Coming up in this post: I give a review and summary of Ryan Serhant’s book, Sell It Like Serhant. As you go through this post, you’ll probably notice:

• Some of his sales advice can be extrapolated into general wisdom for life.
• But other advice he gives is really only pertinent to salespeople (hence the name of the book).

Sell It Like Serhant’s Summary On Hard Work

Serhant’s talk of hard work is like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s speech about how “While you’re out there partying, horsing around, someone out there at the same time is working hard. Someone is getting smarter and someone is winning. Just remember that.”

Here’s how Serhant thought about his work ethic:

That put me at a competitive advantage over my colleagues. While other brokers were going on vacation, in the Hamptons for the weekend, at a movie, out for dinner, or sleeping, I would be hard at work, ready to surge ahead of them. Sales is a crazy race. While they were taking a hot yoga class or eating sushi with friends, I was checking off my to-do list.

Other words, there’s no way around working much, much harder than your competition for a long, long time if you want to actually win at something.

Part of this hard work involves filling up your pipeline, which we’ll talk about next.

You Must Fill Up Your Pipeline

Like every other sales book out there, he talks about filling up your pipeline.

But the way this book explained it triggered something in my brain that drew parallels between sales and real life.

In sales, you want to fill up your pipeline so you’re not overly dependent on a deal. Diversifying your opportunities means you’ll have a much more stable and consistent sales career.

In life, you want to fill up your pipeline so you’ll have opportunities that you can tackle at any point.

For example, even if you have a job, you should still look for a new job to maximize your money. And if you’re looking for a new job, you should apply to as many opportunities as possible to maximize your chances of switching jobs.

And because the job interview process takes a long time, you should diversify even more via opportunities that’ll make you money even if you don’t land a new job. Don’t wait for someone to hand you a job in order for you to get paid.

OK, But Why?

Sure, you should get a pipeline because “diversify” – but why, really?

Most sales book don’t really flush out the idea properly, and I find this book does. In summary, Sell It Like Serhant says that having a pipeline = you can ‘have a life’. More specifically:

One of the reasons you can’t live or die by one sale is because you have a life. I will do absolutely everything in my power to close a deal, but I learned at my wedding that I did not want to be ironing out deals while my children were being born, or on my deathbed.

The metaphor for life here is that you should always have a large pipeline of opportunities. This way, you won’t be dependent on a single opportunity. Whether it’s putting all your eggs in your W-2 job, or a small business, or your GME calls…it’s never a good idea to just latch on to one opportunity and hope it works out.

This way, you’ll never have to obsess over any particular deal at an inappropriate time, and be absolutely devastated if you lose out on one deal.

Humility

The following advice is good life advice, but is probably more useful if you’re a salesperson.

Serhant says that “sales can mean playing games where you don’t…make the rules.” This is true. If you want rich people’s money, you’ll need to give them the service that they want – not the service that you’re accustomed to giving – if you want to land that multi-million dollar deal.

At the end of the day, Serhant says:

Closing a deal means keeping your ego in check at all times.

Other words, you’ll need to sometimes swallow your pride and play by someone else’s rule so you can get money. Be humble in the short-term so you can win in the long-term.

This is true when you’re servicing anyone rich that you’ll make a commission off of.

But probably not as true if you’re not a salesperson. I mean, it’s nice to be humble in life and it’s a great trait to have, but Elon Musk didn’t get to where he was being humble. He got to where he was by executing tons of technical details properly and having a bit of luck on his side. Humility and ‘playing by someone else’s rule’ hasn’t ever been in his gameplan, nor has it been in the gameplan of a lot of successful CEOs / revolutionaries.

Hence, you should take this as gospel only if you’re a salesperson dealing with high-value clients. Otherwise, my review of this Sell It Like Serhant advice is: meh.

Sell It Like Serhant Summary On Being Social

The book makes an argument for extroversion because you get asymmetric rewards from it. For example:

• Social risks have no downside and has max upside.
• No one will murder you (they might just reject you the first time around) AKA limited downside.
• But someone you cold call or meet on the street might end up giving you a very lucrative deal (AKA potential upside is unlimited).

Because this book’s about sales, it’s tempting to socialize only with rich people. Serhant’s advice in the book is just don’t judge a book by its cover and always be respectful.

It’s not always easy to determine who really has money to spend, so be open and respectful to everyone to avoid making a big mistake.

I’d say this is more of a rule of life in general as opposed to just in sales.

