Gotta put in the reps

A month into The National Lottery I’m standing in front of a wall with a roll of Blu Tack, sticking behaviours up one by one. The wall was already wrecked from old posters, and the Blu Tack was that grey, half-dead stuff that’s been in someone’s drawer since 2012. By then I knew most people’s coffee order and I’d stopped pretending every meeting had an agenda.

One of the behaviours was simple, we won’t win without putting in the work.

Four years later the lottery topped €1 billion in revenue for the first time. 19 percent up on 2019. Highest year-on-year growth in the company’s history. I was named Ireland’s Marketer of the Year. If you tell it like that, people assume there was a bit of magic in it, a smart team, good instincts, a few hits in a row. They don’t picture the boring parts but the boring parts were the job.

It wasn’t hustle. Nobody was doing sunrise emails to prove they had grit. We set a bar and we acted like it mattered. We studied. We practiced. We did the work.

We brought in legends such as Peter Field, Paul Feldwick, and Phil Barden to train the team. Not a lunch and learn where everyone nods while guarding a sad wrap. Proper projects that helped us figure things out, while learning what good looks like.

One day we spent a full day on story arcs using System1 data. We must have reviewed over 100 ads. We were reminded that the ads we marketers like are not always the ones that work. Rule number 1 - we are not our audience.

Roger Martin spent decades studying what separates good strategists from average ones. His answer is boring. They practice. “I have never met this mythical beast called a great natural strategist,” he says. “Great strategists have all one thing in common. They just practice.”

He tells the story of A.G. Lafley, one of the most celebrated CEOs of his generation. People assumed Lafley had some instinct for strategy. Martin dug into it and found he’d been practising since his twenties, in the Navy, testing decisions for years before he ever sat in the corner office. When people call it instinct, half the time they’re just looking at someone else’s reps.

There’s a version of marketing where you can coast on soft skills for a while. Good taste. Nice decks. Knowing the right people. Being sound in a room. It works, until it doesn’t. And it definitely doesn’t when a machine can make the deck, write the copy, and give you twelve options before you’ve finished the tea.

Jason Lemkin has a test for mediocre salespeople. Ask them what they’re really good at. “I’m a people person” they say, like it’s on their passport. Then ask them the toughest technical objections to their product. They don’t know. His verdict is blunt, “Being a people person is not enough anymore.”

Same story in marketing. You can be polished and still not add value unless the work is solid.

Lemkin watched a team at a company worth over $10 billion try to get AI agents working. Twenty people. Months of effort. Nothing. When he asked how much of the work they’d done themselves, nobody answered. “The folks that are lost today have never done it.”

AI will write you a positioning statement in eight seconds. It will sound fine. It might even sound good. But if you haven’t done the reps, you won’t know if it’s good or just clean. You won’t spot the missing bit. You won’t notice the line that doesn’t land until it’s already out in the world.

The smell for weak work comes from miles, not theory.

When the cost of production drops to nearly zero, the bottleneck becomes judgement. That wall of behaviours starts to make sense, not as motivation, but as a warning you can’t talk your way around. You earn judgement slowly, by doing the work.