Jeremy Hurewitz is an espionage expert and corporate intelligence agent who believes that real-life spies make the best business leaders and salespeople and business leaders, and he’s exploring why that’s true in a new book “Sell Like a Spy”.
Jeremy 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.
During Jeremy’s time abroad he also worked as a freelance journalist writing on a variety of topics for dozens of publications around the world. Jeremy 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, Jeremy 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 Jeremy 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. Jeremy 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, Jeremy was able to achieve some of the biggest and most meaningful sales of his career.
Jeremy 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.
What you will learn
- Learn how real-life espionage skills can improve your sales and leadership techniques.
- Discover why spies are considered the world’s best salespeople.
- Hear Jeremy’s unique experiences working with spies and corporate security experts.
- Understand the importance of active listening and how it can enhance both sales and relationships.
- Learn the art of vulnerability and how it helps build stronger connections.
- Explore how intelligence agencies recruit curious and adaptable people—skills that are valuable in any profession, especially sales.
Transcript
Jeff Bullas
00:00:12 – 00:00:48
Ok. All right, thank you. Ok. Hi, everyone. And welcome to the Jeff Bullas show today I have with me, Jeremy Hurewitz.Jeremy is an espionage expert and corporate intelligence agent who believes that real-life spies make the best business leaders and salespeople and business leaders, and he’s exploring why that’s true in a new book releasing on Aug. 27, “Sell Like a Spy” and you can get the book here on Amazon.
Jeremy 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.
During Jeremy’s time abroad he also worked as a freelance journalist writing on a variety of topics for dozens of publications around the world. Jeremy continues to write regularly with recent articles appearing in Bloomberg, USA Today, and The Hill.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:33 – 00:02:18
So you did English and philosophy… was that because you love words and language. Um Where did that curiosity and that degree’s inspiration come from?
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:02:18 – 00:02:52
Yeah. Well, first of all, Jeff, thank you so much for having me on the show. It’s great to be with you. Um Yeah, I mean, I’m definitely, I forget if it’s left brain or right brain, but I am the one that is about words and ideas and I’m not, I don’t do, not do well with kind of math and you know, the hard sciences and all of that. So a big reader, you know, always been, you know, somebody who likes to write. So uh English and writing uh were, were a big area of interest for me. So I naturally gravitated towards those areas and, you know, had a wonderful experience in college learning all about literature and writing.
Jeff Bullas
00:02:53 – 00:03:28
Yeah. Ok. So, yeah, words for me, I um I fell in love with them at the age of about five or six when I started consuming books. And um so, uh and then I discovered that I like boarding better when I was about 50 started a blog and started writing. So it only took me 50 years to work out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. But that’s ok. So, um, tell us a little bit about. So you went and worked on building a media project, syndicate. Tell us a little bit about that. And you worked in Prague and Shanghai. How did you get that gig?
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:03:28 – 00:03:42
Yeah. Well, you know, after college I just had kind of a, you know, wanderlust. I wanted to go overseas. I wanted to be, uh, I’m a musician as well. So I joke that I wanted to be some form of, uh Ernest Hemingway meets Kurt Cobain. That’s kind of, that was who I was at 22.
Jeff Bullas
00:03:42 – 00:03:46
I, I can see, I can see that with a beard and hair.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:03:47 – 00:04:12
I’m still a very active musician. So maybe that’s kind of, you know, something. Um, anyway, I traveled around Europe with a backpack and a guitar. I took a one way ticket to Spain. It’s the late nineties and I eventually made my way to Prague, which was still going through this fantastic moment, unique in history that will never be repeated in the nineties and, you know, Eastern Europe and in Prague, I think it was the center of all that. So it was just an amazing time to live in that city. Everything was really exciting
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:04:13 – 00:04:40
and honestly, I asked, I answered an ad in the Prague Post after uh being in the city for a few months playing music in the cafes. And you know, at that moment in time, if you were a young Westerner with a college degree, they were like, you’re our head of marketing, you’re our head of sales because, you know, the, the Czech Republic, those East eastern Europe, central Europe states, they had, you know, not a natural sense of kind of entrepreneurial kind of spirit in what they were doing. So, Americans had a leg up in that way. And
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:04:40 – 00:05:19
my dad is, uh I write about this in the book. Uh my dad was a salesman, my grandfather. So, you know, that’s kind of natural salesmanship in my lineage. And you know, when the directors of the project syndicate said, look, we really want to grow this organization. We wanna be independent because we had money from, you know, donors and nonprofits and they wanted to maintain a nonprofit status, but to be um independent financially and that was remit. And I’m proud to say that we achieved that by convincing these directors that I could go over and meet with sophisticated editors and talk with them about running the very unique opinion columns that we were commissioning. So that was my first experience with sales,
Jeff Bullas
00:05:19 – 00:05:30
right? So project syndicate, um it was just an association that will just write serious copy for uh different newspapers. How did it work?
