Chapter 2: Building the Catalogue
5 min read · 1,035 words ·
The first version of my content plan was a list of topics I thought I could write about. It had thirty-seven items on it. About six of them were genuinely distinct ideas. The rest were the same four things wearing different hats.
That's usually where content strategy starts: with the illusion of abundance, followed by the uncomfortable realisation that you actually have about four things to say.
What I actually know
I spent a while trying to figure out what Sales Source Code should cover. The answer, it turns out, was sitting in twelve years of notes, proposals, and post-meeting debrief emails I'd never really looked at all at once.
Enterprise sales — the kind that involves procurement committees, multi-year contracts, and the sort of budget conversations where someone always asks for a discount on something that hasn't even been priced yet — runs on a small set of repeating patterns. Not "tips". Patterns. The same dynamics show up in almost every deal above a certain size: qualification problems, stakeholder mapping problems, commitment problems, governance problems.
Most sales content ignores the structural stuff and goes straight to execution. How to cold-call. How to write a follow-up. How to handle objections. That's fine as far as it goes, but it skips the bit that determines whether you're in the right deal to begin with.
That's the layer I know well. That's what I wanted to write about.
The content pillars
I landed on five. Not because five is a magic number — I tried four and it felt incomplete; I tried six and one of them was clearly just a subset of another.
Qualification. How you decide which deals are worth pursuing and which ones aren't. This sounds obvious until you've watched a team spend six months on a deal that was never going to close and could have been spotted from the first discovery call.
Disqualification. The active, deliberate version of the same thing. Most salespeople are trained to keep the conversation going. Knowing when to stop it — and being willing to — is a different skill entirely.
Commitment. Not closing. Commitment. The difference is that closing is what you do at the end of a deal; commitment is what you build throughout it. Micro-agreements, conditional advances, the architecture of a deal that moves forward.
Stakeholder dynamics. Buying committees are not a group of rational actors. They're a collection of individuals with different agendas, different fears, and different definitions of success. Navigating that — and I mean the actual mechanics of it, not the "build relationships" version — is learnable.
Revenue architecture. The macro layer: how deals are structured, how contracts expand or contract over time, how you think about accounts as systems rather than transactions.
These became the A/B/E/F/T product series — Qualification Razor, Disqualification Dividend, Confidence Engine, Commitment Stack, Revenue Fortress. The naming came later. The logic came first.
The first batch of posts
I didn't start with the polished stuff.
The first posts I drafted were ugly. Too long. Over-explained. Written like I was defending a position rather than sharing one. A few of them read like they'd been written by someone who'd just discovered that sales had frameworks and wanted everyone to know about it.
That phase is, I think, unavoidable. You have to write the over-explained version before you can find the shorter, more confident version underneath it. The good stuff is usually three paragraphs into the draft you were going to delete.
What helped was forcing myself to answer one question before drafting anything: What's the one thing I want someone to take away from this? Not the topic. Not the theme. The single, specific, stealable idea.
That constraint tightened everything up. Posts that had been trying to cover a whole framework became posts that covered one mechanism from one framework. That's actually more useful for the reader and considerably less exhausting to write.
Where Zo.E changes the equation
I want to be honest about this bit, because it's part of the story.
I didn't draft all of those first posts by hand. Zo.E — the ten-workflow automation system I mentioned in Chapter 1 — handles the generation layer. I brief it, it drafts, I approve or reject via Telegram. The good ones go out. The ones that miss go back to the queue or get killed.
The creative input is still mine: the angle, the constraint, the one-thing question. What Zo.E takes off my plate is the mechanical work of sitting down and producing a first draft from a blank page at 6 AM. That's not a trivial thing to remove. That's usually the bit that doesn't happen.
The practical result is that in the first two weeks of running the system, I had more approved, usable posts queued than I'd managed to produce manually in the previous two months. Volume isn't everything, but having something to publish consistently is the baseline everything else depends on.
What "the catalogue" looks like
Right now it's a NocoDB table with a status column.
There's a Posts table with fields for platform, pillar, status, and scheduled date. Drafts move through: Generated → Approved → Scheduled → Published. There's a separate table for article sources Zo.E uses when looking for things to riff on. Another for engagement opportunities — comments threads, discussions, posts worth responding to.
It's not glamorous. It's a spreadsheet with extra steps. But it's also a publishing operation that runs largely without me, which is the point.
The catalogue at this stage has about sixty posts in various states of readiness. A few are live. Most are approved and scheduled. Some are still in draft. The five content pillars are represented roughly evenly.
That's a content business. A small one, at the start, with no audience yet. But the infrastructure is there, which means the question now is purely about building the audience — and that's a different problem with a different solution.
Chapter 3 is about the design layer: what Nunlimited looks like, why it looks that way, and the decisions that went into it.
Ta,
James
Founder | Nunlimited
