(39) Building Seamless.AI and Growing to $100 Million Net Worth w/ Brandon Bornancin, CEO at Seamless.AI - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmCCa8Wv0EI

Transcript: (00:10) Hello and welcome back to the Colin Cadmus podcast. Today I'm joined by Brandon Bernansen. Brandon is the founder and CEO of Seamless.ai, one of the industry's top providers of B2B contact data. He's hired and trained hundreds of salespeople over the past decade. So, I'm excited to catch up and get his thoughts on all that's changed this year in B2B sales and what lies ahead in 2026. (00:32) Before we get started, if you're watching on YouTube, please take a moment to subscribe to the channel, like the video, and leave us a comment if you have questions or feedback. If you're joining us from Spotify or Apple Podcast, please drop us a review and let us know what you think of the episode. This is much appreciated. (00:46) Without further ado, let's dive in and get his thoughts. Brandon, thanks for joining me and welcome to the show. >> Hey, man. It's great to be back. Thanks, Colin. >> Likewise, man. We uh I we were just saying before we started this. I want to say it was probably five or seven years ago. (00:59) It might have even been closer to eight at this point since we talked on on your podcast. Do you remember what year did you were you doing that book? I'm now I'm now thinking back to it. >> Yeah, I started my AI tech company in 2018 and then I think I did the book in 21. >> That sounds okay. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So the podcast was before the book came out. (01:18) >> Yeah. So like I launched the company few years into it. wanted to interview a lot of the sales and growth experts. Interviewed them, turned it into sales secrets, the book, it was like 700 pages, which is just crazy. It was awesome. Crazy. Awesome. Um, an interview book is the hardest book to put together because you got to write a like through the eyes of everyone else that you just interviewed. (01:42) It's a tough tough way to do it. But >> yeah, that was a lot of fun. >> Yeah. So, that was the last time we spoke. I mean, we've gone probably back and forth on LinkedIn a bit, but it's been a handful of years. So, I'm excited to catch up. You've been just grinding away, man. I mean, Seamless has been relevant since the day I first met you. (01:58) It's still relevant and crushing it today. But, let's start at the top. I want to start with the topic of hiring salespeople. Um, because you've hired many, many throughout your your career. I don't know how many hundreds, but it's got to be in the hundreds, maybe thousands at this point. So, I want to get your thoughts there and and kind of find out what has worked for you guys over the years. (02:17) I imagines it's it's evolved a bit. Um, and I think people are struggling with hiring today. A lot of things are changing. People are, you know, shifting from office to remote. Um, you're now hiring probably a new generation of college graduate, which kind of comes with a bit of a different persona and personality maybe. (02:34) Um, so wherever you want to go there, I mean, what are your secrets to hiring? What have been the big lessons over the years? How have you evolved? Wherever you want to take it there. >> Yeah, totally. You know, I think hiring, so we've got 300 employees now. Um, we've had hundreds every year for quite some time. (02:53) So, we've hired over a thousand people plus. >> You're mostly remote now or are you guys still >> 100% remote? So, we were for the first few years of building the company, I bootstrapped it. So, we were too broke to get an office. 100% remote. Let us get the best most cost effective talent anywhere. Then um you know when we we went from zero to millions really fast once the product launched we got an office >> and this is about 11 years ago right? Almost 11 years ago. (03:18) >> Um no no because so we we launched in 2018 which was like seven or eight years ago. Um and then I got the office around the same time I was doing the book. So probably three years later uh 20 like 21. And then co hit. So like I got an office on a sub lease >> because I always wanted to make sure if I got an office if it didn't work out I could kill it. (03:40) >> Yeah. Yeah. >> And luckily the office was a huge success. Everyone loved it. You know >> I remember it. Yeah. I wasn't there but I remember pictures of it. It was big. It was um this one. So yeah I worked out of a accelerator in uh Newark, New Jersey. You know a big VC firm invested in us and then I opened up an office where we're from Columbus Ohio. (04:02) It was like a 50 100 person office and like we thought we wouldn't fill it because we had three to 10 people and then >> is that the big one where you had like nine computer screens and seven seven computer screens, DJ booth, all this stuff, right? It was awesome. >> So we filled it fast. Everyone loved it. >> And then um CO hit, we shut it down, opted out of the lease. (04:23) So luckily we got out right away. >> Uh which was amazing. Yeah, >> lucky. Super lucky. And we were already used to doing remote so we went back to remote. But to answer your question like hiring what's what's working, what's not. I think for us in sales, we look for like I believe your historical success is the best indicator of your future results. Like history repeats itself. (04:48) Success