Sales is like dating in many different ways. This parallel allows us to look at dating concepts to get new ideas and clarity on how to sell better. That is what we discuss in this video as we go through a set of dating concepts that we can bring over to our sales efforts.
Background
Midway through my sales career, I moved into a new role selling SaaS software, and my sales leadership directed me to sell to C-level executives and business owners. This was a new shift for me, so to support the transition, I bought a book called Selling to Big Companies by Jill Konrath. It is a great book, and I highly recommend it because it offers solid tips for selling to senior leadership.
At this point in my life, I was fairly social, going out with friends a few nights a week. As I read this book about selling to executives, I started seeing parallels between women at a bar and C-suite prospects. Both are getting approached a lot and pursued by many different people.
I found myself converting some of the sales tips and concepts over to dating and approaching women at a bar. When I finished the sales book, I thought there was probably a book specific to dating where I didn’t need to do the conversion, so I went online and came across a book called The Game.
It was pretty entertaining, but it was more of a story about picking up women than an instruction manual. But this book led me to other books and sources of information with tips on how best to sell myself when communicating and interacting with women.
Through all of that, I can see many parallels between sales and trying to meet women. Just as I converted the sales tips to the dating world, we can convert the dating tips to the sales world, and that is what we’ll discuss here.
High Value / Low Value
One of the most helpful concepts I learned while learning about dating concepts is that you can put people and what they do into two categories: 1) high value and 2) low value.
An easy way to understand these two categories is that high value is basically strong, and low value is the opposite: weak. For any individual, their characteristics and actions can put them in one of these two categories. And someone’s categorization can change based on the setting or scenario. Someone who is high value in a social setting might be low value in a business setting, and vice versa.
With this model and tool, you can outline what a high-value person might look like in terms of characteristics and qualities in a particular setting, which can provide tremendous clarity on what you should and should not do. For example, in a social setting, a high-value and low-value individual might have the characteristics of:
- Has many options / Not many options
- Abundance / Needy
- Knows a lot of people / Doesn’t know anybody
- Confident / Insecure
- Gives value / Takes value
This provides a helpful tool for deciding what to do and what to say in almost any scenario, since every action can be classified as either high value or low value. This can help with your decision-making when trying to figure out what to do or what to say.
We can very easily apply this concept to the world of sales and outline what a high-value or low-value salesperson might look like:
- Helping to solve problems / Trying to sell a product
- Working many leads / Trying to find leads
- Abundance / Desperate
- Knows a lot of people / Does not have connections
- Gives value / Takes value
This breakdown can provide us with clarity on what to do and how best to communicate with prospects when operating as a salesperson.
Approval seeking
Another way that sales is like dating is with the concept of approval seeking. In the dating world, this is discussed in terms of how men can put a woman they want to pursue on a pedestal and view themselves as being at a lower level.
This can change when a relationship is established, but in the early phases, an example of this might include:
Her: “I love country music.”
Him: “Me too. Country music is great.” (Even though he hates country music.)
Thanks to the previous topic and tool that we discussed, we can now see how this is low-value behavior and will present you as a low-value man. You can fix that by first seeing yourself as the same level as the other person. From there, you can support that by being a more high-value individual.
This converts directly to sales because, in my opinion, most salespeople put prospects on a pedestal and are in more of an approval-seeking mode when performing cold outreach. This is most obvious in cold emails where salespeople apologize for bothering, saying they will be quick, ask if the prospect has seen their other emails, etc.
Disqualify
A very powerful dating tactic is to disqualify the other person in a joking manner. This is where the other person says something, and you disqualify her from fitting with you. Here is an example of this:
She mentions she’s really into country music:
“Oh no. This isn’t going to work. I can’t date a country music person.”
This is extremely helpful for reducing the other person’s guardedness and drawing them in because it is the opposite of what someone trying to pick them up would say.
This converts directly over to sales and is the sales takeaway. The sales takeaway is where you share a quick expression of doubt if the prospect is a fit. Here are some examples of things you could say to disqualify the prospect when performing cold outreach:
I don’t know if you are a fit or not.
I don’t know if those are areas that you want to improve.
I don’t know if you are concerned about any of those areas.
I don’t know if we can help you in the same way or not.
I don’t know if you are the right person for me to speak with.
Like the dating world, this can be extremely effective at reducing a prospect’s guardedness and drawing them in by creating curiosity about what you are talking about.
Social Proof
If a low-value individual is someone who does not know anyone, then we can present ourselves more as high value by giving off the impression that we know people. A tactic we can use to help with that is displaying social proof. Social proof is basically evidence that you know people.
In a dating scenario, you can display social proof nonverbally by talking with lots of different people in a venue. You can also create an impression of social proof by telling stories where you mention other people.
This converts directly into the sales world with the concept of name-dropping. This is where you mention other people you have spoken to or have worked with. This can not only make you appear more like a high-value salesperson, but it can also help establish credibility when you tell stories about current or past customers.
