Jeremy Hurewitz

Creator of “Sell Like a Spy” & Author

Jeremy Hurewitz

Creator of “Sell Like a Spy” & Author

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Biography

Jeremy Hurewitz is the creator of “Sell Like a Spy” and the author of the book by that name. “Sell Like a Spy” offers communication strategies and business development lessons sourced from the world of the CIA and other government agencies. The program is a synthesis of training and methods from government service and Jeremy 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.

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. Jeremy grew the staff, established a publishing and analytics practice, and helped grow the editorial offerings from two series to several dozen.

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, and he was a stringer for The Business Times of Singapore and The South China Morning Post of Hong Kong. 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.

Speaker Videos

Why Active Listening is the Most Important Skill

Vulnerability and Credibility

Networking Like a Spy

Speech Topics

Sell Like a Spy

This session surveys the high-level principles of the Sell Like a Spy 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. This sets the table to review skills like elicitation, active listening, mirroring, using the environment around, and taking notes like a spy.

Skills of Social Influence

This session focuses on skills cultivated by elite FBI agents – mainly hostage negotiators and counterintelligence agents – as well as law enforcement officials and CIA case officers. The speech starts with an introduction to the fascinating world of corporate kidnap-for-ransom support before diving into defusing difficult encounters, interviewing strategies, reading body language, detecting deception, and negotiation.

Interactive Breakout Sessions

These sessions are typically for smaller groups and are focused on to improve your networking skills and how to use the different sides of your personality to overcome challenges.

In “Use Your Superpowers” 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 and given fascinating case studies to illustrate how to succeed with these ideas.
This popular segment 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”).

Testimonials

“Jeremy Hurewitz’s Sell Like a Spy brings together lessons from world’s most elite information gatherers and people influencers, distilling the spymaster skills untrained readers can apply to succeed in business. Hurewitz draws on decades of experience as an investigative journalist turned jet-setting corporate security expert, as well as interviews with intelligence agents, law enforcement officials, hostage negotiators, Special Forces, and more to ground his writing in real-life case studies. An essential read for anyone interested in becoming a better salesperson—or a half-decent spook!”

- Ian Bremmer, President of the Eurasia Group

“Jeremy Hurewitz knows what the best sales and intelligence professionals understand: espionage and business are about relationships, and the secret sauce of success is the ability to seek connection and develop purposeful and authentic relationships. In Sell Like a Spy, Hurewitz illustrates with stories and examples that persuasion is not the ability to find the right words, but the ability to build real relationships of trust and empathy, and even share vulnerability. Sell Like a Spy is a fun primer on the skills, traits, and professional discipline to succeed in business.”

- John Sipher, Founder of Spycraft Entertainment

“Jeremy Hurewitz spent years working side-by-side with CIA case officers, FBI agents, and other government officials. With Sell Like a Spy, he taps that unique experience to provide crucial insights that can help businesspeople develop relationships, collect information, and overcome challenges.”

- Gregory Zuckerman, Special Writer, The Wall Street Journal