketing successfully for years. But something about what I was proposing was landing for them as half-foreign, half-suspicious.

I called a few weeks later to check on progress. The CEO said they needed another meeting. I flew back. After the second session, they looked even more confused than after the first. And I count myself a reasonable communicator.

On the plane home, I asked myself what had gone wrong. The plan was solid. The logic was clear, at least to me. The team was capable. What I eventually understood is the thing I want to tell you about today.

The sticking point was philosophical, not technical.

They could not see why a security-focused technology company should publish content that did not talk about security technology. The notion that you would invest time, money, and creative energy into producing material that said nothing about what you sold struck them as absurd. They are not unusual. This is the single most common reason companies fail at content strategy, and it is why so much of what gets published reads, unmistakably, like a brochure.

Two functions. Once you see them, you cannot unsee them.

All content does one of two things.

The first is to serve. Content that serves is valuable to the reader independent of your product. It addresses a problem the reader genuinely cares about. It teaches something. It reframes something. It gives the reader something they can use whether or not they ever buy from you.

The second is to recommend. Content that recommends connects your product to the reader’s recognised need. It says: here is the problem you are trying to solve, and here is how our thing fits that problem.

Marketers have terms for these. Top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel. Fine enough words, but they obscure what is actually happening, which is the difference between giving and asking. Serving gives. Recommending asks.

Every commercial instinct pulls you toward the second. Of course it does. You are paying for the content. You have a product to sell. You have a sales cycle to feed. The whole reason you are doing this is to move revenue. Why would you produce content that does not directly move revenue?

Because recommendations without trust are noise.

Think about the last time someone you barely knew recommended a restaurant to you. You probably ignored it. You had no basis for trusting them. No sense of their palate. No idea whether their standards matched yours. Now think about the last time a friend whose taste you trust said, you should try this place. You probably went.

The recommendation was the same. The trust was different. The trust changed everything.

This is how content works. A brand that has done nothing to build trust cannot skip ahead to recommending and expect it to land. A beautifully designed landing page, arriving cold, is a restaurant tip from a stranger. It does not matter how compelling your value proposition reads on paper. If the audience has no reason to trust you, the recommendation is just more noise in a world already thick with it.

Subscribe now

Why brands have it harder

Individuals can earn trust through serving content in a way that feels natural. A writer posts good essays for years, builds a readership, and eventually writes about their book. The readers buy the book because they already trust the writer.

When a brand tries the same sequence, something changes. People are more sceptical of brands offering free advice. They suspect a pitch behind every helpful article. They scan the first paragraph looking for the hidden product mention, and the moment they find it, the trust transaction collapses.

This means the distinction between serving and recommending has to be sharper for brands than for individuals. Serving content produced by a brand that smuggles in product mentions reads as a brochure. Every time. And the reader knows what a brochure is for.

So what on earth do you talk about?

Here is where my friends in Johannesburg got stuck, and where most companies get stuck. If your serving content cannot mention your product, what is left?

The discipline has a name. Topic design. It is the single hardest thing about content strategy, and the reason two meetings with a capable team were not enough.

You are looking for subjects where the audience’s genuine interest overlaps with the territory your product lives in, without the content itself pointing at the product. Your serving content must address something real in the buyer’s life. Something they think about. Something they struggle with. Something that, if you said it well, they would share with a colleague.

Let me make this concrete. Imagine you sell workforce scheduling software to logistics companies. Your serving content does not talk about your software. It talks about what dispatchers actually deal with. An article about the hidden cost of Monday morning chaos. A post about what happens when a driver calls in sick an hour before their shift. A short video on the real reason certain depots consistently under-deliver against their SLA.

None of that content points at the product. All of it lives in the world the product serves. A dispatcher reading it thinks: this person understands my life. That is the trust transaction beginning.

Every commercial instinct will pull you toward mentioning the product. Resisting that pull is the whole of content strategy.

The part most teams miss

I want to come back to my friend’s company in Johannesburg, because the story has a second act that teaches something important.

A few months after our two meetings, I called the CEO to ask how things were going. He told me, with some satisfaction, that his head of marketing had implemented the plan. Progress was being made. Content was going out.

I was pleased. Then I looked at their social media.

Nothing had changed. The same product-focused posts. The same company announcements. The same brochure language, adapted for a social feed. There was a technical uptick in volume, but no meaningful shift in what was being produced.

He thought they had done it. They had not.

This is the part that surprised me, and the reason I am writing this piece. Content strategy is so different from how most companies think about marketing that someone can sincerely believe they are following the framework while doing nothing of the sort. The belief is real. The execution is still a brochure.

The reason is simple enough. When your team sits down to produce a piece of content, the instinct to mention your product returns. It has been there for years. It is the habit that built the business. And the habit does not dissolve because you read a framework or sat through two meetings. It dissolves through repeated, deliberate practice and a leader who checks the work against a simple test.

The test

Before the next piece your team ships, ask a single question. Is this serving, or is it recommending?

If it is recommending, fine. Recommending content has its place, and a healthy content strategy has both. Send it.

If it is meant to be serving, and there is a product mention anywhere in it, you have your answer. The team has slipped back into the brochure. Send it back.

That test, applied consistently, does more than any amount of training. The issue is never understanding. The issue is always the pull.

Share

The deeper point

Content strategy is where most commercial efforts die. Not because the concept is hard, but because the discipline to stay out of the brochure is harder than anyone expects.

The work behind good serving content is listening. You cannot design topics that matter to a buyer unless you have listened long enough to know what matters. The Monday morning chaos. The driver who calls in sick. The under-delivering depot. Those are not ideas a marketing team dreams up in a conference room. They are things the buyer lives with, surfaced through careful attention.

A team that serves before it recommends builds an audience that trusts it. An audience that trusts you welcomes your recommendations, acts on them, and tells other people about them. A team that skips the serving step, or fakes it, is shouting into a room full of people who stopped listening a long time ago.

Before you approve the next campaign, look at what your team is producing and ask yourself the question.

Does this sound like a brochure?

If it does, you already have your answer.

Make it rAIn, KG.

You would leave. Anyone would.

And yet, this is precisely what happens in business every day. Companies promote products to markets that do not need them. Sellers pitch solutions to prospects who have no problem. SDRs book discovery meetings with people who have no reason to show up. The prescription is written before the diagnosis has begun.

That is what we are being when we sell something just for the sake of it. Not because the customer actually needs it, but because our shelves happen to carry it.

The advisor’s compass

Power Listening is, at its core, about taking the position of a true advisor all the way through the marketing and sales life cycle. Not a vendor. Not a supplier. An advisor, in the way a doctor or lawyer is an advisor: someone whose guidance is shaped entirely by the needs of the person sitting across from them.

This is not a soft distinction. It changes everything. An advisor guided by need looks at a prospect and asks, what of their world needs solving? A seller guided by product looks at a prospect and asks, how do I position what I have? The first question opens a conversation. The second one closes it before it starts.

As I have written before, income follows value, value follows understanding, and understanding follows listening. That chain does not begin with your product. It begins with their need. And if need is absent, the chain has nothing to hold on to.

This is the part most people nod along to and then promptly ignore.

Subscribe now

Your only leverage is their need

Let me say this plainly: as a Power Listener, your only leverage with a client is their need. Why do they need it? When do they need it by? It is always about them, never about you.

This sounds obvious. It is obvious. But if it were truly understood, we would not see teams burning through pipeline after pipeline of prospects who were never going to buy. We would not see SDRs celebrating booked meetings that end in no-shows. We would not see sellers spending weeks nurturing a deal that had no pulse to begin with.

If your only leverage is need, then why are you speaking to anyone where need is absent?

This is the question that leads us to one of the most important, and most resisted, disciplines in the Power Listening methodology: early disqualification.

Disqualification starts earlier than you think

Most people hear “disqualification” and think of a moment in a sales call where you realise the prospect is not a fit. That is too late. Far too late.

In the Power Listening methodology, disqualification begins all the way back at the strategy table, when target segments are selected. That is the first act of divining for need. You are already making decisions about where need is most likely to exist, and by extension, where it is not. You are choosing where to set up shop. And you should only set up shop where you are useful. Where there is genuine need for something you offer.

This is not market research in the traditional sense. It is a form of listening at scale. You are listening to the market before you have spoken to a single prospect. You are asking: where are we needed?

From there, the discipline of need-finding runs through every stage. Your campaigns, targeted at those segments, should attract people who feel a real tension, a real problem. When leads start to come in, the question remains the same: is there need here?

This is where most organisations lose the plot. The leads are flowing, the numbers look good, and the instinct is to push everything forward. Book the meetings. Fill the pipeline. Worry about quality later.

Later never comes.

Share

The SDR’s real job

This brings me to the role of the SDR in a Power Listening framework, because it is here that early disqualification either happens or does not.

The golden moment in any campaign is when leads start trickling in and SDRs begin converting them into discovery meetings. This is the moment that determines everything downstream. And it is the moment most teams get wrong.

Here is why. Discovery, done right, is an intense process for a prospect. They are not even your client yet and they are already having to answer a battery of scouting and probing questions. This is not always comfortable. For the prospect to play ball, to show up, to engage honestly, there has to be something in it for them. There has to be a real problem they believe might get solved by investing their time.

As I wrote in a previous piece on discovery, pre-discovery is as important as discovery itself, if not more. Because pre-discovery ensures that the person who shows up to your discovery session is the right candidate. Someone with a genuine tension. Someone who feels there is something at stake.

This means the SDR’s job is not simply to book meetings. The SDR’s job is to fish for need. Not in depth. Not a full discovery. But enough to establish, with some confidence, that there is a real problem present. Enough to “prescribe” a discovery session in good conscience.

Without this standard, the SDR is just pushing for meetings to hit their own numbers, hoping that the seller will unearth something magical in the discovery itself. That is not a strategy. That is a coin toss.

The numbers game vs. control

A lot of people frame sales as a pure numbers game. The more prospects you throw over the line into discovery, the more conversions you will get. It is all ratios.

There is truth in this. But it is the truth of someone who has decided to leave their results to chance.

The difference between a growth leader who leaves things to chance and one who wants to be in control of her results is this: the latter goes where she is needed. She does not just roll the die. Yes, it requires more work. You have to work harder to find where you are needed, all the way from target segment selection through pre-discovery and discovery, to say nothing of every client engagement thereafter.

But the payoff is a pipeline that means something. Prospects who show up because they have a reason to. Discovery sessions that produce real insight because the prospect is genuinely invested. And a conversion rate that reflects skill, not luck.

This is the kind of control Power Listening offers. Not control over the prospect. Control over the quality of your engagement.

Subscribe now

The hardest discipline: letting go

If everything I have said so far is true, then one thing follows logically, and it is the thing most salespeople resist with every fibre of their being.

You must be willing to let a prospect go if there is no need.

A lot of sales “bulldogs” invoke their locked jaw too indiscriminately. They never let any prospect go. Every lead is a deal waiting to happen. Every objection is a wall to be broken through. This instinct is celebrated in most sales cultures. It should not be.

Get into the mindset of ushering a prospect away. Tell them to come back only when there is real need. Play devil’s advocate. Say to the prospect that, from your view, there is no need. Have them prove otherwise.

This sounds counterintuitive. It sounds like you are talking yourself out of business. But what you are actually doing is positioning yourself as an advisor, not a vendor. You are showing the prospect that you are guided by their interest, not yours. And if need is genuinely absent, you have saved both parties weeks or months of wasted effort.

This is the discipline that sits at the heart of Power Listening. It is the same principle I explored in Stop Trying to Prove a Point: your intention determines what you hear. If your intention is to close, you will hear only what supports the close. If your intention is to serve, you will hear the truth. And sometimes the truth is that this prospect does not need you right now.

When to hold on

Now, here is the other side.

When need is present, even when it has only been lightly touched upon, your bulldog instincts have full rights. At that point, it becomes your duty to hang on to the prospect. Not because you need the deal. Because they need you.

This is the distinction that changes everything. We hang on for their sake, not ours.

When a prospect has a real problem that your product or service can address, walking away would be a disservice. At that point, persistence is not pushiness. It is care. You follow up because something of their world is at stake. You push through objections because you know, from your discovery, that the need is real and the fit is there.

The locked jaw has its place. It just has to be earned. And it is earned through need, established honestly, not assumed optimistically.

These are the hallmarks of the Power Listening method. Serve where you are needed. Walk away where you are not. And know the difference early enough for it to matter.

Make it rAIn, KG

And honestly? I get it. There’s something deeply satisfying about feeling like you haven’t been taken for a ride. We live in a world where it sometimes feels like the system is set up to run your wallet dry. So when a provider legitimately marks something down, for reasons they’re comfortable with, and you walk away with a genuine bargain, it’s a wonderful thing. Willing buyer, willing seller. That’s the juncture that underpins the markets of the world, and there’s real joy in finding yourself on the receiving end of it.

This instinct is universal. It doesn’t matter how wealthy you are. People love getting things for free, and they love the feeling of scoring value beyond what they paid. Retail has known this for decades, and they’ve built entire empires on the back of it.

But here’s the thing: this very instinct, this love affair with getting more for less, is one of the biggest reasons your prospects push back on price. And if you don’t understand it, you’ll spend your career chasing discounts instead of closing deals.

Today, I want to give you a different way to handle it. I call it the trade-off mindset. It changes the entire game.

The Dubai Clothing Store

Let me tell you a story.

Years ago, when I was living in Dubai, I stumbled across a massive sale at a clothing store in the Mall of the Emirates. I didn’t recognise the brand, but the garments looked upmarket. And the discounts were staggering. Most items were 70% off.

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. I needed new office clothes. So I loaded up. Shirts, trousers, a jacket. I bought heaps of things, buzzing with that unmistakable thrill of a great deal. I felt like I was saving a small fortune.

That was until I walked past the same store over the next few months (many times) only to discover that their “amazing sale” never ended. It was always 70% off. Always “ending soon.” Their staff had been trained to tell shoppers the sale was expiring imminently. Turns out, their primary target market was tourists passing through Dubai. No one was around long enough to find them out.

Now, let me be clear: I don’t cite this out of any admiration for their dishonest conduct. I find it appalling. I never walked back into that store, and I warned every friend I had about them too. I would have likely become a loyal customer had they chosen a more honest way of treating their customers.

But I share the story for one reason only: to confirm the ache we all feel to score a good deal. It runs deep. Deep enough that a store can build an entire business model on exploiting it.

We live in a world where people want as much as possible for as little as possible. That’s economics. And depending on the person, it can be taken to extremes. As rainmakers, we need to understand this intimately, especially if we’re in the business of framing value from the viewpoint of the prospect.

Subscribe now

Why Buyers Stall

Before we get into the solution, let’s talk about another force at play: one that works hand-in-hand with the price instinct.

Buyers love stalling.

I don’t mean they’re lazy or disrespectful. I mean that stalling is almost a natural reflex, especially when the purchase isn’t an urgent necessity. I’ve seen people stall on high-value enterprise software deals, yes, but I’ve also seen people stall when buying toothpaste. “Let’s just see what else is out there before we commit to the usual Colgate.” Sound familiar?

Stalling becomes more pronounced and deliberate when two conditions are present: the purchase is higher-value and it’s not urgent. The bigger the price tag and the less the hair is on fire, the more likely your prospect is to pump the brakes.

Why? Because there’s an inertia factor at work. People like doing things the way they’ve always done them. Change requires energy. If your product calls for a new way of doing something entirely (say, you’re selling a training subscription the prospect has never had before), you’re up against more inertia. More stall. Even something as simple as a new soap brand rides up against some resistance. There’ll be a bit of stall.