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:05:30 – 00:06:01
Yeah, it was um two of the three directors were Polish emigres to the US academics. Um They wanted to help these newly liberated states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia transition to market planned economies. And the idea for the project syndicate was to introduce a kind of dialogue between east and west. So for instance, we brought, you know, Vaslav Havel, who was the, you know, President of the Czech Republic. At that time, we would edit his speeches, turn them into op EDS and they’d be featured in Le Monde or, you know, the Australian newspapers, you know, and
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:06:02 – 00:06:18
uh so that, that came later actually. Um and then we brought voices like Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs to audiences in Eastern Europe. So we fostered a global debate on international affairs that grew from a couple of columns a month to dozens every month with some of the most famous newspapers in the world
Jeff Bullas
00:06:19 – 00:06:39
that would have been fascinating for you from a networking point of view. Uh Wouldn’t it in terms of meeting these, uh, I suppose, academics and, and personalities and is bigger than life. So, is there any, is, is, is there anyone that stuck out or any people that stuck out for your personalities in that, in that career?
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:06:40 – 00:07:07
Yeah, it’s a great question. Um, two quick things. First of all, you know, my director at project syndicate who is an esteemed professor just recently retired from Colombia professor Andrei Rinsky, uh you know, learned a ton from him about kind of humane leadership, you know, how to be a great leader, how to believe in your people so that he was a pivotal person. But I also think about uh Joseph Stiglitz who is, of course, a Nobel Prize winner. He had, he didn’t win that. He hadn’t won the Nobel yet when I had spent some time with him.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:07:07 – 00:07:40
Um but I remember being a young man and I had actually just been in Africa and he was very curious about my thoughts on Zimbabwe, which was undergoing some very difficult times. And I, I remember just thinking, wow, this man who, you know, there was whispers, he was going to win a Nobel is, is kind of hanging on every word and everything I have to say. And that was really revelatory for me about, you know, how intelligent people should, are looking for information from whatever source and they’re not, they’re not beholden to their egos in that way. So that made a big impression on me. But as you noted, there were some incredible people I interacted with and I grew so much from it.
Jeff Bullas
00:07:42 – 00:07:49
So after that, um you then moved a bit of freelance uh journalism, didn’t you? So?
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:07:49 – 00:08:12
Well, it was kind of at the same time that, you know, project syndicate because of that great leadership. I went to part time after a number of years and I was able to travel to, you know, if I was going to Madrid and meeting with the editor at El Pais, as long as I made it clear that my freelance journalism was separate from project syndicate. They were happy to answer questions from me and I got to, you know, have some great sources and write at the same time,
Jeff Bullas
00:08:12 – 00:08:15
right? So you’re having the time of your life?
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:08:15 – 00:08:18
Yes, I, I really did. It was a great experience.
Jeff Bullas
00:08:18 – 00:08:31
Well, you told me too that uh you came to Australia and wrote a story on Fresher Sharks from the Philippines. And that was published in the Australian, which is one of our esteemed newspapers uh in Australia. So we had a blast
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:08:31 – 00:08:32
in Australia.
Jeff Bullas
00:08:33 – 00:08:53
Well, we got some good beaches and some good sharks. Uh um So then you pivoted into corporate security. How did that happen? Like you? So was he just curious about that or you needed to get a serious job or how did that happen?
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:08:54 – 00:09:21
Uh maybe a little bit of both of that. Well, I came back from my, you know, just under a decade abroad. I’m a New Yorker. I grew up in the suburbs and I, you know, wanted to live in the city and I, the media was changing, it continues to change, obviously, and I was ready to make a change in my career. And, uh you know, people had mentioned this world of corporate security to me and I, I’ve always been interested in the intelligence world. I definitely bumped up against spies when I was overseas. I wrote about it in the book, and we could talk about it.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:09:22 – 00:09:49
Um And this was an opportunity to get close to that world of intelligence because I found out that there were a lot of former CIA case officers there, but also uh you know, an intriguing roster of others from elite government service FBI, you know, Department of Justice, special Forces, all those things. And, and the book I’ve ultimately written uh is a synthesis of uh learnings from those various officials. But you know, to your, to your question, you know, I found that
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:09:49 – 00:10:17
this kind of uh fit with my interests and my experience, most people come from government that work in this world, but they do uh recruit uh former journalists, especially journalists that have had experience with some of the markets that I’ve had uh overseas, especially China, which everybody was interested in, especially in the late two thousands. Um And uh you know, the ability to write, well, the ability to interact with people to investigate these were all skills that helped me get that job.
Jeff Bullas
00:10:18 – 00:10:58
So, in that job, and also you’ve shown it revealed in your book, what are some of the, I suppose the skills of persuasion, in other words, to uh get people to bend your way a little bit more or to, uh you know, what are some of the key skills, you know, emotional intelligence and everything else? What are Kev, would you describe the, the most important skills you would need in spycraft that leads into the world of persuasion and also selling? Tell us about what, what are some of the key elements that you really need to hone yourself on?
