205 - Mastering Sales with the Art of Deep Listening with Sell It's Kyle Scott

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show, and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Kyle Scott, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the co-founder of sellit.com, which launches today. But Solid.com is part of a much larger organization that you have been with for quite a while. Give us a little bit about your backstory, starting with you were in media for a while and got into the corporate training and—

Yeah, Doug, I, I'll tell you, you can't predict where a career is going to take you.

Absolutely true. Look at my career. Who would ever guess, right?

The, the twists and the turns. So I went to, I'll, I'll say all the way back in college, which really wasn't that long ago. Maybe it was now 14 years, but you know, I was an applied economics and management major at Cornell. I thought I was going to go into finance. My senior year of college, I fell in love with media for, for 4 years in college. I ran our, our sort of college radio station, WVBR, and I decided at the very end of my time there, like, hey, I think I'm gonna go into media for career. I, I just loved it so much and I found so much of my mental time and my energy in Instead of thinking about finance and accounting topics, I ended up thinking about how to grow the radio station. And what was unique about that was it was one of the very few student-run commercial radio stations. So there was no student activity fee that funded the operations. We had a full-time staff of like 3 or 4 full-time employees who had to be paid and they got paid out of advertising dollars. So in my very early 20s and even late Tens, I guess, late teens. I start to learn how to run a media business. Mm-hmm. I applied to the NBC Page Program, which is the, the absolute best place to start a media career. And then ended up for 10 years at NBC News Today Show, NBC Nightly News, NBC News Specials. Did the Trump-Clinton 2016 campaign for NBC News Digital, and then ultimately launched a vertical within NBC News called NBC News Better. And that was my first chance to come up with editorial programming and make suggestions on what the voice and the tone of the programming should be myself. Through that process, I ended up meeting someone named Ryan Serhant. Ryan at the time was the star of Million Dollar Listing New York, and he also had a very successful real estate career at that time. He was selling multiple tens of millions of dollars of real estate every single year into the hundreds of millions. And he had just launched a book called Sell Like Sirhan. I was starting to think at the end of my time, like, all right, I've been in journalism really, in media for 10 years. I was about to turn 30. I was like 28, 29 at the time. And I said, do I want this skill set for the rest of my career? Is this going to get me to where I need to be by the time I'm 50, 60, call it 70 years old? And the answer is, Doug, and this probably doesn't surprise you all that much and your listeners, media, the media landscape, specifically the news landscape, was undergoing a massive transformation. And what I saw was that career and that industry was changing in a completely unpredictable way.

Hmm.

And if I had only been for 10 years a news producer and a journalist, my skillset is this big as compared to what it could be. So I ended up pitching Ryan this idea because I knew that he wanted to go somewhere, right? I knew that he was going to be incredibly successful. I pitched him an idea. Hey, what would it look like to take your bestselling book and turn it into a course? He said, sure. I worked at it nights and weekends for basically a year, uh, and I offered to do it for free, by the way. And we could talk about that a completely, completely separate topic, but I think it's worth it. Uh, it could be a good area to dive into. We la— but we launched it and it did $500,000 in 2 weeks.

Wow.

And we said, wait a minute, if we did this part-time nights and weekends as sort of a side project, what would this look like if we did it full-time? And then Ryan hired me. Now, originally the role was supposed to be head of product and production for what was then Sirhan Media Group, basically building a media company. But what ended up happening was the course started taking off. It was then known as the course. We ended up doing $1 million our first year. That was April— that was August 15th, 2019 to December 31st, 2019. $1 million in gross revenue with 50% margins. And we were like, okay, this, this, we're onto something here. And then we started growing it. And ultimately where we are today in 2024, we've enrolled 25,000 people in 128 countries.

Wow.

And what we, we learned, yeah, in, in real estate. But what is crazy, Doug, is that we've always marketed as a real estate course, but over the years we started to see people from other industries were joining in. We had photographers, medical device salespeople, home organizers, yacht brokers. And we asked them, why are you enrolling in a real estate sales course? And you know what they told us? They said, sales is sales. There is nowhere else for me to go to learn how to sell in this century. Because up to this point, Doug, the only sales training available had been from people who made DVDs in the early 2000s, built for the attention span of last century. So we said, you I said, you know what? It's time for a change. It's time to take a sleepy industry that no one is paying attention to, sales training, and remake it for the modern economy. So literally today we're launching, we're, we're talking on our launch day. We launched Sell It.

I was gonna say that ends up to be sellit.com.