The relationship is roughly proportional. The more inertia your prospect faces, the more unfamiliar, disruptive, or expensive the purchase feels, the harder they’ll stall. Understanding this helps you calibrate your approach.

The Nudge

The answer to the stall is a nudge.

If you’re up against inertia, you need something to get the sale in motion. A force that tips the scales just enough to move the prospect from “I’ll think about it” to “let’s do this.”

When you’re selling one-to-one, you can nudge the person along by framing value in their terms. By helping them see what they stand to gain or lose in language that resonates with their specific situation. This is what I broke down in The Simplest Sales Framework: finding what the prospect is actually solving for and framing your solution around their reality.

When you’re selling en masse (over the distance, like in retail and e-commerce), you need different techniques that nudge people out of the stall at scale. Things like urgency (”sale ends tomorrow”) and scarcity (”only 3 left in stock”) are highly effective. They work because they introduce a cost to not acting, and that cost disrupts the inertia.

Share

Objections Are Stalling Tactics

Here’s a truth that many sellers resist: objections are ultimately stalling tactics. No matter how valid the objection sounds, the prospect is stalling.

“The price is too high.” Stall. “We need to check with procurement.” Stall. “Can you send me more information?” Stall. “We’re looking at other vendors.” Stall.

I’m not saying the concerns aren’t real. They might be. But the function of the objection, its role in the sales process, is to slow things down. To create distance between the prospect and the moment of commitment.

And if you consider the price-mindset we unpacked earlier, our deep-seated love of getting more for less, it’s no surprise that price is the most common objection most sellers will encounter in their careers. It’s the easiest card to play, and it taps into the most primal commercial instinct we have: I want to pay less.

So how do you handle it?

The Trade-Off Mindset

I’ve found a very effective way to handle price objections in one-to-one sales. You can extend it far beyond price.

Here’s the core idea.

Retail has spent generations training us to believe we can get the same product for a lower price. That’s the entire premise of a discount. Same shirt, cheaper. Same TV, less money. Same thing, better deal.

As sellers and rainmakers, we need to do the opposite.

Instead of playing into the traditional discount mentality, we need to get our prospect out of that mindset entirely. The premise of trade-off logic is simple and powerful:

Less money = less value. More money = more value.

That’s it. The prospect gets less for less. They get more for more. No tricks. No gimmicks. Just an honest, transparent relationship between what they pay and what they receive.

Subscribe now

Why This Works

This kind of logic (which is awfully logical, when you think about it) accomplishes something remarkable. It gets the prospect to respect your pricing strategy, your company, and you.

Think about it from their side. When a prospect hears that more costs more, and if they want to pay less, they’ll get less, they know your pricing approach is solid. It’s been carefully calculated. It’s based on underlying truths, not arbitrary markups waiting to be negotiated down.

Contrast this with the retail approach. Every time a store slaps a heavy discount on something, what does it really communicate? That the original price was inflated. That the “real” price is lower. That next time, you should wait for the sale. The store’s pricing strategy becomes less trusted with every promotion.

When you adopt trade-off logic in your sales conversations, you build the opposite: trust through consistency. Your pricing tells a story, one where every rand, dollar, or euro corresponds to actual value delivered.

How to Use It

Let me walk you through how this plays out in practice.

Your prospect says your pricing is too high. They want a better deal.

Step one: Sure, you can offer a small discount to give them a win. Yes, feed the madness that generations of retail gimmicks have bred into us, a little. A courtesy discount shows goodwill. It tells the prospect you value the relationship and you’re willing to meet them partway.

Step two: But don’t discount much. Instead, rework the deal such that less money equals less product, less service, or less scope. It has to amount to less value.

Put the prospect in the driver’s seat. Let them decide. The conversation sounds something like this:

“I understand, and I respect that budget matters. Here’s what we can do. At the reduced price, we’d deliver Phase 1 and Phase 2, but Phase 3 (the implementation support) would fall outside that scope. Alternatively, at our original quote, you get the full programme including the hands-on support. Which would you prefer?”

This is fundamentally different from traditional discounting. You’re not giving away the same thing for less. You’re establishing a principle: you get what you pay for.

Step three: Never be the one to take on the decision. Never say, “I’ll have a think about it and get back to you with a better deal.” If they want better pricing, make them do the work. Make them weigh the trade-off.

“Are you still happy to move ahead at the original scope, or would you like to consider the reduced option? And seeing as we’ve had a good relationship, I’ll include a 3% courtesy discount as a show of commitment to you. Take some time to think about it. If we still have capacity when you’re ready, we’ll be glad to do this project with you.”

Then, and this is crucial, remind them why this project matters. Remind them what problem it solves. Remind them what’s at stake if it doesn’t get done. Go back to the pain. (If you need a refresher on how to do this, take a look at The Simplest Sales Framework for a reminder on how to frame value.)

Share

The Clincher

And then there are the moments when the gap is just too wide.

I used this exact approach on a prospect just days ago. He came to the table with a budget that was four times less than what we were asking. Four times. We went back and forth, exploring what could be trimmed, what could be phased, what could be restructured.

But eventually, I had to drop the big one on him.

“Look, if you want something at that price point, we simply won’t be able to help. And I say that with respect. Not everyone is the right fit, and that’s okay. But you’ve got to choose. Do you want cheap? Or do you want your problem gone?”

And then I went on to remind him, in vivid detail, what his problem actually was. What it was costing him. How it showed up in his business every single week. What would happen if it persisted for another six months.

That’s the clincher. Cheap or solved. You can’t have both. And when the prospect hears it framed that way, honestly, directly, without malice, they almost always choose solved.

Because at the end of the day, nobody lies awake at night thinking about how much they saved. They lie awake thinking about the problem that’s still there.

Beyond Price

The beauty of trade-off logic is that it extends well beyond price. You can apply it to almost any objection:

“Can you deliver faster?” Sure, but faster means we’ll need to deprioritise the customisation you asked for. Which matters more to you?

“Can we reduce the scope now and add later?” Absolutely, but a phased approach means a longer time to full resolution. Are you comfortable with that timeline?

“Can we get a lower-tier option?” Of course, but the lower tier doesn’t include the dedicated account management that we discussed. Would you be okay managing that internally?

In every case, the structure is the same. You’re not saying no. You’re saying: here’s what changes. And then you let the prospect decide. You respect their intelligence. You trust them to weigh the trade-off. And more often than not, they choose the option that actually solves their problem because you’ve helped them see what’s really at stake.

Subscribe now

What Power Listening Has to Do with All of This

Now, you might be wondering: what does Power Listening have to do with handling objections?

Everything.

You can only employ the trade-off method effectively if you’ve done the hard work before the objection arrives. You need to have unearthed the prospect’s actual problem. You need to understand how it shows up for them, in their language, in their world, in their daily operations. You need to know what it’s costing them, emotionally and financially.

That understanding becomes your leverage. When you’re framing value and overcoming objections using the power of a trade-off, you’re drawing on everything you’ve listened for. Every discovery question. Every moment of silence where you let them talk. Every detail you filed away about their pain, their priorities, their fears.

When you say, “Do you want cheap, or do you want your problem gone?” you’d better be sure they’re not going to choose the cheaper route over getting their problem solved. And the only way you can be sure of that is if you’ve got the problem right.

Get the problem wrong, and the trade-off falls flat. Get it right because you listened, deeply and carefully, and it’s one of the most powerful closing tools you’ll ever wield.

As I wrote in Stop Begging Your Prospects: diagnosis before prescription. The trade-off method is the prescription. But it only works when the diagnosis is spot on.

So you’d best be listening.

Next time a prospect tells you your price is too high, don’t panic. Don’t cave. And don’t start slashing your quote in half.

Instead, take a breath. Remember the trade-off. And ask them the question that cuts through all the noise:

Do you want cheap? Or do you want your problem gone?

Make it rAIn, KG

The sellers looked at each other. Nobody volunteered a reason, let alone a plan. The GM looked at the sellers. After all, it was on them that the sales weren’t happening. She had nothing to do with it. And the Head of HR? He had nothing to do with people’s performance. Around and around it went. A merry-go-round of implied responsibility with nobody in the saddle.

That meeting stuck with me. Not because of the revenue gap. Gaps happen. But because of what was underneath it. Nobody in that room truly believed the number was theirs. They were all “contributing.” All “supporting.” All doing their bit. But nobody, not one of them, had looked at that target and said to themselves: “If not me, then who?”

And that, right there, is where revenue problems begin.

Ownership Is the Starting Line

Before we talk about tactics, tools, or techniques. Before funnels, frameworks, or AI. There’s something more fundamental that determines whether a rainmaker succeeds or stalls.

It’s ownership.

Not the kind you put on a slide. Not the kind you assign in a RACI matrix. I’m talking about a felt sense of total responsibility. The kind where you wake up and the number is yours. Where you don’t look left or right to see who else might save the day. Where the mission lives in your bones, not just your job description.

This might sound dramatic. It’s not. It’s the single most important ingredient I’ve seen in every high-performing revenue professional I’ve ever worked with. And the single most common absence in every underperformer.

Subscribe now

What “If Not Me, Then Who?” Really Means

Let me break this down, because it’s easy to nod along to a phrase like this without really absorbing it.

“If not me, then who?” is a question you ask yourself. Quietly. Privately. And you answer it with total conviction: me. Not me and the team. Not me plus a safety net. Just me.

It means: I am the primary cause point for this outcome. Everything else, the support, the systems, the people around me, is secondary. Useful, yes. Welcome, absolutely. But secondary.

When someone truly adopts this mindset, something shifts. They stop waiting for permission. They stop looking for backup plans. They stop scanning the room for someone else to pick up the slack. They simply get on with it, because in their mind, there is no one else.

Now, you might be thinking: “That sounds exhausting. And a little unrealistic in a team environment.”

I hear you. Let me address that, because this is where it gets interesting.

A Team of Owners

Here’s what trips people up: they assume that only one person can feel total ownership over a goal. That if five people are involved in a revenue target, ownership has to be divided. Sliced up like a pie, with each person carrying a neat little portion.

That’s not how it works.

When I work with my team, I work hard to cultivate this mindset across everyone. The Head of Finance. The Head of Sales. The CEO. Every single person. And here’s how they all get to legitimately feel “If not me, then who?” They each look at the target from their own vantage point. From their own hat.

The Head of Finance owns it from the lens of cash flow, forecasting, and ensuring the business can sustain its commitments. The Head of Sales owns it from the lens of pipeline, deal velocity, and customer engagement. The CEO owns it from the lens of vision, strategy, and rallying the team forward.

Same target. Different angles. Full ownership from each.

Now, this might seem like much ado about nothing. But this is a critical reality in high-performing revenue teams.

When it works, when every person on the team genuinely believes the outcome rests on them, you have something unstoppable. The energy shifts. Decisions happen faster. Problems get solved before they escalate. Nobody is “helping.” Everybody is leading, from their seat.

But when even one person in that chain quietly believes they’re “just supporting,” or that if they drop the ball someone else will pick it up, that’s when things start to go wonky. And wonky, left unchecked, becomes a revenue miss.

Share

The Tell-Tale Sign of Poor Performers

Here’s something I’ve noticed over decades of building and leading revenue teams.

The very first thing a poor performer does, before they examine their own pipeline, before they audit their own activity, before they look in the mirror, is remark on who else isn’t pulling their weight.

“Marketing isn’t giving us enough leads.” “The product team shipped late.” “Finance is slow on approvals.” “The SDRs aren’t qualifying properly.”

They need no help spotting who else is failing in the flow line. In fact, it’s the first thing they think of.

Now, examine this closely. This is the exact opposite of “If not me, then who?” This is the antithesis of the correct mindset. It’s a way of thinking that says: everything else is more powerful than me. The market, the team, the tools, the timing. All of it sits above me. I am but a supporting act in a play directed by forces beyond my control.

When someone lives in that headspace, they’re not a rainmaker. They’re a passenger.

A real rainmaker, the kind who consistently generates revenue, who finds a way even when the odds are ugly, sees themselves as the primary cause point. The obstacles are real, yes. But they are secondary. The rainmaker’s internal compass always points back to: what can I do next?

I wrote about this idea of being “at cause” in a previous article, Don’t Try to Win the Argument. The principle is the same: when you position yourself as the effect of your circumstances, you lose your power. When you position yourself as the cause, you get it back.

The Parent Test

Let me make this more concrete with an example that needs no explanation.

Ask any good parent whether they operate with the mindset of “If not me, then who?” and they’ll look at you like you’ve asked whether the sky is blue.

Of course it’s them. If the child is hungry, they feed the child. If the child is sick at 2am, they get up. If the school fees are due, they find the money. They don’t lie in bed hoping a neighbour shows up with a sandwich. They don’t wait for someone else to take the child to the doctor. They don’t assume the universe will sort out the tuition.

The answer to “If not me, then who?” is so patently, blazingly obvious that the question barely needs to be asked.

And here’s the thing. It’s not obligation that drives this. It’s something deeper. There’s personal pride in it. Commitment. Love. Care. These elements show up naturally when ownership is real. What causes what specifically is less important, but they tend to travel together. Where there is genuine ownership, there is pride. Where there is pride, there is care. Where there is care, there is relentless action.

The same goes for anyone who takes good care of themselves. They’re certainly not asking around to find out who’s available to offer them a shower. They don’t expect someone else to show up and wash them. The answer to “If not me, then who?” is absurdly clear.

These are extreme examples. I use them deliberately, to land the point that when ownership is truly felt, it’s unmistakable. The question isn’t whether to act. The question is only how.

Subscribe now

When “Someone Else Might Do It” Shows Up

Now let’s look at the opposite.

When the idea that “someone else might do it” creeps in, all manner of problems follow. Look at any household where family members aren’t pulling their weight and you’ll see this dynamic in abundance. The dishes pile up. The bins overflow. The garden becomes a jungle. Not because the tasks are hard, but because everyone assumes someone else will handle it.

And then the resentment starts. “I always do the dishes.” “Why am I the only one who takes out the rubbish?” Sound familiar?

This is the exact same pattern that plays out in revenue teams. When ownership is diffused, when everybody assumes somebody else is carrying the weight, accountability evaporates. Targets get missed. Fingers get pointed. Morale crumbles.

But when every person in that household genuinely believes the home is on them, not divided, not shared, but fully on them, the problem vanishes. Instantly. The dishes get done. The bins go out. The garden gets tended. Not because someone was nagged into it, but because each person has internalised: this is mine.

Commitment Moves Providence

In my book Age of Agency, I quoted the Scottish adventurer W.H. Murray, who wrote in The Scottish Himalayan Expedition:

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.”

Decades of experience as a rainmaker have demonstrated to me that never a truer word was spoken.

When someone truly believes “If not me, then who?” they are fully committed in that moment. It is watertight. Nothing can come between them and the goal. They do not even see it as a possibility to leave the duty to anyone else. This is how anything great on this planet gets accomplished. Every business that was built from nothing, every movement that changed a culture, every product that redefined an industry. Behind it was someone who said, without reservation: this is on me.

When, on the other hand, someone believes that John or Sally might save the day, that’s anything but watertight. It’s a sieve. And poor commitment produces poor results. Every time.

Share

The Surprising Link to Giving Your Word

Here’s a funny thing about commitment. It has everything to do with giving your word.

