They’re Lying About Selling... Here’s How She Made $1.2M in One Day | Forbes Riley

Forbes Riley rejects the label “sales mogul” and calls herself the “Pitch Queen.” Her distinction is that selling tends to focus on explaining a product, while pitching is about creating enough interest, desire, and relevance to get a person to say “yes” or “tell me more.”

Riley says she has generated more than $2.5 billion in product sales over her career. She stopped counting at roughly that level and says she has worked across television, infomercials, home shopping, fitness products, entertainment, digital marketing, and training.

One of Riley’s biggest single-day results was 64,000 units sold in 24 hours, producing about $1.2 million in sales. She uses results like this to argue that pitching is a repeatable commercial skill rather than simply charisma.

Her central definition of a successful pitch is extremely simple: it gets a “yes.” The immediate goal is not to explain everything; it is to earn permission for the conversation to continue.

Riley argues that most pitches fail because people talk too much, talk too little, babble, or list features without establishing relevance. She repeatedly coaches the hosts to shorten what they say and make the listener curious.

A strong answer to “What do you do?” should create interest rather than provide a résumé. She praises “I interview billionaires for a living” because it is short, unusual, and naturally prompts another question.

Riley challenges the hosts’ description of their company because achievement alone does not tell a listener why it matters to them. Her preferred reframing is essentially: explain what your position, network, knowledge, or access can do for the person standing in front of you.

Her rule is that people care less about what you do than about what you can do for them. When one host says he can provide access to wealthy people, his network, and industry know-how, Riley identifies those benefits as a stronger basis for his pitch.

Riley’s most repeated sales principle is: stop telling people what they need and get them to want what you have. She says people dislike feeling sold to but enjoy choosing to buy.

She teaches students to stop thinking of themselves as having a “product” or “service” and instead think of themselves as having a solution. The first task is identifying the specific problem that solution removes.

Riley demonstrates the approach with a stain remover by refusing to start with the product. She first reminds viewers of ruined carpets, stained clothing, spilled wine, ink, and other familiar frustrations so the audience recognizes the problem before seeing the solution.

Curiosity should be built before the product is fully revealed. Riley argues that showing or explaining the solution too early kills the audience’s desire to discover what solves the problem.

Third-party testimony is a major part of her selling structure. Rather than personally claiming a product is wonderful, she would introduce someone who can describe a concrete result—such as avoiding an $800 carpet replacement—which gives the product outside validation.

Her traditional infomercial sequence combines problem recognition, curiosity, proof, solution, a stronger-than-expected offer, and urgency. Examples include two-for-one offers, deadlines, limited availability, and other mechanisms that make a person act rather than postpone.

Riley believes one-to-many selling is inherently more scalable than one-to-one selling. Television, webinars, and similar formats allow a single pitch to influence many buyers simultaneously.

She says a television presenter has to structure a pitch differently because viewers cannot answer questions in real time. The presenter therefore has to anticipate the viewers’ circumstances and internal responses.

Riley says she has had to generate roughly $2,000–$5,000 in sales for every minute of some home-shopping appearances. That pressure forced her to think carefully about exactly who might be watching at a particular hour and why they might buy.

She deliberately forms hypotheses about the audience before speaking to them. A QVC viewer at 9 a.m. may be home because of illness, children, caregiving, unemployment, or another circumstance, while a 2 a.m. viewer may have an entirely different situation.

Her point about audience assumptions is not that the assumptions must always be right, but that a pitcher should begin by thinking about the other person rather than themselves. Once real information becomes available, those assumptions can be adjusted.

Riley demonstrates a “question flip” by identifying the problem first and reversing the usual product-first pitch. For a coaster, the relevant starting problem is water damaging a table; for dog walking, problems include lack of time, inconvenience, energy, and trust.

Her dog-walking example turns “we walk dogs” into a statement about solving the owner’s problem. Rather than describing hours, breeds, or logistics first, she would speak to the owner who lacks time but still wants the dog exercised and cared for.