leaves clues. If you did great historically in anything, sports, school, whatever it may be, I believe that you will have a high propensity to be successful in the next thing you do. It's like, you know, do you hire someone that constantly hit their quotas over and over again? like I believe that that person if given the right training and education and tech and support and coaching will have massive success um at at the new company. (05:21) So number one it's like history of results and let's just say they're new in college so they they they may have like an a good or average GPA. Well then I'm looking like what are the toughest problems that they had encounter? Like if you were adopted from Russia and you came from an alcohol- abused family and then you came to the States with no money, no family, and then like being adopted and you did all these amazing things and then now you're here. (05:54) Like I love the challenges and adversity of like hearing how people overcome different things because I believe in sales you need to be tenacious. You need to be resilient. And if you could go through tough times, I just interviewed someone who came from Russia and who was adopted and went through an abused background, you know, and and it's just interesting to hear these people, the people that like were spoonfed, didn't experience anything hard, were given everything versus the people that a meritocracy had to like fight for anything and everything that they've (06:26) ever gotten. I'll bet on the person that had to fight for everything they've ever gotten all the time. So I think it's like results, problems and challenges that they've solved and overcame historically. Hard work. They have to have a hard work ethic. And I think you could judge that with STR's A's, whatever. (06:47) Like STRs, you could see like what they did in college or high school, were they doing school plus athletics plus all this other stuff? I think that's a great way to judge it. Um college, same same way. And then I just think in the professional world if they've got one to five whatever years of experience like what are they all doing in addition to just work like are they trying to build a personal brand are they trying to you know learn and they're part of masterminds and they're taking all these courses the people that are super hungry (07:17) and coachable and working hard I think those people will always win. Um, and you know, it's interesting like my friend Kevin Dorsey and I we're always in like, you know, I'm not at 9 figure net worth yet, but like I'm not that far off from having 100 million net worth. And every day I wake up like I don't know [ __ ] And I'm so hungry to learn like ads, landing pages, social media, branding, content, writing, uh selling, persuasion, influence, like people that are super hungry to learn no matter the level of success that they have, I think (07:59) is a big outlier. So, we try to ask questions and if you don't know how to ask these questions, just feed into chat GPT or Gemini or Anthropic or whatever, like, hey, I want to hire for past results, hard challenges and problems they've overcome, are they coachable? Do they work hard? Um, you know, are they hungry to learn? Are they always trying to learn and improve? Give me like multiple choice questions for all of these. (08:27) And then you can kind of serve them up to people in the interview and say like you can even have a a pitch a PowerPoint deck where it has the question and the five options and it's like pick multiple choice A B CDE E or just put that on your job application. That's a great way to do lead scoring of your candidates. (08:47) You could lay out all these different Q&As's with multiple choice list them out. I also like just doing open-ended Q&A for these things that I try to learn. Um, and then lastly, cultural fit. Like, are they positive? Do they get along well with people? Do I think that they're better than me and better than our team that we currently have? I'm always trying to bring people on who level us up, get us smarter. (09:12) Like, you always want to move up the average. Like, >> move up the average collective of the team, the intelligence, the success, the results. You never want to like go backwards. Uh, so those are the things that I try to interview for. I try to ask, learn about, and hire for. And I also believe like a great tip for that, Colin, is like I believe the first five days, the first 30 days are indicative of the next five years. (09:42) So, if I hire someone who I think is going to be a rock star and the first week they're not on camera in their meetings, their Slack always says they're away. They're unavailable when I reach out to them. WE'RE TALKING THIS IS like day three. This is day seven. This is day nine. Every employee who just gets hired should be working their ass off for the first year, the first month, the first week. (10:15) If you're not going all out, I picked you because you're a rock star. It'd be like, I'm hiring LeBron James. I put LeBron James on the court and every day we've got practice and LeBron James isn't showing up to practice and not playing. What the hell? So, I believe that first week, that first month is indicative of the next five years. (10:32) If you don't show up and you don't put in the work and you don't give it your all to improve the results and success of the team