And in order for you to meet a bunch of people, you’ll need a habit of meeting new people. The book recommends you set a quota of meeting at least 3 new people a day. The argument goes something like: the more people you meet, the more business you’ll do. Also: the downside of social rejection is eclipsed by the potential upside of a massive deal.

I feel “networking” feels a bit cliché to mention in a sales book, but probably one of those things you must do if you’re primarily a salesperson. But probably quite useless if you’re Warren Buffett and your job is really to just pick stocks by reading the newspaper a lot. I mean, sure, you’ll need clients to have more leverage if you’re Warren (and Buffett’s plenty sociable to start with), but it’s not like clients won’t be lining up at your door when you get the good results for yourself anyway.

Sales Tactics

One of my favorite quotes from Sell It Like Serhant is:

People don’t like being sold, but they love shopping with friends.

So if you’re a salesperson, be that friend that they love shopping with. And then go shop with them.

Another tactic is showing your client things that’s out of their price range. The author recants a time when he was shown a shoe that was out of his price range during his mission to buy a shoe.

My mind was blown. I couldn’t believe the difference between a good shoe and an amazing shoe, and I was able to feel it for myself. This is a great technique for upselling someone if they have more to spend. You can’t control how much money is in a client’s bank account, but you can control how you present the product to them—and that directly impacts how they feel about it.

In sum, if you’re a salesperson, show them a product that out of your client’s “budget” and tell them all the important things about that luxury item.

This’ll save you time on explaining why certain qualities of a cheap item is subpar. It’s self-evident that if a more expensive product has features that a cheaper product doesn’t, the latter doesn’t because it’s cheaper. The self-explanatory nature of this should eliminate a lot of “cheapskate” objections, where your client is a cheapskate and they expect everything to be A1.

After you’ve shown your client something awesome that’s way out of their price range, go back and sell them something much cheaper that’s only slightly out of their price range (but similar to the first thing that you’ve shown them). This’ll trigger FOMO that’ll get your client to spend more than what they initially said was their budget. As a salesperson, you can’t argue numbers with your clients – you can only manipulate their feelings. In other words:

You can’t negotiate with someone’s wallet, but you can negotiate with their feelings.

Go negotiate with someone’s feelings (not logic) by showing them examples of luxury products so they know why a particular price range is needed for what they’re looking for.

This last tip shows how you’ll deliver bad news to your customers. In general, you’ll always want to follow up bad news with good news. And perhaps also deliver good news before delivering bad news, and then delivering more good news after the bad news (i.e. a “good news” sandwich).

As an example, you could follow up bad news with some good news (usually some concession on your end):

• Your product’s shipped late? No worries, you’ll tell your customer that you’ve now given them a discount and/or made their shipping free.
• Got some super bad news about your deal that you need to tell your client? No worries, just tell them that you’ll concede and give up a large part of your commission so the project’s more affordable to them because you’re dedicated to making this deal work (even if the bad news has nothing to do with you).

BTW there’s other obvious sales tactics like using scarcity, urgency, and fear to drive your clients to action. However, the books’ examples are too specific to real estate sales so I’ve decided to omit it here.

Ryan’s Time Management System

One simple way to manage your time is to manage your clients. You might have some clients that take up a disproportionate amount of your time. This is how you can handle them, by setting their expectations correctly throughout:

Now I qualify buyers, I help them focus, and teach them that purchasing property is a process of elimination, not a shopping spree.

In other words, you should always let your client know exactly what you’re willing to do for them, and exactly what you’re not willing to do. And while these expectations are best set in the beginning of the relationship, there are just some things you can’t foresee ahead of time. For those unpredictable cases, just adjust your client’s expectations as you work with them.

Once you’ve got those external distractions outta the way, it’s time to work on your internal flow of work. Ryan Serhant breaks down his time management system into something he calls FKD (Finder, Keeper, Doer). Finder / Keeper / Doer are business roles within an organization (which we’ll explain soon). As he (and most of us) start out as solopreneurs, we must wear all 3 hats. As such, one should time block slots so that every single day, we do some Finder work, some Keeper work, and some Doer work. The roles are as defined:

Finder – all the work you do to do meet new clients / maintain client relationships.

Keeper – all the high-level thinking / strategic work to manage your finances, advertising, and considerations of tradeoffs.

Doer – all the work that you do that doesn’t directly lead to new clients/money, but necessary work that’ll keep the business running or a deal going (i.e. paying the bills, paperwork to finish a deal, etc).

Other words, you must find some time to generate leads / follow up with them, think about your business at a high level, and do the mundane stuff required to keep your business alive.

