We’re taught from a pretty young age to go after somebody else’s concept of the American Dream. What does that look like? Money, God, Mate, Freedom, Happiness, Things. You can condense all these different aspects of the American dream into those six things pretty easily.

Like it or not, one of the first things we socialize to do as we grow is to make ourselves into a person that another person would want to marry, reproduce with – or at least date. A lot goes into that, and you prepare to be good at it if you can. You can’t go into the dating world just concerned with what YOU want, though many of us often do. You have to run down the list and be the kind of person someone actually wants to be alone with without running for the hills.

Are you hearing me right? If you want to date someone, you have to make a concerted effort not to be creepy. You have to make yourself trustworthy, pleasant to be around and worth somebody else’s time.

Because if you can’t manage to be any of those things for your date, you’re pretty much not getting out of the gate.

Sometimes you don’t get out of the gate anyway. You never get a second date. You might have done everything right – opened doors, been super respectful of boundaries, charmed your date into next week. But it just might not be the right match for them, the right time or just the right mix of ingredients, no matter how awesome you are. As you date more and more, you develop the ability to accept rejection as no big deal, because sometimes, “It’s not me, it’s you” is just the truth.

This is something that when we get to adulthood, hopefully we have some semblance of skill at. So why, knowing all these are basic life skills and simply part of socialization, do we have car sales folks out there that are just so darn oblivious of the similarities?

It’s simple:

Feel good. Make the customer feel good.

Open doors for the customer. Pull chairs out. Make a good impression. Act like your mama’s watching you.

Don’t be a creep. Do you know why car salespeople have such a bad reputation across verticals now and then? It’s because some of us, point blank, can be pretty creepy when we’re trying to get that sale. You know what I’m talking about. Don’t be creepy.

When you approach a customer, you’re not selling a car, you’re selling yourself as the right match. Because the experience you give should DEFINITELY result in added revenue for the dealership down the road.

Does all this sound like simple advice? Well, it is simple. But you’d be surprised how many of us are still just not getting this comparison.

So here’s a question for you to answer: Are you a good date, a simply okay date, an awesome date – or are you that person who gets an embarrassing bad-date article written about them and published in Cosmo?

It’s up to you.

But if you’re curious, we can let you know whether you’re a good date or not for your customer. In fact, we’d be glad to.