Rob Buckingham is building Per4mer, an AI coaching service for technical founders who sell to B2B customers. Buckingham's posts focus on sales discovery, qualifying deals, and preparing founders for calls.
Rob Buckingham is most useful for practical founder-led B2B sales discovery, qualification, and call feedback.
Best for
A B2B sales coaching company wanting a guest teaching slot on founder-led discovery and qualification.
Not for
A cybersecurity vendor wanting a sponsored series with guaranteed enterprise reach and published deliverables.
Key takeaways
Four months of friendly contact showed no budget; ask about real problem, ability to buy, urgency.
They repeated a call mistake days after noticing it, showing insight alone does not change calls.
Clarity beats confidence because buyers and messaging keep moving.
Check first: Confirm commercial terms, recent audience data, and how the Per4mer overlap is handled.
Main ideas
Friendship is not the same as a deal · Sales feedback only counts if it changes the next call · Clarity beats confidence because buyers and messaging keep moving
Rob Buckingham is building Per4mer, an AI coaching service for technical founders who sell to B2B customers.
Their LinkedIn posts focus on practical sales problems founders face: spotting real buying intent, preparing for calls and changing what is not working.
Their candid examples and emphasis on learning from actual deals make their work worth following.
Buckingham turns founder sales mistakes into concrete questions and habits.
In one post, four months of friendly contact reveal no budget; they use the experience to argue for asking whether a prospect has a real problem, can buy and has urgency.
In another, they describe repeating a call mistake days after noticing it, making the case for timely coaching, not insight alone.
Across the posts, they favor deal-specific clarity and feedback over confidence, generic advice or sales activity for its own sake.
Per4mer is the business context for these ideas, but the posts also give founders useful prompts for qualifying prospects and preparing for their next call.
Rob Buckingham writes about what goes wrong when technical founders sell B2B themselves, and the subject sits close to the product being built: Per4mer, described as AI coaching for founders doing their own sales.
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The recurring arguments are practical rather than motivational: qualify a deal before investing months in it, treat feedback as useful only when it changes the next call, and replace confidence with a clear read on what is landing now.
Each post starts with a specific moment from Buckingham's experience—a four-month relationship that was never a deal, a call where they talked too much, the night before a big meeting—and turns it into a test, a question list or a blunt instruction.
The fifth post recruits early users, signalling a priority to build alongside the first cohort rather than sell to a broad market.
Friendship is not the same as a deal
Buckingham's central argument: relationship-building can let founders dodge the hard questions a real deal forces.
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Is there a real problem?
Can this buyer pay?
Is there urgency, or will it drag?
Discovery means finding pain, not making small talk.
Without pain, a contact is just a friendly person who was never going to buy—and confusing the two wastes runway.
Buckingham spent four months "building a relationship" with a prospect through coffee chats, check-ins and shared articles.
The person never bought because there was no budget.
Sales feedback only counts if it changes the next call
Buckingham argues that founders face not only a lack of feedback but a gap between knowing what to fix and doing it differently in the moment.
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Enterprise reps have managers who review calls, spot patterns and remind them before a big meeting; founders have neither. Change comes from a reminder just before the chance to act, not insight after the call.
Buckingham talked too much on a call, knew it as soon as they hung up and resolved to fix it.
The following Thursday, they made the same mistake with a different prospect and realised only afterwards.
Their summary: "Learned it Tuesday.
Forgot it by Thursday."
A separate post describes advisors who could not see what was happening and deals that went dark without explanation.
Clarity beats confidence because buyers and messaging keep moving
Buckingham treats confidence as fuel that one bad call can burn away—and as fragile because the ideal customer profile, messaging and buyers keep changing.
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Clarity is the alternative: see which messages resonate now and where deals are stalling, so founders adjust rather than guess. It is presented as a design principle, not just a mindset tip.