Riley repeatedly tells the hosts that their answers are often correct but presented in the wrong order. The useful information already exists; the improvement comes from putting the customer’s problem before the provider’s capabilities.

She teaches the concept of an “open door”: wait until a person has given you a reason to proceed before dumping information on them. A salesperson who keeps talking after the prospect is already interested risks talking themselves out of the sale.

Her rule after receiving the desired “yes” is effectively to stop talking and advance the transaction. She compares it to a marriage proposal: once the answer is yes, there is little value in continuing to justify the proposal.

Riley criticizes network marketers for frequently making their product, ingredients, experience, or business opportunity the center of the conversation. She recommends instead noticing a specific problem, offering the person an experience with the solution, and allowing that experience to create interest.

She uses her SpinGym fitness device to demonstrate selling through experience rather than explanation. She gets the hosts physically using it before giving them a long product presentation, allowing them to describe the muscular effort and benefits themselves.

Riley describes commands such as “give me your thumbs” as part of getting the prospect physically engaged. Her broader lesson is to ask for the next action rather than hoping the customer eventually volunteers it.

During the demonstration, Riley turns the hosts’ own reactions into the sales argument. They report immediately feeling the exercise, discuss where their muscles are working, and begin imagining when they could use the device.

Riley then asks questions that assume movement toward purchase—such as whether someone wants silver or gold. When the answer is “gold,” she treats the decision as made and moves on rather than reopening the sale.

She also demonstrates scarcity by withholding the product after creating demand. The hosts become more interested precisely because access is temporarily constrained.

Riley says about 2.8 million SpinGyms had been sold by the time of the interview. She also says she is in the National Fitness Hall of Fame, while joking that her inclusion owes more to the amount she sold than to having been exceptionally fit herself.

Her own early attempts to demonstrate SpinGym at booths taught her that expertise can become a liability when it produces too much explanation. She would explain exercises and credentials until people walked away, despite knowing the product extremely well.

Riley’s pitching ability was discovered almost accidentally during an acting audition. Asked to “sell this pen” to a camera, she avoided describing its clicker, ink, feel, or price and instead told a personal story about handwritten letters from her mother and the emotional power of a pen.

Jake Steinfeld of Body by Jake saw that audition and told Riley she was going to make him a lot of money. He had created the 24-hour Fit TV cable channel and identified her as someone who could pitch fitness and wellness products.

Steinfeld selected Riley from roughly 500 actresses even though she says she did not understand at the time what special ability he had seen. She credits him as the first person to recognize that her instinct for storytelling could be commercially valuable.

Riley says Steinfeld did not formally teach her how to pitch; he put her on air and let experience teach her. She eventually worked with about 1,500 different products, writing pitches, rehearsing them, appearing on television, and selling them.

Products associated with figures including Suzanne Somers and Richard Simmons passed through Riley’s pitching work. She says repeated exposure to radically different products helped her discover that the underlying persuasion structure remained similar.

Riley says she appeared in 197 half-hour sales shows and was one of relatively few women in a pitching field dominated by men. Her natural speed, energy, and performance background fit the emerging television format.

Her rise coincided with the expansion of cable television and the development of overnight infomercials. She openly acknowledges that being in the right place during the creation of these new commercial formats contributed significantly to her career.

Riley says successful pitching is a learnable skill, even though she initially believed her own ability was largely innate. Only much later did she break down what she had been doing unconsciously into a teachable system.

Her father was a printer, inventor, and amateur magician whose influence appears repeatedly in her approach to persuasion. He built unusual inventions—including a homemade “Batmobile”—and constantly encouraged her to think differently.

Riley says watching her father’s inventions and ideas being discarded after his death profoundly affected her. She concluded that ideas that are never acted upon effectively disappear with their creators.

She connects that experience to the idea that graveyards contain enormous unrealized value because people die with businesses, inventions, books, and other ideas they never executed. For Riley, execution is therefore more important than endlessly preparing.

Her father also made her perform magic tricks as a child, which Riley now sees as early training in pitching. A successful magic performance requires setup, attention, sequencing, and getting someone to believe something initially seems impossible—the same psychological movement she tries to create in a pitch.