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:10:58 – 00:11:10
Yeah. Well, you could get me rambling on for this uh for quite a while. But let me just think of a couple of things, you know, one of the things I, I lead off on almost every talk I give or training for sales teams is the idea of connection. And,
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:11:10 – 00:11:38
you know, Jeff, uh you’re an easy guy to talk to. I’m sure if we were sitting there in a bar in Sydney, we would uh quote unquote, hit it off, you know, and that, and that’s great. You know, when that happens, we all enjoy that. But anybody in sales and anybody who is a spy or a journalist or in just about any other walk of life even socially. Sometimes you interact with people where you don’t have an instant report, you know, and you, you don’t want to give up on that, that easily. Maybe it’s somebody you really need to get along with or a, you know, a potential client that you want to
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:11:38 – 00:12:06
develop that rapport with. So that’s where spies can really teach us a lot because I call them the world’s best sales people because their sale, which is convincing someone to buy into treason, is the hardest sale you could possibly make. So, you know, spies are incredibly good at leveraging a variety of skills to get beyond that discomfort because sure spies meet people and sometimes they do hit it off. But because of their targets, they have to, you know, oftentimes find a way to,
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:12:06 – 00:12:49
with people they would not otherwise spend time with. I’m talking about criminals, terrorists, you know, diplomats from some places that are, you know, authoritarian, really bad countries. And that’s why they need to cultivate these people. So they use a variety of different things, radical empathy, which is looking for that kernel of humanity that’s there. And just about any person, you know, the terrorist who’s you think of as a monster, but actually is a very charitable person. You know, they might, they’ll focus on that. Um They think about uh intellectual curiosity. So the idea is if you introduce yourself to me and you’re a, you know, a rural guy and you’re into hunting and I’m a product of an urban environment and I have never hunted. I, you know, I don’t just blow that off and I don’t
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:12:49 – 00:13:24
pretend that I hunted before. Iii I get interested in that subject and, and the CIA and other intelligence agencies focus on recruiting people who have that natural intellectual curiosity, people who have the ability to get people to open up. Um, and then one of the, the things that is uh I have a personal story about it, but I really believe it is about vulnerability. Spies are really good at when they need to make themselves vulnerable, sharing something about themselves. They’re not always putting on an act, you know, one spy told me about having a child uh on the autism spectrum. And in his posting in the
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:13:24 – 00:13:44
variety of places in the Middle East where family has talked about quite a bit. He on more than one occasion met, you know, uh somebody that he was trying to cultivate, who also has a challenge with a child like that. And what happens, Jeff when you make yourself vulnerable, when you open yourself up to somebody, they typically respond in kind. We have a tendency to tear something back. And
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:13:44 – 00:14:11
You know, what I always say to people is that we relate in that way because while not everybody has experienced tragedy, we all experience misfortune. And so that we tend to sort of share something about ourselves when we make ourselves vulnerable. So, spies wrap up all of these things along with just kind of a natural personality of being likable. Um, and they’re able to connect deeply with people and I haven’t even said anything about active listening, which I call the most important skill that any spy could have. But we can get to that.
Jeff Bullas
00:14:12 – 00:14:27
Yeah. Well, let’s pivot straight into that actually because um, active listening is powerful listening. And uh I grew up in a home with a loving father and mother, but my dad was very, very good at talking. But shit at listening.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:14:29 – 00:14:31
A lot of men are in particular that are usually better.
Jeff Bullas
00:14:32 – 00:15:23
So I made a promise to myself not to be like my dad in that way. And um in my twenties, I went along to a six month course, which is a part of a counseling course. And it was a listening course, active listening. So that changed my life and I was in the middle of being a salesperson in the tech industry at the time because I did enjoy sales because I was reading a teacher. But for me, the ability to actually listen, actively, ask the right questions, be interested and also to uh you know, reflect back what you’re feeling or what you’re sensing with that person as well. It was six of the best six months of my life in terms of a skill that I knew I needed.
Jeff Bullas
00:15:24 – 00:15:48
Um, I’d gone through a marriage break up as well. So I said, maybe I need to be a little bit better listener but tell us a little bit about your, uh, the power of listening that you’ve discovered through, you know. Yeah. Basically espionage. And, that tells us a little bit about what you think are some of the most important skills to be a great listener, in fact, a great communicator as well.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:15:48 – 00:16:07
Yeah. Well, one of the first things to know about active listening, maybe, you know, you already know this, you know, we’re hardwired in our evolutionary sense to not be good active listeners. Unfortunately. So it’s something we have to overcome and you have to commit yourself as I describe it to cultivating an active listening practice. It’s not,
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:16:07 – 00:16:32
there’s no, you know, trick I can teach you, you know, you have to, there’s a variety of things to think about because in our evolutionary trait, you know, when we were, you know, a primitive man on the Savannah, we learned to communicate in short clips so that we could keep our attention focused on what’s in front of us so that we weren’t either eaten by something or that we could eat something if we saw an opportunity. So that’s the way listening and comprehension developed. And to this day, nearly all of us listen with
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:16:32 – 00:16:57
intention to reply, not an intention to truly listen. We tend to, you know, think about what somebody is saying for just a moment, we get the gist of it and then we go back into our mind and think about our, our interesting reply and there are other challenges. The mind works about four times faster than our ability to speak. So you need, a lot of people have had the, the situation in a conversation where you’re saying something and the person’s nodding, you can see from their body language, they know
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:16:57 – 00:17:22
you’re going, they almost finish your sentence for you and they get impatient because the mind works faster than our ability to speak. So we’ve all these hurdles and you know, overcoming them is so hard. The other one that’s an interesting comparison is uh I think about it as kind of like the melody and the lyrics in a song because when you’re talking, you sometimes get just a, it’s been described as 90% of our comprehension is body
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:17:22 – 00:18:04
language and tone of voice. Some people say it varies by amount and only 10% of the words. It varies based on the person, you know, all these different details, but most people agree that it’s a huge, hugely weighted towards the general side of things and not the actual words. And I compare it to like when you’re listening to a song, you might only know the chorus or you might only know a few songs, but you understand the emotional meaning of the song through the melody and conversations like that too. So understanding those things is a first step towards becoming a better active listener. And then it’s about asking clarification questions, putting aside your, the interesting anecdote you want to tell and getting that person to speak more. Because when, when we feel listened to, we feel respected
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:18:04 – 00:18:33
and I often ask audiences to, you know, pause for a minute, close your eyes and think about the best listener you’ve ever experienced. And I say, don’t you have a very high opinion of that person? And, you know, I’ve never had anybody say no, you know, because your best listener is somebody that you cherish. So you can be that best listener. And then we get into, you know, like Bill Clinton and his unique ability to make that person feel like whoever he’s talking to is the most important person in the room. So there’s a lot to unpack there. But that’s kind of a start of how I described it.
