49: Brandon Bornancin of Seamless.AI - From Top B2B Sales Pro to Startup Founder

0:08 Scott Ingram: You're listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast, where we deconstruct world-class sales performers to provide insights and strategies to help you improve. To learn more, visit us at top1.fm. Here's your host, Scott Ingram.

0:24 Scott Ingram: Today's episode requires a bit more setup than usual. If you've listened to this show before, you know that I only interview quota-carrying individual contributor sales professionals who are either number one or at least in the top 1% of sellers in their organizations. If they work for very large companies, one of the things that happens when you perform at that level is you have a lot of options. And a number of the guests I've had on the show were recently number one as individual sellers, but were in sales leadership roles when we talked because, well, they'd been promoted. And I think that's really important and valuable because I also want to highlight the career path choices that are available. So obviously that move into into sales leadership as one. And at the Sales Success Summit, we actually did an hour-and-a-half-long panel focused on sales careers where we talked about that choice between being what I call an intentional individual contributor and moving into sales leadership. That panel was really good. And if you'd like to see it, I actually offer one free video from the Sales Success Summit to everybody who subscribes to our mailing list at top1.fm. So if that's of interest to you, just go to top1.fm, get on the mailing list, and that first welcome email has instructions for how to request that video. Today, I'm going to explore a different path with Brandon Bornancin. Brandon was the top seller in his role as a sales professional at Fathom Marketing, reselling Google search marketing. And he's chosen to go down the startup founder path and is now the CEO of Seamless.AI, where he just finished raising his seed round. So not only are we going to talk about his approach to sales like we always do, we're also going to talk about that choice and what it's like to both sell as a CEO and selling to investors in the form of fundraising. So, Brandon, thanks for joining me today.

2:14 Brandon Bornancin: Hey, thanks for having me, Scott. Thrilled to be here. Humbled to have the opportunity to speak to you and everyone on the podcast.

2:21 Scott Ingram: Beautiful. So, you would typically open with… I ask, what are the top 3 differentiators that have allowed you to get where you've got in sales? But I know you're an overachiever and you told me, Scott, I can't do that. I have 5 things. So, what are those? Talk me through that.

2:35 Brandon Bornancin: Yeah. You know, and it's funny because the, the top salespeople, the top 1 percenters, they, they never followed the rules. Right. So when you gave me a bunch of rules, it was really difficult for me to, uh, stay aligned to 'em. But I was like, you know, there's, there's 5 things that have attributed to my success. And I'm sure like everyone on the call, you know, they've heard Always Be Closing, Glengarry Glen Ross. So, so my 5 follow that theme. Always be filling the funnel, always be writing, always be prospecting, always be helping, and always be learning. And I'm excited to dive into these 5 themes or stories here later on in, in the podcast.

3:13 Scott Ingram: Well, let's do some of that now. I mean, it's so always be filling the pipeline and, and always be prospecting. What's the difference between those 2? How, how are those not the same thing?

3:22 Brandon Bornancin: Yeah. So, so always be filling, you know, I became a top seller because of these 5 things and primarily for me personally, uh, because I was always filling the funnel. With all the sales leads and contacts and accounts and opportunities. You know, as you highlighted in my background, I was selling for, for Google and they, you know, have hundreds of thousands of companies that need search marketing, that are using paid search marketing, you name it. So when I was, uh, before I launched Seamless.ai, the world's best sales leads, I needed a way to go from selling to 20 people, 20 contacts, 20 companies a day to selling 1,000 a day and ended up, you know, building an automation platform and, and that filled my funnel with 1,000 ideal customers a day that were at all of these accounts. And I was able to 10x my income and become a millionaire. And that's why, you know, the, the number one factor in my success going from 6 to 7 figures was always be filling the pipeline with all the leads, all the contacts, and all the accounts that you need to sell to. It's, it's a game changer because when you could ditch 60 to 70% of your time wasted on sales research, data entry, scouring millions of websites, looking for all the contacts and companies you need to sell to in your total addressable market, your life changes forever and you make a lot of money and you help your company make a lot of money.

4:49 Scott Ingram: I get it now. So the, so the filling is really about who am I going to now prospect?

4:54 Brandon Bornancin: It's all about data. Always be filling the pipeline with data. Always be filling the sales funnel with data. Always be filling Salesforce with all the data that you need and all the contacts and accounts.

5:04 Scott Ingram: Beautiful. So the one that's probably the most unique that I, I don't think I've heard yet is always be writing. Talk about that.

5:11 Brandon Bornancin: Yeah. So always be writing is once you have all the data, once you know all your ideal customer personas, right? Who are all the contacts? For example, we sell to all the VPs of sales. Directors of sales, sales development reps, VPs of, of digital marketing, marketing, VPs of demand generation, directors of demand generation, uh, digital CRM, you name it. So you've got all these different personas. So Always Be Writing is about writing all the content and all the scripts to connect with all these different personas. So what are the 5 to 10 cold emails that you need to write to personally prospect, connect, and close that VP of sales to meet with you? What, what are those scripts you need to write? The voicemail scripts, the call scripts, the social scripts, the text scripts, literally writing out all of this content, this prospecting content. I've got a playbook for my, for Seamless.ai and for my personal life where we've got over 1,500 sales scripts on every single thing in the sales funnel. Cold calls, voicemails, emails, Social touches, text, video, meeting callback, meeting follow-up, reschedule, schedule, you know, anything in the funnel. Proposal, thank you. Proposal callback scripts, sales objection scripts. I'm not interested. No budget. Need to talk to someone. Uh, we're already working with someone. Send me more information. You know, I need to talk to my boss. It's not a good time. All of these things you need to be writing content for and you need to be A/B testing.

6:44 Scott Ingram: And where, where does all that live and how do you get to it quickly in, in the moment?

6:48 Brandon Bornancin: Yeah, great question. So, you know, we originally built the sales playbook using Google Docs and then, uh, we actually created a software to host. It's like a CMS. It's called salesobjections.com. I actually negotiated that domain like 7 years ago, uh, salesobjections.com. You know, we, we, we built a custom technology that hosts all the content and it's super clickable and anyone can go there and sign up for the software. And right now it's invite only because it's in beta. And our plan isn't to sell that software. We just built it to get all of this writing content that we have for everything and use it easily so that we can have all the content, train our reps, and sell as fast as possible.

7:35 Scott Ingram: Well, and I have to ask on behalf of everybody that's, that's listening, do you have an invite for the audience?

7:39 Brandon Bornancin: Yeah, absolutely. So, so go to salesobjections.com and when you, you know, sign up, make sure to use the referral code TOP1% and you could spell that out or you can use, uh, top1.fm or top 1, you know, with the actual percent sign, whatever works best. We'll make sure we get it tracked.

8:00 Scott Ingram: Perfect. Perfect. Let's make it even easier. Let's just make it T-O-P the number 1.

8:03 Brandon Bornancin: T-O-P number 1, TOP1. Love it.

8:06 Scott Ingram: There we go. So let's round it out. The last 2 were learning and helping. Talk to us about that.

8:11 Brandon Bornancin: Yeah. So let's go. Yeah. So we've got learning, helping, and prospecting. So learning… well, let's go to helping first. So we've got all the data, all of our customer personas in our total addressable market from Seamless.ai, The World's Best Sales Leads, or another platform. And then you've written all these sales scripts. But to, to really write all the sales scripts, you need to always be helping. Like I obsess over everything about my customer personas. When I stopped selling for me to make myself a shitload of money and, and obsessed over the customer persona and what can I do to help them accomplish their goals, accomplish their dreams, crush it this year, help them maximize revenue, maximize sales, maximize quota, book as many meetings as possible, generate as much revenue as possible. I started doubling my income every year, you know, since 5 to 7 years ago. Every year I would double my income because I had all this data. Then I would have all this content that was so obsessed about helping the persona achieve their goals and dreams that it changes the game. So that's why I'm really focused on being a servant leader and a servant salesperson. And a servant salesperson, I think, I think you could look at this weird, right? So servant salesperson does not mean, oh, Scott, I'm here to help. Here's my company. This is what we can do. How can we help you? It's like, hey, Scott, I know you sell for Marketo, the world's best marketing automation software. The work you do for Glassdoor, Adobe, and Intuit is revolutionary. And I want to help you acquire 10,000 new companies that look exactly like those companies. And here are 5 strategies that my team and I put together that will help you make this next year your biggest and best yet. Let's set up a quick time to run through those in more detail. Here's some availability. It's like really focused on how do we help these companies, these people accomplish their goals and dreams.

10:10 Scott Ingram: Beautiful. And what about the learning piece? How does that apply?

10:13 Brandon Bornancin: Yes. So then you've got like the always be prospecting is like once you have the data, once you have the writing, Once you understand the persona and you're helping the persona, it's prospecting. Massive amounts of activity, a shitload of activity. You gotta be, you gotta be whatever your quota is and the activity to hit your quota, 5 to 10x the activity requirements. That's what I did. So when I became a millionaire, I literally figured out what is the math to 10x to, like, I was given the quota of $1 million and I set it at $10 mil. And then I did the activity to hit the $10 mil. So prospecting, like what's the calling activity, the emailing activity, the social activity, the texting activity, the video activity, how many proposals need to go out? How many demos do you need to give? What's the, you know, and then multiply that by 5 to 10x. Whatever your quota is given to you is given to you by your boss. And they think that that is your potential, which is not what your true potential is.

11:12 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. So the thing that I didn't tell you that I had in my back pocket that I'm going to, I'm going to throw out there now, your previous boss is actually a friend of mine. So I asked Jeff, I said, said, hey, Jeff, so talk to me about Brandon. You know what, from your perspective, what were the top 3 things? And he said, uh, he's tenacious, he's quick on his feet, and he sells the dream. And one of the things that we'll also come back to is there was sort of a, some additional conversation that happened with that. And he also said, look, he's got this really supportive, maybe she's your wife now, but fiancée, girlfriend. And he just works like 18 hours a day all the time. Right. So we'll, we'll definitely come back to that. I'm curious to know if you have any reaction to that before we get into kind of your origin story and how this whole journey into sales began for you.