Riley grew up with severe insecurity rather than as a naturally confident communicator. She says her family were second-generation immigrants from Ukraine and that she was an awkward, isolated child who struggled intensely with her appearance and speech.

She underwent roughly eight years of orthodontic treatment, including braces, headgear, rubber bands, and a device she calls a tongue stretcher. For about two years she says people could barely understand her speech, forcing her to point or write notes to communicate.

Riley later connected that childhood inability to be understood with her adult obsession with clear communication. She says she does not speak simply to express herself; she wants to know that the listener actually received the intended message.

Her father suffered a catastrophic printing-press accident and lost the front portion of his hand. He spent about three years in the hospital during Riley’s high-school years, devastating the family financially.

Riley says the family exhausted its resources during her father’s hospitalization and that she was frequently hungry. Her mother eventually told her there was no money available for college.

A scholarship attached to the Miss Teenage America pageant became an unexpected possible route to education. Riley did not see herself as a beauty-pageant candidate and describes having braces-related issues, a broken nose, frizzy hair, excess weight, and very little confidence.

A doctor treating Riley’s father overheard the family discussing the problem and offered to repair Riley’s nose without charging them. Riley interprets the event as an example of how speaking a possibility aloud can unexpectedly create an opportunity.

Riley entered the pageant in a hand-me-down bridesmaid’s dress because the family could not afford something new. She says her real motivation was the possibility of financially helping her parents.

She won the local pageant and advanced to the televised Miss Teenage America nationals with Bob Hope. She did not win nationally, but describes the experience as one of the first moments that dramatically changed how she saw herself.

Riley summarizes her action philosophy as “dream it, believe it, achieve it,” but says the crucial final ingredient is massive action. Merely visualizing or discussing an ambition is insufficient.

She was academically advanced and says she first went away to college at about 15½ after skipping a grade. Despite being academically capable, she describes herself at that time as extremely lonely and insecure.

Her mother regularly sent handwritten letters while she was away, and those letters later became the emotional story behind Riley’s famous pen audition. The experience taught her that an ordinary object can be pitched through what it enables emotionally rather than through its physical specifications.

Riley originally considered a conventional professional route such as law because acting seemed financially unrealistic. She nevertheless could not abandon her desire to perform.

She had rarely received meaningful acting roles in school and was accustomed to being cast in the chorus or as minor characters. During her senior year of college, however, she unexpectedly received the major role of Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

Professor David Richmond’s decision to cast her became another pivotal moment in Riley’s life. She says Richmond was legally blind and therefore was not judging the physical characteristics about which she was insecure; he told her he saw the personality and complexity needed for Rosalind.

The success of that production gave Riley enough confidence to move to New York and pursue acting despite having little family financial support. She auditioned for her first film and landed the lead role in the 1980s horror film Splatter University.

Riley later worked as a Broadway actress and on soap operas before moving to Los Angeles. Her career subsequently expanded well beyond acting into hosting, sales television, fitness, radio, sports, and entrepreneurship.

Despite performing comfortably on stage and television, Riley describes herself as fundamentally introverted and happy staying home. She says she can command a room when she has a role or purpose but has often struggled with unstructured social situations.

A Hollywood party at the Beverly Wilshire became a lesson in how insecurity can destroy access. Riley arrived in a Camaro she was proud to own, compared herself with the wealthy and famous people around her, decided she was the least attractive and successful person there, and left.

She later realized leaving the party may have cost her relationships, agents, friendships, romantic opportunities, and career connections. That regret pushed her to create deliberate systems for introducing herself and networking instead of depending on confidence.

Even her unusual first name became part of that system. Instead of spending several minutes explaining it, she began saying, “Forbes Riley—Forbes as in the magazine,” creating an immediate association people could remember.

Riley uses a “rule of three” and personal associations to remember other people’s names. She links new names to people or concepts already familiar to her and says remembering someone later communicates attention and respect.