When someone isn’t truly committed to a mission, they’re often happy to sign up to anything. Big tasks, small tasks, ambitious deadlines, impossible promises. Sure, why not? After all, in their mind, someone else is going to carry the load anyway. So the commitment is cheap. Easy to make, easy to break.

But when someone is committed, when they feel the full weight of “If not me, then who?”, they become far more careful with their word. They push back when given a task bigger than they can honestly carry. They speak up. They say, “I can do X by Friday, but Y will need another week.” They protect their word because they know they’re actually going to have to keep it.

This is why it serves any leader well to develop this mindset across their team. When your people feel genuine ownership, they don’t just perform better. They communicate better. They flag risks earlier. They negotiate timelines more honestly. They become trustworthy in the deepest sense of the word, because their commitments mean something.

The Great Paradox: Ownership ≠ Doing Everything

Now, here’s the part that surprises people.

This mindset doesn’t require that someone undertakes all the execution by themselves. In fact, the person who truly takes ownership is often the one who doesn’t have to “do” the work at all.

Isn’t that something?

Think of a CEO. Think of any great leader. They don’t write every email, make every call, build every deck. But they own the outcome. Completely. Unambiguously. The buck stops with them, and everyone knows it, including themselves.

The person who is willing to truly assume total ownership is usually the facilitator, not the doer. They’re the one who brings everything and everyone together. They orchestrate. They course-correct. They remove obstacles. They hold the vision when others lose sight of it.

And yet, here’s the great irony. Those who become fearful of total ownership are usually worried about their capacity to do. “I can’t take this on. There’s too much work.” But ownership isn’t about doing everything. It’s about ensuring everything gets done. There’s a world of difference between the two.

Ownership says: I will lead us to victory. Sure, I will do what I must. Heck, I will do everything and anything that is needed. But above all, I serve as the central force bringing everything and everyone together. If not me, then who?

The Wedding Planner Principle

Let me paint a picture to make this real.

Imagine a wedding planner who believes the wedding is entirely on them. Not partially. Not “their part.” The whole thing. From the flowers to the seating chart to the DJ’s playlist to the backup generator in case the power goes out.

When that person encounters a problem, and problems always show up at weddings, all manner of creative solutions emerge. The florist cancels at the last minute? They find another one by dawn. The venue floods? They pivot to the garden and make it look intentional. The father of the bride’s speech goes twenty minutes long and throws the timeline? They adjust on the fly, seamlessly, because they own the outcome.

Now think about the cake-maker at that same wedding. If they also carry the mindset of total ownership over their piece, “this cake is on me, and it will be extraordinary,” they’ll overcome anything to deliver. Power outage in their kitchen? They’ll find another oven. The fondant cracks? They’ll rework it through the night.

But picture the converse.

Imagine the wedding planner thinking: “Well, it’s not really my wedding. It’s more the bride’s day anyway. I’m just coordinating.” Or the cake-maker thinking: “It’s just a cake. The music and entertainment are the real stars. No one will notice if the cake isn’t all that.”

The result? Self-explanatory, I believe.

Subscribe now

Where Urgency Breeds Creativity

It is this level of urgency, this feeling that it is absolutely, inescapably on you, that breeds creativity.

When you believe you are the one, you don’t accept “no” as a dead end. You treat it as a detour. The prospect is hard to pin down? You’ll stop by their offices and drop off their favourite treat. The budget got frozen? You’ll find a creative commercial structure that works within the new constraints. The decision-maker went dark? You’ll find another way in. A mutual connection, a relevant article, a thoughtful gesture that reopens the door.

Whoever said “necessity is the mother of invention” was probably not thinking about rainmaking. But I have never found a more apt application of this golden principle. When there is personal urgency, there is necessity. When there is necessity, there is creativity. When there is creativity, there is resourcefulness. When there is resourcefulness, there are solutions.

And when there are solutions, there is money.

Remove personal urgency from that chain, let someone believe that “it’s not entirely on me,” and the whole sequence collapses. No urgency, no necessity, no creativity, no resourcefulness, no solution... and no revenue.

I explored this idea of how entrepreneurs create security through the outflow-inflow loop. The principle here is the same: your output creates your income. But it only works if you own the output fully.

The Connection to Power Listening

So what does all of this have to do with Power Listening?

Everything.

I believe this ownership mindset is a vital prerequisite to listening well. Think about it. When a person is locked in, when they’ve truly adopted “If not me, then who?”, they are being a rainmaker in the fullest sense. They don’t need to be told to tune in to their prospect or their market. They don’t need a manager reminding them to “listen more.” It happens naturally.

All other noise disappears. The internal chatter about whose fault it is, the worry about what other people are or aren’t doing, the distraction of office politics. Gone. Their spidey senses awaken. Their antenna goes up. Naturally and without push, they absorb everything pertinent to understanding the prospect, the market, the problem. Because they must. Because the outcome is on them.

When you believe it’s on you, you listen differently. You listen with stakes. You listen to understand, not to respond. You listen because your livelihood, your reputation, and your mission depend on getting it right.

That’s Power Listening in its most natural form. Not a technique you layer on top, but the organic consequence of genuine ownership.

So before you refine your pitch, before you optimise your funnel, before you invest in another tool, ask yourself the question.

Look at your target. Look at your pipeline. Look at your mission.

And ask: If not me, then who?

If the answer is anything other than a resounding, unwavering me, that’s where your work begins.

Make it rAIn, KG

Start Here

Before you do anything, you need to figure out how meaningful this purchase is to the person in front of you.

Not how expensive it is. How meaningful.

These are not the same thing. A Gucci handbag to a woman with no credit card limit might not be a meaningful expense. It barely registers. A basic Swatch to a kid from a middle-class family might be very meaningful. It’s a big deal to that household.

Context is everything. Don’t gloss over this step. Always assess how meaningful this purchase is to the individual sitting across from you, because it determines how much work you need to put into this sale.

Why This Matters

The more meaningful the purchase, the more value you need to show the prospect before they will move. Think of it as a decision scale. On one side sits their money. On the other side sits the value they believe they’re getting. Your job is to tip that scale.

For a small, low-stakes purchase, a little bit of demonstrated value tips the scale easily. For a meaningful investment, you need a lot more on that value side before the scale moves.

This is what I call leverage. Not manipulation. Not pressure. Simply: the amount of demonstrated value required to tip the decision. The more meaningful the investment, the more leverage you need.

Value Is Not What You Think It Is

Here is where most sellers get it wrong.

They try to demonstrate value from their own perspective. They rattle off features. Specs. Awards. Industry benchmarks. But value is not universal. What’s valuable to one person is meaningless to another.

If you’re going to demonstrate value, it has to be framed from the customer’s vantage point. Not yours. Not your brochure’s. Theirs. This is the crux. The magic. The gold.

Take a car sale. You might be tempted to sell the impressive acceleration of a vehicle to a busy soccer mom. It’s a valid feature. But in the bigger scheme of her life, it’s close to meaningless. If this purchase is meaningful to her, the value you present must be meaningful to her, in her context, through her lens.

Who knows? After some actual dialogue, it might emerge that she’s shopping around because she is sick and tired of her current unreliable car. She cannot bear to have her five-year-old wait an extra thirty minutes after class because mom had trouble starting the car. Again.

That’s what she’s solving. Acceleration won’t close this deal. Reliability will.

Subscribe now

So How Do You Find Out What They’re Solving?

You have to be bold enough to ask.

Sounds easy, but the prospect is not always aware of what they’re solving. They may not even be solving anything yet. In practice, you’re going to encounter three main types of prospects. Each one needs a slightly different opening.

The active buyer. This person has a clear need. They know why they’re here. A solid door opener is to ask the equivalent of “What brings you in today?” or “What makes you look at this?” If they’re actively buying, this works nicely. They’ll tell you.

The browser. This is the prospect with a latent need. You’ll hear something like: “Nah, I’m just looking. It’s nice to know what’s out there.” The quickest way around this is to surface the hypothetical: “Ok, got it. Well, if you were going to consider a new one, what would get you to feel like it’s worth the investment?” For this type of prospect, preface your questions with “If you were going to consider a new...” It takes the pressure off and gets them talking.

The one who tells you exactly what they want. This is the prospect sellers get most excited about. They show up with a list, telling you precisely what they need, giving a tired seller the idea that they’ve finally found someone ready to buy. So the seller happily complies with the prospect’s demands.

But this is a dangerous prospect type. This person is making you a cashier at a till point, not a consultative seller or advisor. Even in retail, you need someone consultative when working with higher-end goods that warrant relatively more meaningful investments from buyers. When someone gives you a list of things they need and all they want is the price or a quote, chances are they are comparing you to another provider who they’re likely going to sign with.

For you to have a shot at closing that prospect, you need leverage. And as we covered, leverage comes from demonstrating value that resonates with the prospect. No leverage exists when you’re being told what to do. When you’re being made an order taker.

The trick here is to ask that prospect what they’re trying to solve with that product. Why have they chosen it? Pull the conversation back to the problem.

Going Deeper

At this stage, whether the need was latent, active, or handed to you on a list, you would have brought your prospect to the point where they’re willing to talk about what they value. This is usually framed as what they’re currently unhappy with.

Here’s the thing. Most people will give you a very superficial reason for considering a purchase. It’s the first thing that comes to mind. And most sellers stop there.

You can’t stop there. You need to go a bit deeper. You need to know how this problem actually shows up in their life. This is how you make the discomfort tangible.

The mom who hates her unreliable car needs to tell you how it shows up as a problem. It could be her children waiting ages unattended in distress. The school issuing warnings. Other parents complaining. That’s the real weight of it.

Or take a manager who wants to buy a training course for his team because he completed it himself and found it valuable. That’s well and good, but we want to find out how the gap shows up as a problem for him. Does he find that he’s left with too much work that only he knows how to do? Does he feel like he cannot move more work to his team? And if he is the bottleneck, how many clients is he keeping his business from because of his limited capacity? That is how the problem shows up.

Frame the Solution Around What You Just Heard

Now that you have this, you frame the value of your product or service in a way that solves this specific issue. Not the generic pitch. Not the feature list. You make this problem go away.

The mom doesn’t need to hear about horsepower. She needs to hear that this vehicle starts every time, first time, and that she’ll never get another call from the school.

The manager doesn’t need to hear that the course has great reviews. He needs to hear that his team will be able to handle the work independently, freeing him to take on three more clients.

Share

Match Your Effort to the Stakes

Remember, this needn’t be a long and intense enquiry. It can be quite light and quick.

If the purchase isn’t meaningful, don’t make a huge deal of this. A quick question or two, a brief reframe, and you’re done. But if the purchase is meaningful, if you’re selling an expensive software to a business, then of course you have to do a lot of digging. The business case has to be proportionally bigger. More discovery. More depth. More evidence that the problem is real and your solution addresses it.

Scale your effort to match the meaningfulness of the investment.

That’s the overarching process. It shows up in quick over-the-counter sales and in protracted sales cycles that span months if not years. The principle is the same either way.

Assess how meaningful the purchase is. Find out what the prospect is actually solving. Go deeper until you understand how the problem shows up in their life. Then frame your value around that.

Make it rAIn, KG

I wasn’t leading this one. Two colleagues of mine were running it, both relatively new to the campaign. When I got on, the conversation was already strained. They were pressing the prospect for a detail the prospect had already said they didn’t have. The tone had crossed from curious into interrogative, and the prospect had gone from open to guarded.

I didn’t introduce myself. I just listened.

The Frankenstein principle

The prospect pushed back. They were firm. At times, abrupt. It would have been easy to write them off as difficult.

But the prospect wasn’t the problem. We were. We created the friction, and then we struggled against it. I call this the Frankenstein principle: you build the monster, and then you complain about the monster. Every salesperson has done it. I’ve done it. You push on the wrong thing, or you fail to hear what the other person is telling you, and the conversation turns adversarial. And then you tell your manager the prospect was hostile.

No. The prospect was reacting to what you did.

Three errors on one call

On this call, three distinct errors turned what should have been a relaxed strategy conversation into a near-confrontation. I’ll share as much as I can without making things uncomfortable for any person involved.

First, the number.

My team asked for a financial figure to scope whether the partnership model would apply. The prospect said plainly: We’ve requested it from our finance team, but we don’t have it yet. Then a second person on their side reinforced it: We’re not comfortable sharing figures at this stage.

They could not have been clearer about their position on this. But my team came back to it. And then again. And again. Over the course of the entire call, this question got raised four or five times.

The right move was simple. Acknowledge the answer, take the pressure off, and earn the right to that number by showing why it matters: “No problem at all. Let’s walk you through what we’re proposing, and if it resonates, the numbers will follow naturally.” That kind of response acknowledges what the prospect said, removes the friction, and puts the burden where it belongs: on the strength of your own proposition.

Instead, every repeat of the question sent the same message: I hear you, but I don’t care what you just said.

I wrote in Stop Begging Your Prospects about the 80:20 ratio, where the prospect should do 80% of the talking. That ratio only works if the prospect feels heard. A prospect who has answered the same question five times doesn’t feel heard. They feel interrogated.

Second, the cross-examination.

At one point, one of my colleagues acknowledged what the prospect said, and then followed it with: “I hear you. But earlier you said…”

He wasn’t trying to build understanding. He was cross-questioning. The implication was clear: What you just told us contradicts what you said before. You’re wrong about your own business.

This is a prospect describing their own operations, their own world. And rather than recognising that the apparent inconsistency was an invitation to understand something we were clearly missing, my colleague treated it as evidence to be challenged. Like a lawyer poking holes in testimony.

In Don’t Try to Win the Argument, I wrote about the reflex to prove, to correct, to find the gap in what the other person says. This was that reflex, live and in action.

Third, the moment that slipped away.

Towards the end of the call, the prospect did something generous. After everything that had happened, they still told us what actually mattered to them. Something strategic, something real.

The heart of Power Listening at the transactional level is this: you search through the customer’s world for the point where your value proposition connects to a challenge that genuinely keeps them up at night. And when you find that point, you latch onto it with a value statement that cannot help but resonate. The prospect walks away thinking: This is exactly what I need.

Subscribe now

What gets in the way

Before you get to technique, before you get to strategy, something happens inside you that determines whether you’re going to hear the person in front of you or not.

Suspicion gets in the way. When my team decided, within the first few minutes, that the prospect’s answers weren’t good enough, they stopped hearing what was actually being said. They’d decided the prospect couldn’t be trusted. From that point on, even valid, straightforward answers got treated as evasions.

Ego gets in the way, because it makes the conversation about you instead of them. The need to be right gets in the way, because it turns every exchange into a contest. Impatience gets in the way, because real understanding takes time, and most people want to skip to the close.

Any one of these can prevent you from hearing what the person in front of you is actually saying.

I wrote in Selling Without the Slime about “Step Zero,” the internal recalibration that has to happen before any engagement. Get your intention right. You’re not there to prove anything. You’re there to serve. And you can’t serve someone whose reality you’ve decided to reject.

Receiving is not believing

When someone tells you something, you have two jobs. The first is to receive it. The second is to evaluate it. Most people mash these together into a single step. They hear the words and simultaneously judge whether they’re true. If the verdict is negative, their tone, body language, and follow-up questions show this. The other person feels it. The conversation dies.

There is a better way.

You receive first. Fully. Without filtering. You let the information in. Your acknowledgment is not a declaration of agreement. It’s a signal that you received their communication. Whether you agree is a separate matter entirely, and it doesn’t need to show on your face. What matters is that the other person knows they were heard.

You don’t have to believe them. You just have to receive their communication.

