Michael Hanson

Growth Genie

If you'd like to see one of the following templates:

- Sales training playbook to create more customer-centric messaging
- 30 touch outbound sales cadence to get in front of your ideal customers
- Guides for writing better emails and LinkedIn messaes to generate more consistent pipeline 

Please message me directly on LinkedIn or email me at mhanson@growthgenie.co

Founder & CEO

Are you looking for a more unconventional, unorthodox speaker to shake things up on the sometimes boring topic of B2B sales?

I'm a regular speaker at digital events, in person conferences, podcasts and webinars. I've spoken for brands such as Sales Hacker, the Salesman, Modern Sales Pros, Leadfeeder and Vidyard. A few topics I have spoken about include:

- Selling with less ego - how to prevent ego-driven emotions from damaging your sales process
- From murder capital to the world's most innovative city - how Medellin defined my career
- The 30 touch sales cadence - why a high touch, well thought out cadence is not harassment but truly customer-centric sales.

Email me at mhanson@growthgenie.co to learn more

Public Speaker

The COSMIC Bridge Podcast

In a world of social media polarisation, The Cosmic Bridge wants to close the gap and help build a bridge between extremes and ultimately have more balance in the world. Sharing inspiring stories weekly from cult survivors, pro footballers, death row psychiatrists and more.

Podcast Host

Pavilion

Member

Modern Sales Pros

MSP Expert

Beam

Supporting Beam’s members by donating and encouraging them to achieve their career goals.

Beam is the world’s first crowdfunding platform that helps people from disadvantaged backgrounds to train up and get into work.

Beam has proven a powerful new model to help homeless people get into work.

Beam has been covered widely including by the BBC, The Times, The FT, The Independent, London Evening Standard, Sky, Time Out and others and has been named by The Guardian as one of the most important social tech innovations of 2018.

www.beam.org

Supporter

Trellick Films

Advisor

CloudTask

Board Advisor

I helped scale the company from 5 to 200 employees and enabled our sales and marketing team to do the following:

- Book more qualified sales meetings through outbound sales outreach via calls, LinkedIn, email and SMS
- Increase conversion rates of sales meetings to deals by showing the real value of our solutions to our partners
- Email marketing campaigns
- Increase organic search to our website
- Create relevant content that resonated with our target audience

VP Growth (Sales & Marketing)

enMotion

We work with governments, NGOs and farmholders to empower their communities to:

 - Charge phones using enMotion's solar-powered battery packs 

- Water crops using enMotion's solar-powered irrigation systems

Founder

Opinno

Designing and managing the content of large-scale innovation events in partnership with MIT Technology Review, the US Embassy in Spain and Salesforce. My roles included:

• Preparing, moderating and facilitating design thinking workshops
• Designing event themes and content of interactive breakout sessions (innovation challenges, icebreakers, dynamization)
• Recruiting and managing key-note speakers
• Facilitating relationships between investors and entrepreneurs

Projects and events include:

IN3 - http://in3spain.com/
DreamForce
EmTech France - http://www.emtechfrance.com/

Content Manager

InnoCentive

I was involved in all aspects of the planning and execution of open innovation Challenges. My primary responsibilities were:

• Development and design of Challenges including expert consultation, writing reports, and drafting of all prize design elements
• Moderating and facilitating creative thinking workshops
• Management and organization of final events
• Developing strong and sustained client relationships

I worked with governments, NGOs and leading companies in the fields of pharma, neuroscience robotics, international development and business incubation. Clients included
World Vision, USAID, UKTI, The MasterCard Foundation, Nokia, Novo Nordisk, UBS Optimus Foundation, Votem

In addition to some of our smaller prizes, I was the project manager for the CPN Challenge - a $20 million Program of grants and prizes, which aims to transform the lives of people living with Spinal Cord Injury.

