Vibes, Vision & Values Activate Better Buyers

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Quick History Lesson

Hill → Carnegie → Ziglar → Oglivy → Rohn → Robbins  → Abraham → Kennedy → Popeil → Rudl → Brunson → Hormozi

That is basically an abbreviated timeline of modern marketing from the start of the 1900s to today. These guys (sadly - all guys - I have to expand the limits of my marketing pantheon - geez), took some nugget from the people that came before, remixed it with some modern sensibilities, called it new, and influenced the way marketing worked.

Today’s marketing marvel, Alex Hormozi, is extraordinary - he just sold 83 quintillion dollars of his latest book, $100mm Money Models, in 1 day. That’s amazing - it is a Guinness Book of World Records record.

You ought to be able to just buy one, or all, of their books and be able to have at least a 32 quintillion dollar cash influx, right? Seems like it oughta be the case, right?

The Success Leaves Clues Conundrum

I don’t know who said it first, but I first heard Tony Robbins, the motivational giant (seriously, he is 6’ 6” tall or something), say “Success leaves clues.” All you have to do is study what the successful people have done, do that, and you are in for the same deliciously wealthy fate.

It’s true. Success does leave clues, and as Russell Brunson is so fond of saying, “you can ethically hack” anyone’s approach and make it your own. Here is the conundrum - and it is a killer - the “funnel hacking” ethos that has driven the digital marketing boom of the last 25 years doesn’t work like the gurus say it does, in general. Almost all of these marketing luminaries (with the exception of David Oglivy - who built his career as an agency marketer) have been selling themselves. They have been selling their insight, their process, their powers of persuasion largely (but not solely) to individuals or very small companies. Basically, all of these mavens have sold to others that want a personal improvement or transformation.

When you try to scale this “hook, story, offer” or “hero’s journey” selling to an audience where the goal isn't to make the reader rich, or attractive, or thin, things tend to fall apart.

T let’s your day leave clues - I am SO curious what it would be like to know exactly WTF I present myself as all day long…

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The Hero’s Journey Flails & Fails

You’ve all heard of The Hero’s Journey. From The Epic of Gilgamesh to The Odyssey, it’s the story of a hero who overcomes impossible odds to triumph. (Sorry for the #booknerd talk - I used to be an English teacher, if you can believe that…)

In today’s marketing, that story gets recycled as the rags-to-riches founder pitch:

I’ll be honest, I’ve bought into plenty of that stuff. Some of it works. I’ve even used those elements in my own business. But this kind of emotional storytelling lives on the edge of truth. It’s powerful because it touches fear, desperation & desire. It’s ripe for manipulation because it touches fear, desperation & desire.

When done well, it can move people from interested to buyer. But it doesn’t fit most businesses. Most buyers aren’t in crisis. They’re not gambling their last $200 or chasing overnight riches. They’re making decisions inside organizations, balancing ROI, risk, and priorities.

That’s why The Hero’s Journey often falls apart in B2B and agency sales. The emotional triggers just don’t match the reality of how business decisions get made.

It Falls Apart When Technique & Decision Making Aren’t Aligned

There was a time when every agency owner’s favorite discovery question was: “What keeps you up at night?”
If you’re selling to a true owner-operator, maybe you can fix the thing that’s wrecking their sleep.

But in most cases, you’re not selling into desperation, so your technique and the buying triggers aren’t aligned.

Selling to a business (even when it looks like you’re selling to one person) means you’re selling to multiple roles inside their head:

• The CFO who cares about cost.

• The Ops manager who cares about efficiency.

• The CRO who cares about growth.

That’s not someone who’s going to buy a “last $200 → $43,000 overnight” rags-to-riches story. Those strings don’t pull in B2B.

You still need emotion, but the kind tied to trust, alignment, and confidence, not desperation.

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Vibes, Vision & Value/s

Vibes

Every time you show up—podcast, webinar, LinkedIn rant—you’re giving off a vibe. And if you’re the founder, that vibe is basically the brand.

Unlike the “hero’s journey” pitch that preys on desperation, your job isn’t to play savior. It’s to create alignment:

• Do I like these people?

• Do I belong with them?

• Do they belong with me?

Most agencies sanitize themselves as to not push anyone away. They scrub off ALL the rough edges → the very stuff that makes them interesting. The result? A soulless blob of a business. It might feel safe, but you know what boring is in marketing? It’s a business that in UNALIGNABLE.

