Our special guest on this week’s episode of Conversational Selling is Brandon Bornancin, CEO and Founder of seamless.ai, a software platform that delivers the world’s best sales leads with the first real-time B2B sales search engine powered by artificial intelligence. He is a serial salesperson, a motivational speaker, and a 15 times sales author obsessed with helping businesses maximize success.
“I went all-in on doing whatever it takes to help salespeople, marketers, and entrepreneurs, globally, make more money and maximize their sales today,” says Brandon.
We chat with Brandon about putting in the hours, as well as:
- The big shift toward working with a team for the customer
- Using the shutdown time to write his next book, “Whatever It Takes”
- Building the right sales lists
- Writing out your scripts
- The accuracy of artificial intelligence
- And more
Mentioned in this episode:
- Seamless.ai
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonbornancin/
- Whatever It Takes by Brandon Bornancin
- Seven Figure Social Selling by Brandon Bornancin
Transcript
Voiceover: You’re listening to the Conversational Selling Podcast with Nancy Calabrese.
Nancy Calabrese: Hello, everyone. It’s Nancy Calabrese, and it’s time for Conversational Selling the podcast where sales leaders and business experts share what’s going on in sales and marketing today, and it always starts with that human conversation. I’m so excited because joining me today is Brandon Bornancin, the CEO and Founder of seamless.ai, a software platform that delivers the world’s best sales leads with the first real time b2b sales search engine powered by artificial intelligence.
He is a serial salesperson, a motivational speaker, and a 15 times sales author obsessed with helping businesses maximize success. In the Seven Figure Sales System box set, he reveals 1000s yep, 1000s of pages of proven sales scripts, strategies and secrets that he has battled tested through his career to generate over 100 million in sales and build two multi million dollar companies. Wow. That’s my take on you, Brandon. Wow. And, you know, as a customer of yours of seamless, I can attest. It’s a an amazing platform. And I can’t wait for you to share some secrets. So welcome to the show.
Brandon Bornancin: Nancy, that you so much for having me. Huge fan of Conversational Selling. Nancy, what you’re up to in One of a Kind Sales and the cold calling space and just honored and thrilled to be here today to share what I’ve learned along the way.
Nancy: Oh, my God, well, you know, Brandon and I go back several months ago. We’re trying to coordinate this date and time. And here it is. You know, just to get started, did a little homework on you. And I hear you are the king of sales leads. And Internet’s favorite salesperson, I would say congratulations are definitely in order. But what did you do to earn these titles?
Brandon: Yeah, I would just say I went all in on doing whatever it takes to help salespeople, marketers, and entrepreneurs globally, make more money and maximize their sales today. You know, that was a shift in my thinking in my operating model 10 years ago, and I just went all in on building the sales software, the technology, the books, the scripts, the training, to help, you know, sales people globally maximize their potential.
Nancy: Yeah, what well, what was it 10 years ago that made you pivot?
Brandon: I would say before that, you know, and this is probably when I was like, 22 to 25. I was all about the commission. And I was all about me and getting all the money for me and doing things for me. And then, you know, and that was just a mindset when I was selling for IBM interactive. And that was just the mindset they had. It was a dog eat dog, you know, you verse, everyone else world, right. And I had an opportunity to join a top Google Search agency and sell for Google. And I left IBM interactive. And when I was selling for Google, I was brought into this amazing culture where you’re only in competition with yourself, you only win as a team. You know, you go all in to maximize the success of the customer.
And I just realized, if I can help enough people get what they want, and help enough people get rich, then eventually I’ll be rich, personally, and professionally, spiritually, you name it. And then ever since, you know, I was able to go from a few million to $100 million in sales. And that led to me building a sales software that which now led me to supporting, you know, with our team over 150,000 salespeople globally with seamless.ai
Nancy: That is just awesome. So you really went from one environment to an extreme other environment. Like no in between?
Brandon: Yeah, 100% it was very much. It was like my upbringing. You know, so I came from a poor family. My mom worked two jobs as a banker and a grocery store cashier. My dad worked in Macy’s, which was called May Company at the time selling computers at Macy’s and then on the weekends he did construction, and you know, is very similar, like we grew up super poor. And then he got into sales and got a lucky break at a tech company that he then took to be the first tech company to do a billion dollars in sales and IPO. And it was like that extreme of like poor to rich, a life of scarcity to abundance. You know, you can go from scarcity to abundance by going all in on helping your customers maximize their success.