11:57 Brandon Bornancin: Yeah, no, I mean, Jeff's a huge mentor of mine. You know, he taught me, I, you know, I've worked for some really bad leaders and I've worked for some really great leaders. Jeff was one of the best leaders that helped multiply my potential to get to where I'm at today. And he knows that. And I, I'm really appreciative of him. You know, when, when you're a top 1% performer, You need a boss that supports you, that gives you, that empowers you. And when you break a lot of stuff, he backs you up. You know, I was doing things that, that no one's ever done before at the company that we worked at. And Jeff would take a lot of heat for me because, you know, we'd be going, we'd be doing 5x, 10x the amount of activity, 10x the amount of demos. We'd piss some prospects off. We'd win 10x the amount of business. You know, and like, you, we were just doing things totally new, totally different, totally like, you know, obsessed over our customer personas and all of this jazz. And yeah, I, I would say he, he's spot on. Just, you know, I'm, I'm always trying to learn. I'm always working really, really hard and tenacious and resilient and doing whatever it takes. And my fiancée Danielle, she's been with me, this is my 3rd company. So she was with me when I ran my first company. That generated $6 million in revenue. She was with me with my second company that failed, even though it got acquired by a publicly traded company. I call it a failure because I didn't make any money on it. You know, we, we made like $100 grand. And then she's with me, you know, this third company. So, and then throughout Fathom and IBM Interactive. So she's a huge proponent to my success. I wouldn't be able to do what I do without her. And I think it's important to have a partner that supports you.

13:41 Scott Ingram: Yeah, great, great stuff. And I'm all about fully calling out mentors. So Jeff is actually Jeff Leo Herrmann, and we will put… I'll put a link to his LinkedIn profile in the show notes. So you go to top1.fm, look up this episode, and we'll get you… we'll get you set up that way. So Brandon, talk about how did this all start? How did you get into sales in the first place?

14:01 Brandon Bornancin: Oh man. So this is a wild story, and I think it's good for the audience. Like the top 1 percenters could probably relate, people that are trying to get to the top 1%. I hope this is of value to you. So my family and I were dirt poor. You know, my, my mom worked at a bank as a bank teller during the day. And at night she worked at a grocery store. My dad worked in construction and at like a computer hardware store. So my mom and dad were both working 2 full-time jobs. And they didn't have a college education and they were grinding, you know, all the time. And we were poor. I remember being a kid in grade school, poor, getting made fun of for bad clothes and all this jazz. Could never buy lunch food. It was just, it was an interesting, I'm really humbled and appreciative of coming from that because it took me to where I'm at today. But then my dad, you know, my dad started selling for a computer hardware store. They sold the first Apples and the first PCs, the first Mac and the first PCs in Macy's. So literally like, this was when they would sell hardware, computer hardware in, uh, in stores, like in Macy's stores, retail stores. And randomly a computer associate, CA Technologies, a sales executive was going through the store. They met my dad and they're like, man, you really know a lot about this technology and about computers. You should sell for us at CA Technologies. It was called Computer Associates at the time. And, uh, my dad ended up quitting the computer hardware store and quitting construction. He joined CA. He had to be out in New York for months and traveled probably half my life. He was on the road 5 days a week. But if anyone knows CA Technologies, it's the first software company to go from startup to over $1 billion in sales. The first software company to do over $1 billion in software revenue. And my life, every 2 years after my, my father started in software sales, we completely changed. You know, we were, we would, you know, we went from super poor to super wealthy in a matter of 5 to 10 years. You know, every 3 years we were moving into a bigger house and a bigger house and a, and then, you know, a mansion. And, uh, I just remember seeing my dad go into sales. And we went from super poor to super rich. And that's when I was like, you know what? This is the best profession in the world. Someone without a college education could go in and make a shitload of money, half a million dollars or a million dollars. Unfortunately, my father never hit 7 figures. He hit high mid-6 figures. And he said, Brandon, that's what I was able to do with the technology and education that I had. I know you can hit 7 or 8 or 9. And so what I did was I started looking in colleges that had a sales education, and there were only 5 colleges at the time. And one was where I was from, Ohio. So The Ohio University had a sales education certification program called the Ralph and Lucy Shea Sales Center. So I applied to Ohio University. And by the way, what was great is they had a sales center and it was also ranked number one party school by a few publications out there. Hugh Hefner may have led one of those publications. So literally I'm 18, I'm looking to get into sales, like learn as much about sales. This school has the number one sales school and it's also the number one party school. I'm like, that's where I'm going. And then right when I got into learning about sales, I launched my first company that did $6 million over the course of 18, 19, 20s when I was a freshman to junior in college.

17:47 Scott Ingram: That's fantastic. So I typically ask if there's anything that you would do differently if you could start over today. You've been way more intentional. Almost everybody that I talk to on the show, there's a few exceptions. And what's interesting is almost all of the exceptions to this rule of we all kind of accidentally end up in sales, it's almost always their parents were in sales and they see the truth of what the profession is and what the possibility is. And they sort of seek it out. Virtually everybody else, the vast majority of us kind of ended up in sales because it sort of happened to us. Anything that you would do differently knowing everything that you know now about that journey?

18:27 Brandon Bornancin: Yeah, I would say I started learning about… so always be learning, one of my core principles. When I was 23, 24, 25, I bought every single sales book. They didn't even have Amazon at the time, I don't think. It was Barnes Noble. It was, oh gosh, there were a few of them that went out of business. I don't even remember their names, but I bought 100, 150 sales books. And this goes back. So, my first business was marketing for the online poker industry. And I used to try to learn to play poker by going and playing poker and then losing thousands of dollars. And I was like, dude, I'm going to make… I'm going to learn how to become the best Texas Hold'em poker player by playing poker. And then every week I would go and I'd get my ass kicked and I'd lose all my money. And I just got so sick of it. I'm like, you know what? I'm doing this wrong. Months of losing all my money. I'm going to study all this. I'm going to study all the poker experts. So I bought 5 to 10 different poker books, you know, all the top players. And I studied all the statistics, the probability, the strategy. And then I started like making thousands and tens of thousands of dollars playing poker. And then I realized, well, like when I got into sales, going from being an entrepreneur after my first 2 companies, I sold for IBM Interactive full-time for 3 years and then to Fathom for Google. That's when I bought all these books. I was like, you know what? I lost everything. I, you know, I kept losing everything I owned playing poker, not knowing how to play. I'm going to read every single sales book in the world to know all the sales strategies, tips, best practices. To crush quota. And, you know, that's when I learned everything, read all the books, studied all the books. That's how I created this 1,500 to 2,000 page sales playbook. And, you know, since then with Seamless, with the learning and with the content and the execution, that's how I was able to just constantly double my income every year. So if I could go back at the age of 18, I would read every single sales book possible. Instead of waiting 5 years later.

20:31 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Great, great, great rule. Was there one or two of, of that giant stack? What were the, the most impactful books that you read through that period?

20:42 Brandon Bornancin: So there's 2 immediate ones that, that come to mind. Uh, 3, 3 immediate books that come to mind that like had the biggest freaking impact on my life. The first 2 are by the same author. I got to give a shout out to my mentor, my advisor, you know, Grant Cardone. So, you know, I'm, I thought there was something wrong with me because all I wanted to do was work, hustle, and make a lot of money. I wanted to work, hustle, sell, make a lot of money. And that was against industry norms. That was against what everyone believed in. Everyone kept preaching 9 to 5, don't work too hard. You're, you're, you're going to end up on your deathbed wishing you didn't give it your, you know, wishing you spent more time out of work and all this other bullshit that I don't believe in. So when I came across Grant Cardone, Sell or Be Sold, and the 10X rule, I felt like I met like my other dad, my other mentor, my other father, my other coach who like was like, holy shit, this is the exact same type of guy that I am. This is exactly who I am. He just put it on paper and said, I don't care about how much criticism I'm going to get for being different and being so focused on accomplishing my goals and dreams and all of that. So, the 10X Rule and Sell or Be Sold had a massive impact on my life. And I became close with Grant and Jared 7 years ago before they were famous. So what's really cool is like I read Grant's first auto, like he was big in auto. This is funny too. Like I wouldn't just study like enterprise sales books. I was like, okay, I can learn anything from any salesperson. So if you sell insurance sales, I'm gonna pick up that book and try to learn as much as possible. If you sell cars, those guys are pretty good at sales. I'm gonna pick up the books and learn as much as possible. You sell enterprise sales like Jill Konrath, I'm gonna pick up the books and learn as much as possible. So buying the 130 different sales books, every single possible sales book out there, I came across Grant Cardone. It was like an auto sales book. I started reading it and I was like, holy shit. Like that, that's when I learned about sales objections. And that's when I learned about a lot of sales activity, you know? So, so then he came out with Sell or Be Sold and he came out with The 10X Rule. And that, those books were, are my, kind of my inspiration and my most favorite. And they, they truly highlight that don't listen to society and just give it your all in what you do. And sales is the best profession in the world, which I believe. The other author, uh, Jill Konrath, it was literally the first enterprise sales book I read, Selling to Big Companies. And, and the first part of the book talks about the persona and how busy they are and how much bullshit they have to deal with on a daily basis. They've got their boss yelling at them, screaming at them. They got 20 employees sending them thousands of emails. They got hundreds of calls coming in from people trying to prospect them. Like they're inundated with bullshit, bullshit, bullshit 24/7. And how can you obsess over the customer persona, understand their responsibilities, their KPIs, and what would help them accomplish their goals and write messaging and write content and develop your pitch to deliver value, to help, And, uh, to take that prospect from where they are today to where they need to go. So Jill Konrath is my second big, uh, one of my second biggest favorite authors. My third would be Aaron Ross. Right when I was starting to develop the idea for Seamless.ai, the world's best sales leads, Aaron Ross comes out with his book. He's like, dude, you know, oh, and Jeff. So, so Jeff and I were working together right when the book came out. And I'm like, Jeff, dude, I've been I've been pitching to you, we need to have inside sales. We need to have outside sales. Jeff was a believer, but we knew it was very difficult to sell our CEO on keeping them separate because they used a full-stack salesperson to do outside sales and inside sales. And I'm like, Jeff, you pay me way too much money to have me sending cold emails and sending cold, you know, dropping cold voicemails. Now, granted, I prospect every day of the week. That wasn't the point of that. It's just, you need me pitching and closing 24/7. That's what I do. That's, that's what I know how to do. And, you know, when I first came to, to Fathom to sell for Google, you know, the first year I was a full-stack sales rep and, you know, worked with Jeff and worked with the CEO Scott Lowry and, and Kevin Shaw, the chairman, and walked them through this predictable, repeatable, scalable model. And then the book comes out and I'm like, guys, everything that I said here It's highly validated. Listen to Aaron Ross at Salesforce. And then the 4th and, and 5th authors, Anthony Iannarino, who's one of my investors, one of my authors, one of my mentors, you know, The Only Sales Guide You'll Ever Need. You know, he's, he's published 2 or 3 books now. He's just got amazing content. And also Stu Heinecke, How to Get a Meeting with Anyone. There's so many authors out there. I've read them all. I love them all. That's also, you know, why I'm, I'm writing, you know, Sales Secrets from the Top 1%. And Scott, you and I connect because we love studying the top sales experts. I wanted to share everything that I learned and inter… you know, interview like you, all the best of the best to highlight this stuff because it helped me get to where I, I needed to go.

