A lot of men find the manosphere in search of a magic pill, they want a methodology or a solution for the problem of rejection. The problem of rejection can easily be formulated as “In order for a man to become sexually successful he has to risk and face rejection”, the fact of the matter is that very few of us relish facing rejection. It is to be gazed upon and found unworthy. This is what a questionable element PUA used to sell in their bootcamps, “If you pay $3000 and come to my bootcamp, you eliminate the risk of rejection forever”. Naturally this is tempting for men who are petrified by rejection.
However, it also influenced PUA in a negative direction. A product tends to be developed towards a certain market, and in this case it was men who were petrified of rejection, and frequently suffering from oneitis. The most frequent question I heard asked in the young manosphere started with “There is this girl” and ended with “How do I make her my girlfriend”. In essence, this is like saying “There is this company, how do I make them a customer”. Well, first off you need to have a product that can improve that company, then you have to get them to notice your product, then you have to sell them on it.
This may not always lead to success, but hopefully it leads to someone asking the question “Why are we working so hard to tailor our product to this single potential customer, instead of seeing if what our product already does can appeal to a much wider market who is dying to buy it?”
Yes, No, Maybe…
I’ve had to attend a lot of corporate seminars, workshops and training sessions through the years, but the one that had the most transferable content was a workshop I attended early in my career focused on sales. In my first ever sales workshop, the guy conducting it outlined 3 types of potential customers.
A) YES!
B) Maybe
C) Tell me about it…. but no.
In the case of Customer A, you don’t have to do much of a sales job, your work consists of taking their order and not fucking it up. These people love your product, they have heard good things about your company, have few if any reservations that are overridden by their desire to buy your product.In fact, if you say something negative about your product to this type of potential customer, they are likely to take the side of your product and defend it to the death. They are invested in your product, in their mind they have purchased it already and why do you insist on screwing that up?
In the case of customer B, these are potential customers who have a need for your product, but they are not 100% sold on it yet, they require a bit of sales, information and being taken care of. These types make up the majority of your potential customers if you have a decent way of filtering leads and they require a certain degree of “dexterity” to handle. Some require a harder sell, some require soft selling, and calculating it wrong can often crash the deal. If you hard sell someone who is really just looking for assurances and comfort building, they are likely to backpeddle. If you offer assurances and comfort building to a customer that just needs to be told “Why are you still thinking about it? This is a great product and we’re doing it!”, they are likely to interpret this as weakness or lack of confidence in your product.
Finally, there is customer C, these are customers who are never going to buy your product, but they really enjoy the attention of a salesperson being focused on them. Rather than coming straight out and saying no, they are “time-wasters” who want to keep you around to get attention, feel important and build their ego, but they will never buy anything from you. This may be a non-decider who just enjoys being treated like a decider, it may be a person who has a high degree of critical sense, and has picked another product already. In essence, for you this customer is a type C, but he’s a type A or B for another product. Alternatively, it may be someone who has no intent of purchasing at all, they are just pretty agreeable and hate telling someone no.
By now, I hope you can see that the customers who attended the late 90s, early 2000s bootcamps were largely a group of men that were constantly trying to find a way to turn the type C potential customer into a type C customer. When I tweeted the observation a gentleman replied to me that men are told that all women are type B customers, and never told about type A and C customers. This makes a certain degree of sense, because by making all women out to be type B, meaning that all men have a shot with all women it depends on them is a perfect way to drive productivity in men. It also explains why so many men fall into this trap.
The reasoning behind hard-categorizing customers in this way is that for a salesperson working on commission, spending a lot of time on type C customers when you could find customers of types A and B will never lead to good results. In the time it takes you to turn a customer from B to A, you could have found 3 – 4 A customers, in the time it takes you to turn around a category C customer to be a category B, you could have signed up a couple of category Bs and 10 – 20 category A customers. The key to successful time management as a sales person is therefore to quickly identify the type C customer.
Furthermore, one could reflect on it and argue that for each man, the proportional population of each category is different. For what would be themed an “alpha male”, a majority of women are category A potential customers, a smaller group are category B customers and very few are category C customers. For your average beta male on the other hand, it may be closer to a 33%, 33%, 33% split or worse.