Finding truth, not finding fault

You should try your utmost to agree with your prospect. Not because you should become spineless. Not because you should nod along to close a deal. And not because you should fake alignment you don’t feel. Prospects sniff out disingenuous undertones faster than you realise.

What I mean is more precise: override the impulse to be disagreeable.

Some people are disagreeable by reflex. They hear a statement and scan it for weakness, for something to correct, for a gap they can expose. Like life is a trivia show where you score points for proving the other person wrong.

I try to do the opposite. When someone speaks, I look for what is true in what they’ve said. Not what’s wrong with it. Not where they’ve slipped up. If I can only find 5% that I genuinely connect with, I focus on that and let the rest go.

I’ve found, in sales and in life, that this changes everything. It breaks down the self-righteousness that keeps you from hearing where someone else is coming from. It stops you from deciding they’re talking nonsense before they’ve even finished. It lets you connect with people you’d otherwise have written off.

This is what Power Listening is about, amongst many other important things.

When you do need to push back (because sometimes you must), how you do it matters. Acknowledge the point sincerely. Reinforce what you do agree with. Only then, gently, introduce what you see differently. But never fake it. If you can’t find even 5% of common ground, it’s better to walk away. Your integrity matters more than a deal.

Share

Two kinds of challenge

There is a difference between disagreeing to prove someone wrong and calling out something that’s keeping them from where they want to go.

When I prove my prospect wrong, I’m usually serving myself. I’m showing how clever I am. I’m besting them in a contest nobody asked for. The prospect feels it, even when it’s subtle.

But when I call out a legitimate blocker to my prospect’s success, something they’re doing or believing that works against the outcomes they told me they care about, that’s not adversarial. That’s being on the same team. There’s no ego in it, no vested interest. I’m pointing at the obstacle because I want to help them get past it.

I wrote in How My Gran Beat the System about speaking in your customer’s language, on their terms. That starts with being on their team. When you’ve genuinely set yourself aside, when the only goals that matter are theirs, you earn the latitude to say hard things. You can challenge them, call them out, even push back firmly, because they know you’re not doing it for yourself.

But that latitude only exists when they feel heard first. Without that, you’re just another salesperson telling the client they’re wrong.

This call taught me something I already knew but needed to see again. The reflexes that kill deals are not exotic. They’re ordinary: press instead of pause, correct instead of receive, prioritise your agenda over the prospect’s reality.

The people who master this don’t just close more deals. They learn things other people never learn, because they have access to conversations other people kill.

Receive first. Find the truth in what they’re saying, even if it’s only 5%. And when the prospect tells you what they actually care about, listen.

Make it rAIn,

KG

You’re handed a number. Maybe it came from a spreadsheet in head office. Maybe it came from a board meeting you weren’t invited to. Maybe it came from a conversation between people who have never made a cold call in their lives.

And now you’re supposed to make it happen.

The question sits there, sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly: Where did this target even come from?

It can feel arbitrary. Disconnected from what’s actually possible on the ground. Like someone in an ivory tower picked a number, and now you’re left to somehow conjure it into existence through sheer will and magic.

I’ve felt this. If you’ve ever carried a number, you’ve felt it too.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand after years as a rainmaker, and then more years building my own company: the tension is real, but the framing is wrong. And getting this right has everything to do with Power Listening.

Where targets actually come from

Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth.

In business, your targets are largely decided for you. Not by a boss. Not by a board. By something more fundamental: fixed costs.

The moment you sign a lease, you’ve made a promise. You’re committing to monthly payments for the next five years, whether revenue shows up or not.

The moment you hire an employee, you’ve made a promise. You’re committing to paying that person every month, whether the pipeline closes or not.

The moment you take on any recurring obligation, you’ve created a target. You may not have written it on a whiteboard, but it exists. It’s the minimum revenue required to keep the lights on and the promises kept.

This is the part that employed salespeople and marketers often don’t see. When you work for someone else, the target can feel like an imposition from above. When you run your own company, you realise the target is always there. It’s baked into the business the moment you make a future commitment.

Subscribe now

The rainmaker’s paradox

Here’s what I think sits at the heart of the rainmaking spirit:

We make promises we intend to keep, even when we don’t know how we’re going to keep them.

When you sign a five-year lease, you don’t have five years of cash set aside. When you hire your tenth employee, you don’t have their salary guaranteed for the next decade. You sign because you believe your business model works. You believe that, even if cash flow dips, you’ll figure it out.

That’s not recklessness. That’s the essential bet of commerce.

Yes, there are companies with years of runway in the bank. They exist. But the vast majority of businesses operate on something closer to “faith backed by evidence.” You’ve seen the model work. You believe it will continue to work. And so you commit.

The target, then, is not some arbitrary number invented to torture you. It’s the financial expression of the promises you’ve already made.

Why not just go organic?

Some people push back on this. They ask: why don’t we just do our best and let revenue land where it lands? Why impose artificial targets? Why not let things happen organically?

It’s a fair question. And I think the answer comes down to one observation:

Without a target, almost nothing gets organised.

Think about how target-setting actually works when done properly. You start with the number. Then you work backwards. You ask: what are the activities, the channels, the campaigns, the conversations that could get us there? You map out the “how.”

The target determines the how.

If you need to make ten million this year, you will choose actions that could plausibly lead to ten million. Equally, if you need to make one million this year, you will choose actions that could plausibly lead to attaining a smaller target. If you’re just “doing your best,” you have no basis for choosing one path over another. You’re not working backwards from anything. You’re just kinda doing what you do - and what happens happens.

Organic activity, left to itself, tends to produce organic results. Which is another way of saying: not much beyond the status quo.

The target gives you something to organise around. It shapes decisions. It creates urgency. It forces you to confront the gap between where you are and where you need to be.

The psychology of the number

There’s another layer here, beyond fixed costs and financial planning.

A target is also a management tool. A psychological instrument.

Without a target, you have no chance of exceeding expectations, because there are no expectations. You’re just floating.

With a target, something shifts. You might hit it. You might exceed it. You might fall short. But you’ve given yourself and your team some kind of benchmark of success.

This is similar to pricing, actually. Pricing a product is part science, part art. You can run all the analyses you want, but at some point, the psychology of the buyer is the deciding vote. Too high and you lose customers. Too low and, funny enough, same outcome.

Target-setting is the same. You can model it, forecast it, benchmark it. But ultimately, the number you choose must be something that gets rainmakers into good-quality action. Too high and they give up before the game starts - they never actually commit. Too low and they drag their feet.

What this has to do with Power Listening

Now we arrive at the connection I’m building toward.

Power Listening is the skill of staying in contact with reality. And target-setting is one of the places where that skill matters most.

Here’s why.

A target can become a pipe dream. You set an ambitious number, disconnected from what the market will actually bear, and then spend the year chasing something that was never achievable. That’s demoralising. It burns people out. It teaches your team that the numbers don’t mean anything.

A target can also be an underestimate. You play it safe, set a comfortable number, and leave opportunity on the table. You never discover what was actually possible because you never reached for it.

The art of setting the right target, the one that stretches without breaking, that motivates without demoralising, requires deep contact with reality.

You need to read the environment. What opportunity actually exists out there? What is the market telling you? What are customers responding to? What channels are working, and which are exhausted?

You need to read your team. What are their real capabilities? Where are the strengths you can lean on? Where are the gaps that will limit execution? What’s the honest assessment of what this group of people can achieve in this timeframe?

You need to read your resources. What do you actually have to work with? What constraints are real, and which are assumed? Where is there leverage you haven’t exploited?

This is Power Listening applied to the act of planning. It’s not about spreadsheets and forecasts. It’s about contact with reality, with your market, with your people, with your situation as it actually is.

Share

The harmony of target-setting

When target-setting goes well, there’s a kind of harmony to it.

You’ve listened to the environment and understood the opportunity. You’ve listened to your team and understood the capacity. You’ve set a number that lives at the juncture between ambition and reality.

When target-setting goes poorly, it’s usually because someone stopped listening. They imposed a number from above without understanding what was happening below. Or they set a number based on what they wished were true, rather than what the evidence suggested.

The more I write about Power Listening, the more I see it showing up everywhere revenue lives. It’s not just a sales skill. It’s not just a marketing skill. It belongs as much on the desk of the CEO and the CFO as it does on the desk of the CMO. It’s embedded in the decisions that shape whether a company thrives or struggles.

What comes next

I’ve opened a door in this post, but I haven’t walked fully through it.

I’ve shown you why targets matter and how they connect to the deeper skill of staying in contact with reality. But I haven’t yet fully shown you the “how.” I may have given you a small taste but there is still a lot more to it. How exactly do you employ Power Listening in the act of setting targets? What does that look like in practice?

That’s coming. In the weeks ahead, I’ll probe deeper into the action of Power Listening. Not just the philosophy, but the method.

For now, I’ll leave you with this:

Your target is not an arbitrary number imposed from above. It’s the financial expression of promises already made. And your ability to set the right target, and then hit it, depends on how well you’re listening.

Make it rAIn, KG

In “You’re Using AI Wrong,” I said that using AI to intercept your inputs, to read for you, summarise for you, interpret reality for you, is destructive. Most people thought I was talking about productivity tips. I wasn’t.

In “Listening Is Power,” I stepped back and unpacked the deeper idea. Listening is not a soft skill. It is the gateway to understanding, and understanding is the gateway to competence. You listen your way to power (not power over people, but power as in competence). Your income, your judgment, your commercial edge: all of it depends on the integrity of what you let into your mind.

Those posts planted the flag. But they also left something unfinished.

If the diagnosis is right, if people are retreating from reality, if listening is the antidote, if this is now urgent because AI makes the retreat so easy, then what do we do about it?

This post is about what I’m building to help you do something about it.

Subscribe now

Why I keep coming back to this

There is a belief I hold that shapes everything I do. It is not complicated, but it took me years to articulate clearly. Here it is:

Commercial activity is the foundation of human freedom.

People who can generate money through exchange are independent. They have options. They can say no to bad deals, bad bosses, bad situations. They are not living at the mercy of circumstance.

If you want income, you need to understand how to create value that others will pay for. If you want to understand that, you need to be in contact with reality: with customers, with markets, with what people actually want, with what your product actually does.

And the mechanism for contact is listening.

The chain goes like this: Income ← Value Creation ← Understanding ← Listening.

Break any link, and the chain collapses. Most people break it at “listening.” They stop being in contact with reality. And then they wonder why their income suffers.

A pattern I keep seeing

I’ve built a specialist marketing and sales agency. We do positioning and demand generation for tech companies. I’ve been in this line of work for over 20 years.

Over that time, I’ve seen a pattern repeated hundreds of times. Here’s how it goes.

A company is struggling. Revenue is flat or falling. The pipeline is dry. The sales team is frustrated. Marketing is producing content that nobody reads and ads that don’t convert. Leadership is blaming the market. “It’s the economy. People aren’t buying. It’s a tough time.”

When I sit down with them, I ask basic questions: Who buys your product? What’s different about you compared to the other options? What does your customer actually care about? What are they afraid of? What outcome are they trying to create?

Most of the time they give me the answers they believe are true, not what their customers actually say.

They have retreated from reality. They are operating on assumptions, templates, playbooks, and internal consensus. They have stopped doing the basic work of understanding what is actually happening outside their walls.

The intention question

In the age of AI, this “retreat” is accelerating. AI has made it easier than ever to produce polished work without doing the hard thinking underneath.

I’ve started asking a simple question to diagnose whether someone’s use of AI is healthy or destructive:

What is the intention?

Is the intention to get the job done, to close deals, to serve customers, to create something real? Or is the intention to look good, to sound smart in meetings, to produce polished decks that earn nods of approval, to have an answer ready even when you don’t understand the question?

The people who use AI to look good are the ones in trouble.

Their briefs sound sensible. Their presentations are coherent. Their positioning statements are articulate. But when you push them, when you ask, “Why will the customer care about this? What objection does this answer? What did the buyer actually say?”, they cannot answer. Because they did not do the listening.

They are not seeking closed deals. They are seeking nods of approval around the boardroom table. They are not seeking to understand the customer. They are seeking to appear informed. They are not trying to win. They are trying to survive the meeting.

These differences appear benign, but they run deep and the consequences are severe.

Companies staffed with people who listen inward will be outcompeted by those who listen outward. The ones who pick up the phone. The ones who sit with customers. The ones who hear what the market is actually saying before they build the campaign.

Why this matters to me personally

I’ve worked with countless tech companies around the world. And I’ve watched too many businesses struggle, not because the market was cruel, but because they stopped engaging with it.

The thing I keep coming back to is this: you don’t need to give up.

When someone’s business is struggling, when the pipeline is dry, when the economy feels hostile, they often feel like there is nothing they can do. They feel at the mercy of forces beyond their control.

But there is almost always something they can do. The problem is that the “something” requires direct engagement with reality. It requires listening, real listening, not AI-mediated summaries. It requires making calls when you don’t feel like it. It requires hearing hard truths from customers. It requires updating your assumptions instead of defending them.

That is work people avoid. And when they avoid it, they fail.

I want to change that. I want to reach people who are under revenue pressure and show them that there is a way forward. Specifically in the domain of sales and marketing, there are ways out of the slump. The skill that makes you resilient is the skill of listening: deep, disciplined, reality-connected listening.

That’s the mission I’m building toward.

Share

The promise

Here’s the core idea, stated as simply as I can:

Everyone is worried about forces they can’t control. AI taking jobs. Recessions shrinking markets. Industries shifting overnight. The ground feels unstable.

The universal question is: How do I keep making money no matter what happens around me?

Power Listening is my answer. It is the skill that makes you resilient to environmental shocks, not by insulating you from your environment, but by connecting you to it so deeply that you can adapt faster than circumstances change.

While your competitors are automating their way out of touch with reality, you can own the market by actually hearing what people are telling you. While others panic at change, you adapt, because you heard it coming.

Power Listening is not a soft skill. It is not a passive, zen-type approach. It is a technically precise business and life skill. It takes action to get it right.

I don’t want to stop at the headline. I don’t want to assume you know what Power Listening means just because the words sound intuitive. In the posts ahead, I’m going to show you how to master this critical skill, step by step. With examples, methods, and cases.

That’s the thesis I’ll be testing, refining, and building in public over the coming months.

What comes next

This Substack will keep going. I’ll keep writing about sales, marketing, AI, and the mindset that makes rainmakers dangerous.

But now there’s a sharper focus underneath it all.

If you’ve been reading along and something has resonated, if you’ve felt the same frustration watching people retreat from reality, or if you’ve experienced the power of actually listening your way to a breakthrough, I want to hear from you.

Reply to this email. Tell me your story. Tell me what you’ve seen.

This is the beginning of something. Thanks for being here.

Make it rAIn, KG

Most people don’t actually know what that means.

They hear “AI” and they immediately go to tools and prompts and features. They assume I’m talking about productivity or “how to use ChatGPT.” That’s not where I’m pointing. The real issue sits underneath the AI conversation, and if we don’t name it properly, we keep losing the plot.

So for this post I want to step away from AI for a moment and talk about something more basic: listening. Observation. Taking things in. Because I think we all agree listening matters, but we rarely unpack why.

What I mean by “listening”

When I say listening, I’m not only talking about using your ears. I mean taking information in. It can be spoken. It can be written. It can be a sales call, a customer complaint, a textbook, a legal contract, a bank statement, a market shift, a facial expression, an awkward pause in a meeting. It can come through your eyes or your ears. It doesn’t matter.