26:09 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So much great stuff. Something tells me that we are going to have more links in this, uh, particular episode's show notes than any other show. So again, if you're probably driving now, you're working out at the gym. Go to top1.fm. We will have all of these books connected up there so that you don't have to remember and take notes and write this all down. I got you. And Brandon, I just realized my opening intro was so long that I forgot to mention that this episode is sponsored by Story Dimensions, a SaaS sales enablement company. Stories sell, and Story Dimensions is the only solution that captures and packages real stories from your customers into easy-to-digest and deliver formats that sales professionals can then use to build credibility and trust with their buyers. So, I encourage you to go check that out. Go to storydimensions.com and request a live demo to see how Story Dimensions can help you accelerate sales cycles and close more deals. And of course, we'll have a link to that on top1.fm. In fact, they've got an ad on every page. Uh, so you just click on that on the top right-hand side and, and get going. So Brandon, put this in perspective, especially just in terms of, well, let's do this in 2 dynamics. Let's first talk about your last quota-carrying sales role, but then let's, let's talk a little bit about Seamless.AI. Quantify your results. Like, what did it take? What did you produce to become number 1 and become a millionaire?

27:28 Brandon Bornancin: Yeah, I mean, so I'm a, you know, it's funny being the CEO, dude. I carry a quota right now for sales and for VC fundraising. You know, at Seamless.ai, we were about to close a $2.5 to $3 million round. That quota, I had to do everything that we had to do in sales. Same thing. Build a massive list. You know, always be filling. Build that massive list of VCs. Always be writing. Write all the content to connect with those VCs to get them to want to meet with you. And then obviously always be helping, always be learning and all of that jazz. So it's funny because like just because I'm a CEO, I've got a quota for venture capital fundraising, then I've got a sales quota. You know, my quota is to close 10 licenses a day. So right now, me personally, I want to close 10 licenses a day for Seamless.ai. And then each of my sales reps will close, you know, their quota is roughly 7 to 10 licenses a day. So I carry a $2 million quota right now for our company. That would be… it's actually a $2.5 million quota. My VP of sales carries a $2.5 million quota, and then my AE carries a $1.5 million quota. And then previously before that, You know, my quota was to generate, you know, $80,000, $100,000 in MRR. And then my goal was to just do $500,000 to $1 million in MRR. So it was just grinding against, you know, when you're selling 24/7. I had a bunch of SDRs working for me, the most SDRs that any AE had working for them at the time, or any sales director had working at the time. And I just had them setting up as many appointments as possible. And I created a repeatable process to easily pitch, manage, help, and close that book of business. And that's what helped me double my income every year.

29:20 Scott Ingram: So we talked about your quotas. How have you performed against the quotas?

29:24 Brandon Bornancin: Well, I mean, if I'm given a $100K quota and I'm doing $500K to $1 million in MRR, you're performing at 5 to 10x the quota.

29:35 Scott Ingram: Well, which one was it? That's a big range.

29:37 Brandon Bornancin: Oh, well, it changed every year. So at IBM, my quota was 3 to… it was like $3.5 million the first year, $5 million the second year, $7 million the third year. We beat it. We beat the quota all 3 years. At Fathom, I don't remember. It's been 3 or 4 years since I've been there, but the quota was like $80K in MRR the first year, then it bumped up to, shit, $240,000 and then $380,000 or something. And we just kept beating it like by 5x. So they kept increasing the quota. We set records that have never been done before. You know, we wouldn't worry about quota. We… I never worried about quota. Whatever the quota was, we would set the goal at roughly 10x that and then figure out the activity and the people needed to hit the 10x number and then try to get budget for it. And our management thought we were crazy, but we did it anyways.

30:33 Scott Ingram: So along through all of that adventure, what's your favorite, like, in-the-trenches sales story? Whether you won the deal, you lost the deal, maybe it's the one that you learned the most from. What was that?

30:45 Brandon Bornancin: Oh man. So this is a good one. We were pitching a $32 billion company, a deal where I would 6 figures, that my company would make a mil at the time, Fathom. And I, you know, in the trenches, this was a highly consultative, massive enterprise strategy deal where my team and I, you know, we had to fly in and we had to work with this holding company that had $32, $40 billion in revenue. And then each of the companies had hundreds of millions or billions in revenue. So they, Their business model was to acquire as many companies as possible and take them from $100 million to a billion. So they had a bunch of billion-dollar companies, $100 million companies, $500 million companies. The deal that we were working was to consult all of their companies to help them dramatically increase revenue through online marketing. And it was tricky because you had like this massive deal, but then you had to get all the salespeople, the VPs, the directors from all these portfolio companies aligned and bought into you. So you're literally pitching like 20 to 30 companies to get one company to, to close the deal with you. And that was definitely the trickiest deal because you're working like 20 deals in one deal, getting all the decision makers, getting all the influencers, getting everyone to love the approach, love the team, love the strategy, love the results that you're going to generate. You know, Jeff, me, and, and everyone I worked with. That was a very difficult deal that took a lot of months. And then when we had to pitch it in person, I had a, an ear infection. I had a, I got the flu. I, it wasn't contagious. It, I forget what it was, but like I was deathly sick. I had an ear infection. I had, I'm gonna say it's like the flu, like some type of other inf… infection. And like, I couldn't hear out of one ear and I had to get on a plane and fly to the West Coast from the East Coast and pitch these guys over 5 hours, 7 hours. And I was deathly sick. And I'm like, dude, I don't give a shit. We're jumping on that fucking plane with my whole pitch team of 7 and we're going out there and we're going to pitch it. We're going to crush it. My fiancée is like, you can't go. You're deathly sick. I'm like, no, we're going. I kept just getting as many drugs as possible before we went, during we, you know, landing, you know, after we went. And we ended up crushing the pitch, crushing the strategy, winning the deal. And that deal led to my first 6-figure commission check in 1 month. And it was funny because I was landing in Vegas to meet with a, a, a buddy, 2 buddies of mine in Vegas. And I get a call right when we're in the hotel room of, of Cosmopolitan. And we're laying on the bed, just like getting ready to relax before we go gamble. I get a call from my accountant that's like, hey, we have a problem. And I'm like, well, shit, dude. I just took off for the day. Like, what's the problem? A customer? Are they complaining? Like, what do you need? I'm supposed to be off today. I only take like 2 or 3 days off a quarter. And she's like, I can't just, I can't transmit. I can't wire. I forget what it was, $103 grand or $108 grand. It was something like that. I can't wire $103,000 in commission. I can, but you're gonna get taxed at like 50 or 60 or 40%, whatever the percent was. And I, I like paused and I'm like, you mean like, you mean like 10 grand, right? Like $10,300. And she's like, she's like, no, $103,000. You know, that's your commission this month. And, you know, I, I, I was so focused on every deal that I never like worried about the commission that I was gonna make. I was just focused on as many deals as possible. And I forgot how many deals we closed and how much commission was coming in. And that was when I almost got teary and I was like, holy shit. I was like, holy shit, 6 figures in 1 month. That's incredible. That deal. And there were a bunch of deals that led to that $103K or $108K in commission. But that's the story. That's the deal. That's the one moment that you never forget. That's when I realized if you become the best of the best in sales and you care about your customers and you do whatever it takes to help them, you know, anything's possible and you can make as much money as possible.

35:21 Scott Ingram: Yeah, great, great stuff. You reminded me, you haven't lived until you've flown with a massive ear infection. I remember doing that and I thought, I mean, just the pressure buildup in my head. I literally was sitting in a, in a window seat And I'm thinking they are going to find the top part of my body. They're, they're gonna find this body that's just shoulders and it's gonna be missing a head and there's just gonna be gore splattered all over the plane because literally I think my head is going to explode right now. That's just, that's living the dream.

35:52 Brandon Bornancin: It's the worst. It is the worst. Like, I like what, how you just described it. I would say it's exactly like that, but maybe even a little worse. And you described it Pretty bad. Like, it's terrible. I definitely… I'm sorry you had to go through that. It's miserable. But when I landed, I couldn't hear my team. Like, I literally thought I was deaf. I couldn't hear them. And I'm like, fuck, how am I supposed to pitch this 4-hour deal? Like, literally the pitch was 4 to 6 hours going through every portfolio company, the deal, the structure, the strategy. We had to bring different portfolio companies in on the pitch and I'm like, I can't even hear. Went to the drugstore, bought like $100 worth of drugs, just kept popping 'em, popping pills, popping syrup, popping anything to get over that sickness to just like make it through those 6 hours. And then we had to jump on a plane right after we… oh no, you know what? We stayed the night, I think, and then flew out the next day. So we got to go out to eat, celebrate, and then go out. And I felt a little bit better the next day.

36:52 Scott Ingram: Yeah, there you go. So since we're deep in the, in the pain funnel right now anyway, what's, what do you find to be the hardest part, the most challenging thing in sales today for you?

37:04 Brandon Bornancin: Okay. So I was a, an enterprise sales rep, you know, enterprise sales rep working with enterprise companies, carrying an enterprise quota, launching Seamless, the world's best sales leads. It's, it's like going from, you know, you're selling highly transactional software licenses. So it's a completely different deal. It's a completely different sale and it's not hard. It's just different. So instead of selling $100,000 to $1 million to $5 million deals, you're selling $100 to $200 licenses and you're selling a shitload of them, 10, 100, 500, 1,000 of them. So it's, it's different because, uh, you've got these highly transactional software licenses and, you know, for us, what's interesting is like our product and our platform has gone viral through the outbound selling, through the outbound marketing, Because we built an amazing product. Everyone keeps referring and inviting other people to use it. So for us now, we've got so, we've got hundreds of inbound leads and probably like most of the people on this podcast, we've never, I've never had more than 5 or 10 leads a week coming in via inbound. I've always had to go out and hunt and, and, and eat everything that I've caught. So like, I'm not used to having to like go hunt, hunt, hunt, hunt, hunt, prospect, prospect, prospect, book as many appointments as possible. Like, that's what I do every day. I'm not used to having hundreds of leads come in and figuring out, okay, well, we only have a certain amount of AEs. They can't even manage all of those leads. How do we create the predictable, repeatable process to score those leads, to sell to those leads, to close as many of those leads as possible? And then how do you create an automated self-service sales model So like, we don't want to be having my highly expensive AEs pitching and closing one-license deals. So like anyone with 50 employees or under, you know, how do we automate sales? How do we automate the webinars for the VPs of sales, the directors of sales, the managers of sales development, the sales development reps? Like we're just getting into that now because we're hitting 100, 200, 300 leads a day and we can't present to them all. So we gotta come up with an automated sales process. We gotta make our outbound more like transactional. I'm obsessed with personalization and outbound selling, but we have to move a little bit quicker. So we, you know, we're gonna have to lose a little bit on some of the personalization so that we can move faster, which I think is okay because our conversion rates are still being maintained, which is good. But they're just new challenges I've never had to deal with, but they're great problems they have to solve.