Nancy: Yeah, well, I love what I’m hearing in this very short time, it’s a lot about helping others attain, and it comes back to you, you know, I want to I want to kind of begin with share your unique idea that is different and really sets you apart. What is it that you do or think that has gotten you to where you are today?
Brandon: I wrote it all in my new book, Whatever it Takes. So everyone would ask me like, Brandon, how are you selling? You know, so much, you know, how do you build this, this top fast growing SaaS company that does multiple, eight figures? How do you rate you know, all these different books and whatever, I’m like, dude, it just comes down to doing whatever it takes my new book. And in the book, I highlight over 100 different habits and secrets, to transform your business relationship in life. And it’s funny when I had to come up with the title, Whatever it Takes was one of the habits in the book.
And then I’m like, you know, what, I always say you have to do whatever it takes our theme is whatever it takes, everything we do is, is about doing whatever it takes. So if there’s something or know about calling, go find the people, the content, the training the courses, the books, and go learn it. If you don’t know, you know, if you’re not making enough sales, emails, or appointments, do whatever it takes with sales activity to go make that happen. If you know, lists are the lifeblood for your sales success. If you’re not building the right lists, you know, spend two hours before after do whatever it takes to build the list using platforms like seamless, you name it. So I would say my secret is, I have an uncanny ability to do whatever it takes no matter what, no matter the circumstance, no matter if I’m tired, or excited, raining or sunshine or snowing. It doesn’t matter. It’s just all about W-i-T.
Nancy: Mindset. Determination. That’s what’s coming to my mind right now, would you say? You know, you just have that W-i-T mindset.
Brandon: Yeah, 100%, the W-i-T mindset now? No, that’s mindset when it comes to sales. I believe there’s three core pillars to go from zero to eight figures in sales. And then from eight figures in sales to nine figures, like these three secrets will help you go from zero to 1 million insanely fast, 1 million to 10 million insanely fast and 10 million to 50 million, and then 100 million insanely fast. And I would say number one, you have to know all the people that you could sell your products and services to. That’s the list like you can’t sell anything to anyone in any industry anywhere in the world. If you do not have the list.
Nancy: You need to list, folks. Are you hearing this? Go get the list.
Brandon: And then once you have the list, step two, you need to have the scripts. You need to write all the scripts of cold calling scripts, emailing scripts, social selling scripts, the voicemails, the emails, the cold calls, all of this stuff.
Nancy: Yep.
Brandon: But once you have the list the scripts, then you just need the activity. You know, and I know I know, Nancy, you talk a lot about this because you have a lot of people crush, the the selling and the SDR and the call center activity. Right? If you’ve got the list and you got the scripts, the hardest thing to do is just show up at the gym in the gym and sales is picking up the phone and making 25 50 100 200 300 400 500 dials sending all the emails, making all the emails, you name it.
Nancy: Yep, yeah, you know, the Nike, and here we go. 321 Just do it. 321 Just do it. And, uh, you know, to your point, having the right list, and the right tools and a system in place to execute the process. That’s when you grow and you see the results that you want. Well, I well, first of all, what prompted you to write this latest book?
Brandon: Hmm, yeah, great question. So the latest book, Whatever it Takes. You know, and in one year, I wrote three books. In my free time. So the first book was Seven Figure Social Selling, became a number one bestseller in like 48 hours. And then my second book was Sales Secrets where we interview over 100 salespeople on their top secrets to sales success, and then we’re still interviewing people. Like it’s gonna be always forever updated. And then my latest book, Whatever it Takes so, so this one is the Governor DeWine. I’m from Ohio. So Governor DeWine came on the news on Sunday, or I forget what day I actually think was like Sunday, Monday or Tuesday in March. And he says, we’re shutting down the whole state of Ohio.
He’s like, you can’t go anywhere, you can’t do anything. We’re shutting down the whole state. And Danielle, and I, my fiance, and COO, you know, we run this company of 150 people, we’re like, shit, what are we going to do? I was like, how are we going to take everyone from in person in the office to remote? How are we going to make sure everyone is aware of all the work effort, time, failure, tenacity, everything that we have to be prepared for ahead of, you know, it’s going to take 300 500% the amount of work during the pandemic to generate the same results that we were generating before the pandemic. So, we, we basically whiteboard it out and thought of like, all the habits, all the things that we needed to cover in our emergency meeting, which was everything I’ve learned from running and building multiple companies and selling for IBM, Google, you know, you name it.