Sellit.com. That's how we got here. And what we are doing, uh, is training the freelance and gig economy, which by 2027 will be half of the US workforce. Today there are 36— sorry, there are 36% of the US workforce, which is 60 million people, are engaged in gig work. 44% of those rely on that freelance income as their full-time source of income.

And they've gotta learn how— they've gotta learn how to sell.

All have to learn how to sell. So Doug, that, that is, that is the answer to how we got to where we are today. Got it.

Really interesting. And then what's so fascinating is that I've been working— I told you before we went on, I've been working with a guy, my name is Joe Marcoux, I've been in sales training for the last year, and it's, it, it's amazing what we don't know about sales when you start learning. So I completely agree with you. This is a huge market, and good for you. So when, if somebody signs up on sellit.com, what are they getting? What's—

yeah, so we, we have a, we have a membership, and what we've found, we, we used to do courses, but what we found over time is a big value that we bring to the table. It's not only the courses, it's not only the guides and the templates and the resources and the, and the library library of, of live trainings that we do every single week. A big part of it is also the community, because the reality is, Doug, solopreneurship and, and sales in general can be a very lonely endeavor. Think about it, right? If you are a solopreneur, whether you're an independent worker or you have a small team, your number one job is selling. Your number one job is bringing in income to that business so that way you can thrive and, and grow. Sales is mostly a no game. You spend most of your day talking to people, prospecting, generating leads for people usually to just tell you no. Above a 50% close rate is fantastic. We don't know many salespeople who do that. So most of your days, no. What that means is that it's a very lonely industry. It's a very lonely endeavor. The only people who really understand that are, are people in our, our community. And we brought, brought together a global community. So what we did was created a membership. Where it's only $24 a month. For $24 a month, you get access to our entire library of courses built to help you sell in this economy today. You get access to a community of like-minded entrepreneurs and salespeople who are sharing tips from all sorts of industries. You get live trainings that we do on a nearly near-daily basis. And of course, we have a whole library, a whole knowledge base that is designed to be how-to guides, literally paint-by-numbers. You want to start a marketing campaign, email drip campaign. You want to learn how to post on Instagram to generate leads. You want to learn how to do that cold call. Just download the guide and follow the steps because you really have one job as an independent business owner. Yes, a big part of it is actually fulfilling the work, but that work doesn't matter if you don't have leads coming in. And you can't sell them into your products, your services, or yourself.

So what is it that gets you up in the morning and really excited?

I love building, Doug. It is, it is absolutely fun to build. I think of business as a big, like, 3D puzzle, right? If you think about it, there's, there's inputs, right? That those inputs might be customers, they may be units sold, right? Depending on what the business is. Those come in, money comes in, you have gross profit, right? And then you have like operating expense and then it's supposed to shoot out at the bottom some sort of cash, cash for you. That game of how do you structure the marketing message, the sales message and the operations below it to produce an income is like the world's greatest sport. It really is. Think about it like you can be on a football field, right? You could be on a football field. And you could play the sport of football, that's quite linear. Take that to the next level and join the sport of business. Like the, the amount of mental energy that goes into it, it's like unpacking a little puzzle to, to generate the results, right? It's like, I'll tell you this, and maybe you think this as well. What I love about it, it's completely in your control. If you're running a business, you have no one else to blame but you. If it doesn't go the way that you wanted, your strategy wasn't good enough. You weren't smart enough. You weren't fast enough to get the market trends. Like, it's all you. So the more you can learn, the more you can strategize with other people, the more that you can take away from other people like we do in our community, the more likely it is that you will succeed as that independent business owner.

Yep, absolutely. So Since you like building things, you've got Sell It launching today, as it turns out. That's an interesting coincidence that you're, we're talking today. Do you, do you now build Sell It, build it out and grow it, or grow it for a couple of years and then move on to another project? Or are you, there are some entrepreneurs who are like you who love to build and create, but once they've got their creation going, they don't want to manage, they want to move on and build something else. There are others like to grow what they have created and watch it grow and continue with it. Where do you think you are?

We are building something for the long term, and I believe we are just getting started today. We have spent 5 years proving this concept with real estate agents, and I'll mention I just posted this on LinkedIn. If you go to check out my LinkedIn, I just posted a LinkedIn article about this today. I pitched this, this vision, this idea Day 3 working full-time for Ryan. Day 3, I said, and this was, this was September 13th, 2019. It was Friday the 13th, ironically, but it was 3 days after I started and I approached Ryan with the deck was Sell It, Sell It Like Serhant, the future. And the vision was growing Sell It Like Serhant into the number 1 business brand for sales professionals worldwide.

Wow.