Listening, in the way I’m using it here, is the act of letting information arrive in your mind so you can digest it and understand it for yourself.

That sounds basic. It sounds obvious. Yet it’s the foundation of everything that makes someone competent.

Subscribe now

Why listening has such high status

We treat listening like a moral virtue. We call it “respectful.” We call it “mature.” On the contrary, we say not listening is rude, domineering, selfish, low-grade behaviour.

But we don’t often talk about the deeper reason it has this saintly status. Here’s what I think is going on.

Listening is highly regarded because it is the gateway to understanding, and understanding is the gateway to better outcomes. Better relationships. Better decisions. Better performance. Better results. More power (in the practical sense), not power over people, but power as in competence and control.

Let me make it concrete.

Imagine two friends having a disagreement. One feels hurt because the other did something that didn’t land well. If she reacts without listening, she stays angry, stays ignorant, stays in her own story.

But if she listens, truly listens, she might discover what the other person has been dealing with. Pressure. Grief. Exhaustion. A crisis nobody saw. Suddenly her emotional reality changes. The anger dissolves. Empathy takes its place. The friendship improves. Her own internal state improves. She becomes more tolerant, more grounded, more in control of herself.

That shift came from one act: receiving reality rather than reacting to assumptions. Listening didn’t just preserve the friendship. It preserved her emotional energy and her clarity.

Now take that same mechanism and apply it to learning.

When you go from not understanding something to understanding it, you feel a surge of competence. Think about that precise moment. You feel capable. You feel in charge. That sensation is not mystical. It’s the psychological reward of moving from confusion to clarity, from helplessness to control.

And what is the route from confusion to clarity? You listen. You take information in. You digest it. You build understanding. That is why listening has such status. It reliably increases human capability.

Listening is how you become powerful

This is where I want to be very direct.

If you zoom out far enough, you listen your way to power. Not power as in dominance. Power as in the ability to do something well.

When you understand something, you can act. When you don’t understand something, you can’t. Or you can, but you’ll act blindly and pay the price for it.

Most people underestimate the degree to which competence is simply the result of what you’ve taken in, how well you’ve taken it in, and whether you’ve made it your own.

That is why the most competent people are obsessed with getting information from the right source. They want the raw input, not the softened version. They want to see the numbers, not the story about the numbers. They want to hear the customer, not the summary of the customer. They want to read the contract, not the “high-level overview.”

Because they know, even if they’ve never said it out loud, that their edge comes from the integrity of what enters their mind.

Share

The rainmaker version

Let’s bring this into the world of rainmakers, because this is where it gets practical fast.

A rainmaker is under revenue pressure. Your outcomes are not theoretical. If your understanding is off, your income is off. If your judgment is weak, your pipeline shows it. If your marketing is built on fantasy, your ads burn cash and return nothing. If your customer understanding is shallow, you attract the wrong people, close the wrong deals, and churn the right ones.

In sales, listening is not a soft skill. It is a weapon. When a salesperson asks good questions and truly listens, they gather something priceless: the buyer’s reality. The nuance. The constraints. The priorities. The politics. The fears. The hidden objections. The real decision criteria. The part they will not say if you don’t earn it.

Then a moment happens. You’ve felt it before if you’ve sold anything real. The light bulb goes on and you think: “Now I see it. Now I know exactly why this person needs this. Now I know what they’re trying to protect. Now I know how to frame the solution in a way that fits their world.”

That moment is power. It is the moment you stop guessing. It is the moment the deal becomes solvable. It is the moment your close rate rises because you’re no longer performing, you’re responding to reality.

And that only happens if you listen. If you don’t, you’re left with scripts, assumptions, surface-level objections, and the kind of sales process that looks busy but produces weak results.

Why people don’t listen, even when they “know” it matters

If listening is so powerful, why don’t we do it consistently? Part of it is environmental. Distractions everywhere. Phones. Notifications. Multi-tasking. The modern mind is being trained to switch constantly.

But a bigger part is internal. A lot of people cannot tolerate the silence inside their own mind long enough to let another person finish their thought. They are jumping to conclusions while the other person is still speaking. They are planning their reply. They are thinking faster than the other person talks, so they feel entitled to interrupt.

They don’t mean harm, but the outcome is the same: they don’t actually receive reality. They receive a distorted, partial version filtered through impatience and ego.

Real listening is an active decision. It’s choosing to pause your internal noise and give reality room to arrive. There’s a very simple way to think about it. Communication is an exchange of data. When it’s your turn to send data, send it. When it’s the other person’s turn to send data, stop transmitting and start receiving. That’s the whole game. Simple rules, difficult discipline.

The chain people don’t see

Now we can close the loop back to what I was trying to say in that AI post. Your ability to make good decisions, to adjudicate well, is built on understanding. You cannot adjudicate properly on something you don’t understand intimately.

And here’s the part that’s easy to miss: life is a chain of judgments. Even something as ordinary as placing a coffee cup on a table involves micro-judgments. Distance, force, timing, angle. You do it effortlessly now because you learned it properly. You built competence by interacting with reality directly until the judgments became accurate.

Scale that up. Running a marketing campaign is a chain of judgments. Choosing a segment. Writing an offer. Setting a price. Designing a landing page. Reading the data. Adjusting the message. Cutting the losers. Doubling down on what works.

Flying a plane is a chain of judgments. A surgeon’s work is a chain of judgments. Leadership is a chain of judgments. Parenting is a chain of judgments. Competence is not a personality trait. It is the accumulated accuracy of your judgments over time.

And the accuracy of your judgments depends on the integrity of your inputs. That is why the way you listen, the way you read, the way you observe, is not a lifestyle preference. It is the foundation of your competence.

Subscribe now

Where AI becomes destructive

Now we can talk about AI. The danger is not “using AI.” The danger is using AI to intercept your inputs.

If you let AI listen for you, read for you, observe for you, summarise reality for you, you are inserting a foreign layer between your mind and the world. You are letting a machine decide what you should notice, what you should ignore, what matters, what doesn’t, what the person “really meant,” what the customer “really feels,” what the market “is saying.”

And you won’t realise the cost until it’s too late. Here’s a simple analogy.

Imagine installing something into your vision that intercepts how you see the world, shapes it, smooths it, summarises it for convenience, and then presents it back to you as reality. Would you want that? Would you trust AI to tell you what is happening around you over your own eyes?

Yet that’s what people are doing inadvertently. They are taking the most important part of their development, their competence building, their reality contact, and they are outsourcing it.

They think they’re saving time. They think they’re being efficient. They think they’re staying modern. But if you outsource the intake of reality, you weaken the very faculty that makes you valuable. You become less accurate. Your judgment becomes softer. Your decisions become more generic. Your work becomes average, even if it looks polished.

For rainmakers, that translates into very real consequences: poorer offers, weaker positioning, worse ads, lower close rates, missed objections, lost customers, lower income.

This is not an argument against using AI

I’m not anti-AI. I use AI. I like efficiency. I’m obsessed with productivity. But you have to use it in the right place.

Using AI to improve your outputs, the emails you write, the drafts you produce, the assets you design, the way you structure a plan, can be safe and powerful. That’s the outflow side of your life.

The deadly mistake is using it to design your inflow, the information that becomes your understanding, the raw reality that shapes your judgment.

If you are learning something important, studying something important, making a decision that will affect your business or your reputation or your money, you need direct contact with the source material.

You need to listen yourself. Read yourself. Observe yourself. Digest yourself. Understand yourself. Then, once you know what is true, use AI where it shines: to help you apply, test, rehearse, write, and execute faster.

Share

A simple rule to carry into 2026

If you’re a rainmaker, here’s the principle I’m building my work around, and I want you to hold it in your mind: Do not outsource the intake of reality.

Listening is not just polite behaviour. It is the engine of competence. It is how you build the judgment that makes you dangerous in the marketplace.

Use tools to accelerate your execution, but protect the integrity of what you let into your mind. Because once your inputs are compromised, everything downstream is compromised: your judgement, your decisions, your campaigns, your offers, your revenue, your future.

And that’s the difference between someone who stays sharp in the age of AI, and someone who slowly becomes an innocent spectator in their own life.

Make it rAIn, KG

People are using AI wrong, and I believe they are going to regret it. Not because AI is bad, and not because I am anti‑efficiency. I use AI daily. I love leverage. But there is one specific misuse that is destructive to rainmakers. It will show up as fewer customers, weaker positioning, poorer performing ads, lower conversion, wasted spend, and less income. Most people will not realise the cost until it’s too late.

This crystallised for me in a conversation with a mentee.

The treadmill moment

He is a bright kid, early in his career. Proactive. Methodical. His record‑keeping is impeccable. He takes notes properly and keeps them, which already puts him ahead of most people. So I asked him a question I have asked many times: how do you study material when you want to learn something important?

He told me he gets AI to summarise the content he wants to learn. Then he converts the summary to audio. Then he listens to the audio while he is on the treadmill. That is his primary method of assimilating what he considers important.

I was gobsmacked.

Not because summaries are evil, but because this is the kind of behaviour that slowly trains a person to accept second‑hand understanding as if it were mastery. Like watching someone outsource the very work that builds competence.

Subscribe now

The interpretation layer nobody asked for

If I consider information important, I want the source. I want the author’s intent in the author’s own words. I want the original context, the caveats, the framing, and the nuance that makes the idea usable. I do not want an interpretation step between me and the material that will shape my judgement.

That is why original marketing texts line my bookshelf.

When I wanted to understand the 4 Ps, I wanted to understand what E. Jerome McCarthy was actually doing when he first formalised the framework in Basic Marketing (1960). When I wanted to understand the Unique Selling Proposition, I did not want a modern paraphrase. I wanted Rosser Reeves as he wrote Reality in Advertising (1961), in the environment that forced that concept into existence. I went out of my way to source these texts in their original form.

This is not nostalgia. This is not intellectual posturing. This is about protecting the integrity of my understanding when the stakes are real.

Because when you let AI “read” for you, you are not consuming the source. You are consuming an interpretation of the source. And then you start building your decisions on that interpretation.

Who is to say how AI is going to interpret the material? Who is to say what bias is introduced? So much lives in nuance. AI can sound confident while missing the point, flattening the argument, or shifting emphasis in subtle ways that change what the author meant.

If that happens while you are studying a serious method, you are not just learning slower. You are learning wrong.

Fleeting information vs foundational information

Here is the distinction that entrepreneurship forced me to take seriously: not all information deserves the same treatment.

Some information is fleeting. News, commentary, opinion, trends, hot takes. That content is not intended to change your operating system. You can consume it lightly because it is not something you should be building your judgement on.

Other information is foundational. Principles. Methods. Frameworks. The kind of ideas that solve problems repeatedly. The kind that stay useful long after the headline fades. This is the information rainmakers build offers, positioning, campaigns, and businesses on. If you misunderstand this category, you do not just “sound a bit off.” You lose money.

This is where many people get trapped. In school, and even in corporate life, it can be enough to “know stuff.” You can survive on being informed. You can sound smart at social gatherings. You can accumulate perspectives.

Entrepreneurship does not reward that. Entrepreneurship demands methods that work. When your income depends on your decisions, you stop collecting trivia and start hunting for usable principles. You stop trying to sound smart and start trying to be effective.

That shift changed how I study.

When I study something important, I study actively. I am constantly asking one question: how do I put this into use? I apply the idea to real situations, past and present. I draw pictures. I test the concept against reality. I refuse to gloss over critical details. I understand every square inch.

That is what builds judgement. And judgement is what makes a rainmaker dangerous, in the best sense of the word.

The deadly mistake

Here is the line I am drawing, and I am drawing it hard.

Using AI to design your outputs is safe. Use it to help you write emails, draft posts, refine a deck, generate creative options, tighten copy, create a video, edit a script, or organise your thinking into publishable form. This is a very good use of AI.

Using AI to design your inputs is deadly. Using it to decide what you should understand, what you should notice, what you should believe, what you should take away from an important document, is how rainmakers become spectators in their own careers.

If you let AI intercept your learning, your market understanding, or your interpretation of customer reality, you are letting a machine shape your lens. Your lens shapes your decisions. Your decisions shape your pipeline, your positioning, your ads, your revenue, and your life.

Here is a simple analogy. Imagine installing something into your vision that intercepts how you see the world, shapes it, smooths it, “summarises” it for convenience, and then presents it back to you as reality. Would you want that? Would you trust AI to tell you what is happening around you over your own eyes?

Yet that is what people are doing inadvertently.

Share

How this kills campaigns in the real world

We learned this the hard way at Blacfox.

We trusted AI to provide “market feedback.” We used it as a shortcut. We thought we were accelerating learning and tightening our message.

In hindsight, we were not getting feedback. We were getting a convincing remix. It was remixing blog content furnished by the software vendors. It sounded coherent. It sounded market aware. It sounded like truth. It was not anchored in actual buyers.

It really is not rocket science. We ought to have collected market feedback from the mouths of potential buyers. After all, this counts as usable important information. Instead, we accepted synthetic “feedback” and paid a heavy price for this choice.

The result was campaign death.

I also see some clients do this. They will use AI to “review” work we do, as if AI knows their tastes and preferences better than they do. Worst still, in the name of saving time, they are passively observing how AI reviews something, instead of reading, assimilating, and understanding something for themselves. They are left none the wiser. They become an innocent spectator in their own lives.

And rainmakers cannot afford that.

If you are responsible for revenue, you cannot outsource your understanding of your market. You cannot outsource the formation of your judgement. You cannot outsource reality.

A principle I am still testing

I am still cautious about prematurely declaring a universal law here. But a general principle is emerging, and I am testing it aggressively:

Never use AI to interpret data only you can.

If the information is foundational, go to source. See for yourself what the author is trying to say. If market feedback is what you’re after, go to the market. If the truth is in customer conversations, go to the conversations. Do not let a machine generate your understanding of the thing you are betting your income on.

Use AI after you have done the human work. Use it to draft, refine, and publish once you know what is true. Use it to speed up the output side of the work, not to replace the input side.

As we head into 2026, output is becoming cheap. Prompts will get better. Models will get smarter. Content will be infinite. The rainmakers who win will not be the ones who outsource their thinking the most efficiently. They will be the ones who protect their input and earn judgement.

In an AI era where output is cheap, the scarce advantage will be human judgement, and judgement is built, slowly, by how you ingest reality.

Glad you are here with me. Here’s to a killer 2026!

Make it rAIn, KG

That realisation is not a reason to panic. For me, it’s a call to stop leaving things undone. If there is one message I could leave you with on my birthday, it’s this: do not leave the things that matter most to you for “later.” Let your work in this lifetime be to create and leave behind the one, two, or three things that are deeply important to you, the things you know you want to see exist in this world because you were here.

I don’t mean this in some lofty, abstract way. I mean it in the most grounded, practical sense. Time is short. Use it on what actually matters to you.

The Seduction of Comfort

When I look around, I see how easy it is for life to quietly become about one thing: comfort.

Did today feel comfortable?
Was my life today luxurious enough?
Did I manage to avoid hardship?

We don’t always say it out loud, but comfort becomes the yardstick. A good job is one that pays well and lets you drive a comfortable car, eat at the right restaurants, live in a nice apartment, and avoid the struggles your parents or grandparents went through. And to be clear, I understand that. If you grew up with very little, the exit from that state feels like the only definition of success that matters.

This, for me, is one of the most dangerous aspects of poverty, or even just “not quite enough.” When you spend your early life in that space, the exit itself becomes the dream. You hit a stable middle-class lifestyle, you can pay your bills, you can go on vacations your family could never have afforded, and it feels like: This is it. I made it. This is success.