Account Manager

Empowering B2B Sales Teams to Have Better Conversations | Host of the COSMIC Bridge Podcast & CEO at Growth Genie

Is your sales team:

- Struggling to get the attention of your ideal customers

- Product pitching rather than using customer-centric messaging

- Unable to convert marketing leads into sales opportunities

- Getting ghosted after sales demos

Then drop me an email at mhanson@growthgenie.co to see how we can help you overcome these challenges.

. At Growth Genie, we help sales and marketing leaders, and CEO/founders: 

- Build outbound sales cadences that allow you to personalize at scale and resonate with your ideal customers

- Empower and motivate sales teams through weekly coaching and training sessions

- Build sales training playbooks that help your team use more customer-centric messaging

- Identify areas of opportunity through an in-depth messaging analysis

- Set up follow up cadences post demo to ensure your closers build better relationships with their prospects and aren't ghosted after a couple of calls

In 2023, our revenue was down to £652,500 from £690,400 in 2022.

In USD, that's $824k compared to $872k in 22'.

My goal was first to reach $1 million USD in annual revenue.

And then a stretch goal to reach £1 million GBP, so I failed both.

Here are 5 mistakes I made:

1) I became too attached to deals

I preach not attaching to any 1 particular deal. The more desperate you are, the more you'll come across as a sleazy seller.

While my job as founder/CEO encompasses finance to hiring to tech, I'm also a glorified sales person working on several deals at a time.

As we got closer to the 1 million, I did not practice what I preach.

I became more attached to my target, more desperate to close deals and my close rates went down.

In 2024, I've become more focused on sleep, breathing, diet and faith and my close rate is dramatically up.

2) I relied too much on enterprise clients

In the first 2 years of the company, most of our customers were startups with 50-500 employees and 5-50 salespeople.

Over the last 2 years, we've started working with more enterprise customers.

In this process, I turned away a lot of small deals that I thought were "unqualified".

But if you churn an enterprise customer, or they put you on hold for a few months, that has a huge impact on revenue.

You need some smaller deals to keep your revenue & cashflow healthy.

I've recently been taking on smaller deals again, and some of these have grown into nice accounts for us.

3) I slowed down marketing on our core services.

At the end of 2022, I started a podcast called the COSMIC Bridge. While I interview many revenue leaders and CEOs, there's not a direct correlation to sales training and enablement.

Although I only post the podcast once a week on LinkedIn, that's one of my 5 posts a week.

That meant I was doing 1 less post a week on sales, which = 52 less posts a year.

Outside of my personal brand, I also invested less in our company's social media.

Although I've been quiet on here recently, I'm working with a consultant and gearing up for a big push on marketing in the months ahead.

4) I didn't invest in community

We've trained thousands of salespeople, and worked with hundreds of revenue leaders since I started Growth Genie in 2019.

But I never created a community for them to interact and learn from each other.

This year, I've created 2 invite-only communities on Slack and Whatsapp, so our clients can learn from each other.

If you'd like to join them, feel free to DM me.

There were many more mistakes I made in 2023 but those are the ones that stuck out.

I'm sick of the "how I made 7 figures in 6 months" posts, so thought I'd change the mould here.

Pretty embarrassing for a sales enablement company to see a drop in revenue but we're all human eh?

And I'd never blame the economy or "recession" for this. It's totally on me as the founder, which is why I like to reflect on the above.

What mistakes did you learn from over the last year?

Someone on my team lost his dad 2 years back.

Although his dad was in his 90s, they were very close.

His brothers lived in a foreign country and his mum already died, so he looked after his dad mostly alone.

While there’s some set standards for maternity and paternity leave, there aren’t the same for grief.

After his dad passed, I said  “take as much time off as you need,” and he ended up taking 2 months.

After 2 months, I was the one that encouraged him to come back to work.

While he wasn't working, we kept talking on a personal level.

I believed work could give him some purpose again and structure to his day.

I have no idea if I did the right thing.

Maybe I gave him too much time off in the first place.

Or perhaps I pushed him back too soon.

We're still working together and have a great relationship, so that's what matters.

Being sensitive to people’s emotions while ensuring they do their job well is a tough balance as a founder.

No one writes rules for most things you go through as an entrepreneur.