and the company in that first month, that first week, I think I made a wrong hire. And I want to part ways as quickly as possible cuz I do not after thousands of people I've not seen someone who starts and is completely disconnected. Maybe they're away. (10:52) They're only putting in 20 hours a week. I've never seen anyone when I was a young manager like a new CEO. I'd be like, "Ah, there there's probably just something going on. they'll improve and they'll get better. Year after year, I would do that and I because I've got a huge heart and I I believe in people and then I get taken advantage of and they never improve. (11:13) So for any managers out there, the first month is indicative of the next five years. If they don't show up, get rid of them. And then for new employees, show up and put in the work. Like the company's making a huge investment in you to drive a return, success, results for that company. show up. Do not let that team down. And I believe like if people if people don't show up or if people aren't a good fit, I don't believe in firing. (11:38) I believe in trading them. Like I'm going to part ways with you and I'm going to trade you to a different team and I got to bring on another Tom Brady, LeBron James, Serena Williams here. I got to bring them into the culture because I'm building a a championship, a Super Bowl team, a championship team, and I've only got en (12:00) ough cap space, i.e. e salary employee cost that I can afford to win the game of growing our SAS company and AI company. So I just want the top people. I want to pay the best people in the world the best comp set super high expectations and need them to improve and if they don't we got to trade them. Love it. (12:21) This this aligns and I know we have so much in common in our in our style of this stuff. Um, I'm curious though, roughly how many of the out of the people you've hired for Seamless, what's the breakdown in terms of how many of them are just entry level coming straight out of school versus were you also hiring people with a few years of experience or perhaps even with a with a lot of experience? >> Yeah. (12:43) So, out of 300 people, we'll just do the math, right? Uh, 50 out of 300 are engineers. So you know that's 246 what whatever it is 1 divided by six gives you the engineers and then let's just say 150 are salespeople. >> Okay. >> So 50 AES roughly almost 100 SDRs. So that's half the company is sales. >> I imagine the SDRs are mostly entry level. >> STRs are mostly entry level to a few years of experience. (13:18) Um, if I had to break down the 100 SDRs, I'd probably say 60 are entry level and 30 to 40 have one to three years of experience for sure. >> And is it usually like, hey, I was an SDR at this other company, hasn't worked out so well. I'm looking for a better place. That's usually how you find those types of transitions, right? >> Yeah. (13:40) Like like the college grads are pretty easy. Like Yeah. You know, I I came from >> You just have to train them, right? That's that's where you put in the effort. Yeah. >> And you try to find college graduates that have um sales experience, sales internships, sales training, >> student fundraising, this stuff. >> Yeah. (13:57) Like like they worked at the Telus Center at their college to >> raise. Those are some of the best hires, man. Because they have like real experience picking up a phone a hundred times, getting rejected. Like the kids who have to call the alumni and ask for donations. >> Yes. that those people if they did it and then still want to get a job doing that, you're in like that those are good because they already know the hell that they're in for and they're signing up for it voluntarily. (14:22) So, I love those those hires. They're hard to find though. It's only it's only a few of those people at every >> 100%. It's hard to find. So like that that's where you need like a world-class training and education program which >> coming from being a sales performer sales leader >> I was just always obsessed with sales training to scale what I knew to other people. (14:41) So like >> it's the most fun part >> creating the docs the courses the role playing like all of that stuff I love. The hardest part is making sure people do it. >> Yeah. Like because I' I've got like a database of a 100,000 scripts, tips, strategies, courses, like this this notion database. And I've got everything categorized across 150 different categories. (15:05) Sales discovery, pitching, prospecting, you know, 30 to 50 different sales objections. And then you'd have hundreds of tips, hundreds of scripts for each of those specific sales objections. closing uh followup unresponsive like I've got everything mastered and developed the and and you know I've invested millions in myself into training that then I try to teach to our team the hardest part is getting anyone of any tier to actually study it and master it and learn and you just try to educate them like the more knowledge you have the more power you'll get the (15:39) more power you'll get the more money you'll make so learn this stuff and once I learned how to overcome sales objections. The ones I learned how to write a an effective sales pitch like with a great hook, opener, problem statement, value prop, social proof, call to action, you'll make more money and uh you know, you just try to teach that. (16:02) >> Do you find that it