There is nothing wrong with wanting safety and security. The problem is when the story stops there. When the entire goal of your life becomes “never feel that fear again,” you will sacrifice almost anything, including your bigger potential, to protect comfort.

Interestingly, I’ve noticed that people who grow up more comfortable, often middle or upper-middle class, don’t have that same fear of “going back.” For some of them, discomfort becomes part of the adventure. They’re more willing to take wild swings because they’re not haunted by the memory of what it means to truly not have enough. They’re not carrying the same emotional weight of money.

Different vantage points. Different internal bargains. But underneath all of it lies the same question: is the point of your life to be comfortable, or is it to create impact?

Subscribe now

From Microsoft and Porsches to a Different Question

For a while, I lived the classic comfort story.

I did well at Microsoft. I worked my way up, built a strong career, which culminated in a move to Dubai. I lived in a beautiful apartment. I drove a beautiful Porsche. I ate at the fancy places. I was living what many would easily label “the high life.” Side note: Dubai has a sneaky way of making the the middle-class believe they’re above it.

And by the standards of comfort, I had succeeded. My days were smooth. My status was clear. There was no visible struggle in my daily existence. If you had looked at that version of me from the outside, you could have easily said, “That’s the endgame. He did it.”

But inside, something started to unravel. The high life ran its course. It didn’t feel like enough. Not because I was ungrateful, but because I realised that comfort, achieved and maintained for its own sake, was a very small destination to build an entire life around.

So I walked away from that version of success.

Entrepreneurship was the turning point. Nothing I have ever done has reshaped me the way entrepreneurship did. It forced me to clean up my thinking, align my actions, stare straight at my own value and my own blind spots. It required me to grow up in ways that no corporate role had ever demanded.

That doesn’t mean my time in corporate was useless. Not at all. I needed that chapter. I needed to learn the game from the inside, to build networks, to enter circles and layers of society my parents never had access to. I needed to step into that world, and then, importantly, I needed to step out of it to see what truly mattered to me.

And through all of that, the real question changed from:

“How do I live a comfortable life?”
to
“What is my life actually for?”

When the Endgame Becomes Impact

At this stage, the answer is crystal clear for me: the endgame is impact.

I want my life to be about making a contribution that extends beyond my own comfort. I am deeply committed to the idea that people should be commercially active, commercially viable, and able to stand on their own two feet financially. I want people to be able to step into the world with economic independence, to raise children in a secure environment, and to make decisions from a place of freedom rather than desperation.

That’s not some side interest. That is the core of my mission.

I want people to be able to get out of true difficulty and out of abject poverty using the tools of business, commerce, and enterprise. I want them to experience what it feels like when you are no longer forced to tolerate certain behaviours, environments, or relationships simply because you cannot afford to leave. That is where money and impact intersect for me: in the creation of choice.

So I need to be clear about this: I am not someone who believes money doesn’t matter. The heart of my thesis is that whatever you do, you must make it commercially viable. Meaningful work and financial sustainability are not enemies; they belong together.

But impact sits above all of it. You cannot say, “I want to change the world, but only if I get three cars, a mansion and a lake house out of it.” Impact doesn’t work like that. If you say you’re driven by impact, then impact has to remain the north star, even if the externals don’t always look like a lifestyle magazine.

The beautiful part is that when impact becomes the true measure, action stops being such a struggle. You know that the only way to create change is through doing, so the urge to act doesn’t feel like restless torment anymore. It becomes your natural state. You move, you build, you create, not because you’re chasing comfort, but because you’re compelled by your mission.

Share

Comfort, Inaction, and the Poolside Illusion

Comfort glamorises inaction.

We worship the image of “finally resting by the pool,” as if that is the pinnacle of a life well lived. There is absolutely nothing wrong with rest. Quiet days, holidays, time by the water… those moments matter. But we have vastly over‑glamorised them. We talk about them as if they are the main event, when in reality they are the intermission.

When comfort becomes the measure of success, we unintentionally glorify not doing. We start to believe that a good life is one in which we are shielded from effort, risk, and discomfort. But if you are led by impact, you will do the opposite: you will willingly walk into discomfort for the sake of something you believe matters.

The reward for that is not only what you build, but who you become in the process. The real paycheck is being able to point to a corner of the world, however small, and say, “That is different because I was here.”

What You Hitch Your Happiness To

Another shift that happens when you move from comfort to impact is where you “park” your happiness.

If you hitch your happiness to your looks, your status, your possessions, all of which are transient, you are building your sense of self on sand. Aging will feel like a threat. Market downturns will feel like an existential crisis. Every wrinkle, every lost title, every change will feel like it’s taking something from you.

But if you hitch your happiness to impact, the ground is much firmer. Aging can’t steal that from you. Changing industries can’t steal that from you. A market crash can’t steal that from you. As long as you can still contribute, speak, build, mentor, create, lead, or support, your life retains its meaning.

You stop asking, “How do I keep everything from changing?” and start asking, “How do I keep contributing, no matter what changes?”

The Quiet Superpower of Your 40s

Now, let’s talk about this age thing.

I see so many discussions online about ageism. I know it’s real. I’ve read the comments about being “over the hill” at forty, about careers stalling at fifty, about younger talent being preferred. I understand the frustration and the fear.

But here’s where I stand, on my forty‑fifth birthday: I feel like I’m just getting started.

I am not going to sit here and label myself a failure or tell myself I’m late. That kind of self‑attack is not a place of power. No one builds anything meaningful by constantly criticising themselves or everyone around them. You have to train yourself to see the good in you, and to see the good in others, even when you’re not where you want to be yet.

When I look at my life, I see a very different picture. I see someone who needed every single chapter to get here. I needed my years in corporate to understand that world, to build credibility, to learn how big systems and big companies operate. I needed my years in entrepreneurship to strip away illusions, sharpen my thinking, and show me what I am capable of under pressure.

There was nothing quite like this last decade of entrepreneurship. It rearranged my inner world in the best ways. And I would not trade what I know now for the smooth face and fast metabolism of my twenties. Truly. There are things I wish I had known back then, of course, but if the price of going back was to lose the depth, clarity, and experience I have today, I wouldn’t pay it.

Your forties are a beautiful convergence: you have a massive arsenal of lessons, experiences, wins, losses, techniques, and insights… and you still have energy. You still have a body that can keep pace with your ambitions. You have enough scars to know what matters, and enough time ahead to do something significant with that knowledge.

That combination is powerful.

Subscribe now

Your Second Wind

So to everyone around my age, or older, this is my birthday invitation to you: give yourself a second wind.

Stop telling yourself the story that life is almost “done,” that the horizon has shrunk to the point that effort is pointless. Ask a different question instead: What do I want to create in the next twenty years?

Twenty years is a long time. You can build entire companies in twenty years. You can write multiple books. You can change industries. You can transform communities. You can raise children and then reinvent yourself again. You can start something at forty‑five that only reaches its peak at sixty‑five, and that would still be a life profoundly well spent.

And here’s another advantage of this stage: people are not watching you as obsessively anymore. You’re less consumed with what everyone thinks. That is pure freedom. Use it. Use that freedom to build what you actually want to see in the world, not what looks good on someone else’s timeline.

Define your own value. Decide for yourself what your experience is worth. Let impact, not age, not title, not comfort, be the measure.

My Birthday Promise

So here I am, forty‑five years old, feeling more energised and more committed than ever.

I am committed to my mission: to help people become commercially viable, to help them step into economic independence, to help them use the tools of business and commerce to rewrite their stories. I am committed to impact over comfort, to action over mere aspiration, to building things that outlast me.

I know now that to the extent I prioritise daily comforts over long‑term impact, I will fall short of what I’m here to do. I also know that there is still so much horizon ahead of me. This is not the beginning of the end. This is the start of the next, deeper chapter.

The party is just getting started.

So if you take anything from my birthday reflections, let it be this: time is moving anyway. You can spend it chasing comfort, or you can spend it creating impact. One will make your days easier. The other will make your life meaningful.

I know which one I’m choosing.

Make it rAIn, KG

And he said the line I’ve heard so many times:

“I really did everything I could do.”

You know that sentence. It usually appears at one specific moment in life:
Right after something has gone badly wrong.

We use it after a failed deal, a breakup, a lost job, a project that collapsed:

• “I did everything right.”

• “I did everything I could at the time.”

There’s even that famous story about the Nokia CEO supposedly saying, after the Microsoft deal:

“We didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost.”

Whether or not he actually said those words, the mindset behind it is very real. And I want to challenge that mindset directly.

If you did everything right… why did you fail?

Let’s take the sentence seriously for a moment.

“I did everything right and it still failed.”

If that’s true, two things follow:

1. You weren’t the cause of the failure.

2. Something “out there” was the cause—the market, the timing, the other person, the economy, “life”.

In other words, built into that sentence is a quiet assumption:

“It wasn’t me. I was right. Something else was wrong.”

It can feel noble to say “I did my best”, especially if you’re exhausted and hurting. Sometimes it’s even true that the odds were stacked against you.

But as a habitual lens on life, “I did everything right” is dangerous. Because if you really believe you were perfect and the world randomly punished you anyway…

• Where exactly do you go from there?

• What do you change next time?

• Who has any power in your story: you, or the environment?

If the answer is always “the environment”, then you’ve handed over the steering wheel of your life.

Subscribe now

The people who get stronger vs. the people who don’t

There’s a huge difference between:

• Taking blame for everything (which is unhealthy and extreme), and

• Honestly locating your part in what happened.

I’m not talking about martyrdom:

“Fine, it’s all my fault, I’ll take the fall.”

That’s still drama. That’s still performance.

What I’m talking about is much more sober and powerful:

“Something went wrong here. What, specifically, was my contribution?
Where did my behaviour, my choices, my blind spots play a role?”

Because the moment you can say:

• “I was too slow to respond.”

• “I avoided that difficult conversation.”

• “I didn’t prepare as thoroughly as I told myself I did.”

• “I dismissed their feedback.”

… you’ve just found a lever you can actually pull next time.

And that is the real divide between people who get stronger in life and people who stay stuck and bitter:

• One group is always looking for their piece of the cause.

• The other group is always looking for someone or something else to blame.

The fastest route to real failure: blame

Blame feels satisfying in the moment. It protects the ego. It makes you “right”.

But it has one lethal side effect:

When everything is someone else’s fault, nothing is within your control.

If the client was unreasonable, the market was unfair, your ex was crazy, your boss is an idiot, your colleagues are useless, then you’ve built a world in which your results depend entirely on forces you don’t control.

That’s not strength. That’s helplessness dressed up as victimhood. It’s also the opposite of how anything great is built.

Think about startups and tech companies. Their entire operating philosophy is:

Build → ship → watch it fail in some way →
Ask what we did that didn’t work → change → ship again.

We call this iteration, as if it’s a fancy innovation concept. But under the hood, it’s the same basic mental move:

“We could have done something better. Let’s find what that was.”

Same at home in your kitchen. The “perfect roast turkey” doesn’t appear on your first try. It’s:

• “Last time it was too dry.”

• “I put it in too long.”

• “The heat was off.”

Each time, you’re owning your part and tweaking it. And over time, you go from “that didn’t really work” to “oh wow, this is actually amazing.”

No iteration is possible if your story is always:

“We did everything right, and the universe is just unfair.”

Share

Being “at cause” vs. at the mercy of the elements

Life will always contain things you cannot control: other people, markets, illnesses, wars, random misfortune.

But there’s a deep power in walking through life with this stance:

“Whatever happens, I will look for my part and I will refine that.”

It doesn’t mean you excuse bad behaviour from others. It doesn’t mean you say “it’s all my fault.” It means you refuse to give away your last piece of power: your ability to respond, learn, and change.

That mindset creates a very different feeling inside you:

• You stop seeing yourself as a leaf in the wind.

• You become someone who is at cause in their own life, not simply at the mercy of the elements.

• You walk into the next chapter knowing, “My success or failure has a lot to do with me. And that’s good news.”

The hardest (and most useful) skill: looking for the truth in what they say

There’s another layer to this, and it shows up in conflict.

Imagine an argument (at home, at work, anywhere). One person is clearly on the defensive: they’re raising their voice, justifying, explaining, insisting they did “nothing wrong.”

Maybe that person is you. Maybe it’s them. In those moments, here’s a practice I try to live by:

Don’t just listen to their words. Look for the truth inside their words.

Not everything coming at you will be true. Some of it will be projection, fear, stress, old wounds.

But almost always, if you really listen, there’s at least one sentence that is true, even if it’s uncomfortable.

And if you can find that sentence, and own your part in it, you unlock a special kind of power.

The airport lift story

Recently I had a small but vivid reminder of this.

I was at an airport, impatient, rushing. A woman and her daughter were trying to get into the lift with me, and in my hurry I made a snappy comment to move them along.

She reacted hard. Way more aggressively than the situation really warranted. Instantly defensive, armour up.

In that moment I had a choice:

• I could match her energy, justify myself, go into “I didn’t do anything wrong, she’s overreacting”.

• Or I could pause and apply my own rule: look for the truth in what she’s saying.

And the simple truth was:

My reaction wasn’t very nice.

So I told her that. I agreed. I didn’t grovel, I didn’t collapse. I just acknowledged the obvious truth in her complaint: “You’re right, that wasn’t very nice of me.”

You could almost watch the fight drain out of her. Her body language softened. Her tone changed. She went from hostile to friendly in seconds.

Why? Because the moment you willingly own your part, there’s nothing left to fight about. The whole situation could have turned ugly over something tiny. Instead, it flipped completely, just because I chose truth over ego.

This isn’t about taking the fall. It’s about taking the wheel.

Let me be very clear:

• This is not about always being the one to “take the fall”.

• It’s not about letting other people off the hook.

• It’s not about accepting abuse or pretending other people’s behaviour is fine.

It’s about something much more selfish, and I mean that in a good way:

You do this for your own empowerment.

You look for your part in what went wrong because:

• That’s where your leverage is.

• That’s where your growth lives.

• That’s how you make sure you don’t repeat the same pattern again and again.

The person who refuses to reflect, who always insists “I did everything right, it’s all on you,” might look stronger in the moment. They might “win” that argument. They might walk away feeling victorious.

But they walk away weaker, because their world, their outcomes, are now less within their own control. Meanwhile, you walk away with a clearer sense of:

• What you did,

• What you’ll do differently, and

• How you’ll handle the next round better.

Over time, that difference compounds.

Subscribe now

A simple rule to carry into your next hard day

So here’s the rule I try to live by, and the one I want to leave you with:

Whenever something goes wrong, look first for your part in it; not to blame yourself, but to reclaim your power.

And when someone brings you criticism, anger, or hurt:

Don’t just react to how they say it. Look for the truth in what they’re saying.

You will not always get it perfect. Neither do I.

But if you keep leaning in this direction, owning your slice of cause, iterating like a startup founder, listening for truth even when it stings, you’ll find that:

• Business gets better,

• Relationships get deeper,

• And life, as a whole, becomes something you’re actively shaping, not just surviving.

That’s the real opposite of “we did everything right but somehow we lost.”

It’s: “We didn’t do everything right. But we’re learning. And next time, we’re going to do it better.”

Now, make it rAIn, KG

That’s it. You hire people (full-time employees) and become responsible for their wellbeing. You sign multi‑year leases and equipment contracts. You put up personal surety on loans. You make promises that extend years into the future while living month to month on the sharp edge of your next order. The mix is brutal: durable promises paired with perishable inflows.

