ABOUT THIS EPISODE
"AI will make good salespeople better and bad salespeople worse. It just accelerates every trend." - Michael Hanson, CEO and Founder of Cosmic Growth
Michael studied politics, not sales, cutting his teeth on an election campaign in South Africa before drifting into an account manager role at a London tech company.
He never chased sales for the money.
What pulled him in was the communication itself, and the version of himself it forced him to become: a better listener.
He later ran growth for an outsourced BDR company with 300 reps in Colombia, watching sales teams book meetings his clients still couldn't close.
That gap is why he started training salespeople in 2019.
His research keeps landing on the same number: only 18% of buyers trust salespeople, and most of what looks like a skills gap is really a lack of curiosity about the other person, whether that shows up as a copy-paste demo, a generic cold email, or a script read the same way to everyone.
His framework opens with a lesson from Superman comics: sales dropped in the '70s once he became too invincible to relate to, and picked back up once writers gave him kryptonite.
Michael tells sales teams the same applies to them.
Being upfront about what you're not good at builds trust; pretending you're the best at everything doesn't.
"Most sellers don't have a skills problem. They have a spiritual problem."
He uses AI for research and editing, never for writing the whole pitch, because a fully AI-written post always ends up sounding like everyone else's.
