The Best Salespeople Build Trust Before They Ask for Business

For Ryan Serhant, the difference between “fake it till you make it” and preparing for a bigger role is whether you are lying. He rejects the phrase because it suggests deception, which he sees as especially damaging in sales and entrepreneurship. His alternative is to decide who he intends to become, write that person down, and start acting accordingly. The future version may not arrive exactly as imagined, he says, but the effort can still move you toward an alternate version of that future.

He used that approach at an open casting call for Million Dollar Listing New York in 2010. Serhant had been in real estate for about 18 months. He had entered the business to cover rent while trying to act in New York, and needed to make $2,000 a month. When the producers narrowed the field and began following candidates, he asked what kind of person he wanted them to see.

He borrowed a Range Rover, arranged access to listings, and had the crew meet him at 5 a.m. at a gym. He thought the early call would tire the producers, who had traveled from Los Angeles. He also wanted them to see him as unfiltered and comfortable on camera. When a planned apartment showing fell through, he panicked. Then he remembered a date who had abruptly left him at a restaurant. He decided to use the same tactic on the crew: he told them an urgent matter had come up, left them in the apartment, and drove away. The next day, the producers called to say they were filming the first season with four people; one of them would not make the final cut.

Serhant says he was trying to show the person he believed he would become over the next year, not pass off a false identity as the truth. He advises his daughter, agents, and staff to ask who they want to be and act like that person now. He believes the world is attracted to confidence and competence, and that competence paired with humility can help people receive opportunities before they have accumulated every result they hope to have.

Theater, which Serhant pursued before real estate, helped build skills he later relied on: memorizing information, speaking clearly, breathing with the diaphragm, and inhabiting a role. Selling is not acting, he says, but uses some of the same muscles. He describes theater as a way of creating a full human being, and says the ability to be present and communicate is trainable—not a quality reserved for naturally outgoing people.

That is also why he recommends improv classes to agents who are shy. The point is not to make them funny or theatrical. It is to get them accustomed to looking foolish in front of other people. Serhant sees fear of embarrassment as a major obstacle to action: people may accept failure as part of the job but still avoid the social risk of approaching strangers, making an awkward pitch, or receiving a bad comment.

He connects that willingness directly to sales. Agents who can risk looking foolish can make more attempts and meet more people. One of his largest clients, he says, took five years of follow-up to convert. The client eventually bought properties for $16 million and $73 million, among others. Serhant’s advice is to put yourself out there and keep following up unless someone tells you to stop.

Advancing in sales, he argues, also requires deliberately entering higher-price situations. He wanted to move toward more expensive sales rather than keep doing the same thing, even if he was good at it. He eventually stopped doing rentals and focused only on sales, despite describing the transition as brutal. The difficulty is that people become accustomed to paying their bills with work they already know how to do. They may know what they want to try but hesitate because they cannot be sure they will get there. For Serhant, moving up means leveling yourself up and saying no to the work you are leaving behind.

As an independent contractor, there is no boss who will tell you what to do with the day. When Serhant started in real estate, he needed a structure for deciding how to use it. His framework has two parts: divide the work into “find business, keep business, do business,” and treat the day’s productive time like a bank account. He describes himself as the CEO, CFO, and COO of his own life.

There are 1,440 minutes in a day, but Serhant uses 1,000 as a working allowance for time available to be productive. The number varies by person and circumstances; his point is to treat those minutes as an asset. If someone takes five dollars from a thousand-dollar account, he says, you would not hand over the rest. But people routinely let a frustrating phone call or meeting consume the rest of their day because they do not think of time as something they are spending.

He started imagining himself as the CEO of his own bank of time, with a fresh thousand dollars to use each day. The framing made him more protective of his calendar. Meetings that had once lasted an hour became 15 to 30 minutes, and his days began to run in 15-minute increments. In his account, the change was not about cramming in more activity for its own sake; it was about giving his time greater value.

