There was an interesting tweet yesterday from my good buddy @PUA_DATING_TIPS who said this:
On a deeper level, you are seducing every person that you meet to the concept of “YOU”. Personal branding that
@Troy7Laws frequently speaks about is seduction on a MASS SCALE.
Of course, he was right. ETS is a super smart guy, and he hits the nail on the head here.
‘Personal branding’ is seduction, it’s just a different form of seduction to the sexual kind.
Same thing with sales, same thing with copywriting (which of course will form an essential part of your personal brand business anyway).
Whether you are talking to a girl on a date in the hope of bringing her back home with you, trying to source new customers through email marketing, or playing the longer game of getting people to buy into you and your brand, the task is the same.
You must beguile, intrigue, stimulate desire and trigger action.
In sales there is a well-known acronym for this: AIDA.
Attention
Interest
Desire
Action
I learned it in my first sales job, and it’s remained ingrained in me ever since.
LONDON
When I moved back to London from Manchester in 2004 and read The Game I threw myself headlong into the city’s dating scene.
I would approach girls everywhere. It went on for years.
When I was working in one high-powered office job I would aim to get my first approach of the day in on the subway before arriving at the office. Most days I was successful. I would walk into the bland, air-conditioned office space having done something that (I’m certain) no-one else I worked with had ever done—introduced myself to a new girl, shown that I was interested in dating her, and got her phone number.
Even at the time people thought I was crazy. ‘Why / how?‘ most enquiries began. But the reason that I was so persistent, and so ready to take action, even on the commute into work, was that the sales / persuasion habit was deep in my DNA.
It was borne out, also, in the sales jobs I took on. Day and night I was chasing girls around the big, bad, anonymous city. Taking phone numbers, texting, being rejected, being accepted, getting laid, getting close-but-no-cigar. And so on.
Meanwhile in the office I was calling up prospects, call-after-call, one hundred calls a day sometimes, banging the phones, hungry for a sale.
The impetus is the same in both endeavours. And the structure is the same too (pretty much). It’s all about how you move someone from complete stranger (cold lead) > warm ‘prospect > ‘buying customer’
(OK, I’m being a little crude here, applying this to dating. But you know what I mean).
One way you get successful at it is through a high volume of approaches, or calls. Is it a numbers game? Well, yes, in the sense that the more numbers you put in the more likely you are to get a favourable outcome.
But in both cases, skill is also required—the skill of seduction.
Seduction is intimately linked to persuasion, of course. But it is more than that, too, since seduction suggests that an end is achieved—that the other party is seduced.
And that is vitally important. Because as much as you can go into reveries over the process (and don’t get me wrong, there’s value in doing that too), without getting to the end you haven’t really accomplished anything.
You need to be a closer, in other words.
So yes, seduction and personal branding have a lot in common. Both are ‘soft skills’, predicated on persuasion. But both require a ‘hard finish’, since both have a very definite goal in mind – a sale, or sex.
Gentlemen, always be closing.
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