Set that next to the employee’s world and the contrast is stark. An employee’s life is constructed on the bedrock of predictability. A payslip underwrites a mortgage, a move to a new city, school fees, a car. Even if the job changes, the operating assumption is continuity: the ability to step from one paycheck to another and keep one’s monthly commitments intact. The thing an employee fears most is a rupture in that continuity; yet the thing an entrepreneur never truly has is the continuity itself. That small structural difference (guarantees here, no guarantees there) changes how you sleep, plan, and think.

Subscribe now

So where does an entrepreneur find their version of security? In a different loop entirely: outflow → inflow. Outflow is the value you create, the product you make, the service you deliver, the art you ship. Inflow is what the world returns for it, money, yes, but also access, reputation, momentum. Entrepreneurial “security” is the settled knowledge that your outflow is so wanted and needed, and so well‑designed, that when you push it into the world at volume, the inflow arrives with enough reliability to meet your obligations. That sounds simple. It isn’t, because it hides three quiet, ruthless prerequisites.

First, what you’re offering must actually be wanted and needed. You can produce at heroic volume and still end up with a warehouse of unsold truth if the market doesn’t care for it.

Second, the product must be profitable at the price the market will happily pay. This is where many founders hobble themselves, especially in professional services. They leave corporate, sell time to survive, and adjust to every request. The work gets done, but a product never emerges. Without a product that’s intentionally shaped (named, scoped, priced, and delivered to a margin) you don’t have a business so much as a busy calendar.

Share

Third, once the product is both wanted and profitable, you must create outflow with consistency and scale. If the first two are right, this becomes the most straightforward part of the job; until they are, “more marketing” is just a louder microphone for an unclear song.

This is why productization is not a luxury; it is oxygen. Most ventures launch from a blur: scrappy delivery, eager adaptation, feedback as roadmap. That’s fine for ignition, but it will not carry you into orbit. At some point you must block time, deliberately and repeatedly, to design the product you wish you’d had on day one. What is it called? What exactly does a buyer receive? What do you refuse to include? What is the price, and what margin does that price yield after every hidden cost? How will it be produced at the same quality, again and again, by people who are not you? The day you can answer those questions without wincing is the day your nervous system calms; you have built a paycheck analog.

There is, of course, a psychological snag: committing to a product is terrifying when you’re not yet certain of demand. Doubt whispers that maybe it’s a fad, maybe it’s too narrow, maybe you should stay customizable to keep doors open. But here’s the paradox I’ve seen repeatedly: clarity creates demand. When you pick a problem and design a crisp, profitable solution, with edges, you make it easier for the right buyer to say yes and for your team to deliver with speed and quality. Ironically, trying to be everything keeps you scrambling for anything.

Once the product is clear and profitable, the game simplifies. Your job becomes outflow, outflow, outflow: building production lines that push a proven thing into the world.

Subscribe now

This is where strategy comes alive, not as a mystical document but as a practical “how” stretched across time. Strategy is the choreography of daily and weekly actions, arranged so that today’s constraints don’t block tomorrow’s goals. Want a non‑business analogy? If the problem is “I need to lose twenty kilos,” the strategy is the lifestyle you’ll adopt and adhere to for months and years (meals, sleep, training) so the outcome becomes unavoidable.

In a company, the same logic holds. Given your current resources and position, what exact cadence of activities, hires, channels, and measurements must exist such that success becomes the default outcome rather than a weekly miracle? If there’s no pressure in your world that demands strategic thinking, you’re probably living purely in the present tense.

Pull these threads together and a picture forms. An employee’s security is granted; an entrepreneur’s security is constructed. It is built from a product that the market emphatically wants at a margin that justifies scale, from the discipline of shipping that product in steady waves, and from a strategy that turns intention into inevitability. No, there will never be the soft guarantee of a payslip every thirty days. But there can be something sturdier over time: the confidence that your outflow is designed so well and delivered so consistently that inflow follows with dependable rhythm.

Share

The transition to this mindset is hard because it asks more of you. It asks you to stop selling hours and start shaping assets. It asks you to resist the adrenaline of perpetual improvisation and embrace the quiet, repetitive work of product design. It asks you to think farther ahead than your cash balance would like. But it can be done, and when it is, the anxiety that used to live under your desk begins to move out. You’ve replaced borrowed security with security you built, and that kind is very hard to take away.

Make it rAIn,
KG

For years we’ve been building this community together. In 2025 I’ve gone hard on the weekly newsletter and on serving our tribe. Now, it’s time we meet in person.

An unexpected opportunity presented itself recently while I was in Redmond for a Microsoft alumni event. You may know the name Orlando Ayala from his days as a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft. His energy, his love, his get‑up‑and‑go spirit inspired so many of us. As a young professional in Microsoft Business Solutions (what became Dynamics), I watched his example from afar. Two decades later, life looped back: we met, we spoke, and an idea took root. He considered my suggestion to visit Joburg and eventually said yes!

This brings me to the here and now. Let’s optimise Orlando’s visit and co‑create a truly elite, close‑knit working day in Johannesburg: a marketing and growth masterclass in the morning (led by me), followed by a candid, no‑slides Q&A with Orlando in the afternoon. This is not a conference. It’s a room of doers solving real problems in real time.

The day at a glance

• 09:00–12:30 — Rainmaker Marketing Masterclass (high‑power, practical working session; expect ~30 minutes total for breaks).

• 12:30–13:30 — Lunch (on‑site).

• 13:30–15:30 — Structured Q&A with Orlando Ayala (I’ll lead the interview and take questions from the room).

Capacity: I’m capping the masterclass at ~15 participants so we can go deep, not wide.
Venue: Microsoft Johannesburg. It’s a beautiful space and perfect for this format.

What we’ll actually do

This is a working session, not content theatre. You’ll:

• Pressure‑test your positioning and message.

• Identify 3–5 growth moves worth doing.

• Learn pragmatic ways leaders navigate risk, adversity, and uncertainty (the parts that don’t make it onto slides).

Candid conversation, practical frameworks, and real examples.

The gauge is power

I’m holding myself to a single measure: Do you leave more powerful than you arrived?
If you go out of your way to join us, I will go out of my way to ensure you leave equipped and energized.

Share

Pricing & access

This event will not be free. I’ll be pouring a significant amount of preparation into the masterclass and curating best‑practice material. That said, I don’t want price to be the only barrier: if there’s a strong case for you to be in the room and you’re struggling right now, tell me. I can make one or two exceptions. Pricing will only be sent to those who express interest in attending.

How to express interest (reply with these 4 lines)

Please hit reply and send:

1. Name & role/company

2. What kind of rainmaker are you? (entrepreneur, seller, marketer)

3. Mobile number

4. Are you open to a short call if needed? (Y/N)

Your reply is an expression of interest until we talk to you and confirm your attendance. I’m deliberately not sending you to a landing page to register. I’ll review responses personally (with help from my team as needed) and we’ll confirm seats (on a rolling basis).

Who this is for

• Founders, marketers, and business leaders who do the work.

• People who value candour over theatre and results over noise.

I’m excited. I think this is a rare chance to learn from someone whose track record speaks for itself and to build real momentum together, in person.

Make it rAIn, KG

For me, “light” isn’t a metaphor for cleverness. It’s the discipline of seeing. As you know by now, my vision is a world where people earn freedom through honest trade. My mission is to unleash entrepreneurial spirit with an unbreakable mindset, proven marketing, and avant‑garde tech. This year’s Diwali reminded me that the concept of light may have a lot to do with how much we choose to observe.

The problem we’ve trained into ourselves

As a culture we reward thinking more than looking. We hire for answers, promote for opinions, and celebrate fast-talkers. The result? Brilliant people sprint off the blocks powered by deduction, doctrine, and dashboards, and miss what’s literally in front of them.

I’ve been training a new recruit at Blacfox, a junior strategist who works closely with me. He’s brilliant; genuinely someone I expect to become a monster in this industry. Coaching him has surfaced a pattern I see everywhere: we default to acting from what’s in our head instead of seeing what’s in the world. And observation, like any muscle, atrophies when it isn’t used intentionally.

Subscribe now

Light as optics

Observation is the cleanest form of “light.” It’s optics, not ego; phenomena, not philosophy. It’s also the shortest path to leverage because observation, done right, naturally reveals root causes. When you can see the root, the solution tends to “pop into view,” cheap and fast.

There’s a classic teaching device called the Washington Monument story. I unpack it in my book Age of Agency, Rise with AI, but the gist is simple: when you follow observable symptoms back, step by step, you often find a surprisingly small upstream change that resolves a cascade of downstream problems. Root‑cause analysis is simply structured observation.

The Observation Ladder

Here’s the framework I’ve been drilling with my team. It’s ruthlessly simple on purpose.

Step 1: Just the facts (no additives).
To get into the habit of doing this, describe only what is observable. If you’re a doctor: “There’s a person. Two eyes. Nose. Mouth.” If you’re reviewing a campaign: “This was an outbound tele‑sales campaign. 1,200 dials placed. One script. Two agents. Call window 9 a.m.–5 p.m.” No opinions. No adjectives. No explanations.

Step 2: List the symptoms.
Symptoms are observations of non‑optimum states. “Three meetings booked from 1,200 dials.” “Average call duration: 27 seconds.” “Contact rate: 4%.” Treat these as bullet points, not arguments.

Observation: nose.
Symptom: runny nose.

Step 3: Read the symptom list in concert.
Don’t solve one symptom at a time (“solution‑by‑symptom” is expensive and brittle). Sit with the whole list and ask: What common thread could plausibly create all or most of these symptoms?

Step 4: Name the root cause.
Distinguish the root cause from associated problems. There may be several contributing factors, but one will be primary. Circle that.

Step 5: Minimum viable fix.
Good root‑cause work makes the solution obvious and small: a single upstream change that collapses multiple symptoms. The quality of a solution is the impact per unit of time and money. Aim for maximum effect, minimum spend.

Step 6: Measure and log.
Ship the fix, instrument the metric that matters, and write a 10‑line log: context → symptoms → root-cause → change → result. This turns one team’s eyesight into the company’s institutional memory.

Time ratio rule: Spend 80–90% of your effort on Steps 1–4 (seeing). If you get the root right, Step 5 is usually trivial.

Share

A mini case (how we teach it)

Consider this safe, contained assignment: “Figure out why this campaign under‑performed.”

• Facts: 1,200 outbound calls, one generic script, 2 agents, 9–5, goal = meetings.

• Symptoms: 0.25% meetings booked; high hang‑ups in first 10 seconds; most connects during 12–1; no lift on day 3 after script tweak; agent B outperforms A 3× on connects but not on meetings.

• Read in concert: Low early‑call stickiness + lunch‑hour connects + no lift from copy changes + performance parity on meetings suggests a top‑of‑funnel targeting and timing issue, not a persuasion issue.

• Root cause (hypothesis): We’re calling a segment whose reachable window doesn’t overlap with our calling window, and the script’s first 8 seconds signal “sales” to switchboard filters.

• Minimum fix: Shift 35% of dials to 7:30–9:00 a.m. and 5:30–7:00 p.m. local, front‑load a curiosity‑based opener for gatekeeper traversal, and suppress numbers that show “spam likely.”

• Measure: Contact rate, ≥10‑second hold, meeting set rate per time band, per‑agent deltas. Usually, the lift from timing and opener hygiene alone beats any “better pitch.”

Common traps to avoid

• Solution‑by‑symptom. Fixing each bullet independently creates busywork and cost.

• Experience over eyesight. Your last playbook was true for then. Treat your treasured work experience as a guide, not a governor.

• Tool worship. Dashboards summarise; they don’t see. Start with raw signals (calls, transcripts, screenshots, calendars), then abstract.

• Premature synthesis. If your Step‑1 notes include adjectives or causality (“bad list,” “low intent”), you’re thinking, not seeing.

Subscribe now

A 15‑minute weekly drill for teams

1. Pick a micro‑outcome: one email, one call block, one landing page, one SDR day.

2. Three minutes: write only facts.

3. Three minutes: write symptoms (bullets, no arguments).

4. Five minutes: read them together; propose one root cause.

5. Two minutes: define the smallest upstream change to test.

6. Next day: measure one metric; log the learning.

Run this cadence, and you’ll feel the “observation muscle” strengthen in weeks.

This is important

My vision is a world where people earn freedom through their own honest trade. My calling is to unlock entrepreneurial capacity with mindset, proven marketing, and revolutionary tech that makes the impossible possible. None of that works if we live only in our heads. Sight keeps our strategies situation‑specific and our technology pointed at reality, not wishful thinking.

This Diwali week, I’m choosing “light” to mean eyes open. Turn down the noise of cleverness. Reward the teammate who sees what’s actually there. Spend your energy naming the root, not polishing the pitch. Do that, and the solutions will, almost embarrassingly, reveal themselves.

Make it rAIn, KG

P.S. If you want the deeper breakdown of the Washington Monument tool for root‑cause thinking, I walk through it in my book, Age of Agency, Rise with AI.

Today, let’s build on that. I’ll take you on a journey through the vision and mission that fuel me, and show how this reset is exploding into action.

Picture this: A world where people earn their freedom through honest trade, standing on their own two feet, rising against adversity, and enjoying dignity through production. That’s the vision I’ve chased since ditching the corporate ladder at Microsoft to build Blacfox and other ventures.

Honest trade isn’t just about transactions; it’s liberation. When you produce something others willingly pay for (be it a SaaS tool, a consulting service, or a handmade craft) you unlock creative power and self-worth. I’ve seen it in bootstrapped founders who claw their way from zero revenue to thriving enterprises, and in rainmakers who turn pressure into flow. This vision rejects overextended welfare that dulls ambition, or policies that punish productivity. Instead, it celebrates commerce as a force multiplier for good, where voluntary exchange builds prosperity for all.

But visions alone don’t change lives; they demand a mission. Mine? To equip rainmakers with unbreakable mindset, proven marketing methods, and transformative tech to launch enterprises and monetise value. Rainmakers aren’t just entrepreneurs; they’re anyone under revenue pressure: commission sellers, demand-gen marketers, execs owning the number. I focus on you because you’re the engines of the real economy - the ones trading actual products and services. Let’s break it down.

Subscribe now

First, mindset: It’s the spark. I evangelise a “get up and go” attitude, echoing that there’s no entitlement, only earned success. I keep striving to shatter my own self-limiting beliefs, from exiting Microsoft amid doubts to navigating Blacfox’s early struggles. Now, I push others to take their own plunge.

Then, marketing methods: I share tried-and-tested tactics from my my own business ventures, which act as labs. No textbooks; only what I’ve done.

Finally, transformative tech: AI isn’t a buzzword; it’s your force multiplier. But I warn: it’s a tool. Focus on real-economy contributions, not gimmicks.

This journey, from mindset ignition to marketing mastery, is personal. I’ve tested it in my ventures, from the online training business teaching value creation to AMA New York uplifting marketing’s purpose. My vehicle? I build in my companies and broadcast what works, using my voice to evangelize at scale—Substacks, books, courses, events. No sensationalism; just honest observation inducing natural laws for your breakthroughs.

Now, this realignment isn’t idle talk; it’s roaring to life. First, my brand-new podcast launches this month, staying laser-true to my north. In the debut, I interview Gavriella Schuster, former Microsoft Corporate Vice President and a powerhouse in cloud transformation and AI. With over 30 years leading global teams, she’s reimagined partner ecosystems and now advises on boards, emphasizing inclusive growth. We’ll dive into mindset shifts for rainmakers, leveraging tech like AI to shatter barriers, and real stories of rising against adversity. It’s raw, actionable. Tune in to fuel your plunge.