Abundance Mindset
One way sales is like dating is that it can help you adopt an abundance mindset. This means maintaining the view that there are plenty of fish in the sea, whether you are talking about people to date or prospects to sell to.
One way to see the power in this is to look at the opposite mindset: a scarcity mindset. In the dating world, this can pop up when you get dumped or rejected and feel crushed. They refer to this as “oneitis”, which is when you are more upset than you should be because you view them as “the one.”
This is a scarcity mindset, and it can make you more emotional than you should be, while also negatively affecting what you do, how you act, and how you present yourself.
This converts directly over to the sales world, where we might get upset about a prospect rejecting us or losing a deal. Or act in a low-value way with prospects because we are operating with a scarcity mindset.
You can proactively offset or avoid that by pushing yourself to maintain an abundance mindset. Some things you can keep in the front of your mind to reinforce this are:
- There are plenty of fish in the sea
- There are a lot of prospects that simply don’t fit
- Every no is one step closer to a yes
But the real way to create an abundance mindset is to have an abundance of options, leads, and customers. And the best way to do that is by building pipeline, and we will provide some ways to do that with the next concept of approaching.
Approaching
In the dating world, you build a pipeline of leads and opportunities by approaching women. This could be talking to women in real life, but it could also include meeting new people on dating apps.
And the way that sales is like dating is that approaching women is equal to performing cold outreach, like cold calling and cold emailing. From there, we can use dating and approaching women to get new ideas and clarity on how best to communicate during cold outreach.
This can help tremendously because the woman at the bar is similar to the executive or business owner that we are trying to sell to. The woman is being approached by a lot of guys, which changes the dynamic tremendously. This will make the woman more annoyed and guarded, and you should factor that into how you communicate with her. The last thing you want is to approach her and look like just the next guy trying to hit on her.
This converts directly over to sales where your prospects are getting contacted every day by other salespeople. Just like the woman at the bar, this will make your prospects annoyed and guarded. The worst thing you can do is sound like the next salesperson reaching out to sell something. Our full training program provides many tips to help with this.
Building Interest
One way sales is like dating is that in both scenarios, you need to get good at building interest. One thing I learned when diving into the dynamics of dating and meeting new people is that you want to build interest and attraction before moving to the next step: building comfort.
This was interesting to me because I was guilty of always jumping ahead in that process by going straight to building comfort. This often led to me ending up in the friend zone, and I immediately improved that by consciously focusing on building more attraction before building comfort.
This is similar to what most salespeople do: they skip ahead in the sales process and jump to the sales process step that we call “explanation”, which is where you introduce and explain the product you sell and the company you work for. Just as we can focus more on building attraction on the frontend in a dating setting, we can also focus more on building interest with prospects before we move on to explaining what we sell.
Don’t Be All About Me
A concept that is easy to see in a social or dating setting is that you never want to be completely all about me. If you have ever met or spent time with someone and all they did was talk about themselves, you probably know that this is a less engaging and appealing type of social interaction.
That dynamic also applies to sales situations, and the interesting thing is that most salespeople communicate primarily in an “all about me” type of way. They do this by using more of a product-selling type of sales approach by communicating in their calls and emails along these talking points:
This is who I am.
This is the company I am with.
This is the product I sell.
Do you need what I sell?
Can we meet to discuss what I sell?
If you agree, you can be less “all about me” by shifting the focus from yourself to the prospect. To make this shift, simply ask questions. Our sales message brainstorming process will help you to create an optimal set of questions to ask for your product or service.
Sales Process Steps
Another way comparing sales to dating can help us become better salespeople is by looking at the dating process. It might feel odd to refer to dating as a sales process, but we go through clear, common steps that parallel selling a product.
To demonstrate this, imagine matching with someone on a dating app. You would never message them asking if they will be your girlfriend (or boyfriend). You probably wouldn’t do this for a couple of reasons. First, you know that this would be ridiculous in terms of social norms. More importantly, you wouldn’t do this because the next step is to ask the person to meet up for some form of date.
You can see from this example how ridiculous and illogical it would be to skip that far ahead in the sales process in your DM. But this is actually what most salespeople do in their cold emails.
I receive between 50 and 100 cold emails and DMs a day, and about half of them close for the purchase by asking if I need or am interested in what they sell. This is like asking someone you just matched with to be your girlfriend.
The other half, to their credit, do close for an appointment. You could say these salespeople are using the correct sales process by closing for the date. But most salespeople close for an appointment to talk about their product, which skips ahead to what we call the explanation and skips the step of simply having a conversation.
What you want to do is use a sales process that is similar to what people use when dating. You want to close prospects by having a conversation where you can learn a little about each other and figure out where to go from there.
We hope these concepts of how sales is like dating helps provide you with new ideas for your sales efforts!