Jeff Bullas
00:18:34 – 00:19:19
Yeah. Yeah. For me, it’s, uh, the art of listening. I’m calling it deep listening to hear a person, to feel a person. And, uh, I read a, I can’t remember the name of the book, but I read a book recently, which got into the art of one of the skills. And I, I started applying a bit, is actually asking people their story. How did you start? And here we are in a podcast and I’ve asked you your story and for me, uh I find it fascinating to where did you know what inspired you? Where did you come from? And I did it at a dinner party once or a rest. It was a restaurant celebrating the 25th anniversary of a restaurant. Um, and an artist.
Jeff Bullas
00:19:20 – 00:20:05
And I chatted to this lovely lady who was in her seventies. She’d lost her husband two years before and I got to talking and I heard her whole life story from where it started in Melbourne. The marriage broke up when she got into being a fashion designer. And it was it, it’s just because it’s not just about the words, it’s about. So you are feeling and sensing them by hearing, watching their eyes. I think communicating, looking at the color of their eyes is one thing I’d like to do. What is the color of their eyes? I want to look into their eyes because it’s the gateway to the soul. And yeah, I just started asking people more, what’s your story? And not on a podcast, but just generally because then you’ve got context
Jeff Bullas
00:20:07 – 00:20:24
and um yeah, I’m fascinated by, in fact, I’ve written the outline for a book on listening. So I’m just trying to work out the angle for it. But um it listening, uh active listening, but it’s more than active. It’s actually listening with empathy. It’s sensing, isn’t it all of that?
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:20:25 – 00:20:36
Absolutely. Everything flows from listening. You know, everything from hostage negotiation to sales to everything flows from listening. If you listen, well, it can unlock so many things for you.
Jeff Bullas
00:20:36 – 00:20:43
Yeah. And it even applies to dating. And, um, that’s actually, yeah,
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:20:43 – 00:20:55
I’m on a mission to get men to be quiet a little bit more and be better listeners. I think, uh, female friends would, would, uh, you know, be, be grateful for that so I can get men to just shut up and, uh, and listen
Jeff Bullas
00:20:56 – 00:21:13
more. And it’s really, um, it, it, it was interesting, I was playing a round of golf with a friend of mine and she’s saying he’s got, she’s got a good friend of hers that’s in his forties and he’s having trouble, you know, getting relationships right? Or getting into a relationship. And I said, does he talk a lot?
Jeff Bullas
00:21:16 – 00:21:27
And she said, yes, I said, OK, there you go. If he changed one thing, if he listened a lot of women would find me very attractive.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:21:29 – 00:21:46
You know, we had a very similar situation. Uh, my wife, uh, shared that a mutual friend, uh, bought the book and he’s a very successful doctor. He’s, you know, a good looking guy, but he’s not a great listener and he talks too much and he’s already flagged in the book. He said, oh, I can learn from this chapter and we both looked at each other like y you
Jeff Bullas
00:21:46 – 00:21:47
I really could.
Jeff Bullas
00:21:49 – 00:22:39
Yeah. So you’re right. It applies to almost every corner of our lives as humans, the art of active listening. And, uh, so I think, you know, there’s two words I’d rather like, I think as humans to be attractive is to be interested and interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And that is, uh, because that if you’re interested in someone and you are able to ask some questions and I think the other one word you mentioned, which I totally agree with is the power of vulnerability. And I find one of the books that really brought it to light for me was Renee Brown, I think is the speaker and she speaks about the power of vulnerability. And I, because a lot of us as men, especially one looks strong,
Jeff Bullas
00:22:40 – 00:22:53
we don’t look weak. And if you reveal something to someone that makes you look weak, then you think that is weakness. In fact, I think there’s incredible power and strength in being vulnerable.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:22:54 – 00:23:16
Yeah. And I think there’s a, I think it’s Allen Ginsberg, the poet that said, reveal everything and then they have nothing on you. And I always remember that because I never, I’ve always been a guy that, you know, wears his heart on his sleeve, you know. And uh that’s why as I describe it in the book, like, I’ve, I’ve never worked for the government, but I’ve been a pretty good corporate spy, but I’m good at keeping other people secrets and less about my own. So, uh
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:23:16 – 00:23:38
it would have been harder to be a government spy in that way. But I’ve always been comfortable with sharing uh you know, details about myself. I, you know, I don’t, I don’t buy into the sort of male stoicism and you have to, you know, so I, I think being vulnerable is a great way to connect with people. I don’t think I know it. I’ve seen it over and over again through situations in my life again. I will describe it quite a bit.