39:46 Scott Ingram: So the marketing automation nerd in me wants to ask you 20 more questions along that vein, but that's a different show. Let's transition and talk just a little bit about… and I know this is a big part of just how you operate… let's talk about routines and habits and the things that you do, starting with walk us through if there is such a thing as a typical day, right? The alarm goes off. What time does that happen and what happens from there? Give us, give us give us the walkthrough.

40:12 Brandon Bornancin: Yes. So I wake up at 4:30 to 5:00 AM every day. I've been doing that for, shit, 7, 8, 9 years. I just love waking up early. And I use my Fitbit. My Fitbit wakes me up because my wife, my fiancée, she would freaking kill me every day if I woke her up at 5:00 AM or 4:30 AM. So wake up, it's typically like 4:45 I'll wake up, make a coffee, head to the gym, and I do about, you know, 40, 50, 60 minutes of cardio, 30, 40 minutes of weights. And while I'm at the gym doing cardio, I'm working, whether it's content development, whether it's emails, whether it's deals that I'm working. Like, I just get too bored doing one thing, so I'm either trying to learn something or I'm trying to write or I'm trying to work a deal while I'm doing my cardio. And then when I'm doing the workout, I'm blasting electronic dance music, EDM. I love EDM because it's high beats. So then after the workout, come back and I'll start selling, you know, I'll get back at around 7:00 AM and I'll start working the pipeline right away. And then I've got a dev standup with my dev team for 30 minutes. And then I've got a sales standup for 30 minutes. And the sales standup is where we role-play. We go over good news. We go over how did we perform the day before? You know, it's almost, it's not a daily commit call, but it's like good news. What did we get done yesterday? What are our goals for today? What are the hot deals? Anything on the hot deals, you know, blockers, anything that we can do to get those deals over the finish line, get everyone jacked up every day. Let's do a little bit of role-playing. You know, I believe in daily role-playing and then let's go. And then my day personally, I'm either in 7 to 10 pitches with prospects or with VCs. And then in between there, I'm managing product software development and customer success. So I'm in probably 10 to 15 back-to-back pitches or meetings and kind of strategy sessions. At around 5 or 6, I need a mental break. So I may go for a run or just take an hour break to clear the head, maybe go for a walk and just think about Yeah, I'm not going to say meditate, but when you're working at that velocity, by the time you hit around 5:00 PM, you're like, I need a quick break. I'm not someone that needs a lot of breaks. I get bored. So roughly like 30 minutes to an hour break, and then I start working again from 6:00 to 10:00. And then my fiancée, she hates… she supports how much I work, but I know she loves it, but she hates it because I like to work from 6:00 to 10:00. So while she's watching shows, I'll work by her and, you know, while she's got The Real Housewives on, I'm just cranking through emails, cranking through strategy, product design, UI/UX, customer success, deal flow, you name it. And by about 9, I'll probably shut down, watch it, maybe watch an hour of TV or read it, read like an hour of a book so that I could pass out. And then I try to get to bed by 10. Lately it's like I'm going to bed at 11 or midnight because we've been raising the seed round. But I like to do 5:00 AM to roughly 10:30.

43:27 Scott Ingram: And then I know that that's not a 5-day-a-week thing. So what happens on kind of the weekend days?

43:34 Brandon Bornancin: So I don't believe in 5 days a week. I think… so by the way, like, I don't believe in a lot of things that are normal. And maybe it's just me and people can call me crazy. I don't care. You know, like, society creates a lot of norms, right? It's normal to eat. You need to eat 5 or 7 or 10 times a day. Like, first off, if you look at the science, that's bullshit. Like, your body should really be in a fasting state. You shouldn't be eating that much. Your metabolism is fine. Eating 5, 7 times a day to keep up with your metabolism is bullshit. Like, there's these things that society, these myths, this bullshit that, that people and companies sell you. I think the food industry has sold you that you need to eat 5 times a day. You know, I only eat 1 to 2 times a day. I fast for 12 to 15 hours and I eat lunch or I eat lunch and a small dinner. When it comes to 7 days a week, I think it's bullshit that you only should work 5 days a week. Like who came up with that? Why did they come up with it? You know, when I say work too, by the way, like if you're selling and doing something that you fucking hate, of course you're going to not want to do that any day of the week. So I'm talking about if you love what you do, you should not be taking off You know, 2 days out of 5 days. Like I just gained, but my whole, my whole hashtag thing is there is no Q5, but because I work 7 days a week, I get a Q5 over any of my competitors, over anyone in my industry. So I believe in working 7 days a week. I don't believe in wasting time. I don't believe in like, I don't do like 95% of my friends are, are burning time with mindless shit on the weekend. I cut all of that out because I'm laser-focused on my mission. I've got a mission and a goal to positively impact a billion people. And because we positively impact a billion people, we build a $100 million company. Like, to do that, you need to be laser-focused. You need to cut out, cut out all the bullshit. You can have fun. Like last night I worked till 9 and then I went out and met with, met up with an investor, Danielle, my fiancée's sister, and we had drinks. Rooftop and, you know, by the fire. And we hung out for an hour and a half and then I passed out and woke up at 5 o'clock today. So like you could have fun, but I think you need to minimize the fun and to accomplish your goals and dreams. So I love working 7 days a week. I've been working 7 days a week for the past 5 years. And I think burnout is bullshit. I think if you want to do big things in this world, I've studied all the billionaires. I've studied all the 100 millionaires, the, uh, 3 Comma Club winners, the 2 Comma Club winners. These guys are cranking 24/7 on, on, on helping a lot of people do big things. And I've just mentally, physically, emotionally trained my body and mind to do that and not worry about what other people think. And 80% of my audience probably thinks I'm crazy. Oh, you don't care about family. Just because I work a lot does not mean I don't care about family. I love my family. I do whatever it takes to provide for my family. I do whatever it takes to provide for my customers, my employees, but I'm all in and I do everything all in, whatever it takes to make it happen. So I love working 7 days a week.

46:47 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So what are the other habits and routines that are core to your success and just the way that you operate effectively?

46:54 Brandon Bornancin: Yeah. So great question. Eating. So the workout, you got to work out. Oh, well, I'm sorry. Do you want sales or do you want like outside of sales?

47:03 Scott Ingram: What's the difference?

47:04 Brandon Bornancin: Okay, sure. Yeah. I mean, everything I do is to improve sales and maximize sales anyways. So like, that's, that's all I'm focused on, you know? So the routine, like I think to maximize sales, you have to have your health right. So I went vegan because my mom passed away when I was 22. Okay. So my mom got Alzheimer's. I and my fiancée's mom passed away when she was 19. Of cancer. So like my fiancée and I studied the science of like all of these top 5 deadliest diseases. And we truly believe all the diseases that kill you, that kill America, are because of what we put into our body, what we eat. All the meat's got so much steroids and garbage in it. All the milk and dairy is terrible for you. Like all of this shit that you're told that is so good for you and exactly what your body needs. Is all bullshit and it's killing the world. So number one, health, right? You know, I, I work out and I'm, I eat extremely healthy. I'm vegan. You know, my, my fiancée's vegan. We believe in that methodology and we're maximizing our health. When I went vegan, by the way, and when I integrated intermittent fasting, I lost 50 pounds in less than 90 days. Like I literally dropped to, you know, it's roughly 10 to 12% body fat in 90 days going vegan. So I highly recommend anyone that wants to get in shape, anyone wants to maximize their health, cut out the dairy, cut out the milk, cut out the eggs, cut out the meat. You're gonna, you're gonna be really thankful. It will be hard, but we're here as a support group for you. Next is I minimized alcohol. So like to maximize sales, you know, alcohol is great, but like you need to get to a mental state where you're not dependent on things to help you relax. And this one was really hard for me because I went to the number one party school. I, you know, salespeople, like I'm selling a product for salespeople by salespeople, and everyone loves to go out and they love to drink and they love to eat a lot. So like, uh, I think, you know, I cut out drinking during the week. I minimize alcohol intake on the weekend. Now, this is funny because last night I had a few too many glasses of wine. With the fiancée and friends celebrating a few new investors, you know, with a cigar. But, you know, it's just… I recommend minimizing the intake of alcohol. I think that dramatically slows you down mentally, physically, and emotionally. And then every day on more of the sales front, filling everything I talked about, filling the pipeline with all the data you need. Like, don't be researching and manually data entering all the leads, all the prospects, all the contacts and accounts. That should all be automated for you. Every day you need to wake up with a full CRM of everyone you need to sell to. That was the number one biggest factor in me 10x-ing my income was because I had all the leads, all the accounts, all the contacts that I needed to sell to every day, every week, every month. When I woke up, I never wasted one second of one day figuring out who I needed to sell to that day. It was all prospect and close. It was all send emails, send, make the calls, drop the voicemails, send the social InMail messages and prospect and close the, the appointments, prospect and close, you know, the proposals and the deals. So like those habits I think are critical. And then just maintaining them every day. Like, uh, on the weekends I still prospect every day on the weekends. Every day I'm prospecting. Like, even though I'm a CEO and I'm, I, I'm pitching every day as a CEO, I carry a quota as a CEO. I have a lead generation quota as a CEO because I think everything starts at the top. Like, if I'm not pitching, if I'm not closing, if I'm not prospecting, if I'm not role-playing, I literally role-play every day with my team. And guess what? Sometimes I may not have the best sales objection response. 2, I'm not interested. No budget. Need to talk to my boss. I'm using XYZ competitor. Like the best part of, I make myself highly vulnerable because I think I can learn from any one of my team members, any one of my mentors, any one of these expert influencers like Scott on top1.fm. You know, like I try to learn as much as possible from all of these people in my network. Like Scott has probably done a lot in his life. Life that I can learn from successes and failures. I don't look to Scott as a competitor. I looked, or like, uh, you know, I looked to Scott as every, everyone in my life I look to try to learn something from. And I think that they've gone through a lot, good and bad. And what are the experiences that I can learn from, from guys like Scott or other salespeople or other marketers that I can apply to my life to maximize my potential and the impact that I'm trying to have on this earth? For the legacy that we want to leave.

51:53 Scott Ingram: So, Brandon, let's talk a little bit more about the prospecting today, right? What are you finding to be most effective, whether it be channel or a particular strategy? What's working?