That's what we wanted to do in 2019. Now it's taken 5 years for a whole variety of reasons. It's not easy to go from a niche product to serve a niche audience to do a, to get the capital and the resources to go through a whole rebrand, build a new website, build a new platform, and then launch it to a whole new audience. So it's taken a while, but I cannot wait to see where this goes.

Well, exciting. So what do you think? I mean, you're a high energy guy. I can tell that just by talking to you. Where, what do you think is unique about you that you've been able to bring to the table that's made all of this successful?

The number one skill for business success is curiosity. I look for it on my team and I'm absolutely driven by it. If you are a curious person, you are always asking what's next and you are never satisfied By what's going on today, cuz at the end of the day, what we did today is not good enough for where we have to go tomorrow. It's sufficient, right? It's sufficient. It'll be fine. But really, no matter how good you are, you can always get better. You can always grow better. You can always grow faster. You can always grow stronger. So what I believe is that by having that curiosity gene, and I think I was blessed with that curiosity gene from birth or from my parents, whatever it might be, but I've always been interested in learning. I've always been interested in growing, and it's never been enough just to stay still. So I think that's number 1. And then number 2 is a sense of energy and wonderment about the world. And that's also something that I don't think can be taught. When you talk about that energy, I don't know where it comes from, but I think it comes from my excitement to see what's right around the next corner.

Yeah, you're like a kid at Christmas or a kid going, there's a pony in the stall, right?

That's exactly what it is. I mean, we just built the studio here. One of the, one of the crazy things for me, Doug, is to see how this team has grown over the years. Just me. Now we have 30 people on the team and we keep leveling it up. We keep leveling it up. And now we have a studio which, as I look around, I'm like, oh, we could light it, probably light it better, like light the, light the walls. And we'll, we'll get there slowly but surely. But it, but it is the journey that is truly fun, Doug.

So are you, are you running the whole Sell It operation? You're basically the CEO of Sell It.

I'm the president and the co-founder. So Ryan's the CEO and founder, uh, and then I'm responsible for the day-to-day operations of it.

And you got 35 people working for you now?

About 35. Yeah. A big part of that is our sales team. We have a one-on-one coaching program that we have our own sales team, of course. What, what would a sales training organization be without a sales team? But with that is a, that is a phone sales enterprise. Uh, we have probably about almost 10 salespeople. Sales management between the setters and the closers. And that's a really big chunk of our organization. We then have a sizable marketing team because we are a sales and marketing organization. All you have to do is look at the org chart to really say, ah, what's like the number one thing within the organization? We're a sales and marketing company, but also our, you know, on the content side, if you think about the economics of this business, one of the great things is that it is, it is a relatively light asset. Business.

Yeah.

Meaning, right.

And it's all leverageable. I mean, if you've got an online platform, it's all digital. The, the incremental addition of customers or clients or members costs you nothing in terms of— exactly. So, so it's totally leverageable and it just becomes a numbers game at the front end. How many people—

exactly. It's a numbers game. And, and what that is, what that means is that we can put a, you know, a pretty good investment into the content. And then run it as a really solid, really strong content machine. But because it is a membership, it's not like every time, to your point, we get a new member, we have to add additional content resources. We can, we can have a steady base of fixed costs, and then the variable costs really come from the marketing and sales process, right?

Interesting. So this show's called Listening with Leaders because my career I like yours. I would have never predicted where I would have ended up as a lawyer turned peacemaker. Listening is the foundational skill of life. And I'm just curious about what your take on listening is and how you learned how to listen.

Listening is a skill I think all of us get better at every single day. And the way that I've done it and the way that I've learned to listen is really understand that it's not about me. You have to take your ego out of it. That's the number one thing is you have to remember that, that the, that 3D chess game of business is not about you ever. The second that you make it about you, you become a terrible listener and you become a terrible business partner and a terrible employee and a terrible manager. Like, it's not about you.

That's right.

And I think to the degree that you could take the ego out of it, and it, it is hard sometimes, but the degree to which you could take the ego about out of it and make it all about the success of the team and the success of others, the better listener you become because naturally you become much more interested in what the other person has to say, what the other person is feeling.

That, that I am so happy to hear you say that. You're one of the few guests I've ever had who really has that insight. There's two types of listening. Type 1 listening is where it's my agenda as the listener. I want to get information. I want to be heard. I want to be validated. Maybe I, maybe I need to make decisions. So I'm listening to gather information, but it's really all about me. And then there's the type 2 listening you're talking about where I'm listening to make sure the speaker feels heard from the speaker's frame of reference. And when they, when they feel heard and validated, they'll follow you anywhere.

