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Jeremy Hurewitz    

Creator of the Program Sell Like a Spy and Author of the forthcoming book "Sell Like a Spy"

Jeremy Hurewitz spent the first decade of his career overseas building the media association Project Syndicate while based out of Prague and Shanghai. He spearheaded a business development strategy that saw the association grow from a few dozen member newspapers in mostly Eastern Europe, to a truly global association of over 300 newspapers in over 100 countries. Hurewitz grew the staff, established a publishing and analytics practice, and helped grow the editorial offerings from two series to several dozen.

During Hurewitz's time abroad he also worked as a freelance journalist writing on a variety of topics for dozens of publications around the world. Hurewitz continues to write regularly with recent articles appearing in Bloomberg, USA Today, and The Hill.

Upon returning to the U.S. after his time overseas, Hurewitz settled in New York City and worked for several well-known global consulting firms in the world of corporate security. These companies are staffed by former intelligence officers and Hurewitz worked closely with these former spies. He came to notice how good these individuals were at connecting with clients, how quickly they were able to establish rapport and put people at ease and get them to open up. In addition to former spies, his colleagues included former members of the FBI and the law enforcement community, the Secret Service, the military, the State Department, and other government agencies. Hurewitz learned unique and impactful skills from all these former government employees, and he began utilizing the methods he picked up. He quickly noticed the tangible difference it made in his salesmanship and his ability to connect with clients. By practicing the same methods that government officials use to develop relationships and overcome a range of challenges, Hurewitz was able to achieve some of the biggest and most meaningful sales of his career.

Hurewitz has synthesized these lessons from government service into the Sell Like a Spy program and works with clients to share these strategies to help them improve their ability to connect with targets, develop creative approaches to close deals, and overcome challenges.

Speech Topics

General Principles of Sell Like a Spy

This session surveys the high-level principles of the Sell Like a Spy (SLaS) program. Jeremy typically breaks the ice by informing audiences about the true nature of the intelligence world and misconceptions about it. This humanizes a world that is often sensationalized in popular culture and helps audiences understand that the skills of CIA case officers can be utilized by them to make them more successful. He then moves into skills on connection, elicitation, active listening, mirroring and note-taking.

Skills of Social Influence

This session focuses on skills cultivated by elite FBI agents – mainly hostage negotiators and counter intelligence agents – as well as law enforcement officials and CIA case officers. Jeremy sets the table for this talk by introducing the fascinating world of corporate Kidnap-for-Ransom support and introduces the following skills: diffusing difficult encounters, interviewing, reading body language, detecting deception, and negotiations.

Use Your Superpowers

At the heart of this workshop is a goal of having better conversations and following your passion to find success in business. Attendees are taught to develop three core subjects they can use in conversation and different ideas are discussed interactively to refine them in a group setting. Also discussed are some fascinating case studies about how CIA case officers use their passions (one anecdote is called "The Spy Who Skied") and intellectual curiosity to win. Jeremy shares a favorite anecdote about how this worked in successfully winning business from the New York Yankees.

Spies in Disguise

This popular talk builds on the true-life stories about how spies leverage disguises and cover stories to complete their missions. Attendees are asked to think of characters they admire from popular culture and the group setting provides opportunities about how to virtually put on a mask to overcome challenging scenarios ("the dreaded happy hour" & "the arrogant client").

Crawl, Walk, Run

An agent development tactic used by CIA officers where the idea is "bring someone along slowly and then all at once" is shared and Jeremy describes how he used this tactic to make the biggest sale of his career. Ancillary lessons about collaborating with colleagues and senior management, "the reciprocity rule", and other recruitment strategies are taught.

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