That did not mean eliminating conversation or treating people brusquely. Serhant distinguishes useful small talk from time that serves neither person. A shorter meeting can help both sides focus, he says, and people are often grateful not to have their time wasted. He does not walk into a meeting announcing that he has only 14 minutes. The length depends on the purpose and what the participants need to do. The discipline is to know what the meeting is for and avoid letting it expand simply because an hour was put on the calendar.

He points to 2018, a difficult year for New York real estate, as an example. Serhant says his team sold about $800 million that year and outsold the next-highest sales team by roughly $350 million. He says his team’s approach to time was part of the difference, while acknowledging that other people’s less compressed approach might be healthier or perfectly reasonable. His claim is not that every meeting should be short, but that time needs to be managed intentionally rather than surrendered by default.

“The best sell is no sell,” Serhant says. People dislike feeling sold to, while they enjoy shopping. His method is to build a real connection first, even if the interaction is brief, and to avoid making the product the opening subject. “The art of the sale is that nothing is for sale and I’m not selling you anything,” he says.

He starts with what he calls the two Cs: find something in common and give a compliment. The common ground might be the house, the street, a job, a birthday, or something else. The point is to disarm the other person and establish a human connection. Then he asks questions that let the other person speak. He says he avoids questions that can be answered with a simple no, and uses the answers to learn about the person rather than to steer immediately toward a pitch. The conversation should initially be about everything but the sale.

Relationship-building, however, does not mean leaving expectations unclear. Serhant’s company uses a process called CODO: “close on day one.” At the start of the relationship, the agent explains how the work will proceed and what the next steps are. That way, a friendly interaction does not become an open-ended commitment of time with no shared understanding of what happens next. The agent can be personable while being explicit about how the business relationship works.

The substance of the sale depends on the property and the buyer. Some homes are well-priced and sell themselves; the agent’s job is to find the right buyer. Others are overpriced or attracting little interest, and the agent has to make the case for the lifestyle or opportunity. Serhant’s illustration is that a weak salesperson tries to sell someone the bed, then hopes they imagine a dream. A better salesperson starts with the dream and explains the bed afterward. The product still matters, but the buyer’s reason for wanting it is the starting point.

The same principle underlies his “hook ’em, help ’em, ask ’em” framework. First, give someone a reason to know you and a point of connection. Then help them with something that has nothing to do with a sale: an introduction, a useful discount, or access to something they want. Only after that comes the possibility of asking for business. The ask is not compulsory, Serhant says; the framework is a way to build trust before expecting anything in return. He says his company uses the approach in training salespeople, including through SellIt.com, which he describes as serving upwards of 60,000 salespeople in 133 countries.

Serhant divides follow-up into three parts: follow up, follow through, and follow back. Follow up with prospective clients; follow through on what you promise; and follow back with people who have worked with you. His rule for prospecting is to keep going until someone buys, dies, or makes clear they do not want to work with him. He says he does not pursue people who ask him to stop.

The five-year client relationship was not a repeated generic “Is now the right time?” message. Serhant sent personal notes every other week: something about the market, a new listing or sale, or a relevant alert. He used Google Alerts to track people’s names and companies. When an alert revealed a milestone, such as a business purchase, he would send congratulations without attaching a request. The aim was to remain in the person’s mind so that, if and when real estate became relevant, they knew whom to contact.

This was a long-term practice, not a guaranteed conversion formula. Serhant says it does not work every time, but that it has worked often enough to be worth doing. The client he describes eventually responded after five years of notes. Serhant says he then sold him a $16 million property, followed by one for $73 million and then another for $33 million.

A separate deal shows how uncertain a prospect can be. In 2011, when Serhant was handling one of the largest listings he had seen, a buyer contacted him by phone about an Upper West Side apartment listed at $8.5 million. The buyer offered $8 million and said he would pay cash. Serhant had little experience with a deal of that size and did not ask the qualifying questions he would ask later. They negotiated to $8.3 million, and then the buyer disappeared.

