Those of you who read my essay on doing some AB testing on Tinder, will know that I’m quite a recent adopter of online dating apps. I did try some of the sites back in 2007 or 2008, but found it to be quite a wrenched hive of scum and villainy. I’ve always been more partial to day game, social circle game or night game as methods for meeting women, because you can screen your targets much more effectively, so fatfishing is more or less non-existent in those forms of game prior to 2 am at the bar when all bets are off.
The thing I’ve found is that styles of game are a lot like workout routines, people find one they like, stick with it, defend it zealously and regard anyone who has a different routine as having it just to insult them. I’ve always found this to be a rather non-pragmatic approach both to training and game.
I tend to take the approach that you should learn as much as you can, test as much as you are able and keep what is useful. To use an example I’ve got a weight training program and I have a body weight training program, I prefer the former but I use the latter for active recovery, rehabilitation after injury and when I’m unable to access a gym.
Breaking Down the Sales Funnel
In a bigger picture sales funnel, you would have awareness, interest, interaction, decision and action as the phases. In the sales funnel I use later, we start at the decision and action stage, which is after the part most men struggle with, namely lead generation. The awareness stage can be broken down in two general ways. The first is where your potential customer becomes aware of a need, for instance when I discovered that the place I’m staying in right now doesn’t have a corkscrew, and I had a bottle of good wine I was planning on drinking. The second is where a customer becomes aware of the product through marketing.
Once the customer is aware of either the need or the product, they move into the interest stage, this is where they do their research on the product, think about if they really need it, which product to get and various others. Sometimes the interaction happens during the interest stage, in other cases it can happen after and in some cases it can even happen in the awareness stage. This initial interaction is when the company becomes aware of the customer as a lead (a potential customer) and the initial interaction determines if the customer drops out of the funnel at this stage or becomes a prospect (someone the company needs to follow up with to close the sale), at this stage we move into the sales funnel.
The generic 7 step sales funnel I usually use after a lead is solid consists of initial contact, qualification, develop solution, presentation, evaluation, negotiation and closing. The initial contact when it comes to game is your first approach, online, in day game or night game. The qualification is when you’re trying to determine if she is interested and willing to move forward, I call this the “Do you have a boyfriend?” stage. The qualification stage is when you’re calibrating your pitch to her, Krauser had a good example of this in one of his field reports where he determines if the girl is more “r-selected” or “k-selected”, when he figures it out he knows which DHV stories to use for her.
The develop solution and presentation stages build on the preceding stages, what you know about her and the vibe determines which pitch you run, in day game this can be insta-date or take her contact info and work it out later. Once you have her on the date, if you try to take her home the same night or push it to date two. The most classic example of the evaluation and negotiation stages is LMR (Last Minute Resistance) where the girl gives you all the classics “I’ve never done this before“, “I never do this“, “This is not me” and so on. Then there is the closing, which is fairly self explanatory.
In a typical day game sales funnel, every girl who walks past you is a potential lead, where you determine if this is a prospective customer or not. Once you approach, you have the point of initial contact (the open) and then qualification (building interest). Once interest is there, you need to figure out whether you want to take her on an insta-date, get her contact info, or schedule a date later that day or week. This is the develop solution and presentation stage, where you pitch the next step to the customer (the girl), she evaluates and negotiates with you and you close the deal for either the insta-date, the number close or the date later. Then once you’re on that date, you proceed from develop-solution to closing again.
Every style of game has a bottleneck at some point in the sales funnel. Day game is great for lead generation on a busy street in a major metropolitan area, you will have hundreds if not thousands of potential leads pass you every day. However, the bottleneck comes in the qualification and develop solution stage, as you don’t know if the girl is in the market for your product, if she’s a tourist who is on her way to the airport to leave or various other things which make her a false lead.
Night game is great for lead generation in an area with a lot of bars and clubs, but you have a narrow window to get those leads. It depends a bit on the culture where you run game, and your social situation, an event promoter in Vegas will have plenty of leads generated, a person who has to get up at 5 am Monday through Friday to get to work, and has to be sober for at least 12 hours before work, not so much. So, lead generation can be a bottle neck in night game, but you can also run into problems in the later end of the sales funnel, especially with evaluation, negotiation and closing with her friends showing up and putting her in a cab, and so on.
Online game is great up until the closing stage (setting the date to meet up), because you can run many conversations in parallel, you can run sales towards as many customers as you are able at the same time. The bottle neck in online game is in the close (getting the girl out on the date), and the logistics of handling multiple customers eager to close.
Social circle game is great in that you have a lot of the initial stages of the sales funnel already done, and you can focus on evaluation, negotiation and closing. The bottle neck in social circle game is that sooner or later you get a reputation as “that guy”, which can work in your advantage to some extent, if you’ve slept with 3 out of 4 girls in a group of friends, odds are you will sleep with the 4th if you try just because she’s curious. There is also a limitation on how many leads you can generate, so I tend to think of social circle game as something more practical if one is looking for some form of longer term thing.
Summary and Conclusions
The biggest weakness in every style of game is time wasting, whether this is the girl who spends the whole night grinding on you at the club, then when you try to take her home she says “Oh I have a boyfriend” and runs out. Or the girl you hit on with day game, who laughs and enjoys the attention, then drops “Oh, I’m here on vacation, I’m on my way to the airport now” when you try to set up the date. The girl you spend a few days chatting with in text who then suddenly go dark on you, or who flakes on the date.
One of the major buzzwords in business these days is “omnichannel sales” what this breaks down to is seamless integration between different customer facing interfaces. Instead of communicating and serving in parallel the goal is for these channels to work together, and blend together seamlessly. A customer can check out a piece of clothing at a fair, try it on in the brick and mortar store, buy it online, and return it to any location the company has.
We’ve always used a sales style vernacular when describing game, and I view the various styles as being more complimentary than anything else. They often flow into each other as well, for instance, the classic day game instant date often starts as a typical day game open, then bounce to a second location such as a coffee shop, then to a place with alcohol, and finally back to a private location. This transitions from day game to more pseudo night-game as the date progresses.
This is also how I’ve come to conceptualize efficacy in game, namely omnichannel game. If you have day game skills, you can use them as you go through your daily life, whether that means the girl sitting next to you on the plane, the girl at the grocery store, or the girl walking towards you on a busy street. While you’re doing day game or night game have an app like Happn on your phone, to have all the girls near you who also have the app pop up the next day on your phone. If you have night game skills, and the girl from Tinder flaked on the date and you’re already at a bar, use your night game skills.
This gets around the biggest weakness in day and night game, which is that you can can only have a few conversations in parallel at best using those styles. While also giving you a buffer against the biggest weakness in online game, namely flaking. You can swipe on Tinder while you’re in the office to generate leads for later, and if the girl off the app flakes, you run day game or club game since you’re out anyway. These are not competing styles, in the same way that body weight training and weight training are not competing styles, they are complimentary to each other.
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
