Well well well…

We made it to #50 (not an April fools joke).

I’m not going to sit here and tell you I didn’t think we’d make it. It was written from the beginning.

We’ve got a great edition for you guys this week:

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There's a tweet making the rounds that says almost every purchase over $50 is an identity purchase.

Not a features purchase. Not a logic purchase. An identity purchase. Yes, even B2B.

A hard-hitting example: carnivore diet products convert 4-5x higher than generic fitness content. Not because the product is better. Because the buyer's identity is welded to the philosophy. Returning the product means abandoning who they decided to be. The psychology won't let them.

That's a different game than listing benefits on a sales call.

Here's where most sellers get stuck. They hear "identity purchase" and think that's a B2C thing. Lifestyle marketing, flashy cars, people selling a version of themselves. Sure, that's one version of it. But the same dynamic plays out in B2B software, commercial real estate, SaaS, and even high-ticket services.

Jake made this point on the podcast. He sold for a publicly traded software company, top three in its market. The reason people bought had almost nothing to do with what the software actually did. Buyers needed to walk into their board meeting and say they had the best data provider in the space. That was the identity they were protecting. The software was just proof of it.

Same thing in commercial real estate. His firm kept winning against national players because clients needed to be the company that hired local. It wasn't a price decision. It was an identity decision. And once they figured that out, the marketing basically wrote itself.

The tweet puts it this way: level one is selling to an existing identity. "You're a trader, here's trader stuff." That works fine. But level two is creating the identity and selling everything inside it. You don't sell a course about making money online. You build an archetype. You build a worldview. And then everything from the $47 ebook to the $5,000 mastermind is just gear for playing that character.

Most salespeople are still operating at level one, if they're operating at this level at all.

The practical question for sellers isn't "how do I use this to manipulate people." It's "what identity is my buyer already trying to protect or grow into, and does what I'm selling fit that story?"

Because when it fits, you don't have to sell as hard. When it doesn't fit, no amount of feature dumping is going to close it.

The lowest refund rates in the world belong to products where returning the thing means killing a version of yourself. That's the standard. Build something that fits that well, sell it to someone who already believes it, and you almost never have to "sell" again.

Worth thinking about what you're actually selling.