Jeff Bullas
00:23:38 – 00:24:24
Yeah. Well, the one thing you did mention was that if you are willing to be vulnerable, then it’ll be matched a lot of times by the person you’re talking to. They go, oh, he’s willing, he’s willing to be vulnerable or they’re willing to be vulnerable. I’ll share a little bit about me, but the whole male stoicism thing is certainly a major issue and that then leads to, you know, men suffering mental illness or maybe a little bit more because of that. They’re not willing to open up and share. So, so in when you work in corporate security and you came across and then what are some fascinating stories that you stumbled, well experienced um in that career that you learnt from, like we,
Jeff Bullas
00:24:25 – 00:24:40
you didn’t become a spy, of course, but in terms of what were some of the biggest observations you made along the way in that career in corporate security? And the art of spycraft. What are some interesting stories that you remember? So
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:24:40 – 00:24:44
stories about colorful cases we worked on or the?
Jeff Bullas
00:24:45 – 00:24:46
Sure.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:24:46 – 00:25:05
Well, you know, one of my favorite wild stories. I have a lot of Chinese stories because I’m a Chinese guy and you know, China’s uh wholesale, industrial theft of, you know, western businesses. Uh intellectual property was something we worked on closely and it was, you know, it remains something I still think and focus on a bit through my work. Um
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:25:05 – 00:25:30
The most extreme case we worked on was uh and I write, I have a spy novel that I finished that will hopefully, you know, come out in the near future. Um but I and I, I write about this in the book, we had a hedge fund that was going to short a company. I can now mention the company because I think they’ve been delisted. They were called Real Gold. They were listed on the Hong Kong Exchange and this was during a wave of uh hedge funds shorting every Chinese stock, they could get their hands on because
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:25:30 – 00:25:55
they realized that there was a lack of corporate governance structures and they were making stuff up. So we’ve got to work for this company. We did a good investigation starting with the public records. So we did public records research. We found a Byzantine structure, you know, offshore this and that and lots of red flags. But when we got into human intelligence and sent uh you know, an agent uh to the mines in Inner Mongolia. We found some extraordinary things. We,
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:25:55 – 00:26:22
There were supposedly three mines that real gold was mining gold from and one was producing gold, but the other two were a sham, one was flooded with water. The other was basically empty beside a sleepy guard. But then, and we took photos of that, you know, you were able to show that the operative was great. He took photos of the track leading to one of the, you know, non-existent mines and you could show weeds growing out of the, the, the ground. So no heavy machinery had been through in quite a while.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:26:22 – 00:26:51
But when the guy went down to the mines, uh excuse me to the village, the villagers were like, oh yeah, that mine, you know, the real gold paid us to go up there and pretend like we were working and a bunch of white men in suits came to watch us. So it was the banker road show. They faked the mines being productive in order to get a boost in the IP O. So this was solid gold for our client. They were able to short the stock. They went public with it and the company was delisted and our client made millions.
Jeff Bullas
00:26:53 – 00:27:02
Yeah, it was, it, you just, it’s hard to find the truth quite often, isn’t it? Especially when it’s buried literally in a mine on the other side of the world. Um
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:27:02 – 00:27:30
It is, but you, I think the key thing is to know how to ask the right questions and put yourself in the right situation. So a lot of the work that I focus on is reputational due diligence. People call them background checks. And uh you know, we find that people are penny wise and a pound foolish. You can get a private equity firm that’s making a $100 million investment. And then they’re desperate to save $1000 on this kind of investigation. But, you know, we say, look, if you’re gonna keep the CEO and this $100 million investment,
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:27:30 – 00:28:03
you know, you might have played golf with him, you might have called a few references. But if you want to let us do our thing, we’ll tell you a lot more about him. We’ll do things like, you know, we’ll get into his country club where he plays tennis regularly and we’ll watch him play and we’ll find out does he smash his racket like a baby and storm off the court if he loses or is he graceful, you know, and socially amiable, uh even in difficult moments like that, and, you know, smart investors know that that means a lot about how you deal with somebody under stress and what their personality is like. So these kinds of insights are there and they’re available, you just have to know the right buttons to push and how to make them happen.
Jeff Bullas
00:28:04 – 00:28:09
Yeah, maybe that might be playing a round of golf with someone who can be very, very revealing.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:28:10 – 00:28:43
It can. But if you’re, you know, the private equity investor and you’re playing with this CEO, that guy is gonna have his, you know, where that woman is gonna have their best face on. Right. They’re gonna be there, you know, they’re not going to reveal their true self. It’s having someone like me as an operative speak with a former litigation foe or someone who worked with them five years ago or someone who serves on a board with them and get them through the methods I write about in the book to by elicitation by asking questions in the right sequence by asking more encouraging questions to get them to open up and say things about somebody they might not otherwise reveal. So there’s real trade craft that goes into that.