And, and then we, we had this emergency meeting at our company. And then we, you know, instilled these habits and principles that I’ve garnered over the past 10-15 years, gave it to them, and then the company, grew 400%, during the pandemic, and I’m like, you know, what, I have to share all of these habits that I’ve been teaching myself and teaching my team, that they have to master that would help them survive and thrive during any economic condition, and then 22 days. So I wrote this book, 22 days in March, when the country got shut down. Because they shut down my gym. So I just wrote it from 5 to 7am, for 22 days straight. And yeah, just just released it recently, a week or two ago, in less than two hours became a number one bestseller, and I’m just super grateful to share all the habits that I’ve learned to transform my business relationships and life with with all of you.
Nancy: Okay, well, we’re gonna look out for that book, for sure. And I’ll, we’ll promote it at the end of our talk again, I want to go back to how you and I were originally connected, and that’s through seamless.ai. Can you tell everyone why this is an awesome platform? And what it does?
Brandon: Yes, definitely. And thank you so much, Nancy, we appreciate you as a customer. And I know you’ve been a customer for a few years now. And it’s, it’s incredible to see your growth. What it comes down to is sales people. Like I mentioned earlier, the list is the number one thing for a salesperson to be successful, if you do not have the list, you will not find new customers and you will not acquire new revenue, right? The problem is, it is expensive, time consuming and difficult to to build a list to sell the list to prospect list. When I was selling for IBM and Google, we would spend millions of dollars on these old expensive, outdated sales databases. And they would be missing 90% of the people I would need to sell to. And out of the 100 of 1000s of people that I would need to find in the database, I would call these numbers and call, you know, reach out to these emails. And only 20% would go through I’d get like 80% bounced emails and phone numbers.
And I’m like, this is stupid, right? There’s 7 billion people on this planet. And no sales database is gonna to have emails and phone numbers for 7 billion people. I was like, there has to be a better way. So I called all the engineers at Google that I was selling with and I’m like, Hey, guys, why don’t we build a Google for salespeople? So you type a title, any company in the world, in in real time our search engine will find every single person with a current title and current company. And they’re like, oh, man, that’s genius. And we worked on it for a year and then we built it. But then we’re like, okay, now we’ve got this search engine that will find any contact in the world that matches your search criteria. Now we need to find the emails and cell phones for these people. So then I called the engineers at IBM, Watson and I’m like, Hey, guys, we need to build an AI research engine that will research, validate, and verify emails and cell phones for anyone in the world. And they were like, That’s impossible. And then we started working on it, and we started building it, and then we made it possible over a year. So then in two years, we had this platform that would find everyone that you need to sell to and then research their perfect emails and direct dials and cell phones instantly in seconds. I was able to generate $100 million in sales using that platform. I built it for myself to sell for IBM and Google, and and became a millionaire using it as a salesperson and then realized, hey, I want to help everyone globally do the same, and sales and marketing and entrepreneurship, quit my job, we invested millions of dollars into building the platform ourselves.
And now, you know, seamless helps you find emails and cell phones, for anyone in the world, it’s free, you can join for free at seamless.ai. And then we’ve got unlimited sales leads packages for a low monthly rate per user. And we power I don’t know, 150,000 sales teams, at large companies like Google, Facebook, IBM, Dell, Oracle, Twitter, Slack, you name it all the way down to startups, you know, growing companies like one of a kind sales, which means he’s head off. So it works for any b2b company in any b2b industry, selling to any b2b professional.
Nancy: You know, one thing I want to talk to you about is the I hear this all the time, about the accuracy of the data, can you speak to that as it relates to seamless?
Brandon: Yeah, 100%. So the way that we were growing so fast is these databases like a Dun and Bradstreet, like a zoom info, like a discover org, they’re only gonna have five to 10% of all the people that you need to sell to. So if there’s a million people that you need to sell to their database is going to have like 500, or 1000 of the million people that you need to sell to. What’s great about seamless is our real time search engine, is going to be able to find 90 to 95% of every single person in the world they need to sell to.