52:06 Brandon Bornancin: Yeah, so what's working is is changes for each company, right? You know, if you're selling shampoo, it's going to be different than selling a seven-figure enterprise global website redesign for Google. You know, or you know, a six. Figure search marketing program, selling that is going to be different than selling a $125 license to Seamless.ai, the world's best sales leads. But what I know is what's working for us right now and what's working for me is I leverage all the channels. I don't believe in the debate of one channel over the other. Like, I don't buy into any bullshit around cold calling is dead, emailing is dead, Social is dead. You're dead. I'm dead. Like, I don't buy into any of this channel, channel debate bullshit. It's… you need to, like, in marketing, you know, you know a lot about marketing, Scott. It's you use all the marketing channels. It's not you only write content and you don't do any SEO or paid search or social or mobile. Like, you use them all as best as possible, and every day you're trying to improve the conversion rates. Of those channels. So, you know, we use them all… emailing, calling, voicemails, texting, social, tons of social, tons of content, tons of InMails. I think for us lately, that's something new that we've been getting into is video and content. You know, if anyone that follows me, like, we're literally launching a, a TV show on LinkedIn that documents everything we do. So like we're getting into some new stuff where we're documenting everything we do and then sharing what we do with the audience because what we do, everyone else is trying to do and we have successes and we have failures that you can learn from. So, you know, a lot of personalization, a lot of getting using Seamless to get like thousands of leads every day into the funnel. And then we're using a multichannel approach. So, you know, we're doing, you know, the mass personalization of emails because our data is so personalized and our leads are so, like personalized with hundreds of data points. And we get that into Salesforce, we'll get out all the emails. And we, and in our emails, we're very persona focused. So VPs get a certain cadence or sequence, directors of sales get a certain sequence, SDRs get a certain sequence, VPs of marketing get a certain sequence. So we're very persona obsessed with our messaging and our cadences. And our cadences are anywhere from 7 to 30 steps, all multichannel. Emails first, calls, voicemails, social touches, texting, voicemails, content development, you know, the 9. And for us, you know, you see anywhere from, you know, 3% conversion rate from cold to closed won all the way to a 30, 40% conversion rate from cold to closed won, depending on the channel, depending on the cadence, the timeline, the persona.

55:07 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So I'm sure there are tons. So let's kind of focus on what are the most effective or most important tools and apps that help you execute all of those processes?

55:18 Brandon Bornancin: Yep. So anything you do at the top of the funnel, like I'll just go top down. So it starts with data. You, you need all the data. And this is why obviously we built Seamless. Like you need all the data to sell to everyone. You, you need to acquire your total addressable market instantly, and you need to know all the accounts and contacts you need to sell to. So number one, you need a data platform, whether it's Seamless.ai or any other data platform out there. You need a sales data engine that fills the funnel 24/7 for you. Next, once you have all this data, you need to put it somewhere like a CRM. So we're partners with Salesforce, we're partners with HubSpot, we're building out partnerships with every CRM. Like you need a CRM. I've been a Salesforce customer. Salesforce is an investor. In, uh, Seamless.ai. So it's, it's pretty awesome that, you know, we're partnered with them and, and, and we've got investors from Salesforce in the company. So that's really exciting. So we're a big fan of Salesforce. We're also a big fan of HubSpot. We're also a big fan of Pipedrive and Zoho and all of these other CRMs, ProsperWorks, that are helping thousands of sales teams and, and marketing teams maximize their, their growth. So you need that CRM. Next, you know, you need an emailing platform. So, you know, we're, we're partnered with Outreach.io and SalesLoft, and we, we have licenses to both. You know, before that it was ToutApp, you know, that, that ran that market. So I recommend, you know, making sure you leverage an emailing platform and then you need a dialer. You know, well, you don't need a dialer, but it's, it's definitely a nice to have if you want to go fast. Like I still do manual dialing even though I have a dialer. Like, uh, we use the dialer that's built into our email platform, like Outreach.io and SalesLoft. But also, you know, we partnered with insidesales.com. They've got a great dialer, you know, RingCentral. There's a lot of different calling, outbound calling dialers out there that will help you go really, really fast. ConnectAndSell, you know, uh, Leader. There's another one, I forget what it's called. ConnectLeader, MonsterConnect, you know, and then calendar. You need a calendar app for scheduling. Like you need to be able to easily communicate availability, get availability from people, get the, get the meetings booked. And then lastly, you know, I think that you need like pipeline management software and intelligence. So being able to effectively maximize pipeline management, there's a few new technologies coming out, out there that use AI to tell you like if a deal's at risk, how likely and probable a deal's going to close and all of this jazz, which is really cool. And then lastly, you know, probably content management for sales playbooks. You know, that's, that's why we actually had to build our own salesobjections.com because we couldn't figure out a way to easily manage our 1,500-page sales playbook. So I recommend getting something to easily manage a sales playbook, whether it's Google Docs, whether it's Highspot, whether it's salesobjections.com, whether it's guru.com, you name it, get something so that your reps can easily leverage the playbook. That has all the scripts you need to crush quota. You need to have a playbook for all the scripts and everything that happens in the funnel. Everything that happens in the funnel can be laid out from cold calls, voicemails, emails, social touches, scheduling meetings, rescheduling meetings, meeting thank you and next steps, meeting follow-up and callbacks, proposal thank you and next steps, proposal callbacks, high usage, no usage, low usage, you know. All of these things are funnels, sales funnels, and they have call scripts, voicemail scripts, text scripts, social scripts, email scripts that should all be scripted out. And same with the sales objections.

59:00 Scott Ingram: And then what about on the learning side? So we talked about your food diet. What about your information diet? What are you reading, listening to, and watching? And when does that happen?

59:08 Brandon Bornancin: Ooh. Yeah, good question. I mean, being an entrepreneur, like I already studied a lot about sales throughout you know, the past decade of being a full-time salesperson. And I'm always studying sales and sales strategy, right? But now it's, it's more about learning how to build a great company that, that gets to $100 million in revenue. I've never done that before. Like, I've always been a quota-carrying, top 1% salesperson. So, so for me, I have to learn all this other, all this other jazz to get us to $100 million in revenue and positively impact a billion people. So I'm reading a lot of books about paid search marketing, social media marketing, content development, customer success. And I'm going on Kindle and like, if I have a problem around customer success, I'll go into Amazon. And Amazon's an investor in Seamless.ai. Literally the founder of audible.com, Don Katz, invested into Seamless. So we're big fans of listening to audiobooks and I listen to audiobooks and I at 2x speed. I just love like getting all the content as fast as possible at 2x speed. And then on my Kindle, I've got the unlimited scroll. So guys, like the unlimited scroll's a game changer. I took a few speed reading courses and like, if you put, if you buy the books on Kindle, you could turn on unlimited scrolling and you could like speed read a book really quickly and get all the key themes and strategies. Shit. You know, if it's a 7 or 10 hour book, you get it in an hour. So I recommend, you know, I just look at whatever I need to read at that point in time to take the business to the next level. I'll buy the top 3 rated books, read them quickly, and then go into execution. Like whatever I read, I try to document. So I'll highlight everything in Kindle, or if I'm listening to it on Audible, in my notes on my phone. And then I try to make sure I execute because it's easy to read something about sales or marketing or marketing automation or customer success or SaaS. Freemium SaaS models and onboarding and then not do anything about it. Really big on reading and then executing everything that you've learned into your own pipeline, into your own quota, into your own business.

1:01:20 Scott Ingram: Brandon, let's switch gears just a little bit. I'm curious to know if, do you subscribe to a particular sales philosophy?

1:01:29 Brandon Bornancin: No, no, no, I don't. I mean, the answer is no. I, you use them all. Like, I think if you obsess, like, if you're always helping your customer, like if you have an amazing product that you know changes the lives of your customers and you're always helping them, and then you're applying like what I had talked about, always be helping, always be prospecting, always be writing, you know, always be, always be helping, always be learning. Like you, you just like multichannel and you have to use all the channels to maximize sales. You need to leverage all of the sales philosophies and strategies. Like, and you and I, Scott, we're passionate about highlighting sales experts. Like, I'm, I'm writing a book on it. You're writing a book on it. You've got a podcast. You know, I'm doing a podcast on this. Like, we love learning all the sales strategies and best practices and philosophies from the top 1%, from the top sales performers. And I think like you've been so successful and the people here on this podcast have been so successful because they don't just do the Challenger sale or the predictable revenue Aaron Ross sale or the Anthony Iannarino, you know, Ultimate Sales Guide sale or the Stu Heinecke sale or, you know, the Mario Martinez sale. Like you apply it all, you apply all the strategies, all the philosophies at the right point in time. It's being able to leverage all the plays. Like a quarterback does not just run the same running play or the same passing play, right? They're not always throwing Hail Marys or they're not always running a right back sneak to the left. It's the quarterback's got 1,000 plays. Tom Brady is a fricking animal, by the way. This is why I love role-playing, like to totally get off track. Tom Brady watches film 90% of his time. Like, and Tom Brady's a game changer. I don't care. Like, I don't care what anyone says. Like, I'm not from New England. I don't really watch football except for the Ohio State Buckeyes. College football I love because the Browns, I'm from Cleveland and they, they're terrible. But, uh, like, this is why I love role-playing. Like, Tom Brady has 1,000 plays he's using 24/7. At any point in time, he could read the room, read the prospects, Read the sales objections that are going to come at him and leverage the right play at the right time to score the touchdown, to win the game, to win the Super Bowl. And he does that because he's always training. He's always learning. He's always role-playing. He's studying film 24/7. That's why I make our guys role-play. I also make our guys record every demo and try to record every call because I think we can all learn from each other. That's not for me to get on these guys' asses. I don't believe in degrading salespeople and marketers on my team. I don't degrade anyone on my team. So like I used to work at companies that would like, well, I don't know what it's called, like yell at you if you did something wrong on a call or maybe you didn't use the best sales script to overcome an objection. Like I don't believe in that leadership. And this leadership I learned from Jeff Herman, by the way, of the multiplier effect. Like how can we leverage all the intelligence and all the conversion rates and all the data to coach our people to maximize their success. Like, I'm trying to learn from my inside salespeople every day what I can do to increase my conversions from cold to booked appointment. I'm studying my AEs just like they're studying me, not to yell at them, but to, A, figure out what are they doing that are helping them close deals, and then what strategies can we share with each other to help the whole team close more deals? So, you know, We don't subscribe to one philosophy or strategy. We use it all, all the place.

