I very recently had to quit my job working in the door-to-door sales division of a major company, due to no longer being able to work full-time hours. From the first day of training to the day I quit I began to notice that game and sales have a great deal in common, something that has been noted by a number of men in the manosphere. After having spent a little bit of time in door to door sales, I have come to conclude that while there is a great deal of overlap between them in terms of concepts, there are a few key differences.
During the induction process for my job, the company gave us a number of public speaking tests to measure our competence and suitability for the job, including a short impromptu speech about oneself and a number of mock sales pitches of random bizarre items to be presented to the group on the spot. My item was fluoro-green table tennis mesh. More than half of potential employees in my batch failed and were asked to leave.
The managers had weeded out those they felt were not confident enough to sell to other people. Why? Because just like in game, confidence is king. There is an extremely strong correlation between confidence and success with both women and sales.
One day during our training week, my boss took my group for the day and ran through the key concepts of sales. While explaining each of them he continuously referred to one example: chatting up a girl in a bar. He even briefly mentioned the term Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), something that I’d never heard outside of a game context before.
Since sales and gaming women were used so interchangebly, I began to realize how many tactics and concepts could be applied to both. One example being the classic sales concept of “assuming the sale”, which my boss laughably explained with the example of buying a girl a drink in a bar by opening her with the line “What are you drinking?” before getting two of that drink and having them with her. Makes me wonder exactly how much money he’s pissed down the drain on that move.
Building Momentum
Momentum is another key concept that game and sales share in common. In my job, sales were not extremely infrequent. The average employee made around half a dozen sales in a full time work week. As such, every time we’d get one we’d feel a dopamine rush that would get us into “state”. We’d feel like a boss and keep going at the job with more energy and confidence, netting more sales. As such the first sale of the day was always the hardest to make.
The concept of momentum is equally important in game, but is achieved in a much different way. On a night out, doing a few warm up approaches (even if they went nowhere) would be enough to get me into state, building the momentum and buzz to approach freely, similar to how you’d feel approaching after a few drinks. In sales however, talking to potential customers did not give me any sort of momentum. I only got my momentum through my successes and not the process itself, unlike game where momentum is achieved through both.
Speaking of alcohol, in the specific type of sales I did, at least everybody would chug energy drinks like no tomorrow for the job. I personally never saw the appeal of it when I wasn’t sleep deprived, but my teams reliance on Red Bull and Mother reminded me of guys using alcohol as a crutch to approach. My team would have one large energy drink at the beginning of the sales day and another halfway through, spacing their intake out like most pick up guys do with alcohol while approaching at night.
Building Prospects
One of the keys to direct sales is contacting as many people as possible. The more people you talk to the more likely you are to get a sale. A certain percentage of people you talk to will be the “yes customers” who want just what you’re offering and don’t even really need to be persuaded very much to sell them. This is basically the game equivalent of approaching till you find a girl that needs dick that night. It also takes more confidence and skill to convert “the maybes.”
Just like in game there is a direct correlation between the amount of effort you put in and your results. The more “contacts” you make in the day and the more you persevere with each one the more sales you will get. It really is a numbers game.
Building Value
The most common comparison people make between the sales and game skillsets is that between pitching your product and “DHV’ing”. There is a key difference between them however. The whole “sell yourself” mentality can be harmful in game depending on how how you go about it, especially if you try to logically “sell” yourself to a girl like you would with a product in your sales pitch, which not only fails to hit the girls emotional buttons and comes off needy as if you’re trying to impress her.
With girls it is ideal to flip the script, so to speak, and get her to sell herself to you and work for your approval. If similar can be done in sales I did not come across it, at least in what I sold.
Although the male salesmen were above average in terms of alphaness, I don’t believe their experience could easily translate into cold approaching if you threw them into the deep end. There isn’t any “approach anxiety” for door to door, and their experience in selling their product to strangers wouldn’t give them many transferable reference experiences to gaming. 90% of what we’d say to each potential customer is the same as what we had said to the one before.
While many of the concepts of sales and game can be applied to one another, the visceral experience of selling and gaming are very different from each other. A confident guy who can ramble a lot and command authority can exceed in both. Therefore I personally wouldn’t recommend getting a job as a door-to-door salesmen unless it’s temporary and your short on cash.
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