The right playbook on the wrong ground

Posted on: 12 June 2026

A message reached me on LinkedIn the other day, the kind I know by heart. A single courteous line, straight from the handbook: how do you generate most of your opportunities? The question looks harmless, and yet it carries its own diagnosis of the person asking it, because it assumes that opportunities are the output of an activity measured in volume, something you grind, count in messages sent and optimise for conversion. Whoever writes like that is not asking a question, he is declaring his model of the world, and that model, given how the market I work in actually behaves, is simply the wrong one.

This needs saying at once, before the piece collapses into the usual complaint against cold outreach, because the problem is not that she sells by volume. Volume is a perfectly rational strategy across entire sectors, and anyone who despises it on principle has failed to understand the arithmetic that sustains it. The problem lies elsewhere, and it is more interesting. There are markets where volume is not merely less efficient but structurally counterproductive, where applying it does not slow you down so much as disqualify you. The distinction almost nobody draws is the one between markets of flow and markets of position.

In a market of flow the next client is worth as much as the last. Clients are largely interchangeable, the value of each is predictable and contained, and the relationship counts for little because the transaction exhausts itself quickly. In a context of that sort the logic of the funnel is impeccable: you increase the volume of approaches, you accept a very high rate of refusal and you do your sums on the large numbers. The person who says no today costs you nothing, because you did not need him and tomorrow a thousand more arrive. Here counting the messages sent is exactly the right thing to do, and whoever turns up his nose at it does so out of snobbery rather than analysis.

In a market of position the arithmetic inverts. Value sits not in the single contact but in the specific relationship and in the reputation that accumulates over time inside a small community with a long memory. Private banking, family offices, prime real estate, advisory work on complex wealth: these are all settings where the genuine decision-makers can be counted, know one another and talk to one another. In a place like that every miscalibrated message is not neutral as it would be in the funnel. It burns an option. The prospect who files you away as one more among the many who write never reopens, and that judgement does not stay sealed inside his inbox, it circulates. Volume looks efficient because it counts the messages it sends; what it does not count, because it does not even know it ought to, are the bridges it closes with every approach.

Here is the point that genuinely interests me. In a market of position the way you open a conversation is already the conversation. The handbook question asks for no information, it communicates a precise position, and the position it communicates reads more or less as follows: I do not know who you are, I have not troubled to find out, and I am contacting you anyway because you are a line on my list. The signal, in other words, precedes the content, and before he has even read what you are proposing the qualified interlocutor has already read how you moved, and the how tells him everything he needs to know about your grasp of his world. The filter is not the text of the message. It is the message as such.

I say none of this from a moral vantage point, because the person who wrote to me is doing nothing dishonest. She is doing well a job designed for a different terrain from mine. She has learned a method, and the method is sound; she applies it, though, where the rules are written differently, and there the move that is right by the book produces the opposite of what the book intends. It is the subtlest error there is, because it springs not from incompetence but from a competence out of context. To confuse a market of flow with a market of position is an error of reading, not of execution, and errors of reading are the hardest to see precisely because the person committing them is executing flawlessly.

I watched it happen once before, in an altogether different age. When cinema was making the shift to digital, around the turn of the millennium, a generation of salesmen arrived who treated cinema houses as they would have treated any other B2B account: list, calls, demo, close. Large numbers, an industrial approach, with no grasp of the fact that the market was made of a few hundred exhibitors who all knew one another, met at the same trade fairs and traded opinions on who was serious and who was not. Whoever came in with the volume playbook burned his reputation within a single season, because the first exhibitor handled badly told the others how he had been handled. Whoever came in understanding that he was speaking to a community rather than to a list built relationships that held for years. Same product, same price, opposite outcome. The difference lay not in the quality of the selling but in the reading of the ground.

This is why prickly replies to messages of this kind are a tactical error even when they are deserved. To answer with sarcasm, to explain why the question is wrong, to raise one's voice: all of it demonstrates that the message reached you, that it shifted your day, that you are an available recipient. Real distance is the kind that does not even register the blow. In a market of position authority is built by the accumulation of relevant appearances and by consistency of register, not by the brilliance of any single retort, and every time you stoop to the frame of the person who wrote to you, you are eroding the very thing that makes you worth seeking out.

I will close, as I almost always do, with a question that whoever sells by volume never puts to himself, because his model does not even permit it. How many of the prospects you contacted over the past six months would reopen the door to you today, were you genuinely to need it? In a market of flow the answer does not matter, because others keep arriving. In a market of position that closed door might be the only one that counted.