How To Know When Someone Is Ready To Buy

This is Part II of the Marketing For The Tribe series. If you missed Part I, where I break down why most audiences never buy anything and how to find the people who actually spend money, read it here. You don’t need it to follow this one. But it’ll hit harder if you do.

What do OnlyFans and The Church have in common?

Go ahead. Take a second.

Most people can’t think of a single thing.

One sells purity. The other sells pleasure.

One promises heaven. The other sells sin by subscription.

But peel back the moral packaging and you’ll find they run on the exact same engine: customers.

The same customers, in fact.

That’s the part most marketers never understand and the reason this post exists.

After trying to convert complete strangers into paying customers across many markets, offers, and price points, I learned one thing the hard way.

People buy according to the perceived identity in the moment they are purchasing.

Meaning:

What, how, and when people buy depends entirely on the moment, the context, and who they believe themselves to be when your offer shows up.

That one idea, if you actually internalize it, will make you more money than any funnel, any ad platform, and any copywriting trick you’ll ever learn.

Big claim, I know. I know.

So let me prove it to you.

Let’s say you want to sell an OnlyFans subscription for a young, female bikini model.

You’re in charge of getting customers.

And your boss says that you have to sell that subscription from the pulpit, in a real church, on a Sunday morning.

What are you going to get?

Crickets. And maybe a police escort. (***Don’t actually do this.***)

Now take the exact same product and offer it to the exact same people six hours later.

When people are alone, phone in hand, and nobody watching.

I bet you’re going to get an entirely different conversion rate.

Did the product change? No.

Did the customer change? Not really.

What changed is the identity the buyer was wearing when the offer arrived.

In church, that person shows up as devout, disciplined, accountable.

At home, same person shows up as curious, bored, impulsive.

Different hat. Different rules. Different wallet.

Treat the following sentence as a rule:

People don’t buy when you want to sell. They buy when they’re ready to buy.

That readiness isn’t about who they are.

It’s about who they are right now—mentally, emotionally, and contextually—at the exact moment your message lands.

The same man who drops a tithe in the church plate on Sunday morning might drop a tip on OnlyFans that same night.

What changed? Not the person.

The context. His identity shifted.

Sunday morning, he’s a believer. Sunday night, he’s a consumer of pleasure.

Same human being. Two completely different mindsets.

And most importantly—two completely different wallets.

That’s how buying really works.

It doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens inside specific moments.

And most marketers never think in moments.

They think in demographics. They think in “target audiences.” They build customer avatars and try to force-feed products to people who aren’t in the right state to buy.

Then they blame the ad. They blame the platform. They blame the funnel.

They blame everything except the actual problem, which is that they showed up when their prospect was being someone else.

The right offer, in the wrong context, gets zero sales. Every time.

An average offer in a perfect context, on the contrary, can be a home run.

That’s how it’s always worked. That’s how it’ll always work. And if you don’t believe me, let me tell you how I learned this the hard way.

A few years ago, early in my marketing career, I got a call from a founder starting a new project for his new company.

They needed a marketer. Great. I needed business.

The industry? Swingers.

Not real estate. Not financial services. Not chiropractors. Swingers.

Now, once you stop laughing—and you will laugh—understand something: as a young, ambitious marketer looking for work, I treated it like any other business problem.

I needed to know who the customer was, what they wanted, where they lived, and how to reach them.

So I sat in a conference room with the founders and started asking the standard questions.

Who are these people? What’s their age range? Where do they live? What do they read? What sites do they visit?

Silence. Awkward pauses. Polite smiles. Nobody could give me a straight answer.

And then one of the founders said something that rewired my brain about marketing forever:

“Well…it’s not like these people walk around with signs that say ‘I’m a swinger.’ They’re teachers. Accountants. Lawyers. Parents. They look perfectly ordinary. You probably know a few already…you just don’t know it.”

Right there. That was the moment.

That was when I realized how fundamentally wrong most marketers are about how people buy.

We think buying behavior is public. Visible. Measurable. Easy to categorize.

Slap it on a spreadsheet, build a lookalike audience, and let the algorithm do the rest.

It’s not.

It’s private. It’s hidden behind closed doors, in browser tabs nobody sees, in midnight purchases, in secret habits that no survey, no customer avatar worksheet, and no focus group will ever uncover.

What people do with their money reveals more truth about them than anything they’ll ever say about themselves.

These people—the swingers—had perfectly respectable daytime identities.

They put on their professional faces. Attended serious corporate meetings. Shook hands at networking events. Paid their taxes on time. Then, at night, they put on a different mask (literally) and spent money that reflected an entirely different side of who they were.

Now think about this.

We know some lawyers are swingers.

Now try to sell that crowd a swingers’ event at a law conference. You’ll get nothing.

Blank stares. Nervous laughter. Maybe a complaint to the organizers.

But take the exact same product to the exact same people in the right environment—after hours, private invitation, total discretion, the right signals in the right sequence—and suddenly you have buyers lining up.

What changed?

Not the offer. Not the price. Not even the person.

The identity. The context. The timing.

During the day, they’re lawyers.

At night, they’re something else entirely.

And any marketing that ignores that shift will fail. Not sometimes. Always.

That experience taught me something you’ll never learn in a marketing course, and something I haven’t seen written in a single textbook:

People become someone else in the moment of purchase. A different version of themselves. A version with different desires, different shame thresholds, different budgets, and different decision-making rules.

Your job, as a marketer, as an entrepreneur, as anyone trying to exchange value for money, is not to create that person. You can’t.

It’s not to convince them to become that person. You won’t.

Your job is to figure out when that person shows up.

And be there, ready to sell, when they do.

You can sell to saints and sinners.

You just can’t sell to both at the same time.

Stay tuned for the next part.

Talk soon,

Nick