But I would also say like a big part of it, the, the way that when people ask me about motivation, the big thing that I say is that it has to come from inside. So mo— motivation and even like working for nonprofits and volunteering your time, that all has to come from a selfish place.

Right?

Because it all has to be so intrinsically motivated to actually do it and succeed at it. So like, you can be generous of spirit, you could be generous with your time, but ultimately there is a, there is a reason for it. It makes you feel good. It makes you feel good to be a good listener. So it is about you, but recognize in a way, but it, but recognize that that being about you is about being about others.

That's right. I came to that realization many, many years ago. But I've learned something even more important than that. And that is that when you learn how to validate people specifically by listening to their emotions, not their words, that you can create magic in their life and in your life. Imagine having no more fights and arguments ever again in your life. Imagine stopping all the emotional hijacking that goes on between people. Because they don't know how to manage their own emotions. Right. And imagine being able to walk into any room, no matter how intense, and know exactly what to say and how to say it and be perfectly calm and confident and compassionate at the same time. That's what deep listening is in my perspective. And that's what I teach. I teach people how to do that. So it's pretty cool. You ever get emotionally hijacked by other people's emotions?

Tell me what you mean by emotional hijacking. I'm curious to hear about this.

Walked into a situation where somebody is angry, either angry at you or angry at somebody else, and inside yourself you're starting to feel anxious or upset. Are you feeling uncomfortable?

Of course. Yeah, of course.

That's emotional. That's being hijacked by other people's emotions. Yes. And so part of, part of, part of what we can learn when we learn how to listen is to stop the emotional hijack. So if you're, if you're angry and I walk into a situation, you might be angry at me or you might be angry at somebody else, but if I can listen to you in a way that calms you down in 90 seconds, we stop the emotional hijack and all of a sudden we feel calm inside ourselves. And none of that, none of that anxiety that we feel around emotions exists anymore. We feel very comfortable around emotional people. That to me is the power of listening. Learning how to do that.

The only way, Doug, to do that is by practicing. That's right.

Knowing how to do it and then practicing it. And the reason I'm talking about this is because in your sales stuff, it is— sales is totally emotional. In fact, I teach salespeople, abandon reason when you're selling somebody. Abandon reason. There is no such thing as rational decision-making. Yeah. It's all emotion. And so you better learn how to listen to emotions if you wanna make sales.

And I would say, Doug, that's also true in B2B sales. People don't, people don't realize it doesn't matter because the company is just a bunch of people at the end of the day. It's not an institution that makes its own logical decision. Yes, you, you often have to, the buyer often has to back it up by logic, logic. Mm-hmm. Because they have to make the case for the budget. Why'd they spend this? Why'd they make, decision. But ultimately, that's just the justification.

That's right.

Because ultimately, that person's buying because they have an emotional connection to you as the seller. That's right.

All decision-making is emotional. And it gets down to even at the synaptic level when, when the neurons are deciding which way to go, the decision, what's gonna give me more pain, which gonna, or what's gonna avoid pain and what's gonna give me pleasure. Totally emotional. And so Understanding that we are driven as emotional beings, not rational beings, changes how we relate to people because we relate to them as emotional people. And in sales especially, I've learned that it's critical to be able to relate to people at an emotional level, to be able to listen to their emotions, not their words, listen to what they're feeling and then reflect back what they're feeling so they feel heard and validated. And then they're willing to sit down and listen to your pitch once they feel heard. That's the secret.

It is.

So cool. So where do you think Sell It's gonna go from here?

Sell It will— so our mission at Sell It is to make sales skills the most recognizably valuable skills in the world because at the end of the day, they are. Whether you are in full-time sales because you're a salesperson, you're an account executive, you're a business development rep, You're the chief revenue officer, whether you're selling yourself because you're an entrepreneur, a solopreneur, and you have to do that in order to make an income, or you're just an everyday person who doesn't have a job related to sales, or, or, or perhaps you're, you're not even employed, you're retired, you're stay at home, whatever it might be. All of us are engaged in some form of sales, some form of persuasion. You need it to ask your boss for a raise. You need it to justify your budget, you need it to convince your kids to have that broccoli for dinner.

Right, exactly. It's sales. It's all part of negotiation.

Exactly. But Doug, here's the problem. Even today in 2024, the word sales still conjures up the image for many people of the movie Glengarry, the 1992 movie Glengarry Glen Ross, which is the guy standing in the front of the room Coffee is for closers. Always be closing. Get on the phone, say whatever you need to say, make the sale. And if that means making it up, make it up because it doesn't matter. There's a transactional sale. People think of used car salesperson, snake oil salesperson. There's a reason why this is the case because that's what sales used to be.

