Ignore Dating Strategies / Adopt Sales Strategies

September 26, 2024

It is useful when two separate entities evolve in parallel. We can isolate variables as an abstract twin study.

Sales and Dating have similar dynamics, with an unequal and competitive distribution of power between buyers and sellers, men and women. Each develops evolving strategies for their position, which in turn provoke counter-strategies from their opponent.

To support the argument for these parallel systems, I would like to point out the similarities in media for both. In sales (probably the one you are least familiar with) you have an industry of dejected (often male) salespeople, frustrated by a lack of success on waves of economic activity over which they have essentially no control. They seek out gurus who will teach them the secret programmatic language to manipulate people into giving them money, using the social programming that almost everyone is conditioned by. *Salespeople abuse norms of politeness, social interaction, and coercion to gain opportunities with potential buyers.*

Example:
When you call someone and say hi, they are socially obligated to say hi back. They are trapped and this is used to move on to the next manipulative tactic. This is one of the most popular sales methodologies for a cold call (it’s called the up-front contract by Sandler) –

for example “do you have 30 seconds to hear why I’m calling you today?”

It would be absurd to position yourself as someone so important that you don’t have 30 seconds to spare, but once you’re locked into that “contract,” it would be absurd to time those 30 seconds so that the salesperson honors their commitment and you have no socially respectable means of resisting. You’re now stuck with a cold call that you can’t leave without violating a social norm.

In contrast, there are gurus who resist these manipulative tactics. They focus instead on delivering value, working only with excellent products, and making sure their own position makes it easier and better for potential buyers.

These are somewhat similar to the promiscuity of the short-term “Game” style dating strategy that seeks the fastest available access to sex, and to building a long-term relationship, the kind that is meant to find a suitable partner for the foreseeable future. This is the redpill/whitepill divide in dating.

In dating, men are thrown into a state of despondency by circumstances beyond their control (atomization, undersocialization, economic factors). They may self-improve in a long-term strategy with no immediate benefits, or they may use highly manipulative tactics for short-term gains.

Another common sales strategy is to send out hundreds of low-effort, copy-pasted emails in the hopes that you’ll find a buyer desperate or compliant enough to respond and give you the time of day (the spray and pray). You are essentially “monitoring” the market to find someone who will buy your product under almost any circumstances. We call this the 5% rule. With a very low level of skill, but some effort, any salesperson can close 5% of their business. This is essentially a “no-lose” business.

Unfortunately, the same is true in the dating world. With a very low level of skill, but a high level of effort, pretty much anyone can get laid 5% of the time. Some of this is due to (perfectly valid) promiscuity and availability, but I suspect most of it is due to compliance due to social conditioning, previous abuse, or bad timing. You find a girl who is recovering from a bad relationship, or a girl who was heavily socialized to stick to men growing up, or a girl who is in the midst of a mental health crisis.

This presents us with a number of problems for both dynamics:

variability

In sales and dating the variables are simply enormous. Any advice can be rendered non-transferable because success is determined by so many external circumstances. This allows for the highest form of survivorship bias, where the most objectively successful people in these fields are either aware of their good fortune and keep quiet about advising others on a grand scale (and thus any advice that might be helpful is hidden), or are unaware/don’t care and perpetrate massive scams based on their good fortune. It is a rarely noted but deeply disturbing reality that the people who teach salespeople how to sell are only selling to salespeople. Likewise, the advice of many of the biggest dating gurus is actually more effective at appealing to men (get the biggest muscles, the fastest cars, and the most money, three things most men love and most women are mostly indifferent to).

unfalsifiability

because almost any technique can work 5% of the time, doing something for a year will result in enough case studies to demonstrate enough anecdotal evidence to impress someone with minimal success. I can make 20 cold calls on camera and show you the one that went well. I can approach 20 women (on camera, unfortunately, almost always without permission) and show you the one that went well. Without a scientific standard of research, we are doomed to never rid ourselves of terrible strategies that don’t work, because almost everything works a little bit.

mutual and counterproductive frustration

Both sides of the dynamic will use strategies that degrade their own experience as well as the experience of others. It’s an arms race of enshittification. For example, men/salespeople, in order to maximize their chances of success from an interaction, will respond to rejection with objection management strategies to try to overcome the no. Women/buyers, exhausted from the onslaught of attention, will resort to low effort strategies like ghosting to stay sane and turn people down without having to deal with their objection management strategies. Men/salespeople get zero feedback on their approaches and so continue to do the same crappy outreach on a massive scale, frustrating the women/buyers they approach. The result is that women/buyers are overwhelmed by low-skill junk and have even less desire to put forth effort in return, making men/salespeople even more desperate and aggressive in their pursuit.

exploitation

This dynamic is ripe for economic exploitation and has created vast industries of platforms, courses and media to consume. This is partly because the people who are most successful in this dynamic are successful through their understanding of social dynamics and manipulative tactics, and this translates seamlessly into mass manipulation of desperate consumers.

utility

There is, however, a fundamental and useful difference between these two parallel worlds. Capitalism cares much more about money than sexDespite all the problems, it distributes resources where they are needed in order to collect more resources.

So there’s a real economic and academic effort to understand how salespeople can actually perform better. There’s excellent research on the mindsets and mannerisms of successful salespeople who don’t have the same skills or competencies in the dating world. And companies don’t really have ethical standards for privacy or have to give consent to be studied in the same way that sexual behavior is studied.

If these two systems are indeed similar and one problem can be solved, then many of the findings are likely applicable to the other system as well.

So I propose we look to the sales world for dating advice. Perhaps in a follow-up post.