Always Be Closing (in Seduction, with Girls)

A ladies man who wants consistent romantic success adheres to one maxim: ALWAYS BE CLOSING. Because the man who can’t close is a man who can’t win.

As a tire salesman in my late teens, it took me a while to fully cement the lesson that I needed to always be closing. Even though in sales it is crystal clear that your whole object is to move the prospect into becoming a customer, I still felt gun-shy asking for the close much of the time. If the prospect wasn’t showing enough readiness, I might avoid trying to close at all. I did not want to be pushy.

Yet by the time I had a year of sales experience under my belt, I’d left behind my hesitancy to close. In the summer of 2003, as a then-intermediate salesman, I fully embraced the ‘Always Be Closing’ philosophy – and I turned myself into a resistless sales closing machine.

Singlehandedly, during my return to sales from a semester away at school, I lifted an underperforming store that hadn’t hit its sales quota in eight months into a winner. I sold so hard to everyone who walked in that door that I pushed us well past our July quota. If someone came in to get a flat tire fixed, and that person’s tires looked like they could use changing, he or she’d be leaving with a set of four brand new tires, or I didn’t know how to sell. The boss hadn’t thought that year’s exaggerated sales quotas were achievable for any month, but I handily beat them in July.

When I left the store to return to school the next month, mid-August, I made clear to the boss that I was leaving the store hundreds of sales ahead of where we should have been at that point in the month to reach that month’s quota. It was the rest of the sales team’s over-quota status to keep (or forfeit). Somehow, in my absence, the remaining sales staff sold so abysmally that despite the generous sales cushion I left, they nevertheless missed quota without me. That’s the difference a single closer on the team can make – versus an army of lily-livered non-closers.

You’d think I might have taken that same lesson to always be closing with me when I dove into seduction a few years later. For some reason, I didn’t. Instead, I had to learn the exact same lesson all over again the hard way with girls.

This article is for anyone who, like that young and naïve me, has yet to realize the importance of maintaining an unshakeable eye on the prize; an unbending, resistless drive to push ever forward toward the close – whether with sales prospects or romantic ones (though our focus in this article, given the nature of this website, will be on the romantic ones).