Buckingham describes psyching up before a call, watching it fail to land, then spiralling over what went wrong—and repeating the cycle on the next call. The prescription is preparation tailored to the live deal: the product description, tactics for the deal's current stage, relevant skills and the right mindset, all drawn from CRM and calendar context rather than generic advice.
Build the product in public with the first 50 founders
A priority across the writing is recruiting a small founding cohort rather than a broad market, giving early users direct influence over what gets built.
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The stated audience is narrow and consistent: technical founders selling B2B directly or through partners. The offer is membership in the group shaping the product, in exchange for feedback and early involvement.
Buckingham opened early-access applications for 50 founders, offering a free 30-minute founder sales consultation with monthly check-ins, three months free followed by founder pricing, and direct input into the product. The post supplies the background implied elsewhere: two startups as COO, deals that went dark, CRM complexity that felt productive without being useful, and wins that felt like luck.
Across the five posts, the product moves from an early-access invitation for 50 founders to a described launch "in a few weeks" with a free Solo tier.
The pitch shifts from joining a design cohort to what the coaching does on a specific call the night before.
The posts have no dates; ask for the timeline to confirm the order of these positions.
How do you tell a real deal from a friendly conversation?
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This is the clearest statement of the qualification test behind the other posts, and the piece that speaks most directly to discovery and deal qualification.
Buckingham describes four months spent "building a relationship" with a prospect — coffee chats, check-ins, articles shared — only to learn there was never any budget.
The argument: relationship-building lets a founder avoid the questions a real deal forces: Is there a real problem?
Can they actually buy?
Is there urgency?
Discovery means finding pain, not making small talk; a friendly contact with no pain was never a deal.
It closes with "Fire fast.
Your runway won't wait."
For brands planning a campaign
Gives a teaching slot a concrete failure story, three qualifying questions and a blunt closing instruction — enough structure to run a discovery and qualification session without outside material.
Why do founders keep making the same sales mistake after they have already spotted it?
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This answers with one specific week and explains why the product exists.
Buckingham talks too much on a call, knows it as soon as the call ends, resolves to fix it, then repeats the mistake the following Thursday with a different prospect.
Founders do not just lack feedback — they forget what they learned when it matters.
Enterprise sales reps have managers who review calls and remind them before big meetings; founders have neither.
Change comes from being reminded immediately before the chance to act differently.
For brands planning a campaign
Supports a session or module on call review and coaching cadence, with a specific, easy-to-retell example of the gap between insight and changed behaviour.
What mindset does Buckingham bring to founder-led selling?
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This is the shortest route into the philosophy behind the other posts and the phrase at the heart of the product.
Buckingham describes psyching up before sales calls, then spiralling after a call that did not land and repeating the cycle.
Because ICP, messaging and buyers keep moving, confidence is fuel that one bad call can burn away.
Clarity — seeing which messages are landing now and where deals are stalling — lets a founder adapt rather than guess.
The post ends with "Clarity over confidence" as the design principle for Per4mer.
For brands planning a campaign
Useful framing for messaging, positioning or feedback-loop content, contrasting motivation with adjustments based on what is actually happening in deals.
This is the most concrete description of the intended experience, told from the founder's perspective on the evening before a call.
The post opens with the night before a big call: rereading emails, refreshing the prospect's LinkedIn page, hoping to remember what was said last time.
It then describes Per4mer connected to CRM and calendar, aware of the deal and meeting, and telling the founder what needs to happen in the call — the tactics for the deal's current stage, the relevant skills and the mindset to bring.
The pitch: this is the coaching enterprise reps have had and technical founders doing their own sales have not.
Per4mer is said to launch in a few weeks, with a free Solo tier.
For brands planning a campaign
Shows the product's current shape (CRM and calendar integration, per-deal coaching, free entry tier) and suits a campaign involving a demo or hands-on walkthrough rather than a talk.
Who is this for, and what stage is the business at?
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This post names the audience and current offer, alongside the personal background behind the writing.