Vision

If vibes are who you are now, vision is who you’re becoming. Buyers don’t just want a vendor for this quarter, they want a traveling companion into the future.

And here’s the freakin’ cool thing…your vision doesn’t even have to be right. If you thought that Web 3 was the future of money & marketing or that when Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.3B it was a steal (WordPress owner Auttomatic bought it for under $30mm a few years later) and your banging that drum with a funky beat, people still lined up to listen to you, because they believed in the way you were thinking forward.

What buyers want is a Wilbury, a traveling companion who sees the road ahead the way they do.

Value/s

Values come in two flavors:

1. Qualitative values (how you act):

• Do you treat people well?

• Are you educators, nurturers, or “get-shit-done” killers?

• What’s it feel like to spend time with you?

2. Quantitative values (what you deliver):

• How do you think about value for money?

• How do you balance growth vs. profit?

• Can you make your clients smarter about their customers, products, or market?

Values don’t have to be about ROAS or stuff that people figure out in gasp - speadsheets. Some of the most powerful ones are softer - like clarity on who a prospect’s ICP is, or isn’t, or a data stream that helps a client understand why one approach worked on one segment of their list, but not all segments. Empiric value doesn’t have to be about numbers per se - it’s just value that can be measured.

The Point

→ The Hero’s Journey selling pulls heartstrings with desperation.
→ Vibes, Vision, and Values creates something better - alignment.

Alignment is what makes prospects get close enough to become buyers. They come closer not because you are the only thing that can save them, but because you are a market entity that feels SAFE to them.

Let's Get The Vibes Happening

No shade on Hormozi, Brunson, or Hill…those guys were/are geniuses. But their lessons were largely designed for selling personal transformation, not for selling into complex B2B or agency contexts. So here’s how we help you skip the Bohemian Rhapsody selling (you know, “…I'm just a poor boy..”)

1. VIBES

Take a gander at everything you’ve put into the market recently…cold emails, LinkedIn posts, sales decks, proposals, whatever…

• Are there VIBES? Or sanitized, generic, and safe 🤮

• What’s the feeling you want prospects to have?

Action: Figure out WTF your vibe is and get it out into the public 3x this week.

2. VISION

The market is unstable. There’s AI shifts, privacy fights, platforms rising and dying. Nobody knows what’s next, but your clients want to know what you see coming.

Action: Take a beat, think ahead and say something that you THINK is gonna happen in the world of marketing, or tech, or your ICP’s world. Dammit, say it twice - out loud - to someone in your market. (You get a gold star if you are afraid they are gonna disagree…)

3. VALUES

Clients don’t just buy the ore that comes out of your digital mine, they buy the ways that you act (your values) and how you measure value.

Action: Take a freakin’ stand and talk about how you treat your team, or your clients, or your dog…show what matters to you. Then stop talking about measurements (ROAS or CvR) and start talking about how and why you measure specific things. Don’t just share the metric - share the meaning & importance of the metric. Dork out on your blog for 40 minutes - that’s a sales enablement piece that shows how you think of value.

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The 3Vs → Visibility & Vitality

When you lead with Vibes, Vision, and Values, you make yourself visible and you create market vitality to the right buyers. This isn’t an alliterative array of marketing tricks, they’re the truth of who you and your team are, made public.

Action Step: Book a working session with me.

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Big Events Coming Up:

INBOUND - The HubSpot love in is taking place in SF for the 1st time this year. Usually INBOUND is a staid, boring Boston-style marketing bacchanal. Maybe SEO, spam & high subscription costs will get a shill West Coast vibe?

AWE-DROPPING IPHONE EVENT: Tim Apple (he of the golden bribe to DJT - no way that 24k ingot hasn’t been melted down yet and turned into Trump coins or whatever Ponzi scheme is spewing from Pennsylvania Avenue this week), well, anyway, Tim Apple and his crew are unleashing the iPhone 17 Barely There Air or something.

CONTENT MARKETING WORLD: Robert Rose, Guy Raz and a bunch of really talented people are gonna flap their gums at you to help you think of ways to make SaaS accounting platforms, corporate re-insurance and AI-powered amortization tables REALLY interesting. (Note, it’s a really good conference…no shade, just snark.)

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