Jeff Bullas
00:28:44 – 00:29:16
Yeah. So you must have a very hard sense of skepticism based upon your history working in that area, wouldn’t you? Like you’re looking for red flags? Uh uh Those sort of things like you said, it’s Byzantine type structure. It’s everything’s offshore and, but um, so have you honed your sense of, I suppose, healthy skepticism is maybe the best way to describe it over the years. Is that something that you’ve worked on in terms of you, you’re trying to find the truth um,
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:29:16 – 00:29:39
I tend to believe people. So I have had to sort of train myself to be a little bit more skeptical, uh, frankly Jeff, you know, I think I’ve gotten there. Uh, maybe I’ve seen too much and, and all of that. But, yeah, and then usually if I’m doing one of these investigations and, and I work with a corporate intelligence firm called Intra Four International and I do a lot of the human intelligence gathering that I’m describing to you. I’m a strategic advisor to this firm.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:29:39 – 00:30:08
And uh usually I have some marching orders from the client. Maybe there’s a red flag, they want to know about something, maybe that red flag only comes up after we’ve done the public records research and we find they had a, you know, two DWIs driving while intoxicated five years ago. And so you might want to drill down on certain facts. So I usually have an assignment about some things I want to look into and, um, I listen to how people talk about things and I listen to what they don’t say and I listen to how they say it and I start to, you know, factor those things in.
Jeff Bullas
00:30:09 – 00:30:25
Yeah. Yeah. But I think being a good listener is actually working out just like you just said, then it’s like, what are they not saying that can be actually a real, a real uh reveal of the truth? Because what are they leaving out here and they shouldn’t be leaving this out here.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:30:26 – 00:30:50
Absolutely. And then there’s all of the details on detecting deception. And there’s a whole section about that in the book about, you know, you, you, you can’t use a lot of people who are former CIA FBI are going around to corporate types and saying I can make you a human lie detector and that’s not true. Like nobody can, you know, tell you if someone’s lying with a great degree of certainty, humans are too varied. Even a polygraph isn’t, you know, always true. So,
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:30:50 – 00:31:11
but you can find uh patterns of behavior that people exhibit. And you can take that as a red flag, not an indication, they’re definitely lying, but they might be anxious, they might be being deceptive. So there are things that you can learn in conversation to keep in mind about someone being potentially deceptive and body language will reveal that as well too sometimes.
Jeff Bullas
00:31:11 – 00:31:48
Yeah, that was the next question I was going to ask because I was thinking while you were talking. So um yeah. And so, yeah, tell us a bit about body language because when I was working in sales, it’s certainly um there’s different tactics you use to open people up physically, which then allows them to be more open uh in conversation. Like, you know, if someone’s sitting with their arms like that at a meeting, you’re going, I’ve gotta change this body language. Any top tips about body language, uh basically in persuasion and also detection and any, any tips you can reveal about body language that you’ve learned over the years.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:31:48 – 00:32:12
Yeah. Sure. I mean, one thing similar with deception, I’m skeptical of anybody who says one movement in body language means this one thing, you know. So yes, when you fold your arms, it’s considered a blocking behavior. Anything that someone puts in front of you themselves, between you and them, they’re indicating blocking behavior. So if you’re at a business meeting and someone is, you know, setting up in front of you and they put things,
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:32:12 – 00:32:43
their water bottle, you know, that that’s something where they’re trying to establish distance. Conversely, if you’re maybe on a date as we were talking about, these skills are useful in everyday life and your date comes and, you know, you’re sitting down and there’s a napkin folded there and they remove the napkin, they clear a path with the water glass and the salt and pepper. That’s the opposite of blocking behavior. They want to be very open. Um, but what I tell people and just, you know, the quick answer I think is establish a baseline behavior. You sit down with somebody in a room.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:32:43 – 00:33:11
What are they like? You know, are they talking with a lot of uh body language? Are they, you know, very calm? Do they, you know, what are they exhibiting? And then when you start talking, if you say, mention price and they start rubbing their neck or they start rubbing their legs or licking their lips. These are soothing gestures and you can look up, there are a variety of soothing gestures. So when they break from that baseline, they, you can know that, hey, that they, I might be making them anxious, you know, and
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:33:11 – 00:33:33
maybe one other quick thing, always remember when you’re talking with somebody that their body language will tell you how they feel. And in particular, the feet are very revelatory. So if you’re standing talking with somebody and their feet are pointed away from you, they want to exit the conversation, but somebody with their feet pointed directly at you, you can, you can consider is more engaged and directly speaking with you.
Jeff Bullas
00:33:33 – 00:34:25
Yeah, I found it as when I was doing face to face large scale selling, you know, the other bit selling big deals. It was fun because you, you’re trying to sense them, you’re watching them, you’re seeing their body language and you’re trying to work out what’s really going on. Are you just being in other words, uh it’s between you and another bidder for example, to get their business. And so it becomes, it’s like a, it’s like a chess game, isn’t it really in terms of uh trying to uh unearth their objections because they quite often won’t tell you. Um So let’s go to objections then. So in terms of how do you remove those objections in, in selling and persuasion so that they will,
Jeff Bullas
00:34:25 – 00:34:34
you know, how did one unearth them? And then how do you actually solve them? I’d be interested in your insights on objections because that’s a big part of selling, isn’t it?