Months later, the buyer’s lawyer said a deposit had arrived. Serhant recounts that people he spoke with suggested the buyer might be using the contract and deposit to solicit money from other people, then avoid completing the purchase. The explanation was that the funds could be held in an attorney’s escrow account, and the buyer might eventually get some or all of them back if the seller failed to close and did not pursue a lawsuit. Serhant says he was told he had been conned, but he still did not know what was happening and was worried about losing what he considered his biggest deal.

A friend found the buyer’s name attached to an address for a house in Paris. Serhant sent a message saying he would be in Paris the next day and asking whether they could meet to complete the board application. The buyer replied after months of silence, giving him a time and place. He arrived with a group of people, and Serhant got him to sign a few pages, though not to complete the application. Serhant returned with it unfinished.

Later, the buyer contacted him from New York and said he was ready to close. Serhant went to meet him at the Mandarin Oriental. A group of armored Escalades arrived; they drove to the airport, where Serhant thought the buyer might be taking him onto a plane. He says the buyer appeared to be inspecting a new airplane he was buying. They returned to the city and closed on the apartment in cash. When Serhant asked why he had put him through the process, the buyer said he had been drunk and browsing the internet one night, and eventually felt bad because Serhant had not left him alone.

In high-value negotiations, Serhant says, agents have to manage the egos of buyers and sellers as well as their own. His prescription is to communicate often, respect everyone, and “kill bees with honey.” He argues that ego damages deals and careers because people put themselves first and overestimate how much the world is focused on them.

Most business transactions, unlike a competition with a single winner, work only if both sides get something they value. In a real estate sale, he says, the agent should look for a way to help the other side win. That does not mean abandoning one’s own interests; it means recognizing that the transaction depends on the other party agreeing to it. If the other side feels respected and successful, the deal can succeed too.

Serhant describes this as partnering with people who have strong egos and giving them credit rather than challenging them for status. The approach requires overcommunication: people should understand what is happening and what is expected, instead of being left to fill in the gaps with suspicion. His advice is to play for the other side to win, on the premise that if they win in a transaction, he wins too.

When Million Dollar Listing first aired, Serhant expected the phone to ring. It did not. Viewers did not automatically call the agents they saw on television. What he did notice was the potential of turning attention into a community, and a community into business.

Early social platforms gave him a way to keep in touch with viewers and reach buyers, sellers, and other people in real estate. The challenge was that property was not a low-cost product someone could casually buy through a social post. A home might cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Serhant’s opportunity was not to close the sale directly through Instagram, but to make more people aware of what he did and build a flow of leads over time. He wanted to create a reality people could see and return to, and to make the business easier to find.

He says he started using Twitter and Facebook before Instagram arrived in 2013. Instagram’s visual format was particularly useful for real estate because it put images of properties on people’s phones. Television created attention but moved slowly: by the time a season aired, a property might already have sold. Serhant and colleagues therefore invested in YouTube, hoping to reach people more quickly and build a brand into a business.

He describes the model as content to community to commerce. In his view, distribution is a business’s most valuable asset: a strong product is not enough if nobody knows about it or buys it. Traditional advertising pushes a message toward an audience; social media and public relations can pull people into stories. Serhant says that, by the mid-2010s, some sellers and developers were writing property tours on his personal YouTube channel into their exclusive agreements. For them, the channel was not merely a way to raise his profile; it was part of how their properties would reach potential buyers.

That distinction shapes his view of personal branding. When Shane Parrish asked how he would start again in a new city without contacts, Serhant did not propose beginning with self-promotion. He said he would interview local business owners—dry cleaners, coffee shops, and other operators—and make content about them using his phone. He would become, as he put it, the public “mayor” of the town. With a few dollars for a laptop and a website, he would create a guide to the place. In Georgetown, for example, he might call it “Going to Georgetown” or “Growing up Georgetown,” using alliteration to make the name easier to remember.