1:05:11 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So I think that's so much about what this, what this show is about. And if there's any consistent theme, I, I may change the way I ask that question in the future just to understand if there's sort of a core philosophy, because I've yet to talk to anybody who's like, yep, I'm 100% what, you know, pick your, pick your process, right? I'm 100% Sandler all the time. It's exactly by the book. That's what I do. No, it's, it's best of, right? You sort of assemble your own process, strategy, and approach by picking the best of all of these different insights and methodologies and incorporating what fits best for who you are and what you're selling is and who your market is and all of those pieces. So, Brandon, from a motivation perspective, one, what motivates all of this and how do you think about motivation in general?

1:05:59 Brandon Bornancin: Yeah, this is, this is easy for me personally. Every day I am worried I'm going to die not living up to my full potential. Like, I am scared shitless of I am going to die knowing that I did not maximize my potential on this earth. You know, I forget, you know, there's 365 days in a year. You know, you've got a certain amount of time. Like, I, I used to do the calculation every day because right now I do a calculation on how many sales days there are in the year. Like, right now there's 111 sales days left in the year and keep selling. And I preach that to my team every day. I literally do a sales day countdown. How many sales days are there left in the year? So like, I also do like a life countdown and I focus on, you know, how many days like left in, in life do I have? And I'm worried that I have so much more potential and I, I could be doing so much more to help more people maximize their potential. And I will be on my deathbed Or, or something. And I will die knowing that I only lived 20, 50, 100, you know, 80% of what I really could have accomplished. And for me, that's, that's my motivation. Like, you know, I've got a mission to positively impact a billion people. That's massive. That's like 1/7 or 1/8 the, the global population. I wanna help a billion people maximize their potential and, uh, in wealth. So like in sales and wealth and income, but also in health. Wealth and health. I want to maximize a billion people's potential. So I'm just worried that if I don't give it my all every day, 7 days a week, I will die knowing that I quit on myself and I quit on what I could have accomplished here on this earth. And it's really weird. It's symbolic. Like, I don't know when I went from just like caring about quota to being this like focused on this broader, bigger mission and this legacy. Like, I don't care about legacy, by the way. I don't care about my name or what people think about me personally. I care more about just helping people get to where they want to go and help them accomplish things that they never thought were possible. And I think that's what keeps me up at night. How can I help people accomplish the impossible and as fast as possible and figure out what they didn't even know they had inside them? Death scares me the most.

1:08:23 Scott Ingram: Well, speaking of motivation, I wanted to give a shout out to another friend of the show, David Dulany, and his upcoming sales development conference. I'm pretty sure we'll be releasing this episode a little over a week before that event happens at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco on August 30th. This is the second year he's done that event, and it's 100% SDR focused. He's even got 2 tracks, one for leaders and the other for in-the-trenches SDRs. So you can check it out at tenbound.com/conference. And of course, we'll have that in the show notes as well. And if you use the promo code DD35, you'll save 35% on your ticket. So tell David hello if you're able to make it. I know it's going to be another great conference. And, and Brandon, I'm sure you can…

1:09:08 Brandon Bornancin: Amazing conference. Yeah, we're actually a gold sponsor. We'll be there. We're going to be giving away a ton of really cool stuff. It's an amazing conference. Sales Development Conference, August 30th, Thursday. It's going to be amazing. If you haven't bought your tickets, go out there and buy tickets. You know, you're going to learn so much. If you think this podcast is of value, the conference will definitely add dramatically to that, from the networking to the strategies that you learn, everything.

1:09:34 Scott Ingram: Yeah. And I believe so much in these conferences, right? It's one thing to read the books and listen to the podcasts, but you've got to rub shoulders, right? You've got to get face to face. You've got to have these conversations. And I really think that that, you know, iron sharpens iron, right? The more that we get to bump up against each other and share these ideas and what's working and share the failures and continue to improve, that's where the magic happens. And there's no better way to do that when you've got everybody in one room at one time at an event like that.

1:10:02 Brandon Bornancin: Yeah, we, we can't wait to be there. It's going to be exciting. Everyone that's on this listening in should definitely attend.

1:10:09 Scott Ingram: So Brandon, is there something you believe that the average sales professional would think is crazy?

1:10:15 Brandon Bornancin: I think everything that I probably dropped on this podcast.

1:10:19 Scott Ingram: Been there, been there, done that. What about the flip side, though? So what does the average seller believe that you think is crazy?

1:10:27 Brandon Bornancin: You know, I think what I think is crazy is giving up on your prospects. What I think is crazy is, is doing the minimum to meet your quota or accomplish your revenue goals. What I think is crazy is putting in 9 to 5. What I think is crazy is, you know, not making that next call when the prospect didn't pick up. You've got a proposal out and they told you that they'd close the deal today and it's 3:00 PM and you're just gonna send one email and pray that they get back to you. What I think is crazy is, you know, you've got a bunch of deals in your pipeline and And you've sent 5 emails, made 7 calls, 3 voicemails, 2 social touches, and the prospects haven't gotten back to you in 3 weeks and you still have the deal in your pipeline. You know, what I think is crazy is not studying, not learning, not being coachable. Dude, I'm trying to learn something new every day from the audience, from salespeople, from sales experts like yourself every day. Like I used to be closed-minded and then And, you know, when you open up your mind to feedback, to criticism, to ideas, to new strategies, you crush it. So I think, uh, what's crazy is being closed-minded, not open to new ideas, not open to new strategies, new sales scripts, new subject lines, new content, new channels, new technologies, new books, you know? So I would challenge everything that you think is normal. I dropped a lot of stuff on this podcast that, uh, is out of this world, not normal. But hopefully you learned something from it that you can apply to take your potential, take your results, take your revenue, take your bank account, and take your income to the next level. Because I've already done it. Like, I've already made a lot of money and I'm not here to do all this work to make a lot of money. I'm here to make you a lot of money. Every day I'm trying to make my audience a shitload of money. That's why I wake up every day. Because I know if I could help you guys all become millionaires, or, you know, join the, the 1-comma club or the 2-comma club, the 3-comma club, I'm gonna make a lot of money. So we obsess over helping people make a shitload of money. And if we do that, we pull that off. You know, your success, our success is reliant on your success. And, uh, I recommend, you know, hopefully applying a lot of the things and strategies that we talked about on this podcast to, to crush it this year, to crush it next year. And to do things that you never thought were possible because we just motivated you to realize, dude, I'm just an average guy. I am just an average guy that came from a poor family in Cleveland, Ohio. You know, I'm just a guy that learned how to do sales, selling at, and you know, at a, at a company, you know, and I've lost, won hundreds of millions in deals. Like, you know, the, like everyone is average. Like, but it's the talent. It's, it's, it's not talent. It's the hard work and the hustle that makes you become the top 1%. I was never super smart in school. I was never super smart in sales. I was never great at sales. I was never gifted in sales. I never had a lot of money. I never had anything. I never had connections, money, strategy, all this jazz. I just hustled my ass off and did all these things. Always be learning, always be helping. Always be filling the pipeline with data, always be writing, always be prospecting. The 5 themes that I shared, like you're doing all of those things, you're gonna go to the next level.

1:13:57 Scott Ingram: So Brandon, you totally reminded me of Tim Ferriss did this thing. He, Derek Sivers went on a, a similar rant and he put some music behind it. And I would, I would do that if I had time to, you know, figure out the licensing and stuff. But I, since I've already got you up on the soapbox, What advice would you give to somebody that's just starting out in their sales career today?

1:14:20 Brandon Bornancin: Yeah, this is a great question. I love this question. You know, I would buy… I would do kind of what I did, right? Buy every book possible on sales and read them all. I don't care if you… I didn't like reading. I don't like reading, you know, but I bought 100 28 different books on sales and I read them all over the course of years. Like, you know, read as many possible. If you could read, you know, I would try to read 1 to 2 books a week. If you could only do 1 book a week, pick up a sales book and read it and then pick up the next one and read it. And there's a way to figure out what sales books are prioritized based on value. Like, you know, just figure out all the sales books in recency. Like by date, by relevancy and by value, I would buy literally 120, 130 sales books. And I'm writing a book on aggregating all of the sales expertise. I know Scott has his book about what all the top sales experts do. That's why, that's actually why we wrote the books because we don't want people to actually have to read the 130 sales books. Right, Scott. But I would go back and I, you know, I would pick up our books, pick up Scott's book, pick up my book. And then if you need more, read the 130 books out there on sales. And then just know that it's going to take way more work than you think. Like, I, when I launched my company and we would have quit, 99% of people in my position would have quit because they didn't have the 10-year mindset. So I knew I had a 10-year mindset. I had a 10,000 contact email call social touch mindset. I had this like number 10 where I just knew it would take 10 times the amount of effort, the amount of work, the amount of money, the amount of time to be successful with Seamless. So like, I don't consider where Seamless is at today a success. In 10 years, I know whatever we've achieved, we've given it our all in the timeline that I knew that it would take to be successful. So just make sure that you read a lot and that you prospect a lot, 10 times more than what your boss tells you to prospect. And that you're always learning, always optimizing, always helping. It's a lot of what I talked about on the podcast. Unfortunately, there's not like one thing. It's the 5 things that I talked about here.

1:16:38 Scott Ingram: Well, and Brandon, does that advice change at all if, let's say that there's somebody listening to this show and they've been a middle performer, maybe, you know, they're, they're making their number, they're doing okay, but they're nowhere near 5 or 10x, right? They're, they're looking to double their income this year, they… we flipped their switch, right? It's game on now. What's your advice to them? Like, they've been in sales for a while. They know some of the fundamentals and the basics. How do they kick it up and get to that next level?

1:17:07 Brandon Bornancin: Yeah. So, okay, this is great. I actually have something very specific. One of the strategies that took me to the next level was actually studying all the sales scenarios and sales funnel. All the sales objections and every single thing in the sales funnel that can happen. And I talked about this a lot in the podcast. So you're gonna have your cold outreach, you're gonna have your scheduled meeting outreach, you're gonna have your reschedule outreach, you're gonna have your meeting outreach, your, your demo follow-up, your proposal follow-up, your nurture outreach. Then you're gonna have your objections. The biggest thing that took me to the next level was number one, filling all the pipeline with all the leads, the 10x the amount of leads and data. That's critical. You have to do that. Like do way more than anyone else in your industry, your peers, your employees, you name it. Just fill the pipeline with everyone you need to sell to every day. Number 2 is the content around overcoming all of these sales objections, managing all of these different sales tasks or sales things that come up. Like if someone says, You know, I'm not interested, no budget, send me more information, I need to talk to my boss, I'm not interested, I'm already working with someone, I'm already working with X, I'm already working with Y, I'm already working with Z, whatever that may be, you know, you need to, you need to do that. So, so that's what I recommend doing.

1:18:31 Scott Ingram: Awesome. So Brandon, clearly you are also a student of sales. What would you want to know about the top 1% sellers in other organizations?

