• You’re gonna love it! – How much will I love it? How are you measuring love? Comfort? Wealth? Stability?
  • You’re going to save a lot of money! How much money? Where will it go? What will we have to cut? Is it saved by efficiency, increased effectiveness? How are you measuring this?
  • It’s going to be great! If it’s gonna be great, how are you measuring greatness and how much greater will that measure be? Do you have an actual prediction based on something?
  • It’s going to improve your quality of life! In what way by how much and when?
  • America’s gonna be great again! What specific metric are you referring to? “When” seems or key import. So what era of greatness are we going back to? To what characteristics of greatness are you referring?
  • We’re going to earn so much money! How much? Who? Just the 1% or everybody?
  • We’re going to get a fair deal! For whom? What is the measure of fairness.
  • You’re going to have the best healthcare! Cheaper? Affordable? More effective? Efficient? Best how?
  • You’re going to have great jobs! What is a great job? By what measure or characteristic is it great? Consensus? Study?

Who talks like this? I’ll tell you who, specifically: people who don’t have anything. They don’t have facts. They don’t have indicators. They don’t have studies. They don’t have reports. They don’t have numbers, rates, values, trends. nada

Without quantifiable predictions how can we evaluate success? If we’re unhappy with the deal we got, the sales person can just backpedal, change the terms, make excuses, weasel, make new equally, ephemeral promises.

You’ve all seen it. Perhaps in a middle school book report. It was a great book. The hero won. They beat the bad guys. I liked it. How to tell me you didn’t read the book by not telling you didn’t read the book.

Let me tell you, folks, The Great Adventures of Captain Zoom — absolutely incredible book, one of the best, maybe the best book ever written. Captain Zoom, he’s a tremendous guy, just fantastic, moving faster than anybody’s ever seen, believe me. He goes places — outer space, downtown, wherever — very far, very fast. Some people are saying he even saves the universe. I don’t know, but that’s what they’re saying. The author? Genius. Really smart. Describes things better than almost anyone, maybe even better than me. The lesson of the book is very clear: if you’re a winner, and you move quickly — very quickly — you win. That’s what Captain Zoom does. Thank you, everybody.

Donald age 12

But you’ve probably seen it in a conference room too in a PowerPoint presentation. Sales are gonna go up. We have improved the customer experience. The team did great!

We’ve seen some truly positive momentum this quarter — really encouraging movement across all our key areas. The feedback from the field has been overwhelmingly strong, and our teams are reporting significant wins across the board. Overall, we’re in a much better position than we were before, and all indicators suggest we’re on a very solid path forward. The big picture is very clear: we’re making outstanding progress.

How much did sales go up? Percentage? Profits? Revenue? Did you reach more people? How many? You are winning. Ok, what did you win? Better position? Where is the position? How are you measuring it.

We can’t evaluate what you are saying.

Cut those people out. Anybody who can’t answer with specifics about how much, when, where, and how, is grifting you. Whether it be because of being ill-prepared, disingenuous, malevolent, or just stupid, it’s all the same outcome.

When I was in the US Army, this was drilled into us as cadets and junior officers. We needed to present actionable numbers for whatever metric we were measuring. Job completion. Soldier readiness. Tasks completed. When we wrote performance reviews for subordinates, we were to present quantifiable justifications for our “They are an outstanding NCO!” statements. If the person excelled in leadership qualities, not only were you to enumerate them, but present the quantifiable evidence of your evaluation.

During a critical maneuver, SSG Jones responded to an equipment failure within 30 minutes, coordinating with the supply section to procure a replacement and preventing a projected 4-hour training delay. SSG Jones conducted a follow-up with the equipment maintenance team within 24 hours, identified two procedural gaps — delayed updates to maintenance logs and insufficient operator refresher training on early warning signs of malfunction — and took full ownership of the issue, by scheduling extra training and log inspections. They submitted a detailed corrective action plan outlining five specific steps to improve equipment readiness and reduce failure incidents by 25% over the next quarter.

This format was drilled into us. I have heard on more than one occasion, “Don’t write me that flowery shit. It doesn’t say anything. I’ve got 128 excellent soldiers. I already know that. How excellent are they, LT!?”

So, here’s a little tip. Salespeople will appeal to our emotions to sell us something we perhaps don’t want or need for a price that we can’t pay. They are not appealing to facts or figures or data. They are manipulating us.