The site would cover where to get brunch, lunch, and dinner, whom to hire for movers, where to get dry cleaning, and who walks dogs. Serhant said he would build it around interviews and reviews, with a direct call to action for the businesses featured, then turn that local presence into a real estate business. He summarized the relationship-building order as “give, give, give, give, give, ask.” He also described the approach as a way to become ingrained in a community and give people a reason to know your work.

Serhant says the resulting audience became a distribution funnel for real estate that could not simply be bought through conventional advertising. People who followed his content could become familiar with his work before they had a property to sell or buy. The commercial value lay in being known and in having a way to reach that audience repeatedly.

Serhant’s drive to keep expanding has brought professional success and strain at home. In a scene Shane Parrish raises from Owning Manhattan, Serhant’s wife tells him that he used to be happy and that he is never satisfied now. Serhant agrees that the impulse to keep pushing can be difficult for the people closest to someone who is ambitious.

He argues that a business that is not growing is dying, while distinguishing that from a lifestyle business whose owner is content with a fixed scale. For him, growth is connected to happiness and to the desire to do more tomorrow than yesterday, even if the difference is small. He does not suggest this is everyone’s preferred life; he says people who do not feel the same drive can have a good life too. But for someone who is oriented toward growth, reaching one goal can quickly raise the question of what comes next.

In 2019, his last year fully working as an agent, Serhant says his team crossed $1 billion in sales and his commissions were about $22 million. Rather than treating that as an endpoint, he asked what the next challenge was. He had built teams and sales and developed a distribution operation, and wanted to start a company from zero. He did so in 2020, during the pandemic, while his family was building a house and caring for a nine-month-old.

People around him advised against starting a company under those conditions. Serhant says the opposition strengthened his resolve. He also saw the shutdown as a chance to build while the spring market was paused; when the market resumed, he says, people came in droves and the company grew quickly. He describes the timing as fortunate, and says the business was in the right place at the right time.

Serhant describes his early years in New York as a period when the future he had imagined as an actor seemed to vanish. In 2008, his debit card was declined while he was buying groceries. He had avoided checking his bank balance because not looking made the immediate stress easier to bear. After the card was declined, an impatient customer behind him made the moment worse. He left the store and cried on the subway.

He called his parents, who told him to come home. He knew he could rely on family, but took the prospect of returning as a personal failure. Then he called a friend who was already in real estate and was told to get a license. Serhant did, and found a way to earn money showing rentals. He says he made $9,000 in his first year in the business, supplementing it with odd jobs, including hand modeling.

He describes the period from late 2008 through early 2010 with the phrase “the only way out is through.” The work was to keep moving through the circumstances one day at a time, rather than wait for them to become easier. He says many people left real estate as the market collapsed, while he and his friend kept working, meeting prospective renters and showing apartments.

But hardship, in Serhant’s view, explains a person without excusing their conduct. He says his past may help explain why he values time, resilience, and giving back, but it does not justify being rude or disrespectful. His own experience of being an outsider and facing difficult circumstances is context, not permission to treat other people badly.

Serhant says he has three sisters and two brothers, was often picked last for sports, and felt like an outsider growing up. He recalls writing and illustrating stories in his closet for years. He does not present that past as an excuse for how he behaves. Instead, he says, it helps explain why he focuses on time and giving back. His standard is to work incredibly hard and be incredibly nice, with endurance on his side.

Asked what success looks like, Serhant distinguishes micro-success from macro-success. A successful conversation is an example of the first: a specific interaction that went well. At a larger scale, he describes success as a “happy legacy”—leaving something behind for his daughter and for people he has helped at work.

He says he wants to give people opportunities they might not otherwise have had. Serhant describes his responsibilities as extending beyond himself to people who work with him directly and people employed indirectly through the business. He says his drive might look like ambition or a chip on his shoulder, but that he experiences it as responsibility. He does not want to waste the opportunity he has built.