Half the time you have to wing it.

Thoughts?


I've done all the guru hacks:

✅ Meditation
✅ Ayahuasca
✅ Breathwork
✅ Cold showers
✅ Daily Prayer

But none of these "fixed" me.

I still feel:

- Fear
- Anxiety
- Anger
- Doubt
- Desire

Almost on a daily basis.

But I learned to accept these emotions.

I realised it's how I react to them that define me.

When I feel scared before an important sales call, what do I do with this fear?

If it makes me anxious and I play out the worst possible case scenario, it's not productive.

But if I think, "I'm feeling fear because I'm not prepared enough. I'm going to spend the next 30 minutes, researching this company and check CRM notes."

Suddenly I've used this fear to improve.

The other key with emotions is detachment and surrender.

In a sales call, I have 100% control over my own actions.

But I have 0% control over the buyer, their words, reactions and emotions.

Learning to accept that certain buyers you won't "click" with and that you can't sell to everyone is a game-changer.

How do you deal with your fear?

#b2bsales #salesmanagement #salestraining 

This is the last edition of Michael's B2B Sales Tips.

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Some good news and bad news for y'all today (damn I spend too much time with Americans). Let's kick off with the bad: This will be the last ever editi

Open article: Sad News + My Top Sales Newsletters by Michael Hanson • 1 min read

Michael Hanson on LinkedIn • 1 min read

Faithless have sold over 15 million albums worldwide.

Their track Insomnia has 185 million views on YouTube alone.

It's regarded as of the biggest dance tracks of all time.

But behind the scenes of the band is a story of graft & determination.

Years of no-one knowing who they were in the early 90s.

Sister Bliss handing out cassettes to DJs at gigs.

Turning up at the offices of record labels.

It's essentially what we'd call door to door sales.

She discussed with the story behind the band and her most memorable gigs.

Listen here - https://lnkd.in/eySg8dix

Is your sales team scared to pick up the phone?

The solutions are simpler than you think...

#b2bsales #salesmanagement #salestraining #outbound

Your 1 on 1s with your sales team are absolute torture.

Here's why...

After 14 years in corporate life, I still feel fear before important calls.

I learned this breathing exercise a few years back, and it has helped calm my fear.

It's unbelievably simple.

Just breathe in more than you breathe out and repeat the cycle for 3-5 minutes.

I do it for 4 seconds in, 8 seconds out.

But you can remix it as it feels comfortable for you.

Hate commuting into an office?

Smelly armpits in your face.

Backpacks rubbing against you.

Feeling claustrophobic.

It's why I despise rush hour and the rat race.

There's a better way BUT it's not always to work from home...

Charlotte Lloyd lost her mum when she was just 17.

But she wasn't able to grieve properly until she was 21 while travelling in Brazil.

She then entered a period of depression in her 20s.

Charlotte finally changed her mindset many years later & has used grief as an advantage in sales & entrepreneurship.

So what if you churn a customer, someone shouts at you on a call, or you work for 6 months on a deal and lose it to a competitor.

It can't compare with the darkness of losing someone so close to you.

We discussed the link between grief and resilience in sales.

Listen here:
https://bit.ly/3TIbNnE

#b2bsales #salestraining #salesmanagement #grief

Charlotte Lloyd helps Founders and Solopreneurs increase pipeline and convert clients on LinkedIn by showing you how to social sell using content along with a warm cold outbound system to close sales. However in this episode of the show we won’t be...

Open video: How to Use the Grief of a Loved One as a Gift! Ep 72 Charlotte Lloyd on bit.ly

How to Use the Grief of a Loved One as a Gift! Ep 72 Charlotte Lloyd

It's not easy to work 9-5 Monday-Friday when you run a business.

The Tim Farris 4 Hr Work Week sounds great but is utopian for many founders.

I'm not a night owl and enjoy down time in the evenings.

So my favourite time to work is Saturday afternoon.

There are no distractions from clients or colleagues so creativity flows more.

If you work on weekends, what's your typical schedule?

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