An early-access invitation for 50 founders: a free 30-minute founder sales consultation with monthly check-ins, three months free followed by founder pricing, and direct input into what gets built.
The post also gives the background behind the writing — two startups as COO, advisors who could not see what was happening, deals that went dark with no explanation, CRM complexity that felt productive without being useful, and wins that felt like luck.
The stated target is technical founders selling B2B directly or through partners.
For brands planning a campaign
Identifies the intended audience and business maturity: an early-access group, not a scaled offering. Ask about reach and readiness before considering a co-marketing arrangement.
Buckingham argues that friendly contact is not evidence of a sales opportunity.
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In one post, four months of coffee chats and follow-ups led nowhere because the prospect had no budget. They advise establishing whether a buyer has a real problem, can buy and has a reason to act before investing more time.
Uses a first-person sales mistake to build a short qualification checklist, ending with a blunt takeaway: “Fire fast.”
For brands planning a campaign
A guest teaching session on founder-led discovery could use this story to show how to ask direct questions about pain, budget and urgency—and when to stop pursuing a weak opportunity.
Make call feedback usable in the next conversation
Buckingham describes realizing after a call that they talked too much, then repeating the mistake on a later call.
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They contrast founders’ lack of ongoing review and preparation with enterprise sales teams, whose managers can spot patterns and prompt different behavior.
Builds the argument from a small, concrete example, distinguishing knowing what went wrong from remembering to act differently in the moment.
For brands planning a campaign
A coaching or sales-enablement brand could use this lesson to show how to review calls and turn feedback into one specific behavior to try in the next meeting.
Prepare around the live deal and adapt from evidence
Buckingham challenges reliance on confidence and generic sales advice.
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They argue that founders need clarity about what is landing now, where deals are stalling and what a particular prospect and meeting require. Their posts connect that need to deal-specific call preparation and coaching.
Contrasts an appealing but fragile habit—psyching yourself up—with a repeatable focus on current evidence and the next action. In the product example, preparation covers deal stage, tactics, skills and mindset.
For brands planning a campaign
A B2B sales coaching company could teach reps to prepare for a specific prospect meeting using current deal context, then adjust their messaging based on observed buyer responses. This is a closer fit than a broad motivational session.
The only named business in the posts is Per4mer, an AI sales-coaching product for technical founders.
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Rob Buckingham says they are building it, and the posts promote it directly: an early-access application for 50 founders with a free consultation and three months free, a waitlist with a free Solo tier, and links to Per4mer.
The posts disclose no sponsorship, affiliate, partnership, client or investment relationship; ask whether any applies.
Buckingham also writes about having been COO at two startups.
Per4mer
Owned business
Buckingham says they are building Per4mer, described as AI coaching for technical founders doing B2B sales.
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Posts market it directly: early access for 50 founders, with a free 30-minute founder sales consultation, monthly check-ins, three months free and founder pricing after; a separate post promotes a waitlist and a free Solo tier at launch. Posts also invite the early group to influence the product roadmap.
Original disclosure
"That's why I'm building Per4mer.
AI coaching for technical founders doing B2B sales.
I'm opening the early access applications for 50 founders.
What you get: free 30 minute founder sales consultation, plus monthly check-ins; 3 months free; founder pricing after; direct input on what we build."
Rob Buckingham's posts are short, first-person accounts of selling as a technical founder, each built around one moment that went wrong and the lesson drawn from it.
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The clearest entry point is the post about four months spent nurturing a prospect who never had budget, followed by one about making the same call mistake twice in a week.
Together, they carry two arguments that run through the rest of the writing: establish whether there is real pain, a real buyer and real urgency before investing time, and treat feedback as useful only when it changes what happens on the next call.
Later posts turn to preparation: knowing a deal's current stage, the tactics that fit it and the mindset to bring, rather than relying on generic advice or psyching yourself up.
The style is direct and anecdotal, and most posts end with a mention of Per4mer, the coaching product Buckingham is building for technical founders who sell their own deals.