That's right.

Sales today is not that. Sales today is not transactional. Sales today is about building relationships and guiding a customer to what is actually the best thing for them.

That's right.

Because ultimately sales is about guiding someone to make the decision that they already would've made themselves. You're just helping them do it better and faster. It's not about pushing. It's not about pushing.

That's right.

And today we very much believe at Sell It, people hate being sold, but they love shopping with friends. And that goes back to the emotional component of decision-making. People love saying yes to friends, right? If you could build a real relationship and show that you're actually in this for them and not for the commission, not for the money, right? That comes from being a genuine, authentic person. You'll make the sale much more often. Much, much often.

That's right. Yeah, you're right. It's all about, I mean, sale, good sales is not transactional. It's relation, right? And, and with my, with my clients, for example, we have a relationship that lasts a lifetime. It's not—

that's the change you talk about. That's the change you wanna see in the world. Like that's, that's where we want Sell It to go. If Sell It is successful, when Sell It is successful, we will move the needle on culture. We will lend, we will lend in a day where people are saying, yeah, you know, STEM skills are really important. You've probably heard of that science, technology, engineering, and math.

Of course, important for sure.

But to really get ahead, to really get what you want out of life, to really accomplish whatever your goals is, and it may not be monetary goals, it may be I want to spend more time with my friends and family, maybe I want to retire early, it may be I do want to buy the Ferrari or the Maserati, that's fine too. But whatever it is, it's only sales skills that will get you to the most realized version of whatever your vision is for yourself.

That's exactly right. It is, it is because we are always helping people make decisions and we want people to make the best decisions they can make with the available information in front of them.

Yes.

And when we can provide a solution for people that really solves the problem and they honestly believe that you can help them solve the problem, then we're doing good in the world.

That and a big part of your job as a salesperson is contextualizing that information because you can Google— let's use the example of cars, right? You can absolutely Google, go to Consumer Reports, Edmunds, J.D. Power and Associates. What are the best cars? Put in, I need— I have a family of 5, I travel a lot, but it'll spit out a car for you. You can go buy it or you can go. But what happens when you go to the dealership? They give you the context, right? They give you the context. And that is why it's about guiding. It's about filling in the blanks with the information you can otherwise find online. But only that true expert in cars, only that true expert in homes, only true— that true expert in watches can give you the context to make the best and most informed decision for you.

Absolutely. Well, good for you. This sounds like a really exciting enterprise you've got going on.

It's really fun.

Nice job, Kyle. So one more question. I'll let you go. What is one thing about yourself that we would never know unless you revealed it to us?

Good question. I, I've, I have a, I have a presentation that I do and we're talking about identity. Uh, and I think identity is a very misunderstood word because I think it's overused today in many different ways. When I talk about identity, I talk about your sort of the way that you show up to the world, right? And it's really important the way that all of us show up and we teach this in our one-on-one coaching program. We, we're showing up to accomplish a business result, accomplish a business result. So you have to be really strategic about the way that you show up, and it will never be for anyone, it will never be the perfect Venn diagram overlap of who you really are and the way that you show up in the world. You want those two to be as close as possible for frankly to, for sales. You have to be your authentic self in sales. You have to be for successful sales. You have to be authentic. But I think one of the things that, that I'm uniquely able to do that is uniquely useful for me is I truly am a chameleon. I, I am able to be an extrovert and an introvert. I am able to adapt in multiple environments almost sometimes to my, to my detriment in which if I spend too much time with someone, I start talking like them.

Hmm.

That does happen. But I also think it's a skill. And that's one of those like very, very unique things that I love going to events. I love going to network things, but I also really love reading a book and not talking to anyone. I love both sides of it. What was that?

Ambervert. You're an Ambervert.

Yeah, exactly. But it is that, that like chameleon of like my Venn diagram is constantly moving depending on the situation. I think that's a unique, very unique and very interesting. It's something I only realized Once I started studying sales and once I started learning actually what sales is, I had the vocabulary to explain that.

Good for you. Well, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy launch day to chat with us. Really appreciate it, Kyle.

Thanks for having me on, Doug. This is, this is fantastic. I really, really appreciate it. And I hope we were able to help your listeners understand what a, what a wonderful opportunity sales truly is. And I recommend everyone lean into it.

Absolutely.

Become the best version of yourself by learning how to sell yourself better. It's, it's an incredible skill.

Check out sellit.com, everybody. Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnoll.com.

DougNoll.com/podcast.

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