So we’re gonna find the entire coverage of your total addressable market, right? Roughly 90%. And then accuracy, these databases will be 20 to 30% accuracy. So if you email or call 100, people, you’re only going to get through to 20 to 30 of those people were seamless, we use AI, this 10 step AI real time engine to research, validate and verify perfect email, cell phones and direct dials instantly, in real time in seconds, you know, our accuracy, where you’ve got the database at 20 to 30% accuracy on 10% of your Tam, we’re going to be able to find 90% of your Tam at a minimum, and we’re going to have up to a minimum of 90% accuracy. So Wow. You know, you email and call 100 people we’re gonna get you through to 90 out of the 100. Guaranteed.
Nancy: Awesome.
Brandon: And it’s because it’s technology, right? There’s no humans involved. You know, there’s 7 billion people on this planet, the only way to research 7 billion people is to use AI and to use search. And that’s what we’ve been, you know, it took us much longer. It took us millions of dollars and years to build. But once you build it, it can find anyone it can research anyone and that’s the power of that.
Nancy: Yeah. Tell me something that’s true that almost nobody agrees with you on.
Brandon: Yes, something I believe. You know, if you want to be successful, you should work 15-18 hours a day, every day. Yeah, yeah.
Nancy: You’re going to get a lot of naysayers out there, you know.
Brandon: Yeah, totally. And I loved Elon Musk when he said this, because it’s how I work. You know, work work long hours. I’m looking at the quote right now. But, you know, he says like, if you work more hours than any work like hell, you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour work weeks every week. This improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40 hour work weeks, and you’re putting in 100 hour work weeks, then if even if you’re doing the same thing you know, that you will achieve in four months what it takes that other person to achieve in a year. Like I believe we should work every waking hour that you can.
Nancy: So is it safe to say that work is your hobby?
Brandon: 100% you know, I don’t call it work. Like I’m all in on helping every single person globally connect opportunity. Every waking hour when I’m working out when I’m hanging out. When I’m reading when I’m watching TV when I’m doing anything. My brain is obsessed with helping the world connect to opportunity. And that’s what seamless does, right. Like our goal. Our mission is to help the world connect opportunity to positively impact a billion people and maximize the potential personally professionally of everyone globally.
And if you’ve got big goals and dreams, even if you have small goals and dreams, like put in the work, you can squeeze more time out of every hour every week, every month, every decade, I believe everyone overestimates. You know what they can do in an hour. And they underestimate what they can do in a day. And the same as for the day versus the week, the week versus the month, a month versus the year. And I go into it with a decade long mindset, like go at something for 10 years straight, and don’t give up.
Nancy: Love, love your passion, though, listen, we could go on and on. But we’re kind of at the end of our program, what is the one takeaway you want to leave the audience with?
Brandon: I would say I’m gonna leave the audience with two takeaways. One, you have to do whatever it takes to be successful. If you want to master the habits to transform your business relationship at life, and your mental, you know, belief system to help you get there, pick up Whatever it Takes to get to do whatever it takes, it’s on Amazon. And then number two, you have to find the list and build the list and sell to the list 18 hours a day, seven days a week. And the best way to build your list is to jump on seamless.ai for free at seamless.ai.
Nancy: You got it. So how in addition to that, how can my audience get in touch with you?
Brandon: Absolutely. So follow me on LinkedIn, we get about a million views every few days, because every day I share a secret to sales that will help you make more money on LinkedIn. And then I also have a daily newsletter that’s integrated into seamless.ai where I share top secret sales scripts, strategies, playbooks, tactics, tools. So you can get my newsletter by going to seamless.ai and signing up for that platform and newsletter.
Nancy: Awesome. Well, folks, my takeaway is, focus on what you love, be passionate about you what you love, start with that good lead list. seamless.ai. And I really, really want to thank you, Brandon, for sharing your time with us today. And I hope you’re gonna come back because there’s more I want to ask you, will you be open to that?
Brandon: Absolutely, let’s do it. Nancy, anything for you.
Nancy: Oh, yeah. All right. That’s definitely an invite. So happy selling everyone until next time, Nancy Calabrese. Conversational Selling. Thanks for listening.
Voiceover: The Conversational Selling Podcast is sponsored by One of a Kind Sales. If you’re frustrated that you don’t have enough leads, or your sales team complains that they just don’t have enough time to prospect, we can help. To work with Nancy and her team one on one to help you manage your sales team, install her proven outbound sales process and create more bottom line results, email her now at Nancy@oneofakindsales.com. To learn more about Nancy and her outbound sales secrets, grab Your Free copy of her book, The Inside Sales Solution at oneofakindsales.com/book.
