Brandon Bornancin is the founder of Seamless.ai, a platform which organizes the world’s contacts to help you make profitable relationships when prospecting. He’s here to explain the five differentiators that make him successful, as well as how his worth ethic (and thirst for knowledge) has put him in the top one percent of salespeople in his industry. Brandon is on a mission to help one billion people maximize their wealth, health and potential. Surprise: he believes a career in sales is actually a far BETTER path to wealth than creating a startup! He also dives into how to crush daily quotas, his favorite tools, as well as how to stay healthy and motivated.
Links to everything linkable are at the bottom of this post.
(02:20) What are the top 5 differentiators that have allowed you to get where you have in sales?
Always be filling the funnel, always be writing, always be prospecting, always be helping and always be learning.
(04:00) Filling the Pipeline vs. Prospecting: Brandon needed to go from selling to 20 companies a day to selling to 1000 ideal customers a day, automatically.
(05:00) Always Be Writing: Once you have the data and know your ideal customer personas (i.e. VPs of Sales, Directors of Sales, VPs of Digital Marketing, VPs of Demand Generation) write the 5-10 cold emails, voicemail scripts, social scripts, and text scripts to personally prospect, connect, and close that VP of sales to meet with you. Brandon has over 1500 sales scripts (meeting follow-up, schedule, re-schedule) for everything in the sales funnel. He A/B tests it and stores it in SalesObjections.com. Use referral code TOP1.
(08:00) Always Be Helping: Be a servant leader and salesperson. Help companies accomplish their goals and dreams.
(11:00) Always Be Learning: 5-10X the activity (calling, video, social, texting, proposals, demos) required to meet your quota.
Brandon’s boss Jeff said that Brandon is: tenacious, quick on his feet, and sells the dream. He works 18 hours a day all the time and has a supportive girlfriend/fiancée Danielle. It’s important to have a partner who supports you.
(14:00) Brandon grew up poor. His Dad was one of the first people to sell Mac’s and PC’s in Macy’s and joined Computer Associates, the first software company to do over a billion dollars in software revenue. They became very wealthy. Brandon realized it’s the best profession anyone can jump into and pursued an education in sales. His first company did $6 million during his college years.
(18:00) What would you do differently if you could start over today?
From age 23-25, Brandon bought every sales book (100 to 150). He made money marketing the online poker industry. After getting tired of losing money playing poker, he bought 5-10 poker books and had success. He bought and studied as many sales books as possible to get all the tactics and strategies. If he could go back, he would read every single sales book possible instead of waiting 5 years to do it.
(20:30) “Sell or Be Sold” and “The 10X Rule” by Grant Cardone are some of Brandon’s favorite books. Brandon will learn as much as possible about selling insurance, cars, enterprise, to learn the techniques. Jill Konrath’s “Selling to Big Companies” was also helpful finding out about the “persona” and the distractions executives can understand how to help them accomplish their goals. Aaron Ross’ Predictable Revenue helped streamline their process.
Brandon is also a huge fan of Anthony Iannarino and Stu Heinecke of “How to Get a Meeting with Anyone.”
(27:00) What quantifiable results did Brandon produce to become a millionaire? Build a massive list (of VC’s), always be writing (to connect with those VC’s and get them to meet), always be helping, and always be learning. His sales quota is to close 10 licenses a day for Seamless.ai. Each sales rep’s quota is 7-10 licenses a day. His team setup as many appointments as possible and he created a repeatable process to pitch, manage, help, and close that book of business.
They set their goal at 10X the quota and then calculated the activity required to produce that.
(30:20) Brandon’s favorite “in the trenches” sales story. Pitching a $32 billion company and had to get 20-30 influencers to all align with their pitch. He was deathly sick but still crushed the deal, earning his first six-figure commission check in one month.
(36:50) What’s the most challenge thing in sales today? Automating sales and webinars for scale. Making outbound more transactional (losing a little on personalization) to move faster.
(39:50) What’s a typical day like for Brandon? Wake up at 4:30-5AM every day from his Fitbit, make coffee, go to the gym while working on emails and content development. 7AM, works the pipeline right away, then dev team meeting, sales stand-up for 30 minutes (to role-play, go over good news, hot dealers, blockers, yesterday’s results, and role-playing).
7-10 pitches with prospects or VC’s and managing product development, software and customer success in-between. 5-6PM, mental break to go for a run or walk to think. 6-9PM, more work. He’ll crank through emails, strategy, product design, deal flow, UI, UX, customer success, while the fiancée is watching TV. An hour or watching TV or reading a book, then bedtime by 10-11PM.
(44:40) If you love what you do, you should be able to work 7 days a week so you get your “Q5.” Have fun but minimize it to accomplish your goals and dreams.
(46:40) What are the other habits and routines core to Brandon’s success? Work out and get your health right. Automatically fill the pipeline with all the data you need, so you wake up knowing who you need to sell to that day. Carry a lead generation quota and prospect every day on the weekends, even as a CEO.
(51:50) What’s working right now? It’s different for each company. No communications channel is dead or “better” than the other. Use all the marketing channels. Brandon is launching a TV show on LinkedIn and getting more into video content. They’re persona-obsessed, making sure everyone gets their personalized sequences.
