Last week, Senior Account Executive, George Mann came second in the Wiser Elite 100 Over 100 award - that ranks the top achieving sales professionals in the country.
We caught up with George about his journey to Multiverse, and what motivates him to succeed.
Can you explain what your role as an Account Executive at Multiverse entails?
As a Senior Account Executive, I'm helping the biggest organisations solve the biggest challenges they're facing. Challenges like digital inclusion, diversity and skills. All the while, I'm playing my small part in helping build an outstanding alternative to university and corporate training - disrupting a broken system and being part of the creation of something incredible that can impact hundreds of thousands of lives for the better.
Working at Multiverse means that every day I get to bring about this change: I'm helping to progress the most important agendas right now (diversity, inclusion & equity as well as digital transformation), coupled with the shared responsibility to get it right. Bringing urgency, passion and my best.
To give you an example, yesterday comprised of presenting a proposal to the CEO and leadership team of one of our main clients, preparing with another client to present during their company ‘all hands’ on the future of work and learning as well as the ways we were partnering to address these, and finished with a team call providing additional training to enable our expansion into the US market.
We're guided by a world-class leadership team, who are all incredibly committed to our development. Naturally, working at a company that believes in the power of learning - I've got the chance to continually develop and hone my consultative and business skill set as a sales professional.
What motivated you to join Multiverse?
I think most of my colleagues have a strong ‘why’. Mine is fairly simple. I grew up with dyslexia, which meant that there were more obstacles in the path to educational success. I was lucky - I was diagnosed early and heavily supported by my parents, who massively valued education and were in a position to prevent this being an educational or career barrier.
But many others are less fortunate and experience it as a real blocker to accessing education and as a result the career they want or are capable of, just by virtue of being dyslexic. A student with dyslexia is 3.5 times more likely to be temporarily or permanently excluded from school and twice as likely to fail to get a grade 4 or above in English and maths at GCSE. Just 5% of university students are dyslexic - compared to 15% of the general population.
With this reality in my mind, agitating for change and having impact against it to enable the true unlocking of others’ potential, particularly where there are barriers to access and inclusion, is something I find massively motivating. I set my sights on starting my career in a space that would make a substantial change to educational and employment injustices.
Successfully seeking out a mission-driven start-up, aligned to this motivating factor, and successfully scaling its impact felt like a fairly tall order: it's so rare that I didn't think it existed, until I found Multiverse.
What motivates you now, day-to-day?
At Multiverse, I know I am making an impact in everything I do against an agenda I deeply care about. Changing lives through apprenticeships, and supporting businesses to address the biggest challenges they face.
At a company driven by learning, it’s probably also no surprise that we’re afforded the luxury of learning a world class sales approach, from world beating leadership, from how to understand and articulate business challenges coupled to the impact we can deliver to address them, through to the ways in which to set up and effectively run a global enterprise client franchise. On top of this, the chance to do this alongside equally passionate, professional and progressive colleagues is such a joy.
What’s been a recent highlight for you at Multiverse?
Without a doubt, working on several really energising and ambitious client initiatives looking to link organisational challenges associated with capability building to drive digital transformation and at the same time address head-on the issues of diversity, inclusion and equity - this has been incredibly rewarding.
But, to give a specific example, being recognised as 2nd in the Wiser Elite 100 Over 100 award - that ranks the top achieving sales professionals in the country - has definitely been one of my proudest achievements recently. It’s proof that an outstanding leadership team, a hyper relevant organisation and a relentless focus on an important mission are catalysts for impact, driven by performance. Even for someone, like me, with no prior sales experience as a Teach First ambassador.
Multiverse has accelerated my career, allowed me to make an impact, and kept me constantly just (at times, a lot) outside of my comfort zone to enable me to consistently develop.
What advice do you have for someone considering the next step in their career?
Always look for ways that you can innovate - whether that’s the processes in your role, or an entire industry that finds itself in the midst of turbulence and you find your role in agitating change.
Always focus on what you can learn. Learning to be the best drives everything you would want in your career whether it be money, impact, career progression, great relationships, the ability to be part of something incredible. And learning comes from the people you will be working with. Have they done great things before, are they focussed on developing and coaching their teams, do they share values conducive to this such as integrity, loyalty and determination to be the best and pursue excellence. We have this in abundance at Multiverse which is one of the main reasons for our hyper-growth.
If you work in sales, it’s worth understanding different sales processes, committing to implementing them, going beyond accepting them as a given truth and understanding how they work within your context, consider where there are opportunities for refining them and keep aiming to apply excellence.
If you’re also motivated to join one of the most rapidly scaling organisations, coupled to a mission on flight to become the first mission-driven unicorn, you should definitely consider how Multiverse might fulfil this. Our sales team is currently recruiting for Enterprise Account Executives(opens new window) and Commercial Account Executives(opens new window) and we're also recruiting(opens new window) for a range of roles across the organisation. I was fortunate to benefit from the advice and time of others as I looked to join over two years ago and would be very happy to be contacted for advice, insights or questions about joining as well - george.mann@multiverse.io.