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:34:35 – 00:35:02
Yeah. II, I think I have less to say on how to overcome the objection because they’re all going to be so unique. You know, I, we can, I work with clients directly on doing that, but I have to dig in on what the objections might be and then we can work on it. But what I can speak about more is unearthing those objections through one of the more popular skills that I teach, which is elicitation and elicitation is, you know, a way to collect information in a more circumspect manner and it leverages behavioral science. So,
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:35:02 – 00:35:28
you know, for instance, if you have a client and I’ve done a lot of kind of consultative retainer based sales for a lot of money, you know, 67 figure annual retainers, and when we would try to renew those retainers, you would uh you know, worry about whether, you know, they’re, they’re up for that. And sometimes you have less than ideal information about how the client is perceiving you and using your service. And if they’re a private company, how they’re doing in the market,
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:35:28 – 00:35:49
so, you know, you might call up your client and say, you know, hey, Jeff I, I heard a rumor. I’m not sure if it’s true. I heard the company was struggling. I’m hearing about layoffs. I’m hearing about budget cuts. Like I was disturbed by that. So I wanted to just give you a ring. And what you’re gonna find there is that, that tendency to correct is gonna come up. People don’t leave things. If I, if I say Jeff isn’t your favorite color blue,
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:35:49 – 00:36:10
you’re not gonna say no, it’s not blue. You’re gonna tell me what your favorite color is because we’re all vain in a certain way. And we’re the stars of our own universe. We’re gonna tell you something about ourselves that you might not have gotten wrong. So you’re proud of your business and you’re gonna tell me no, Jeremy, you got that backwards. We’re actually doing really well. And so that tendency to correct does that work and also professional pride.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:36:10 – 00:36:43
I, you know, I might not be a good friend, but I’m somebody they’re acquainted with professionally. So they’re gonna want to do a little bit of bragging about how they’re doing. So those are two examples about how you might unearth an objection. Um, in this case, it could be, hey, your fees are too high and I’m trying to get ahead of that with our renewal session, which is planned a month from now. You know, and I’m gonna want to sit down with you and I’m gonna want to know ahead of time. Hey, do I have some headwinds because your business is struggling or, you know, a variety of things? So, by doing what I just did, I was able to close that information gap and unearth any objection that might come up.
Jeff Bullas
00:36:44 – 00:37:34
Yeah, it’s certainly out of communication. And another thing, you know, uh, information is sometimes it’s, uh, the art of being quite tentative in terms of asking a question. What I’m sensing is that, tell me if you’re right when you s did it, actually, when you’re talking about that is that, you know, look, I’ve sort of sense as maybe you, you’re not quite happy with the situation is, am I right or am I wrong or, and then if they go, absolutely, I am, you know, nervous or whatever they reveal then. But the art of being tentative is, is basically, um also important part of listening in that you’re, you’re trying to be uh gentle in the communication in terms of trying to get them to open up and,
Jeff Bullas
00:37:35 – 00:38:07
and it’s, I sense that you might be feeling this way about that and I go, uh uh and then you get them to say yes or no, we’re going. Hm. You haven’t quite, you’re not quite getting me. So you get absolutely is a big word that’s used if you actually have got the message, um, then you’ve got the other one going well, not quite. So it’s, it’s trying to dig deeper, isn’t it really to actually unearth the truth? And then so because you got to operate from that to actually be able to persuade or to understand first.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:38:07 – 00:38:21
Absolutely. And one of the, the way you’re describing it makes me think about another uh element of trade craft uh that I call the stumbling ask. So the idea here is if I say to you, hey, Jeff, you know, I was thinking maybe you could help me out with something.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:38:22 – 00:38:48
You know what? I don’t want to kind of cloud our friendship with this request. Let’s just put it aside from now. But now you go, whoa, whoa, wait a minute here. I mean, you know what’s this about? You know, what’s going on and no, no, no, I want to leave it. And then I say, look, you know, could you introduce me to your colleague on this other team? You know, but I don’t know, I don’t understand why she’s not taking my calls, but I want to speak to her and then you go, yeah, no problem. I’ll make sure I go talk to her over there and then you’ll follow up with me and say, did she respond to your email? Now you’re a part of
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:38:48 – 00:39:15
because you insisted on knowing it and spies do this. Spies get somebody involved and they accomplish two things by using this method. Number one, they get someone to do something they’re trying to do, right? Get them to move forward there. But they also get to confess their friendship and how they don’t want to kind of cloud things by, by doing that. Um, I think it’s a really canny way to get someone on board with something you’re trying to achieve and making them seem like it was their idea.