She argues that people frequently forget names because they are preoccupied with how they themselves are being perceived. Remembering another person requires deliberately shifting attention away from oneself.

Riley says she graduated from college at age 20 with two degrees completed in three years. She describes herself as academically strong but socially limited, with few friends and a strong desire to see a larger world.

Rather than pursue the stable 30-year-career-and-pension model common around her on Long Island, Riley says she wanted freedom, travel, success, and adventure. She has generally structured her career around independent opportunities rather than traditional employment.

At about 20 she used a book called Europe on $20 a Day and a few thousand dollars from her first movie to travel through Europe. She says she consciously wanted to accumulate experiences that would someday make her life worth telling as a story.

That desire for a life worth recounting became an informal decision filter. Riley says she has repeatedly asked herself whether an opportunity might become a meaningful story later.

Riley says she helped start the X Games for ESPN. She also hosted Westwood One’s syndicated Off the Record on roughly 250 stations alongside the era of Howard Stern’s radio prominence.

She says she hosted Los Angeles’ Laugh Factory for about three years. The hosts express surprise at the number of apparently unrelated media careers she managed alongside infomercials and fitness.

Riley also refers to work on a dog game show and other television projects, reinforcing how varied her media career became. Her career was not a single progression from acting to sales but a series of overlapping opportunities.

Riley says she deliberately avoids using luxury possessions as evidence of success. Despite billions in attributed sales, she says she drove a Prius for a long period, avoids expensive labels and showy purchases, and does not feel a need to prove her worth through cars or possessions.

Her explanation for repeatedly adapting across industries is that change is constant and comfort is dangerous. She moved from acting to cable television, infomercials, home shopping, fitness products, digital marketing, webinars, and online education as distribution channels changed.

Kevin Harrington is cited by the hosts as someone who has praised Riley’s ability to recognize and adapt early to media trends. Harrington was also directly involved with Riley in infomercial work.

Riley’s personal philosophy includes the belief that “life happens for you, not to you.” She tries to interpret painful events as experiences from which something useful can eventually be extracted.

One of the deepest tragedies Riley describes is the murder of a boy she says she had raised for 12 years. She presents surviving severe loss as part of the reason she feels strongly about extracting meaning from difficult experiences.

Both of Riley’s parents died around age 70 shortly before 9/11, according to her account. Their deaths caused her to question what gave her own life meaning and strengthened her desire to have children.

Riley subsequently had boy-and-girl twins and devoted significant time to raising them. She describes motherhood as a major change in what “mattering” meant to her.

Her daughter was exposed to Riley’s business world from childhood. Riley says the girl accompanied her to HSN, traveled with her, watched and participated in negotiations, and met many of Riley’s professional contacts from around age eight.

During the COVID shutdown, Riley experienced an unusual period in which she felt she had nothing professionally to do. At the same time, the man who is now her husband was recovering from a serious motorcycle accident.

Riley’s 17-year-old daughter responded to that period by proposing that they start a company together. Riley initially dismissed the idea because of her daughter’s age.

Riley then discovered that her daughter had quietly been earning money by doing digital work for Riley’s contacts. She had been coding, building websites, managing YouTube channels, and helping figures in Riley’s network while developing relationships independently.

The daughter confronted Riley with the fact that Riley herself was the one person who had underestimated her. After showing her mother the money she had already earned, she proposed that together they move into the digital business world.

The daughter told Riley she could make them $1 million within a year if Riley allowed her to lead the effort. The two began working on webinars, online programs, funnels, and converting Riley’s instinctive pitching ability into something teachable.

Riley says it initially took roughly three weeks simply to identify what she could teach because pitching had become automatic to her. Her daughter helped her analyze years of performances until they could identify recurring patterns and turn them into a system.

Their first test put 25 people into a Zoom-based training offer priced at $1,000 each. Riley says every person bought, creating $25,000 overnight in an account that had previously produced no revenue for roughly three years.

They repeated the 25-person offer for four weeks and reached approximately $100,000 in a month. The result convinced Riley that her offline pitching expertise could be successfully transferred into digital education.