Sell It Like Serhant Follow-Up Summary

All sales books talks about the follow up. Let’s see how Serhant approaches follow-ups.

First, he follows up with every potential client. Forever.

Your follow-up frequency should be based upon how ‘hot’ the client is. If they’re not looking to buy, you should follow up with them consistently, but not nearly as frequently as someone who’s wanting to buy. And obviously, if you’re actively working on a deal with a client, you’d follow up with them every single day, if not twice a day, depending on the deal.

His argument of why you should follow up with everyone is because it 1) takes almost no time to follow up, yet 2) the upside is unlimited.

Time-block some time each day to follow up, as part of your “Finder” activities.

When you follow up, make sure you provide some value (i.e. humor, or some helpful thing related to your niche), as opposed to just “I’ve got something to sell you.”

Serhant’s got stories where he ended up getting $510K in real estate commissions because he followed up with some cold lead for 5 years.

The book breaks up following up with clients in 3 parts:

1. Follow-up: Keeping in touch with leads. Forever.
2. Follow-through: Building the relationship with clients through trust and integrity by keeping your word and doing what you said you’d do. This makes clients happy and keeps them coming back.
3. Follow-back: Keeping in touch with previous clients because often times they become repeat customers and provide the most value.

Dealing With Losing / “Failure”

If you lose a deal or fail at something, don’t dwell on it. MOVE. ON.

Focusing on your losses without moving on will obliterate your confidence. It’ll also ruin your career and cause you to quit.

Instead, just learn what you need from your losses and detach from it emotionally. You’ll win some and you’ll lose some. Always. It’s just physics. There’s some things in the world you can control, and some things you can’t. Just focus on your next win and the lesson you can learn from failing, and move on.

Since you’ll have some point where you lose / fail anyway, the book advocates “failing smart” so you can improve over time and minimize the number of times you lose / fail.

Sell It Like Serhant Summary On The Urgency Of Life

The book advocates doing the most important things first, and don’t procrastinate on them.

He also advocates that you try everything and live up to your potential. A lot of these ‘mindset’ books, including Winning talks about urgency. Winning talks about life as a sprint to the finish line. This book talks about maximizing effort so you don’t leave any potential behind at the cemetery.

I never want to look back at my career and think, “Oh, what if I had tried that!?” You know where you’ll find the most wasted potential? The cemetery. As long as I’m alive I will do everything in my power to use every ounce of my potential and keep climbing over that fence.

But how do you keep up the constant drive and motivation to be able to just keep sprinting, day after day, year after year? How do you keep yourself from just giving up and stopping? The answer in this book: regret. More specifically, regret in the form of imagining a “Future You” being disappointed with how life turned out.

What will life hold for Future You? Your Future You is waiting and he/she can be living the life you’ve always dreamed of, and achieved the things that you’ve always wanted to achieve. And Future You was able to get everything they ever wanted because you chose to urgently put in the hard work now. Everyday. Until your goals are reached.

Or, Future You can live with a life filled with regret and lost potential.

So what’ll it be? Will Future You be proud of the effort you put in everyday? Or will they wish that the current you did a lot more?

Review

Great book. A lot of the lessons aren’t just for salespeople, but for people in general.

Especially resonated with me is keeping your pipeline full. While this is normally a sales term, I think in general we should always have an abundant of opportunities to pursue at any given time. Example, I’m currently working a 9-5 W2 job right now, but simultaneously welcoming the following opportunities:

• Interviewing for a new job so I can get more money.
• Writing this blog so I can improve my communication skills (and maybe in the future monetize this for some passive income).
• Engaging in e-commerce so I can diversify my income stream way from just my 9-5 job. If my e-commerce business matures, I can ‘have a life’ and won’t worry about taking a vacation that lasted too long and being fired. Even if I got fired, I’d have something to fall back on.
• Writing a series of crypto/NFT trading bots to further diversify my income stream.
• Investing long-term in the stock market and also real estate syndications so that my income will grow to the point where I can FIRE, should the worst come and I end up actually having to work til I’m 40 or something.

Some advice though, is really for salespeople or extroverts. For example, I don’t think meeting 3 people a day is really going to do anything for me. Salespeople love sales because they have to justify their career. But I don’t think meeting 3 people a day is necessary for everyone. I can write code to print money for me and I don’t like talking to strangers on the street…so why should I?

Because this book is filled with some great advice, mixed with some very sales-specific advice (though that’s in the title of the book), I rate this book a 4.5/5 due some of its content being somewhat useless for the masses.