(55:00) What are the most effective and important tools (and apps) to execute? A sales data engine to see the total addressable market such as Seamless.ai. A CRM (SalesForce, HubSpot, PipeDrive, Zoho, ProsperWorks). An emailing platform (Outreach.io, SalesLoft, ToutApp). A dialer (InsideSales.com, RingCentral, ConnectAndSell, ConnectLeader, MonsterConnect). A calendar app for scheduling. Pipeline management software. Content management for sales playbooks (SalesObjections.com, Google Docs).
(58:50) What is Brandon reading and watching? Books about paid search marketing, social media marketing, content development, and customer success. Buy the top 3 rated books you need on Kindle Unlimited, turn on unlimited scrolling and speed read what you need. Document and go into execution.
(61:15) Do you subscribe to a particular sales philosophy? No, use them all. You need to leverage all the sales philosophies and strategies. A quarterback does not always run the same “play.” Brandon has his team always roleplay and record every call.
(65:40) Where do you find motivation? Every day, Brandon worries he’s going to die not living up to his full potential. He’s aware of how many days he has left in life. He’s on a mission to help people accomplish things they didn’t know were possible, as fast as possible.
David Dulaney has an upcoming sales development conference at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco, August 30th. It’s 100% SDR focused with two tracks: one for leaders and another for in-the-trenches SDR. It’s at TenBound.com/conference. Use promo code DD35 to save 35% on your ticket.
(70:00) What does the average seller believe that Brandon thinks is crazy? Giving up on your prospects, doing the minimum to hit your quota, limiting yourself to 9-5, being closed-minded. Hard work and hustle gets you to the top 1 percent.
(74:00) What advice would you give to someone just starting out in their sales career today? Buy every book possible on sales and read them all, 1-2 books per week. Also, know that it will take more work than you think. Read and prospect a lot, ten times more than your boss tells you to prospect.
(76:50) What’s your advice to take your sales to the next level? Study all the sales scenarios and sales funnels: cold outreach, scheduled meeting outreach, re-schedule outreach, meeting outreach, demo follow-up, proposal follow-up, nurture outreach, objections. Fill all the pipeline with 10X the amount of leads with everyone you need to sell to every day. Create the content to overcome these objections and manage these sales tasks.
(78:25) What would you want to know from the top 1% sales performers in other organizations? Brandon would like to know what strategies they executed to become so successful, and how they get unstuck during bad times. What are the consistent best practices for demo-to-closed-one, to crush booking as many appointments and possible, and to get your team performing over quota consistently?
(79:50) Any best practices to get through tough times? Become purpose-driven. Obsess over helping your customers. Give it your all for ten years.
Setup a follow-up meeting while that prospect is still on the line to avoid “scheduling” tag. Make sure everyone is aware of the ROI and results. Ask what other decision makers on the team tend to say, and what they need to see to approve. Ask for the sale at the end.
(86:00) What should startups consider? Before quitting your high-paying sales job to start a company, you’ll make more money being a top 1 percent salesperson. You’ll cap out at 1 to 2 million per year. Keep making that money and invest in real estate instead of a startup. Don’t start a company to get rich.
(94:40) “Being an entrepreneur is just like being a top 1 percent salesperson: it takes everything you’ve got and more to crush quota, to perform at 200, 300, 500 percent. You need to give it your all, you’re going to make a lot of sacrifices, and you’d better be prepared to do that if you want to make 1-2 million. The reason you’re not where you want to go yet is because you didn’t work hard enough, you didn’t sacrifice enough, you didn’t learn enough.”
(95:20) What would you challenge listeners to do in the next 7-10 days to improve themselves and improve their results?
Figure out the amount of contacts and accounts you need to fill the funnel with to hit 10X the amount of revenue and quota you want to obtain. Write 10X the scripts for everything possible that happens in sales. Start executing the prospecting and activity to hit that. You’re not reading and learning enough, so quadruple what you’re reading over the next 7-10 days. It’s more critical to take action, think big, execute, than sitting and wasting your life.
Brandon Bornancin is exclusively on LinkedIn.
Join Seamless.ai and use the referral code TOP1 to get 600 free leads, a $1000 value.
Scott’s upcoming book is “Sales Success Stories” with over 20 contributors at Top1.fm/book.
Brandon’s book is “Sales Secrets from the Top 1 Percent: The World’s Best Sales Experts Share Their Secrets Sales Success.” You can find it at SecretsSalesBook.com.
Resources
Brandon Bornancin on LinkedIn
Seamless.ai Use the referral code TOP1 to get 600 free leads, a $1000 value.
Jeff Leo Herrmann on LinkedIn
SalesObjections.com
Sell or Be Sold by Grant Cardone
The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone
Selling to Big Companies by Jill Konrath
Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross
The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need by Anthony Iannarino
How to Get a Meeting with Anyone by Stu Heinecke
Story Dimensions
TenBound Conference Use code: DD35 for 35% off your ticket!
Sales Success Stories complied by Scott Ingram
Sales Secrets from the Top 1 Percent: The World’s Best Sales Experts Share Their Secrets Sales Success complied by Brandon Bornancin