About nine months later, Riley says the business qualified for a Two Comma Club award for generating a million-dollar funnel. She says this occurred about six years before the interview and that the online business continued growing afterward.

Riley says she has now taught more than 100,000 students through her pitch programs. Her daughter’s suggestion to document Riley’s method ultimately contributed to the creation of her book and training system.

Riley says some of her students are women in their late 80s who are now earning money online. She uses them as evidence for her belief that entrepreneurship and digital business are not limited to young founders.

At the time of the interview, Riley said she was approaching her 66th birthday on April 25. She describes her current stage of life less in terms of proving success and more in terms of creating a legacy.

Her deepest stated personal value is “I want to matter.” She says that feeling originated in childhood, when she often felt insignificant, and later evolved into a desire to help other people change their lives.

The hosts identify their own guiding values during the discussion. One names integrity; another says he avoids doing business with people he dislikes or does not trust; another answers “God first.”

The School of Hard Knocks founders say their eventual business was not an obvious or predetermined career path. They recall believing when younger that they would eventually do something significant, regularly discussing their plans, and later turning street interviews and business content into the School of Hard Knocks.

Two of the hosts used to meet at IHOP roughly once a year to discuss their lives and future plans before the eventual company existed. Looking backward, they see those conversations as early evidence of the entrepreneurial direction they later took.

The discussion repeatedly contrasts education with execution. One phrase used is that many people become “addicted to education” but “allergic to execution,” meaning information has little commercial value unless someone actually acts on it.

Riley says other people’s judgments frequently stop people before external circumstances do. One of her recurring principles is not allowing another person’s opinion to become your reality.

Riley says one person believing in someone at the right moment can redirect an entire life. She identifies the doctor who helped her, Professor Richmond, Jake Steinfeld, and later her daughter as examples of people whose interventions altered her direction.

She also describes herself as having long carried unusually large ambitions despite deep insecurity. As a young person she imagined becoming an actress, attending the Oscars, traveling, and living a life dramatically different from the one she saw around her.

Riley says she was involved in Kim Kardashian’s early television exposure before Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Her account begins while Riley was filming a vitamin infomercial with Kardashian’s then-stepfather, Bruce Jenner, who invited her to meet the family.

Riley says this meeting occurred roughly eight months before Keeping Up with the Kardashians launched. She remembers meeting Kim, Kendall, Kylie, and the rest of the family before their reality television fame.

While producing a steam-iron infomercial with Kevin Harrington, Riley suggested using Kim Kardashian on the program. Riley says Kardashian had not previously appeared on television, was then known partly as Paris Hilton’s friend and as a closet organizer, and performed well on the infomercial.

Riley recalls Kardashian subsequently telling her while they were driving together in Florida that the family had obtained a reality show with Ryan Seacrest. Riley remembers responding casually because neither of them yet knew what the show would become.

Riley later came to regard the Kardashian family’s rise as an extraordinary example of marketing and brand development. She particularly credits the family’s ability to turn appearance, style, personality, and constant visibility into commercial value.

Her upcoming book is identified as Pitch Secrets A to Z. Riley says the finished edition is intended to include color and many photographs from the people, products, and experiences accumulated throughout her career.

Riley’s final advice to younger people is that nobody else gets to define who they are. She tells people to believe in themselves and find at least one genuine advocate rather than waiting for universal approval.

She illustrates that advice with her own daughter, who at 16 rejected a relative’s suggestion that she take a $16-an-hour clothing-store job and instead said she wanted to own the store. When the daughter later said she did not want to attend college, relatives predicted she would become broke and homeless, but Riley supported her entrepreneurial direction.

Riley believes one committed supporter can be enough during the period when an ambition still looks unrealistic to everyone else. She describes that person as someone who can listen, encourage, laugh and cry with you, and tell you to continue.

Riley says she ultimately wants to be remembered as someone who had a difficult childhood, chose to survive and thrive, and then used what she learned to help others. She says messages from students who attribute greater income, freedom, or family time to learning how to pitch have become more important to her than the sales totals themselves.