Jeff Bullas
00:39:16 – 00:39:31
Yeah. Once you, once you’ve got him to think it’s their idea, then you’ve, you’ve almost got him. Exactly. But I like that also. You’re tapping into a sense of curiosity of going, oh, what, what, what were you gonna say? Absolutely.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:39:31 – 00:39:37
Absolutely. These human tendencies, you, they’re, they’re right for, uh, using to, you know, convince people to connect and
Jeff Bullas
00:39:37 – 00:39:55
influence. So, the other thing I’m curious about and need to wrap it up because you gotta go and cook a meal for your beautiful wife apparently, which is great. So, uh, in terms of the process of writing the book, I’m always intrigued by because
Jeff Bullas
00:39:57 – 00:40:34
I have written a book in, um, blogging, the smart way, which is about a, uh, it was about 100 and 20 pages. So, but I haven’t. A lot of books we are writing today have to meet a certain number of pages like 220 or 320 or something. And quite often it basically, authors have to fill up that many pages. So you’re going, you could have told me this in 50 pages or you could have done it in 100 pages, for example. So, but we’re still seeing lots of books that are 300 plus. Tell us a little bit about, um, the art of writing this book about some of the struggles and the joys of doing this because, uh, writing a book is a big job.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:40:35 – 00:41:16
Yeah, it is. And I’ve written a couple that haven’t been published. Now. There’s some that are, uh, which is great and I hope that continues. Um, what can I say, I’m a fast writer. So I work quickly uh writing, sell like a spy was um interesting because I had been working on it for a few years already, right. Uh Talking to people writing articles, um, you know, doing free talks, building up the brand with it and building the intellectual property and building up what I’m doing with it. So I had been working on it in some ways for a couple of years. But by the time I got the book deal, I, you know, I got an agent, I got a book deal and II, I kind of knew the program more or less where, where I wanted to go.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:41:16 – 00:41:52
Um So the principal writing just took a couple of months because I had been working on the framework for it for a couple of years, you know. So, um that combined with the fact that I just am a fast writer, uh maybe it’s the journalism background or whatever, writing on deadline and all that, uh it it was a joy and I, I love to write and, uh, you know, I want to write nonfiction and fiction and, you know, I, I hope that people want to read it because I just love the, the process of writing, you know, letting my thoughts come out on the page, uh, about something I know and I’m passionate about and care about. To me it’s one of the greatest joys in life.
Jeff Bullas
00:41:52 – 00:42:39
Yeah. II, I agree. It’s something that, uh, I do every day. I actually have a journal which, um, is a great thing. Yeah. And, uh, just still, you know what I feel or sense or experienced the last day. Um, we’re up to about 650 pages so far. But it’s, it’s really been good to do that. The other thing I love about writing too is I write to learn in other words. And, um, and I love Stephen King’s quote. He says, um, uh, if you, if you, if you want to write, you need to read, there is no other way. In other words, inspiration doesn’t come out of a vacuum. You need to be, uh, an avid reader, you know, and I love reading. Luckily. So it’s not something I,
Jeff Bullas
00:42:40 – 00:42:54
it was something I was born with innately, which I’m so glad for that gift. And also an encouraging mother that wanted me to read and correct my grammar because she was a secretary. She even did shorthand
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:42:54 – 00:43:34
And, Jeff, you know what I would also add to um in terms of writing is note taking is something I’m pretty passionate about. And I write about that in the book because I think it’s a big blind spot in the business world. I don’t think the business community does good with note taking. So, uh and spies are really good at note taking. They have to file contact reports after every meeting with an agent, there’s an extensive process of building a dossier on a target agent. Uh if they determine somebody is to go after. So, you know, having that kind of ability to write and download quickly and collect, you know, the atmosphere that, that II I also write about. I think that influencing sales is something I think is really important to learn. Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:43:35 – 00:44:17
Yeah, I, I totally agree. And um I used to carry around notebooks or a little notebook with me, but since the rise of the smartphone, uh I, I use my notes app more than any other app on my phone and I use it all. So I might be walking down to the beach here and I got, I have a thought and I’m going, I’ll actually stop and actually put it into my notes. And what I love about notes too is I can share it with myself via email as well. Uh I can have it on my computer. I can cut and paste that later. To add to it, it might be a story, it might be a quote. Um But I think being an active note taker, like you said, is just absolutely vital. And
Jeff Bullas
00:44:17 – 00:44:43
uh you know, I do a bit of meditation even known to stop myself during a meditation and write something down that popped up that floated through my consciousness. Yeah. So, yeah, Jeremy, I’m gonna ask you one more question to wrap it up. Um And, uh I ask all my guests if you had all the money in the world, uh, what would you do everyday that brings you deep joy and happiness?
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:44:45 – 00:45:14
Um Well, I’m, I’m music is a huge part of my life. I’m a musician. Uh I think if I had a ton of money, I’d start a little record label and I would curate it and, uh, put out music by people I think are underserved in terms of, uh, they should have a broader audience and I would promote it. Um, and I’d put out beautiful vinyl editions of the records. Uh And that’s what I would do with a ton of money. I think my wife would say let’s get a beach house and I would like to do that as well. But, uh for this answer, I’d say, let’s do a record label and put out some great music.
Jeff Bullas
00:45:15 – 00:45:41
Great answer. Thank you very much for sharing that. My pleasure, Jeremy. It’s been an absolute pleasure and a joy to sit down with you for uh nearly an hour and um, hear your stories and uh enjoy the rest of your evening. And, uh thank you very much and uh we’ll have this up in the next few weeks and we’ll let you know about, um, when this podcast goes live and the team. So, thank you very much. It’s been a joy.
Jeremy Hurewitz
00:45:42 – 00:45:51
I hope your uh, readers check out, sell like a spy and if they want to find me, they can find me on Sellek ay.net. It’s my website and linkedin and all of that. And uh I really appreciate you having me, Jeff. Thanks
Jeff Bullas
00:45:51 – 00:45:52
Jeremy.
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