Both write about the divide between sales activity that looks productive and deals that are real.
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Buckingham's four-month relationship with a prospect who had no budget, and deals that went dark for no explained reason, sit alongside Sisay's list of forecast deals that "did not exist on Friday" — the resurrected closed-lost deal, the verbal agreement with no paper, the inbound demo forecast to close in four days. Both end with a blunt rule: Buckingham says fire fast; Sisay says a deal that skips three stages is a wish rather than a forecast.
Sisay writes about sales operations and forecasting, mostly in satirical list formats that ask reps and managers to recognise their own behaviour. Rob Buckingham writes first-person accounts of individual calls and deals from the founder's side of the table, closing each post with the coaching product in development.
Both treat the sales conversation itself, rather than the pitch or the personality, as what decides a deal.
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Stoltenow argues that reviewing a proposal live catches confusion early, surfaces who else has to approve and teaches the buyer how to buy. That matches Buckingham's insistence that discovery should establish pain, budget and urgency, not build friendly contact for its own sake.
Stoltenow focuses on proposals, negotiations and partner-led agency work, writing numbered lessons drawn from client calls. Buckingham focuses on early qualification and the founder's own behaviour, tying each post to a coaching product for technical founders.
Both write about founder-led selling and what must become explicit before it can scale.
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Sam's 90-day sequence for a first sales leader — auditing the knowledge the founder holds intuitively, running three leads through a documented process, then building partner co-sell — starts from the same premise as Buckingham's posts: an undocumented system and unexamined deals, not a shortage of talent, are the real problem. Sam's point that a deal dies months before negotiation and the CRM never notices echoes Buckingham's accounts of deals that went dark without explanation.
Sam writes structured playbooks for tech services firms and AWS partner ecosystems, with named frameworks such as the Minimum Viable Sales Process and CUSP SCORE, and addresses founders hiring their first sales leader. Buckingham writes shorter, first-person diagnoses of selling their own deals, aimed at founders who have not yet handed selling to anyone else.
The LinkedIn account shows about 1,020 followers as of October 11, 2026.
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That is a small, early-stage audience, so plan a guest teaching slot as a narrow, well-targeted placement rather than a reach play.
The posts address technical founders who sell B2B themselves; two of the five deal directly with discovery and call feedback, the proposed slot’s topic.
Two also tag healthtech and cybersecurity, signaling where Rob Buckingham is aiming the content.
Before committing, ask them for recent impressions, comments, and follower growth on the founder-led sales posts closest to the proposed topic, plus any audience survey or LinkedIn follower demographics covering industry, seniority, company size, and geography.
Follower count alone cannot show whether the audience includes the buyer’s target companies.
A guest teaching slot for a B2B sales coaching company on founder-led sales discovery and deal qualification is a strong fit.
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The topic is central to Buckingham's strongest material, not a subject they touch in passing.
One post walks through four months of coffee chats and check-ins with a prospect who never had budget, names the three questions relationship-building avoids (is there a real problem, can they actually buy, is there urgency), and ends with a teaching line a host can build a session around: fire fast, your runway won't wait.
A second post describes the companion lesson: a call where they talked too much, resolved to fix it, and repeated the mistake the following Thursday with a different prospect — the gap between knowing what to change and doing it under pressure.
Together, the posts offer a failure story, a qualification test, and a coaching cadence for a practical session without outside material.
Audience scale is small, but the need is a teaching slot, not a reach campaign.
The LinkedIn account showed about 1,020 followers as of October 11, 2026, and the posts address technical founders who sell B2B directly or through partners.
A narrow, well-targeted placement is the realistic shape of a win here.
Before booking, settle how to handle the overlap with Per4mer, the AI sales-coaching product Buckingham is building.
It serves the same territory as a sales coaching company: coaching for technical founders doing their own selling.
Decide whether to position the session alongside the product as complementary or address the overlap explicitly.
