Announcing Sellit.com

Sales is the skillset for the new economy.

Today, we launch Sell It , the first-ever online, interactive sales training platform for solopreneurs and enterprises.

It’s the next chapter in our company’s journey to make sales most recognizably valuable skills in the world.

Sales skills have the highest career lifetime value, propelling all careers, opening all doors in life, and driving the global marketplace. No matter your actual job, all of us must excel at sales to get ahead in this attention-deficit, fast-moving, efficiency-maximizing world.

The Journey Here

Ryan Serhant and I launched Sell It Like Serhant as a course for the niche of real estate agents in 2019, nearly five years ago, based on Ryan’s thought leadership from over a decade selling real estate and his bestselling book of the same name (more on the story behind that another time). Since then, we’ve grown the Sell It Like Serhant business within SERHANT. Ventures to over 25,000 enrollees in 128 countries, expanding our impact well beyond the core audience of agents.

Since the beginning — literally day three full time with what was then Serhant Media Group — I envisioned the expansion opportunity into different sales domains (check out my simple pitch deck from September 13, 2019 here). At the time, I described the growth as “expansion packs,” like the add-ons from The Sims, the millennial computer game classic. There would be Sales Core, and from there, we could have different courses for different industries.

We soon realized our initial real estate sales courses were attracting salespeople from other industries without?these expansion packs. Within the first month, we sold a course and membership to Joe Capisano, a yacht broker and the owner of Campisano Marine. Soon after, we enrolled Weiliang Ni, a Formula 3 race car driver into our 1:1 PRO coaching program. It turns out he wanted to learn how to sell sponsorships to fund his racing.

Cue the montage: Within the first year, we enrolled a photographer, home organizer, medical device salesperson, an insurance broker, many mortgage agents, a fisherman from Alaska, and so many more.

When we asked them why they were enrolling in a real estate sales course, they all said the same thing: Sales is sales. This is a great course, with everything I need. There’s nowhere else for me to go to learn how to make more money doing this.

We were onto something, and we were validating the theory I pitched early on: This can impact so many more salespeople beyond real estate agents.

In 2022, we embarked on the relaunch, enlisting a design agency to help us find a new name and visual identity. For the name, we went through hundreds of ideas, from Blue Whale (because every salesperson wants to catch the whale…) to Bluebird (too much like Twitter, and also the name of a company that makes busses…) to Sales Grove (are we doing gardening…?) to Best (good luck ranking for SEO…) to Denali (like the mountain or car…) to Rise (taken…). There were plenty of others.

One day, someone from our PR team suggested we drop “Like Serhant” from Sell It Like Serhant and make it, “Sell It.”

Simple.

It was there all along. Sometimes, we’re too close to the problem to see the solution.

Today, we launch Sell It, two years after embarking on the rebrand, nearly five years after launching the original course, nearly six years since I pitched the idea for the original course, and seven years after meeting Ryan. We continue with a new-and-improved core membership and 1:1 coaching program plus a new product we creatively call membership plus, which includes project-based sprints and group coaching.

The Opportunity

By 2027, half of the U.S. workforce — 80 million people — will be engaged in gig work, or self-employment. Today, 36% of U.S. workers are freelancers, and there are more than a billion independent workers worldwide. 44% of those rely on freelance work as their primary source of income.

The freelance economy is here to stay, and it is expanding 8x faster than the US economy as a whole. In fact, here in the U.S., while filings of W2 tax returns have stagnated in recent years, 1099 flings has skyrocketed.

Why?

The long answer is a separate post for a separate time, but for now, consider this: Worker burnout is at an all-time high, with 42% of workers across six countries reporting decreased levels of engagement in their jobs. In 2023, 40% of companies experienced layoffs, and we expect another 40% of companies will experience the same this year. Only 51% of workers who work for someone else report being extremely or very satisfied vs. 62% of self-employed workers. Those who are not self-employed are more likely to report their job being stressful or overwhelming.

The growing workforce of people who sell have significant tailwinds going for them except for one thing: The engine that fuels the long-term benefits of self-employment — namely more freedom and less stress — only runs on being able to build a sustainable business with steady revenue. In other words: Self-employment only works if you can learn to sell yourself, your products, or your services.

It turns out this skill is a big gap for self-employed workers.

In our inaugural survey of American entrepreneurs, we found the majority believe?sales is the most important skill for business success, and their?number one challenge is prospecting for more customers and clients. Yet, more than 80% said higher education had little to no impact on their career success, and majority told us they are willing to spend more than 4 hours per week refining skills that would benefit their business.

So, we have a growing market that recognizes they need sales skills, and they're willing to invest into developing these skills. Yet, traditional higher education has not helped them in their businesses up to this point. In fact, for some, it's completely failed.

This doesn’t come as a surprise. There are more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States, and fewer than 100 have sales programs or courses. That’s less than 3%!

Moreover, there are legitimate questions about the return on higher education from certain types of careers, such as self-employment. The cost of higher education has outpaced inflation. From 2000-2020, average tuition increased at private universities by 154% while in-state tuition at public national universities increased a staggering 221%. Inflation over the same period was only 54%. Student loan debt has reached $1.6 trillion, more than auto debt and credit card debt. The only category of consumer debt more than student loans is mortgages.

Enter: Sell It.

The Future

We created the training and community platform for this growing segment of the population who has nowhere else to go to learn the skills necessary for success in their businesses.

We're building on Ryan's 1.5 decades of selling over $10 billion in real estate in the world's most competitive market and my decade of experience as a news producer and journalist. Take sales know-how and quality information presentation, and we get an educational platform that's fun and engaging and one that?actually?delivers results.

We’re here to help people who sell (that’s all of us) achieve professional success, make more money, and thrive in this new and changing economy.

Even bigger than that, I believe we can shift the cultural perception of sales to be the most recognizably valuable skills in the world, because … surprise … they are, even more than STEM skills that usually get top billing. The reality is all of our individual successes hinge on our ability to sell ourselves, our products, our services, and our ideas.

I’d love to have you join our community and start earning more income today — whatever it is that you sell.

We’ll see you over at sellit.com.