Growth Sales Manager — Traction Labs by City Innovations

Growth Sales Manager — Traction Labs by City Innovations

The Role

Most sales roles hand you a script and a list. This one asks you to build the pipeline with us—from scratch, through experimentation, and with real relationships.

Traction Labs is the growth studio inside City Innovations. We help B2B teams build repeatable traction engines—systems designed to turn outreach into qualified conversations and conversations into revenue. We don't blast lists and hope for the best. We test, learn, iterate, and build relationships that compound.

As a Growth Sales Manager, you'll sit in the overlap between sales and marketing, where the best growth actually happens. You'll nurture leads through smart digital sequences and get in front of people to have real conversations. You'll run outbound experiments to figure out what opens doors, then walk through those doors and sell.

This isn't a "dial 100 numbers and pray" role. This is part strategist, part relationship-builder, part marketer, part growth experimenter—and you'll be doing it for our clients and for us. You'll also be joining a startup that's still being built, which means you won't just grow our clients, you'll help grow us. If that excites you, keep reading.

This position is located in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Why This Role Is Different

Most sales roles are execution-only—work the list, follow the cadence, hand off the meeting. This one is different. You'll help design the cadences, choose the segments, and learn from every touchpoint. We run 2-week traction sprints, which means you're not running the same playbook for months hoping it works. You're testing, adapting, and sharpening your approach every two weeks based on what the market is actually telling you.

What You'll Do

We build traction engines through integrated disciplines we call the Traction Flywheel: Attraction (demand generation and market experiments), Conversion (agile sales and pipeline acceleration), and Expansion (product and service design). You'll operate across Attraction and Conversion to nurture leads digitally and convert them through direct, human conversation.

Prospect & Nurture

• Build and run multi-touch outbound sequences using tools like Apollo, Dripify, and Gojiberry to test messaging, timing, and targeting with every cadence.
• Nurture leads through email, LinkedIn, and other digital channels to keep conversations warm and moving prospects toward qualification.
• Segment and prioritize outreach based on signal, not just list size. Use data and AI tools to focus where traction is most likely.

Sell & Build Relationships

• Run discovery conversations to understand what prospects need and whether there's a fit, then move the opportunity forward. This means sometimes getting on calls.
• Build genuine relationships with founders, executives, and growth leaders. This isn't transactional outreach, it's consultative, curious, and human.
• Present our approach, tell the traction story, and help prospects see what's possible when they work with us.
• Collaborate with the broader team to hand off qualified opportunities cleanly and stay looped in through close.

Experiment & Learn

• Work in traction sprints (2-week cycles) to test outbound hypotheses—messaging, channels, offers, segments.
• Design small experiments, not large bets. A/B test subject lines, sequence structures, call scripts, and value props, then double down on what earns responses.
• Measure what matters: qualified conversations generated, pipeline created, and learnings captured, not just activity volume.
• Surface learnings every sprint and share insights with the team and clients.

Leverage AI

• Use AI tools to research prospects, personalize outreach at scale, analyze response patterns, and identify which segments to prioritize.
• Help shape how the team uses AI in sales workflows. Your daily experimentation makes the whole team sharper.

The Laws You'll Live By

• Sell to Learn, Not to Scale. Early outreach isn't about closing deals. It's about learning what resonates and with whom.
• Speed to Learning Over Activity As Progress. 50 thoughtful touches that teach you something beat 500 generic ones that don't.
• Small Experiments, Not Large Bets. Test a new angle this week. If it works, scale it next week. If it doesn't, you learned something in days, not months.
• Pursue Traction, Not Strategy Decks. Proof beats plans. A reply is worth more than a persona document.

Who You Are

• 4–7 years in a role that blends sales and marketing. SDR, BDR, growth rep, demand gen, outbound marketing—the title matters less than the work. You've prospected, nurtured, and closed (or directly supported closing).
• A relationship-builder, not just a sequence-runner. You're good at digital nurturing and live conversation. You can warm someone up over email and then win them over on a call. People trust you quickly.
• Hands-on with outbound tools such as Apollo, Dripify, Gojiberry, HubSpot, LinkedIn Sales Navigator. You've built sequences, tested cadences, and optimized based on data, not guesswork.
• Comfortable with experimentation. You'd rather test three approaches this sprint than perfect one approach over a quarter. You think in hypotheses, not just tasks.
• Consultative, not pushy. You sell by understanding problems and offering clarity, not by pressuring. You listen more than you pitch, especially early in a conversation.
• Comfortable with AI as a daily tool. You already use AI to research accounts, draft outreach, or spot patterns—and you're curious about pushing it further.
• Data-literate. You can read response rates, conversion metrics, and pipeline reports, and you use them to make decisions about what to try next.
• Founder-minded and hungry. You're not just looking for a role, you're looking for something to build. You think like an owner, you care about the business beyond your quota, and you're energized by shaping a company in its early stages.

About Traction Labs by City Innovations

We're a growth studio devoted to helping B2B organizations find and build traction as fast as possible. We sit in a unique space: we're not a strategy consultancy that stops at the deck, not an agency that just runs campaigns, and not a RevOps team that only scales what exists. We help teams define, build, run, and tune end-to-end traction engines through rapid iteration and compressed learning cycles.

Our clients include organizations navigating scaling challenges, stalled growth, strategic shifts, M&A integrations, and AI-driven transformation. We work as an embedded growth team—not outside vendors.

Traction First. Everything Else Second.

What We Offer

• $78K – $95K base salary. No quotas, no variable comp games. We'd rather pay you well and trust you to build something meaningful.
• Health coverage: Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Unlimited PTO: We trust you to manage your time. As long as client work is met and the team is moving, take what you need.
• 401(k): Plan for the long term while building for the short term.
• Hybrid/remote flexibility: This role is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with flexibility to work remotely. We care about output, not where your laptop is.