Guest teaching content can test the relationship cheaply, but the competitive angle should be a deliberate choice, not a surprise on the day.
No sponsorship format, rate card, media kit, or partnership inquiry route appears in the posts; every call to action points to Per4mer early access or a waitlist.
Ask Buckingham directly to agree the terms for a slot.
When to choose a specialist
A cybersecurity vendor wants a three-part sponsored content series with published deliverables, a fixed fee, guaranteed placement, and reach into enterprise security buyers within a month.
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This is a poor fit on three counts.
First, the commercial mechanics are undocumented.
Across five posts there is no format, rate card, disclosure, approval process, or partnership contact route, so a series with locked deliverables and a fee would need to be built and negotiated line by line.
Second, the vendor cannot verify reach or audience fit.
The account showed roughly 1,020 followers, but the posts publish no impressions, comment volume, follower growth, or demographic breakdown by industry, seniority, company size, or location.
Two posts carry healthtech and cybersecurity tags, but a vendor seeking guaranteed reach into a named buying group has no evidence to support that commitment.
Third, the business is at an early-access stage: the offer is a first group of 50 founders, with free consultations, three months free, and founder pricing after.
Co-marketing capacity, review turnaround, and sign-off are undefined.
There is also a content-format problem.
The posts are short LinkedIn posts, with no transcript, video, article, or longer-form work to build a multi-part series around.
A vendor that needs a series rather than a single session should look elsewhere until Buckingham's commercial arrangements and production capacity are documented.
A worked campaign example
A B2B sales coaching company wants a guest teaching slot on founder-led sales discovery and deal qualification. Here is one way to build it from the posts.
Shape: a 45-minute live session for technical founders who run their own sales, followed by a one-page qualification checklist the host can send to attendees and reuse in its own funnel.
Opening (5 minutes): retell the four-month story from the post — coffee chats, check-ins, shared articles, then the discovery that there was never any budget. Land the point early: relationship-building let the founder avoid the hard questions and feel productive while doing it.
Middle (20 minutes): the qualification test.
Work through the three questions named in the post — a real problem, an ability to buy, and urgency — and show what a founder can say to get an honest answer without turning the conversation into an interrogation.
Use the post's framing that discovery is finding pain, not making small talk, and that a friendly contact with no pain was never a deal.
Close this block with the fire fast instruction and what delaying it costs in runway.
Second half (15 minutes): the feedback loop from the call-review post.
Describe the specific week — talking too much, knowing it immediately, resolving to change, then repeating it on Thursday with a different prospect — and explain why a reminder before the next call works better than another insight afterward.
Give attendees a simple pre-call prompt: one behaviour to change, one question to ask, one signal to listen for.
Close (5 minutes): offer the checklist as a takeaway, plus one action — pick the deal in the pipeline that fails the three-question test and decide this week whether to stop working it.
Materials and follow-up: the checklist page, a recording for registrants, and a single follow-up note restating the three questions.
If the host wants a Per4mer product demonstration attached to the session, the posts describe CRM and calendar connection, deal-aware preparation, staged tactics, and a free entry tier.
Agree that separately rather than assuming it is included.
Before committing to promotion, ask Buckingham for impressions, comments, and follower growth on the discovery and call-review posts, plus any follower demographics.
Those numbers, not the follower total, will help determine how hard the host should push attendance.
Agree terms, format, disclosure, and any fee directly.
Askia Sisay is the better choice when the host wants the session to focus on forecast and pipeline discipline for a sales-ops or sales-team audience, and to open with humour rather than a founder's failure story.
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Two posts do this directly.
One lists the Q3 habits everyone abandons by Friday — CRM updates after every call, honest forecasts, personalised follow-ups — and advises keeping one habit instead of eight.
The other names the deals that show up in a forecast without existing: the deal marked closed-lost in February that is somehow warming back up, the deal with a good feeling but no paper, the demo request forecast to close Thursday on a four-day cycle, and the $80K enterprise deal whose first call was yesterday.