Share

Then, on November 13, we’re hosting a can’t-miss event at the Microsoft premises in South Africa. I’m bringing Orlando Ayala, a legendary force from Bill Gates’ senior leadership team, to connect with partners. Orlando, who retired after overseeing 40,000 people across 115 subsidiaries, transformed Microsoft’s global sales and emerging markets strategy. His journey from Colombia to Microsoft’s executive suite embodies rising against the tide. Expect insights on mindset, marketing in the AI era, and tech-driven profitability. If you’re a Microsoft partner, this is vital - register now.

Finally, the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) recently launched “Partnering with AI,” an online course I co-created as a companion to my book, Age of Agency. It’s packed with practical tools to rise with AI, from mindset rewiring to tech integration for monetisation. Applications are open; check it out. As far as I know, GIBS is still offering signed copies of my book with enrolment, but spots are limited.

This is Make it rAIn in motion. If you’re ready to trade hesitation for action, join me. Let’s build a world of self-determined producers. What’s your next plunge?

Make it rAIn, KG

Instead of rushing out something half-baked, I chose to pause and sharpen my axe, as the old saying goes.

I’ve been reflecting deeply on my voice, why it matters, and what this space truly stands for. Today, I want to share that reflection with you, not as a self-focused monologue, but as a reminder of our shared journey toward economic freedom through honest trade.

If you’re here, it’s because you’re a rainmaker: someone under revenue pressure, ready to turn it into flow. Let’s reaffirm what Make it rAIn is about and why it exists for you.

Subscribe now

At its core, this newsletter (and the broader platform) is a thrust toward self-determination. I believe people achieve freedom through honest trade, unlocking creative power, personal pride, and dignity. Commerce, done honestly, creatively, and intentionally, is one of the most powerful forces for good in the world.

It’s not about handouts or waiting for the system to save you; it’s about producing value, exchanging it fairly, and reaping the rewards that fuel your independence. I’ve seen too many talented individuals held back by dependency, whether on some hidden form of welfare, entitlement mindsets, or false narratives that normalise receiving without giving. I stand against those subtle traps, echoing Margaret Thatcher’s conviction that there’s no such thing as entitlement, only earned success. I champion a “get up and go” attitude: income follows production, and value begets value.

This isn’t just philosophy. It’s the foundation of everything I share here. My own journey underscores it. I started in corporate leadership at Microsoft, honing skills in sales, product marketing and strategy, simplifying complex value propositions to drive growth. But I hit the limits of that world. My influence felt capped, my decisions impacting a unit rather than millions.

So, I took the plunge into entrepreneurship, founding Blacfox, a B2B growth agency where we help tech companies discover and share their value through positioning and messaging frameworks. It’s been my lab: developing “growth recipes,” building teams to execute them, and validating approaches that scale impact.

What sets this space apart is my commitment to authenticity: I teach only what I’ve done. Like a chef who only shares recipes proven in their own kitchen, every insight here comes from the fire of my ventures. I’m no armchair theorist or motivational hype machine.

Share

You could call me an entrepreneurship evangelist, using my skills as a:

• a marketer and seller who has mastered positioning to close deals;

• a technologist (self-taught coder since 16) deploying AI for hyper-productivity and seamless customer experiences; and

• a communicator who perceives nuances, decodes root problems, and simplifies complexity to speak directly into your reality, inspiring you to act.

These strengths aren’t separate; they interweave. My marketing flair and tech savvy fuel the business “labs,” while my educator’s voice amplifies the validated lessons through Make it rAIn.

So, what’s in it for you? If you’re an entrepreneur, seller, or executive carrying revenue targets, this is your toolkit for turning pressure into prosperity. I shatter self-limiting beliefs, the biggest hurdle to entrepreneurship, pushing you off the ledge to soar. That means mindset shifts to overcome fears of failure or inconsistency, reminding you that trading your ware (your skills, products, or services) is the path to dignity and independence.

No more waiting for get-rich-quick fantasies or speculative schemes; I focus on the real economy, where sales and marketing are life skills for freedom. You’ll get practical methods: how to leverage AI to systemise your operations for max output, craft compelling positioning using frameworks like McCarthy’s (context, competition, company, customers, segmentation, positioning and the 4Ps), and organise yourself to produce more with less. For instance, in Blacfox, we’ve learned precisely where gen-AI use is valuable and where it is fatal. I’ll break that down here, step by step, so you can apply it with ease.

Subscribe now

But it’s deeper than tactics. I want you to see the opportunity: to get independent and be okay, providing for yourself and your family through your own efforts. This is about expansion, overcoming adversity, mastering your destiny, and achieving agency without financial reliance on others. In a world of noise and distractions, Make it rAIn cuts through with no-fluff, results-driven content.

Whether through my book (Age of Agency), soon-to-be-released podcast, online courses on AI, or these newsletters, the goal is to equip you to fly. Subscribers have shared stories of landing better jobs, starting small businesses, or transforming their revenue approach after applying these insights. That’s the measure of success, not vanity metrics.

As I sharpen my axe, this reflection reminds me (and hopefully you) why we’re here: to build a community of rainmakers who reject dependency and embrace merit-based prosperity. I’m not just talking economic policy or shaming systems, though I’ll critique insidious systems when they hinder trade. The bulk is about you: shattering those internal barriers, getting you entrepreneurial, and providing the methods to organise, market, and soar. AI makes it easier than ever, lowering barriers to entry, amplifying your gifts, so let’s harness it together.

Thank you for your patience with this delayed post. I’m recommitted to our Tuesday rhythm, fuelled by this clarity. If this resonates, share your own plunge story in the comments, let’s inspire each other.

Let’s make it rAIn, KG

Start where value is obvious: the buying flow

If you make the buying process radically easier, the process becomes the USP. Deconstruct it and remove friction:

• Access: Can customers find it when and where they want?

• Order: Is placing an order effortless, self-serve, repeatable?

• Pay: Do you support the payment methods they actually use?

• Receive/Delivery: Is handover fast, reliable, transparent?

When you redesign these steps, the “how I buy” becomes your competitive edge. That’s the heart of GTM digitalization: reimagining the route to market so buying is faster, simpler, and more convenient than the status quo.

To prioritize, ask blunt questions: How easy is it to pay? to order? to get a price? to tailor the product? The answers point straight at what to fix first—and what to turn into your USP.

Subscribe now

Design > declare (with one concrete example)

Don’t change the core product if you don’t need to; change the surround. Imagine Nike doesn’t market a “polyester tee” but designs the offer around what runners value: a short app flow that captures climate, mileage, and fit; a shirt produced to those specs; delivered on a sensible cadence—tailored performance apparel at mass prices. That’s a designed USP. The copy simply names what the product already delivers.

Plenty of modern winners didn’t invent a new product category—they made buying/logistics feel inevitable. Think of companies that focused on the route to value, not the widget—classic GTM digitalization.

Let customers tell you what to build into the offer

Don’t guess. Listen for need; it exposes opportunity. Use two data streams:

• External: forums, reviews, social chatter—what people complain about or wish existed.

• Internal: sales patterns, repeat buys, offer spikes, support tickets—what people actually do.

Be wary of over‑relying on surveys (they bias toward the questions you asked). Behavior is the cleanest signal.

Three levers you can pull today

You rarely need a full product overhaul to stand out. Differentiate by enhancing:

1. Place (convenience) — Put the product where the customer already is; compress steps; remove handoffs. Sometimes place is the USP.

2. Product (experience) — Add light customization, setup, training, warranties—services that neutralize anxiety or effort.

3. Price (model) — Rethink how value is captured: subscriptions, bundles, pay‑per‑use. Often the model change is the differentiator.

This is the practical re‑ordering of McCarthy’s 4Ps I use in practice: research → process‑optimize Place/Product/Price → then promotion. Promotion’s job is to say the value you’ve already engineered.

Share

Make the value blindingly clear

Your USP should read like a promise customers actually want:

“Buy this, and you’ll get this specific benefit.”

Use their language, point at the outcome, keep it painfully simple. That’s your PMF (positioning & messaging framework) in one line—and it should be the same line sales, marketing, and product use everywhere.

Balance wow with reality

Two forces are always in tension:

(1) the urge to make it a no‑brainer for the customer to buy, and

(2) resource constraints.

Solve for both by shipping one or two hard‑to‑copy, high‑impact enhancements first, then scale what converts. Keep two loops running: keep sensing what customers value; keep finding cheaper ways to deliver that value.

A note on strategy drift: efficiency moves are easy; growth moves are harder—but that’s where durable differentiation tends to live (often via servitization—wrapping services around products). Don’t let efficiency become the only story.

Subscribe now

Try this next week (90‑minute sprint)

1. Pick one product and map Access → Order → Pay → Receive. Circle the ugliest friction.

2. Draft a light enhancement to Place/Product/Price that removes it (no core rebuild).

3. Ship a quick pilot to 10–20 users.

4. Write the one‑line promise that names the benefit they just experienced.

Measure conversion or repeat‑buy lift; if it moves, scale.

Now, make it rAIn, KG

Two tribes, one truth

There are at least two big tribes in our working world.

First, the makers of the new. Founders, entrepreneurs, inventors, creative strategists. We chase novelty. We love that early heartbeat of an idea, the sketch on a napkin, the first user who says yes. We build new products, new companies, new ways of working. That’s our oxygen.

Second, the operators of the machine. Process builders, production managers, administrators, controllers. They keep the trains running and the quality high. Without them, the lights go out, the line stalls, and customers feel pain.

Both tribes are essential. This essay is not a plea for one against the other. It is a case for a truth that applies to both: long-term success lives in the heart of the mundane. Not instead of passion, but alongside it. Often, because of it.

Rainmakers and the messy day

Let’s talk about Rainmakers, because many of us live in that world. Sales in particular does not gift you a calm calendar. You can arrive ready to write a proposal and discover a client has delayed the project. Targets move. Something breaks. You need a new plan by 10 a.m.

That chaos is real. The advice here still applies. In fact, it is the antidote to that chaos.

Everyone says they want a sales engine that runs like a well‑oiled machine. I have heard this from global enterprises, from heads of sales, from founders, and from leaders who swear they will “operationalise” revenue any day now. Yet we keep romanticising days that feel like a rollercoaster. We tell ourselves we love that no two days are the same. We repeat the story so often that a calm, repeatable day starts to feel foreign.

This is the trap. We claim to want predictability, then design our working lives to avoid it.

Subscribe now

What newness is really for

If you love building new things, ask a simple question. What is the end game of newness? The honest answer is this: making the new thing business as usual. The best outcome for a new product, process, or company is that it becomes repeatable, teachable, and runnable without heroics. In other words, boring.

You launch, you learn, you stabilise, you document, you train, you scale. The arc of progress bends toward boring. That is not a downgrade. That is the win.

Where excellence hides

Look at any high performer. They de‑risk their craft until the spectacular looks ordinary in their hands.

• A striker drills the same movement a thousand times, then a thousand more, so that the top‑corner finish is not a miracle. It is muscle memory under pressure.

• A pianist plays scales long after they can play the concerto. Scales remove noise from the hands so the music can speak.

• A chef repeats prep work until the knife becomes an extension of the arm, which makes room for creativity on the plate.

Practice is not only about getting better. Practice removes chance. It strips randomness from the motion. That is what professionalism is. You reduce variance on the basics so that when real uncertainty shows up, you have capacity left to handle it.

Share

The seller who outgrows chaos

Picture two sellers.

Seller A lives for the rush. They brag about the 2 a.m. party and the 8 a.m. pitch. Every win feels like a movie scene. Every loss has a story to tell.

Seller B is different. She studies her accounts every week. She can recite her funnel in numbers, not vibes. She runs a drill each morning, one role‑play objection before the first outreach. There is a checklist for discovery, a checklist for demo, a checklist for negotiation. She reviews call recordings and writes down phrases that worked. She tracks them. She learns.

Over time, the daily, weekly, and monthly game becomes quiet in her head. She can do it in her sleep. That is the signal that she is ready for a larger arena. Bigger quota, tougher territory, more strategic accounts. The risk did not vanish. It moved to a higher order. She earned the right to face it.

The real limit on growth

To the degree that we worship chance and unpredictability, we cap our professionalism. When the appetite for novelty dictates our day, we never stay long enough in one game to remove chance from it. We keep experiencing the surface‑level thrill of the unknown, instead of the deeper thrill of mastery.

Chance never disappears. It graduates. Master your current level and you qualify for the next level of chance, where the stakes are larger and the impact is greater. That is a richer form of excitement than the endless first‑date buzz of new projects.

Make boring your operating system

Here is a practical way to turn boring into your advantage. This applies whether you build new things or keep the machine running.

1. Pick the game. Name the one activity that moves the needle most. For a seller, it might be first meetings set with qualified prospects. For a founder, it might be weekly customer interviews or shipping one product improvement per week.

2. Define a core loop. Write the five to seven steps that produce that result. Keep it visible. Run the loop daily or weekly at a consistent cadence.

3. Create a drill deck. List the ten conversations, objections, or scenarios you face most. Practice one per day. Rotate. Record the lines that land.

4. Count reps, not hours. Reps build predictability. Calls made, proposals sent, demos run, interviews completed. Set a rep goal for each cycle.

5. Instrument the line. Build checklists, templates, and small automations. Not heavy bureaucracy. Just enough structure to make the right action the easy action.

6. Schedule the review. Same questions, same day, short and sharp. What worked, what failed, what gets changed in the loop, who is accountable.

7. Protect the line. Time blocks, no‑meeting windows, clear rules for interruptions. Make it slightly harder to break the loop than to keep it.

8. Use novelty as seasoning, not the meal. Assign a small weekly slot to explore a new idea. Keep exploration on a leash so it does not steal the week.

9. Set a boredom bar. When the core loop feels easy for several cycles in a row, level up the challenge on the same game. Bigger accounts, tighter service levels, tougher quality metrics.

10. Celebrate boring wins. Ring the bell for 30 straight days of the loop. Reward consistency in public. Culture grows where attention goes.

Subscribe now

What this is not

This is not an argument for dull work or grey offices. It is a call to aim passion at the right target. Creativity belongs in the design of the system, in the sequencing of drills, in the wording of the checklist, in the small improvements you discover through repetition. Your art survives, and it matures.

This is also not a denial of the buzz that comes with the new. The buzz has its place. Just do not let it run the calendar.

A word to founders

You can be a builder of new things and still respect the factory. In fact, you must. The founder who scales is the founder who can convert breakthrough into routine. The work evolves from heroics to systems. Your team cannot rely on your cape forever. Give them a line they can trust.

A word to operators

If you already love process, this idea is home. One caution though. Process exists to create outcomes, not paperwork. Keep your loop as light as possible while still being strong. Measure the result and prune anything that does not move it.

A word to the dopamine crowd

Endless novelty keeps the nervous system excited and the scoreboard empty. If you crave stimulation, do not create a new game every month. Raise the stakes inside your current game. The excitement remains, the learning compounds, and the outcomes grow.

Choose boring on purpose

Mastery does not feel like fireworks in the moment. It feels like Tuesday. Show up, do the reps, lower the chance, and then accept the promotion to a bigger arena where chance is larger and you are ready for it. That is how careers are built, how companies grow, and how pros are made.

Strive for boring. It is not the enemy. It is the doorway to your next level of success.

Make it rAIn, KG