1:18:44 Brandon Bornancin: So what I would want to learn from other salespeople, top 1% performers, is what were the strategies, the habits, and the best practices that you employed, that you executed to become so successful? I also think it's important to figure out, like, what do you do? How do you get unstuck? You know, like, it's easy to be highly motivated in good times. It's hard to be highly motivated in really, really bad times. So, you know, what are some of the strategies and how do you stay so motivated in good times and bad? What are the strategies that you execute to become a top 1%er in outside sales? You know, what are the strategies that you leverage to, after giving a presentation or pitch, to follow up to get the deal done, to make sure that you're, you're getting that deal from pitch to closed won or demo to closed won? I'd love to learn The strategies, best practices, and ideas that you leverage to make that happen. And then on the inside sales front, what are the strategies, ideas, and best practices to crush booking as many appointments as possible? And then on the sales leadership side, you know, what are the strategies, ideas, and best practices to get your team consistently performing over quota annually?

1:19:59 Scott Ingram: Awesome. Lots of good stuff. Anything that you would add sort of based on those questions for you? So, you know, getting through the tough times and staying motivated or particular best practices in the demo-to-close arena? What are those for you?

1:20:14 Brandon Bornancin: Yeah. You got to have a big mission and a big purpose. So you have to become purpose-driven. Don't worry about the $100K or the $500K or the million that you make. Eventually, you'll start making so much money you don't really care what goes in and what goes out. For me, I never looked at the bank account. I just knew that money kept coming in. And that's awesome. And actually, like, for me, I would close so many deals because I was building, you know, because I built Seamless and every deal that I closed would help fund Seamless. It was like a new deal that I had to close to fund my company. So I was very purpose-driven. And the reason I was purpose-driven was like, I had to close this deal to get the money that I could put into funding launching Seamless. Cause I invested $500K of my own cash. And left a, you know, $2 to $2.5 million salary out on the table over the past 3 years. But I was so focused on positively impacting a billion people. So like, I was so mission-driven. I was so purpose-driven. And you gotta come up with what's your purpose, what's your mission here? And like, if you obsess over your customers and you become very purpose and mission-driven to help them, You're going to help them make a lot of money, save a lot of money, and you're going to make a lot of money along the way. And I learned this from mentors like Cardone, mentors like Tony Robbins, mentors like Marc Benioff. You name it, these guys are very purpose-driven. They're very mission-driven. At some point, you will have enough money that it doesn't matter. And at some point, you should really focus on what's your bigger mission, what's your bigger purpose? Because that that keeps you motivated when you want to quit. That will keep you motivated when you've gone through hell. Like, 2017 was my worst year yet. Like, worst year yet. Like, I had a CTO steal from me. I had like all types of bullshit go down. VCs were dropping. Like, you know, the tech was crashing. Like, and then guess what? We fight through that because we're purpose-driven and mission-driven to help a billion people And we, we get through it. We close a bunch of deals. We hire new engineers. We hire new salespeople. And now we're record growth, 500% growth. We're growing at nearly 50% a month. Every month Seamless.AI is growing. How did I go from the worst year yet to the biggest year yet, raising $2.5 to $3 million for our seed round, hundreds of customers, you know, We're on pace to acquire 100,000 users with Seamless.ai. The only way that we were able to do that was because we were mission-driven. We were purpose-driven. We knew it would take 10 years. So we said, we're gonna go through hell for 10 years to get to the end goal. We know that it will be difficult, time-consuming, expensive, and probably a pain in the ass to do, but we're gonna do everything we can to get through it over the course of 10 years. And once we get to that end mark, we know that we've positively impacted a lot of people and it may go longer than that. That. It may go shorter than that, but we're doing the 10-year mindset. Give it your all for 10 years. And one bill, you know, our goal is to get to a billion, you know, positively impact a billion people as fast as possible. We hope to do it sooner than 10 years, but at least 10 years.

1:23:35 Scott Ingram: And, and what about that demo-to-close piece? What, what works best for you in that place?

1:23:40 Brandon Bornancin: I mean, we're doing a lot of one-call closes, so it's interesting. Like, I, I was never like I always sold a really complex solution, enterprise solution, where we couldn't one-call close people. So for us, you know, now we're, we're working the one-call close, and like, it's weird if we're not converting, you know, one-call, you know, one-call closes and demos at 50%, 40%. But then let's just say we don't close them, you know, we're, we're working to make sure that do we need to set up another meeting with the DM? If the DM's not on the call, do we need to set up a meeting with the users? If the users aren't on the call, we'll make sure that we get this, you know, Seamless gives us cell phones of everyone, but you know, we need to make sure, you gotta make sure that you get cell phones, emails of everyone involved using Seamless or by asking them or by doing anything else. Set up that follow-up meeting with them while they're on the call. Don't get off the demo or the meeting or the pitch without setting up the closing call. While they're on the line. And that avoids freaking email tag and scheduling tag and, uh, make sure everyone's aligned on the value, the ROI, the results. One of the most valuable questions I ask is, you know, who are the decision makers? You like, besides you, Scott, you know, who else on the team needs to see something like this? Who else buys sales technologies like Seamless? And what do they typically say, you know, when you're, you're pitching them on buying a platform like this? What do they typically say when you're looking at a new sales technology? What do they need to see to give you budget, to give you the credit card, to give you approval, to sign the contract? Maybe, maybe that person just does it and they don't even need approval. They could sign the contract. Maybe they need to get DM approval, but this guy just cares about booking appointments. But the DM only cares about generating revenue 3x the pipeline of what the quota is. So you got to figure out who are the DMs, the users, the influencers on the deal, get them all in the room, get them all aligned on the value and the ROI, and ask for the sale at the end. Don't keep asking for next steps. What are next steps? Like, okay guys, you need this, you want this, you deserve it. It's only a matter of time before you do it anyways. Yes, go. What's the best credit card number to put that under? Or what's, you know, sign, you know, I just sent this to you via eSign. Why don't you authorize that right now and I'll hold and then we'll get you kicked off. Like, you got to ask for the sale. You don't ask for the sale, nothing happens.

1:26:11 Scott Ingram: Yeah, there you go. So I almost forgot to ask about… I sort of teased in the beginning this kind of choice that you made. Both a successful sales professional. Now you're having success as a startup founder. If somebody's in that place, right, they are, they've had a successful sales career, they've got this idea, they've got something, they've got a purpose that's driving them and pulling them. Talk about that choice and the pros and cons. And, you know, what's, what's this really like? And what would you suggest to them?

1:26:45 Brandon Bornancin: Or what would you have them It's funny because I'm, I'm the, uh, I'm the entrepreneur that's the anti-entrepreneur now. Like, uh, this is my 3rd startup, right? Like, I, I left my, my job full-time making a lot of money, you know, to, to, to launch Seamless because we had this vision to, to, to positively impact a billion people. And we knew that everyone needed sales, the world's best sales leads, and the data was garbage out there and the market. Could not grow fast enough because they had the wrong data and they didn't have the contacts and accounts. So like, we have this technology that we were using that 10x'd our income and helped us become billionaires. And we knew we could help a lot of people do the same. I would like, before you think about quitting your high-paying full-time sales job, like if you're quitting your sales job, your high-paying sales job like me to start a company and get rich, you will make more money being a top 1% salesperson. I'm just going to tell you, like, I learned this the hard way, you know, like, like eventually, typically in sales, you're going to cap out at $1 mil a year to $2 mil a year, which by the way, guys, like, that's pretty fucking good. That's freaking amazing. That's great. Like, and those are like the top 1% of the top 1%. So you will cap out, like companies will change your quota. We'll change your teams. We'll change whatever. But like $1 to $2 million or even half a million is a lot of money. You can do a lot with that. I recommend keep making all of that money, keep crushing it, providing value to your company, providing value to your team, your employees, and investing in startups or investing in real estate and not doing a startup. Like if you're doing a startup for the money, It's not worth it. You know, like, like check this out. If I was making $1 million a year and I launched, I launched Seamless first year, I made $0, literally paid myself $0. I went from a lot of money to no money. Second year, I paid myself $22 grand, literally $22 grand year 2. I also had to invest $500,000 of my own cash, everything on the line. Mine, everything I had in the bank, everything I had in savings. I didn't touch my 401. Luckily, like I had a ton of cash in the 401. I was prepared to raid it to fund Seamless. I luckily did not have to do that. So I have some cash there, but I took everything I possibly owned, dumped it in the company. Year 3, you know, I'll make probably $50,000 to $75,000 to $100,000, you know, probably $50,000 to $75,000 actually. So like you're, and then, and then year 4, year 5, year 6, when you get really big, your investors and your venture capitalists don't want you to pay yourself a lot of money. And because it's your own company, you're not going to pay yourself $200,000, $300,000, $400,000, $500,000, $1 million because that money needs to go into hiring other people to help maximize the success of your company. So guys, if you want to start a company, to get rich, don't do it. That's my advice. And I recommend just make a shitload of money in sales. Sales is the number one profession in the world. It's the most profitable. You can make the most amount of money. It's the most amazing opportunity. Stick with sales. You're not missing anything. All the hell that I've gone through, like you, I promise you, no one deserves to go through it. No one should go through it. It's terrible. Like 99% of startups are like Seamless. It's hell. Everything's on fire. You don't have anything, you know, and you have to make fire out of no wood and you're in the desert. Like you got to figure out what to eat and there's not anything around you for 100 miles and you got to walk 100 miles to eat. Like, uh, it's terrible. And I say that not to discourage you, but I say that to give you advice. Like, you know, I recommend figuring out how to stay in the top 1%, make a shitload of money. And it's the best thing in the world. I'm happy now being an entrepreneur because now we're impacting a lot of people. But for 3 years, no one knew who Seamless was. 3 years, I wasn't impacting barely anyone. 3 years, I drained everything I ever had into the company. My whole bank account's like empty, frozen, nothing. You know, my fiancée, everyone around me, like, what are you doing? You've gone through all your life savings. You're going through hell. We don't see you anymore. All you do is work. You know, you're not driving a lot of results, a lot of revenue, all this jazz. And now, you know, you hit an inflection point once you get through the hell. But I want you guys to understand the hell that they don't write about in books, that entrepreneurs don't talk a lot about, because 99%, like what we went through, is exactly what you would have to go through. Now, if you're prepared to take no money for 3 years, if you're prepared to empty your life savings to launch your own company, I highly recommend it.