For attendees who are reps and managers responsible for the forecast, that gives the host material for a session on turning a forecast review into an evidence check, with a line attendees can repeat: if it appeared in the last five days and skips three stages, it is not a forecast, it is a wish.
The need is for discovery and deal qualification teaching, and Rob Buckingham's posts do not provide it.
They offer no qualification framework, no account of what a seller says to establish a real problem, ability to buy or urgency, and no firsthand founder-selling narrative.
Instead, they observe how teams behave at quarter end rather than show how to run or improve a discovery conversation.
The improvisational, list-driven format gives a host strong beats but fewer teachable steps.
Buckingham's posts describe a four-month wasted relationship and the three questions that would have ended it; Askia Sisay's describe the consequences of bad pipeline hygiene.
A host who books Sisay for a session on discovery and deal qualification should reframe it around forecast integrity and build the qualification half from another source.
Nate Stoltenow is the better choice when the host wants the session anchored in a specific late-stage moment a founder can act on the same week: the proposal.
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One post describes a client who stopped emailing proposals and started booking 25-minute proposal review calls, closed three deals in two weeks and saw the close rate improve.
It then names five things the call does that email cannot — catching confusion early, hearing real feedback, signalling investment, teaching the buyer how to buy, and surfacing people such as a finance approver who never appears over email.
The post offers a test founders can apply to their pipeline: if someone cannot give you 15 minutes to review a proposal you spent hours building, they are probably not going to be a good partnership.
A host who wants one concrete, repeatable change to how founders present and close deals gets it here, with a claimed result attached.
It answers a neighbouring question, not the need for discovery and deal qualification teaching.
Proposal review assumes the deal is already qualified; it does not cover how a founder establishes whether a problem is real, whether the buyer can pay or whether there is urgency.
The account is secondhand and anecdotal — one client's two weeks, with no reported volume, base rate or counter-example — so it works better as a tactic a host can test than as a proven method.
The second post is a podcast recap about an agency's RevOps partners and scaling fundamentals, useful for a session on running a services business but outside discovery and qualification.
Rob Buckingham's posts describe the founder's own failed deal and the questions they avoided; Nate Stoltenow's describes a client's successful change at a later stage.
For a session explicitly about discovery and qualification, that is the tradeoff.
MB Sam - Growth Advisor is the better choice when the host's audience is past the first discovery call and the session should focus on building a system around selling.
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One post lays out a 90-day framework for a founder's first sales leader: days 1-30, shadow every discovery call and map the implicit knowledge gap into a friction map of why deals stall; days 31-60, run three mid-market leads through a minimum viable sales process so the test is the system, not the person; days 61-90, set the baseline for partner co-selling and the next two hires.
Its organising claim — hiring a star into a broken system just creates a faster way to lose money — is a sharp frame for a session on why a founder's intuition does not transfer to a new hire.
The second post names two recurring leaks, the marketing-to-sales handoff and a CRM where qualified means different things to a rep and a CFO, plus the forecast confusion that comes with co-sell running on its own stage model.
A host who wants a structural, process-level session for founders who are hiring, and is willing to work through a framework live, gets more scaffolding here than from a single failure story.
The content takes a framework-first approach rather than showing the founder's own calls.
The need is discovery and deal qualification teaching; MB Sam's posts focus on documenting and systemising selling, hiring and partner motions.
The qualification content is a scoring method named but not explained in the post, rather than a demonstration of what a founder says in the room.
The posts are also denser and more jargon-loaded — implicit knowledge gap, minimum viable sales process, co-sell, shared pipeline language — raising the preparation cost for a live teaching slot aimed at technical founders who still run their own calls.
Rob Buckingham's posts are firsthand, from the perspective of the person doing the selling, and easy to turn into a session; MB Sam's sit further back, at the structural level around the selling.
For an audience of founders making their first discovery call this month, that distance is the tradeoff.