🏢 Corporate Sales Strategy as Dating Advice
It's useful when two disconnected entities evolve in parallel. We can isolate variables like an abstract twin study.
Sales and Dating have similar dynamics, with an unequal and competitive power distribution between buyers and sellers, men and women. Each develops evolving strategems for their position, which in turn invoke counterstrategies from their opponent.
To make the case for these parallel systems, I'd point you to the similarity in media for both. In sales (likely the one you're less familiar with), you have an industry of dejected (often male) salespeople, frustrated with a lack of success on waves of economic activity they have essentially no control over. They seek out gurus, who teach them the secret programmatic language to manipulate people into giving them money, leveraging the social programming nearly everyone has been conditioned by. Salespeople abuse norms of politeness, social interaction and coercion to get opportunities with prospective buyers.
Example: If you call someone and say hi, they are socially obligated to say hi back. They are trapped, and this is used to get to the next manipulative tactic. Here's one of the most popular sales methodologies for a cold call (it's called the up-front contract by Sandler) -
e.g. "do you have 30 seconds to hear why I'm calling you today?"
It would be absurd to position yourself as someone who is so important as to not have 30 seconds to spare, but once committed to that "contract", it would be absurd to timekeep that 30 seconds, so the salesperson sails through their commitment, and you have no socially respectable means to oppose it. You are now stuck on a cold call you can't leave without breaching a social norm.
In opposition to this, you have gurus who oppose these manipulative tactics, who focus instead on delivering value, on only working with excellent products, on ensuring that their own position makes things easier and better for prospective buyers.
These equate somewhat to the promiscuity of short term "Game" style dating strategy seeking the quickest available access to sex, and to longer term relationship building, the kind that intends to result a suitable partner for the foreseeable future. This is the redpill/whitepill distinction in dating.
In dating, men are buffetted by circumstances out of their control (atomisation, undersocialisation, economic factors) into dejected frustration. They can improve themselves in a long term strategy with no immediate benefits, or they can use highly manipulative tactics for short term benefits.
Another common sales strategy is firing out hundreds of low effort copy pasted emails in the hopes that you'll happen upon a buyer desperate or compliant enough to reply and give you the time of day (the spray and pray). You are essentially "checking" the market to find someone who will buy your product under nearly any circumstances. We call this the 5% rule. At a very low standard of skill, but some effort, any sales person can close 5% of their business. This is essentially "unloseable" business.
More unfortunately, the same applies to the dating world. At a very low standard of skill, but a high level of effort, pretty much anyone can get laid 5% of the time. Some of this is down to (perfectly valid) promiscuity and availability, but I suspect the majority of this is compliance due to social conditioning, prior abuse or poor timing. You find a girl on a rebound from a bad relationship, or one heavily socialised to comply with men growing up, or one in the midst of a mental health crisis.
This leaves us with some problems for both dynamics:
variability
in sales and in dating, the variables are just plain vast. any advice can be rendered non-transferrable because the success is defined by so many external circumstances. this enables the highest form of survivorship bias, where the most objectively successful people in these areas are either aware of their luck and keep quiet on advising others at scale (and so any advice that could be useful is hidden), or are unaware/don't care and grift at scale based on their lucky break. It is a rarely noted but deeply concerning reality that the people who teach sales people how to sell, are only ever selling to salespeople. Similarly, many of the largest dating gurus advice are more effective in appealling to men (get the biggest muscles, the fastest cars and the most money - three things most men love and most women are usually indifferent about).
unfalsfiability
because nearly any technique can work 5% of the time, doing anything for a year will result in enough case studies that you can demonstrate sufficient anecdotal evidence to impress someone with minimal success. I can make 20 cold calls on camera, and show the 1 that went well. I can approach 20 women (unfortunately on camera, nearly always without consent) and show the 1 that went well. without a scientific standard of inquiry, we're doomed to never rid ourselves of terrible strategies that don't work, because almost anything works a little.
mutual and counterproductive frustration
both sides of the dynamic will engage in strategies that worsen their own experience, as well as the others. it's an enshittification arms race. An example:
Men/Sellers, in order to eke out every bit of probability of success they can out of an interaction, will respond to rejection with objection handling strategies to try and overcome that no.
Women/buyers, exhausted by the onslaught of attention, resort to low effort strategies like ghosting in order to stay sane and reject people without having to deal with their objection handling strategies.
Men/Sellers, receive zero feedback on their approaches, and so continue to do the same shitty outreach at scale, frustrating the Women/buyers they approach.
The result, Women/buyers are overwhelmed by low skill garbage, and have even less desire to provide effort in return, making Men/sellers even more desperate and aggressive in their pursuit.
exploitation
these dynamics are ripe for economic exploitation, and have produced massive industries of platforms, courses and media to consume. in part this is because the people most successful in these dynamics, are successful in part due to their understanding of social dynamics and manipulative tactics, and this transfers flawlessly into mass manipulation of desperate consumers.
utility
There is a fundamental and useful difference in these two parallel worlds, however. Capitalism cares about money a lot more than sex. For all its ills, it allocates resources where they're needed to accumulate more resources.
So genuine economic and academic effort has gone into understanding how sellers can actually perform better. There is excellent research on the mindsets and mannerisms of successful salespeople that doesn't exist at the same skill or competence in the dating world. Businesses also have no real ethical standards of privacy or need to consent to be studied in the same way as sexual behaviour.
If these two systems are indeed similar, and one can be solved, then many of the findings are likely transferrable to the other.
So I suggest we look to the sales world for dating advice. Maybe in a follow up post.