1:31:43 Scott Ingram: Well, that, you know, I'm, I'm so in agreement with that. I, you know, Sales Success Media, which, which owns the podcast, which is the entity that I created to house all of this stuff. It's really just a passion project. The biggest outcome that I get from this, and, you know, I'm coming up on 2 years, it's just starting to eke out, you know, a little bit of money. But you know where, where the impact really is? I've gotten so much better as a sales professional, right? The people that I'm able to surround myself, the mentors that I've created, through these conversations and a lot of unrecorded conversations have massively impacted my sales results. And the thing is, the size of company I would have to create to offset that, right? Take multiple 6 figures, now add all of the taxes and overhead additionally that you have to pay when it's your company and you don't have somebody paying the taxes, your benefits, providing the 401, all of that stuff. I mean, I just, I look at both sides. I'm like, oh my God, I would have to create a multimillion-dollar company for this to even begin to make any sense. And maybe it'll get there on the side, but the purpose is really giving back to this community. Selfishly, it's just making me better, right? The more I sell, the more money I make. That's where my bread gets buttered. So I think, I think that's really fantastic advice. And Brandon, you're on the more successful side of the startup side, right? You're telling the truth about a winning startup at this stage, right? In your journey, 3 or 4 years in, right? There are so many more that don't ever even get to this point.

1:33:25 Brandon Bornancin: Yeah. Yeah. And because they quit, right? Because they did, they didn't know that they would not make a dollar for years. They didn't know that it would take 10x the amount of capital to build the technology, to build the software. They didn't realize, like, we rebuilt our seamless search engine that delivers the world's best sales leads 3 times. Imagine taking like a few hundred thousand dollars and building a car and then smashing it with a massive hammer, destroying the car, and then having to build the car again. And then you realize, well, shit, you made a better car, but it's not perfect and it won't scale to drive a million people across the world. So then you got to smash that and then you got to rebuild. Like, these are the things that, that you give it your all and you give it your best, but you didn't realize that it would take so much money, so much capital, so much work, so much time, so much energy. You'd have to sacrifice. Dude, I've sacrificed everything, like my money, my relationships, my time, my passions. Now, now Seamless is like my all-in passion and helping a billion people is my all-in passion. Like, I don't really feel that way. I'm just saying that for the audience to realize, like, you will give up.

1:34:33 Scott Ingram: Go…

1:34:33 Brandon Bornancin: like, I don't golf, I don't boat, I don't hang out on the weekends, I don't hang out at night with my friends. Like, not that I don't want to, but the business requires so much of you and so much of your time. Just like becoming a top 1% salesperson, being an entrepreneur is just like being a, a top 1% salesperson. It takes everything you've got and more. To crush quota and to perform at 200 to 300, 500%. You need to give it your all and you're going to have to make a lot of sacrifices and you better be damn prepared to do that. If, if you want to make a mil, make 2 mil, make half a mil, like the reason why you're not where you're, you want to go yet is probably because you didn't work hard enough. You didn't sacrifice enough. You didn't learn enough. And all of that comes back to just like hustle. You could do all of those things with a lot of hard work. Work, and you need to do all of that work, and you need to make a lot of sacrifices to get there.

1:35:26 Scott Ingram: So if you're listening to this, keep selling. You're in the right place. Brandon, let's tie a bow on this thing. So we've talked about a ton of stuff, and I like to end with an actionable challenge. So the person listening to this, they've, they've gotten inspired. You've flicked that switch in them. They're ready to take this to the next level. What would you challenge them to do in the next 7 to 10 days that is going to help them improve themselves and improve their results?

1:35:53 Brandon Bornancin: I'm gonna say, you know, 5 quick things, and it goes along with the themes. For the next 7 to 10 days, figure out the amount of contacts and accounts that you need to be filling the funnel with to hit 10x the amount of revenue and, and quota that you want to attain. So if, if your quota is $1 million, set Set it to 10, figure out the amount of contacts and accounts you need in the funnel to always be filling the funnel. Next, you know, write 10x the amount of scripts for everything possible that happens in sales so that you're, you're always writing all the content that you need and optimizing all the content that you need. And then start executing the, the prospecting and the activity to hit that. And then lastly, You're you're not reading and you're not learning enough. So you know I would I would recommend to to quadruple what you're reading over the next seven to ten days because you and I even I'm not reading enough. I'm not learning enough. I'm living well below my potential. I haven't accomplished one hundredth of what I'm supposed to do here, and that pisses me off. So you know let's all of us over the next seven to ten days. Write out everything, you know, 5 to 10x where we're at today, where we need to go, and just start. I don't analyze anything. Like, I launch and I don't think about it. Like, I launch these videos that have transcription and I don't edit the transcription. Then people laugh at me. Like, I don't care. I'd rather get the content out. Now I've started to edit a little bit, but like, taking action on these things that we're highlighting and the strategies that we're highlighting, it's more critical to take action and to think big and to execute and to always be filling the funnel, always be writing, always be prospecting, always be helping, always be learning than just sitting there not doing anything, wasting time, wasting your life. I'm here to help you not waste your life. So start taking action. Do all of these things. Always be writing, always be helping, always be prospecting, always be filling the funnel, and always be learning ASAP.

1:37:56 Scott Ingram: So Brandon, you are a rather social individual online. Where can folks connect with you and, and learn more about what you're up to and about Seamless.ai?

1:38:06 Brandon Bornancin: I am exclusive. This, this goes against probably everything I, I preach, but I am exclusively on LinkedIn. So I have Facebook and Twitter accounts, but I, I really don't use them. I am 1,000% on LinkedIn. Brandon Bornancin, connect with me on LinkedIn, add me on LinkedIn. I accept everyone. We're launching LinkedIn TV show. We're launching All types of stuff on LinkedIn. That's where we're all in right now on LinkedIn. And then also for the show, if you use top1 as the referral code, join seamless.ai, the world's best sales leads today. We're gonna give everyone 600 leads, $1,000 value for free on me and Scott because you listen to the show. So go to seamless.ai, the world's best sales leads, join for free. Using referral code top one, six hundred leads, a thousand dollar value.

1:39:00 Scott Ingram: Well, they had to earn that value. We've had a great long conversation, Brandon. I really appreciate your time and your being as open and sharing with us all of your insights and strategies and techniques that have gotten you where you are. Again, we are going to have epic show notes on this one at top one dot fm. And remember, join that mailing list. That welcome email will. Will provide details for how to get your hands on one of the videos, any video you want from the Sales Success Summit. And then Brandon, uh, what about your, your book? We're contributing to each other's, uh, book projects. You can learn about…

1:39:32 Brandon Bornancin: this is so exciting. And, and this is, by the way guys, this is how you, you get to the next level. Scott and I are both passionate about understanding the top sales performers. You could consider us competitors, but we view each other as As friends, and what can we learn as Scott writes his great books? And Scott, for the audience, you know, share what your your book is and where they can find it.

1:39:55 Scott Ingram: Yeah, so the the book is Sales Success Stories. We've got over twenty contributors. More detail will be available. I'm as we record this, I'm getting ready to go on vacation next week, so there's going to be a lot of work done. I'm going to have some extra brain space to work on the book project, but you can learn the most at top. Top1.fm/book. If you're listening to this episode right away, there will still be a little bit of time where you can jump in on the crowdfunding campaign. All of those benefits are still going to be out there probably through the end of August, and I think that's going to be the drop-dead date. I'm going to have to turn it off because one of the benefits, if you contribute $50 or more, you'll get your name in the book as one of our benefactors. So, I can't keep doing that. We're going to have to close that off and then we'll go down to traditional things. But that link will always take you to the most relevant place at top1.fm/book. Brandon, what about yours?

1:40:46 Brandon Bornancin: Yeah, and that's awesome. So, so we're writing Sales Secrets from the Top 1%. The world's best sales experts share their secrets to sales success, where we interview all the SDRs, the AEs, the VPs of sales, the sales authors, and entrepreneurs to get their sales secrets. To sales success. Very similar theme to Scott's book, except we're kind of going more broad across the gamut. And, you know, you could find the book at secretsalesbook.com. You could preorder today, $19.99. Highly recommend it. We've got some of the top sales authors, you know, we've got some of the best entrepreneurs in the world in there. It's kind of like a compilation, how Tim Ferriss did his Tools of Titans, where We're hitting everyone in sales and even in marketing and entrepreneurship for their sales secrets from the top 1%. And secretsalesbook.com, you can buy it at secretsalesbook.com. And actually Scott's gonna be featured in the book as one of the experts, and he's gonna drop your knowledge as a top 1% sales performer and what you learned interviewing all these top salespeople and all the top sales success stories that you've gathered. Which is really cool. You're kind of like a mini, a mini book in a book.

1:41:59 Scott Ingram: Yeah, well, I'm like the Tom Sawyer of, of authors, right? I basically convinced everybody else to write my book for me. So it's, it's a, it's a fun model and we're having a ton of fun with it. And you know, the beauty of books is they're not zero-sum like so many, uh, other industries are. And it's funny, I just learned this week that Anthony Iannarino is going to be launching his book on the very same day that I was planning to publish ours. And I don't think I'm going to change a thing. You know, the beauty is I don't know a successful salesperson that only ever bought one sales book.

1:42:32 Brandon Bornancin: Never.

1:42:32 Scott Ingram: Right? We've bought lots, or in the case of Brandon, hundreds. And I think that's… I probably fit in that category. I haven't done the math. I've been at this 15 years. I'm sure I've purchased well over 100 sales books. So, here's 3 that are going to be new and fresh coming out this fall. I think there's a great opportunity You know, you shouldn't not buy Anthony's book. Anthony's a great author.

1:42:53 Brandon Bornancin: He's an investor in our company too, Anthony.

1:42:56 Scott Ingram: Well, and ironically, the title of his book is, I think it's Eat Their Lunch. And so it's about this idea of how do you take away business from your competitors? But again, I think the, I think the pie is bigger than that. I don't think that somebody purchasing Anthony's book hurts me. And I don't think somebody purchasing my book or Brandon's book is going to hurt Anthony one bit. So, go out there and buy all of them. You need to go on a sales book buying spree this October because clearly, there's a lot of great stuff coming out. Brandon, this has been so fantastic. Thank you for, again, for just all of your time. Everybody, go to top1.fm, get the show notes because, like I said, it's going to be a link fest to all of the great stuff that we've shared here today.

1:43:36 Brandon Bornancin: And go to seamless.ai, sign up for the world's best sales leads. We're going to hook you up. Scott wants to know about all the money that you made. Applying these strategies from our podcast today and the podcast that he's been hosting over the past 2 years to help you crush your quota. I want to hear about all the revenue and income that you generate using Seamless and from this podcast. And thank you guys so much. We're humbled to be here. And make it this next year your biggest and best yet. You've got more in you. You can do more. You've got more. Let's do it. Let's crush it. To the Sales Success Stories podcast. To be sure you never miss an episode and for an invitation to our Sales Success Community powered by Influitive, subscribe to our newsletter at top1.fm.