Yes Girls, No Girls and Maybe Girls
The focus of a lot of PUA on turning “No girls” into Yes girls and Maybe girls, is logical because this is the situation that so many of their potential customers found themselves in, thus PUA developed products to cater to this demographic. A guy who is high value and thus keeps running into Yes girls, doesn’t really need to learn game. Men who are more aware of their investment are also less likely to develop a fixation on a specific “No Girl” and look for a methodology to turn her into a yes girl. However, the major challenge a lot of men run into is that they learn game specifically to turn a “No girl” into a “Maybe Girl”, thus they spend a lot of time selling and very little time closing.
This is why you get a lot of the LMR (last minute resistance) material, and similar material, because as everyone who has ever worked with a “No customer” knows, they are a pain in the ass to deal with. You spend weeks or months selling to them, negotiating contractual terms, the documents go back and forth with small changes between lawyers, and in the end they decide not to buy anything at the contract signing. Alternatively, if they sign, they will be on you to change terms, specifications, deliverables and timelines constantly. You’ll experience the exact same situation with a no-girl, the selling never really ends and just maintaining a conversation requires a herculean effort on your end. The best way to deal with a no-girl is the same way you deal with a category C customer, force them to make a clear decision and act accordingly. Escalate fast, and directly forcing them to play their hand, once you get the no, forget about the interaction and move on. This minimizes the time you waste.
Despite my general disdain for a certain style of movie, I do find the trope of “Guy lusting after no girl for 90% of the movie only to discover that he had a yes girl sitting next to him for all that time”, very entertaining because it’s so typical of a certain type of man. Attention is the currency of girl world, and unless there is a massive SMV gap, or a very bad context, a “No Girl” is perfectly happy to court the attentions of men she would never sleep with. You can generally differentiate a “No Girl” from a Maybe Girl because the Maybe-girl invests in the conversation as long as you keep it interesting to her, with a No Girl, you will generally have to carry the entire conversation, meaning it’s very one-sided.
Yes Girls are usually quite straight-forward to differentiate from “No girls” in that they will actively work to keep the conversation going when there is a lull. You also have a bigger margin of error with Yes Girls. If a conversation with a “No Girl” is like balancing across a flaming tight-rope with axes swinging, a conversation with a yes girl is like driving down quiet country road. She will invest in the conversation, respond positively most of the time and offer you conversational threads if she senses you struggling.
Maybe girls are perhaps the most difficult to differentiate at times, and I suspect this is because they vacillate more than the other two. They may throw you a rope one time and not the next, they may appear cold and standoffish one moment, bubbly the next and so on. Escalation and forcing a decision is often a decent move in this case, because if you are dealing with a “No girl” it’s better to eject before you spend too much time, whereas if you’re dealing with an actual maybe girl it’s useful to know if she is leaning yes or no.
Summary and Conclusions
If one were to boil down the two major areas of struggle many men who find the red pill share, fixations with no-girls and avoidance of rejection would be the two I’d argue end up on the top. Many men would rather invest a lot of time playing friends with a “No Girl” than going out and looking for new leads. This is also the selling point of the blue pill fantasy, and the strategy behind the production of Beta Males, that eventually the “No Girl” will hit the wall and need a Beta provider to take her off the lot, and eventually the Beta male will get his unicorn.
However, the fact of the matter is that as any person who has worked in sales will tell you, chasing customers takes away from closing customers who are chasing you. It’s much easier to close a customer who starts off at a position of being interested in buying your product, because they are much less likely to have second thoughts and won’t need you to convince them to “buy in” again when you’re ready to sign the contract.
A note:
I recently launched a Patreon page where I will be posting additional content every month for those who support me and I will do a Google Hangout for the highest tier Patrons (limited to 10 people).
I’ve also had some requests for consults, which I’ve declined up until now, but due to demand I’ve chosen to open up for doing some consults on request. For details please check out my Consulting and Patreon Page
As always you can buy my book Gendernomics at Amazon.com as both paperback and Kindle
I’ll be live with the Red Man Group at 1 PM est with Rich Cooper at 1 PM EST
