The Concept of "Sales" Is a Lie
The more people try to sell, the more they put off buyers
Tactics like fake discounts, hidden lines in contracts and made-up case studies give salespeople a bad name, and it’s why only 18% of buyers trust salespeople (the RAIN group).
“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference between the two” is not just a useful life lesson for alcoholics. Sellers also can only control what they say and how they act. Buyers are 100% in control of their decision and hate being cornered and pushed.
So what’s the alternative? Elite salespeople guide customers to make decisions in their best interest to help them solve critical problems. Think about this:
Would you rather close a £50k deal that's not in your customer’s best interest so they don’t renew next year? Or would you turn a customer down, send them to a competitor and make a friend for life who two years later gets promoted and buys a £300k contract off you?
Seems like a rhetorical question, but many sellers are taught to lie and take the first deal.
I had no aspirations to go down the investment banking route. I thought the economic reward was not worth working until 11pm at night, and the effect on my mental health and social life.
I was always more interested in making a long term impact on people’s lives. After studying politics in Nottingham, I did an internship in Berlin and I was fortunate enough to book Roy Bennett as a speaker for one of our events. Roy was the Treasurer for the MDC-T, the main opposition party trying to take down Robert Mugabe. During the event, Roy and I got on like a house on fire.
Eventually Roy invited me to work with him on the 2013 Zimbabwean election. I was based in South Africa, as it wasn’t safe for any of Roy’s team to be in Zimbabwe. To understand why, check Roy Bennett’s Wikipedia and you’ll learn about the torture he faced.
Of course, the election was rigged, but I learned a lot. I was responsible for writing Roy’s speeches and managing all of his social media content. Nowadays, you’ll see I’m very active on LinkedIn, and those 6 months working for Roy influenced my writing style today. Roy and his wife tragically died in a helicopter crash in 2018. Apart from my father, Roy has been the most inspirational male figure in my life.
During the election, I helped implement Ushahidi, a “crowdsourcing” platform that Zimbabweans could text to report incidences of violence which were then shown on a map. In 2013, after returning to London, I interviewed for an Account Manager role at InnoCentive. Even though I had no experience in tech, I fluked my way in as they were also a “crowdsourcing” platform. This was the start of my B2B commercial career.
In 2017, I made the crazy decision to move to Medellin, Colombia. At the time, I was doing some content marketing projects remotely with some US clients, so Medellin was perfect for the time zone. I thought I’d be there for 3 months, but ended up living there for 2 ½ years.
While I was there, I started working full-time for the US sales outsourcing company, CloudTask. I was one of their first employees, helped the company grow to 200+ people, and ran the sales and marketing team, reporting to the co-founders directly.
Through my role at CloudTask, I had built up a large network of CEOs, sales leaders and marketing leaders, and was constantly hearing the same thing over and over from them. Sales was becoming a spam game or what I call “spray and pray”. Automation tools meant salespeople were sending the same prospecting email to hundreds of people and using the same generic demo that was never tailored to clients.
I realised there was a huge gap in the market for teaching salespeople that they needed to understand that buyers’ inboxes were flooded with hundreds of spam messages. To stand out, they needed to get creative and show they cared about their customers more than their commission checks. The first thing I say in training is “everyone hates salespeople, so how are you going to differentiate from the sleazy stereotype.”
Initially it was just a side hustle with a couple of consulting clients, and eventually my daily posting on LinkedIn had sourced enough clients for me to start a company in late 2019. Almost five years later, we’ve worked with 60+ customers and I have a great team across 4 continents.
My journey in African politics was inspired by a desire to help change lives. Although I failed on that front, I feel I’m now able to do that. I may be teaching people how to make more money through sales. But ultimately I want to teach them how to positively impact other people’s lives in the long term, as when you do that, money is just one of many benefits that you’ll reap.
Michael Hanson is the CEO and Founder of Growth Genie, a consultancy that empowers B2B sales teams to have better conversations through training, coaching and building sales playbooks and processes. Their clients range from fortune 500 companies like JLL to fast growing fintechs like Dext.