was easier the training and sort of the ramping process when you were in the office? I think it was. I think that remote is doable, right? And there's pros and cons. There's some trade-offs, but I think you really need to hire like selfarters for remote. They because you're going to give them that library of content. (16:20) And you can do live trainings and stuff, but like it's not even really that different than watching a video. And so like you really need to hire people who want to put in the work. They're willing to sit down for a few hours, you know, every day and listen to some training and stuff and and really hone their craft. (16:34) Whereas in the office, you can build a lot of excitement around it, right? Like I miss the office. >> It's so much fun. You're in front of there. You got the PowerPoint up, you're playing video. >> My team is so sick of me trying to get an office every year because I'm always like, "Guys, like half my go to market leaders are in Columbus, Ohio where I'm at. (16:55) Go Buckeyes, Ohio State, number one natty, national championship this year for sure." Um, and I believe like just the the training, the learning like I miss being next to 50 people >> and like I could hear, "Oh, this is wrong. This needs to optimize. There's a problem here in the product." Like you just learn as a founder, you learn how to change and improve and optimize everything so fast where like the Slack channels like you can try to listen and follow everything like it it's good. (17:24) But what we've done remote because we've been remote for seven out of 10 years or seven, you know, like six out of eight years in business or whatever. Um we do live training for the first month. Okay. So we'll take new employees AE >> over Zoom >> AES SDRs etc. live training like with daily curriculum daily training is live for about a month. (17:48) Then we've got our LMS with on Kajjabi. So, we've got all these different courses that we've created that teach you everything for go to market sales, prospecting, pitching, closing, objections, follow-up, uh, unresponsiveness, pipeline management, deal tracking, KPIs, everything in all these different courses that you could take in Kajjabi. (18:09) And then we've got our notion database which has tens of thousands of scripts, strategies, best practices. I'm like, you know, those may be pulled from my books. Those may be pulled from like, oh, I see this good cold email. Hey, let's put that in here as an example. I see this good blog post from Colin or Jason Lemin. Boom. (18:29) I put that in the right category so that it's related to the topic that I'm trying to teach them because I want people to be able to self-learn. Yeah. getting self starters is critical and enforcing that training live versus non-live is way easier. >> Yeah. Yeah. Completely agree. But but if you hire the right people, anyone can figure it out, right? If you give them the resources and the people who really want to do well. (18:54) And I think that might be one of the sort of hidden benefits of remote is like you're only going to the people who are going to stick with the job and do well, they really want to do the job, right? Whereas when you're in the office, there's always sort of this like cohort of or not cohort, but sort of like a percentage of the group that I feel like is largely there just for the excitement of the office and like the job is secondary to them, right? Like they like the social environment. (19:20) In New York City, this was a huge thing. Like people wouldn't want to leave a job and people would stay in a job they don't even like doing the job. They like the company. They like the social life. They like coming into the cool office every day wearing a hoodie or or whatever, you know, instead of putting on a suit. (19:36) And so, you know, the one of the nice things about uh remote is like there's none of that, right? Like with the exception of if you have an offsite or something. So, like the people who stick around, but they should really be dedicated and you can see that reflected in their work. But I want to ask you the the one thing that came to mind right away when you when you spoke in the beginning about proving their historical track record, have you heard of track wreck? I've been uh looking into this lately and it's kind of blowing my mind. (20:03) >> What uh what is that? >> So it's called the website is trackre.co and so you know um you know rep view right? >> Yeah. >> So rep view like helps people sort of see like uh >> quota team sort of evaluate the company before you go work there kind of. So trackrex on the other side they're doing they're building out the track record profiles for the salespeople so that you on the hiring side can go look like if you're hiring an AE who's got 5 years experience or something you can go in and see their historical performance (20:36) things like their roles and titles their revenue growth um how much of their revenue came from inbound versus outbound what types of personas and ICPs do they have experience selling to >> and it gets verified by their previous employers. So, it's not like a resume where you're like, "Okay, this looks great, but like now I have to call 50 people and figure out if it's actually real. (20:58) " >> Yeah. You know what's funny with that? Like, there are so many great employees, but there's also a lot of really [ __ ] up people as well who do like crazy [ __ ] They'll steal. They'll not show up to work. And it's funny because like employees, they could bash you online, but like there's no way for employers to share like the truth about the game changers versus the duds. (21:21) >> Yeah. >> And um I wish there was I wish there was like more >> kind of that what what this doesn't do today is it's not like Yelp like you if you had a bad experience with an employee, I don't think you can just go in there and just like write, you know, something wrong. >> There's also a lot of legalities, too. (21:38) Like a lot of employers like my wife is the super lawyer COO of our company >> and like >> talking bad about any employee like we would just never do. >> Yeah. But I feel bad for the people that, you know, steal your equipment and never show up or uh steal or, you know, work four jobs at once like you see on these posts online with >> tech job stacking >> the the guy doing 12 jobs from India or wherever. (22:07) >> Yeah, they're all in India now on X. Everyone's like none of these people are in the US. There should there should be a way for people to protect like other employers and other companies and teams because I think that's really unfortunate and >> uh >> yeah so check it out you guys you might find it useful over there but basically I mean I'm I'm it's something that I've wanted for a long time and when you said that it just made me think about it right away cuz and it and it creates sort of I don't know what you call what (22:36) do you call these circle charts where they have sort of different words on each side and it and and it like shows and you try to fill up the whole circle means like a perfect match, right? >> And so that's that's sort of what they're showing on the recruiter side. So like if you're looking for people who have let's say um you know SMB experience, building their own pipeline, 30-day sales cycles, uh contract values under 30K, like and you can sort of just you can search for profiles that match all of that stuff. But the piece that (23:04) really stands out to me because you can find this on résumés is that it's verified, right? So you can see that their former CEO verified it or something like that. So So yeah, Track Wreck, dude. Check it out. It's it it hit the nail on the head when you when you said that. You made me think about it. >> But um >> are you guys still recruiting heavily now or have you or I guess we'll we'll dive into the AI piece a little bit, but I'm curious if you've sort of changed your your look on on headcount. (23:34) I think AI definitely changes your outlook on headcount. Like >> Yeah. Yeah. >> We were always able to do more with less because because our company helps you find and close deals with AI. So we were always able to get our TAM and give a ton of leads to our sales team both hot and cold to go and sell. (23:54) And that's how we did 200 million plus in a few years insanely fast in Stripe transactions. It's like I pull it up on Stripe and show it. Like I'm proud of that because uh to start a company from zero and to do over 200 million is insane to me. Primarily bootstrapped. We essentially bootstrapped it >> and then just did a big PE deal like it and sold a portion of the company. (24:16) So um that was really exciting and the way that we did >> that for growth capital just a quick side question there. That's the main reason you do that. Yeah, it it was it was pretty much like growth capital and to give capital back to investors >> like employee investors, uh early on investors, you name it. (24:36) Like cuz cuz to do the PE deal, they want to buy, you know, a minority or majority of the company. You're able to take money off the table, still operate like some PE's, they'll just whack the whole seuite. They'll whack everyone. And luckily for us, you know, we partner with a great private equity firm. >> You catch the majority. (24:55) >> Um, a lot of those details are like confidential. Okay. >> Um, but but what I can share is they're a great partner, you know, we're past year five >> and my whole leadership team and I have still been running the company running the company. So like now, but I view everything differently as an investor. Like I'm the largest investor besides my PE firm in my company. (25:23) So honestly like I'm always looking for people who are better than me to take my job. I I don't operate like when I was a a young new CEO I was like I'm scared of VCs. I don't want anyone to be able to fire me. And I think as you mature you just realize like hiring people better than you is a secret to success. >> Yeah. (25:46) And I think when I was brand new CEO, I wanted to be the smartest person in the room. I wanted everyone to know that I had the answers. And then you >> right, >> you just realize like you don't know everything. There's a lot of people way smarter than you. I just try to hire those people. And I'd love to hire the best operators to help us keep scaling uh beyond wherever we're at. (26:07) But we are we're hiring like crazy. You know, I think we're always trying to hire 20 to 30 SDRs a month, 5 to 10 AES a month. Um, and it's all just about the right people. Like for us, we're a little bit lower ticket, high volume, you know, like 30-day sales cycles. Um, they go really fast typically, >> you know, 5 10 25k deals is the SMB deal. (26:36) The mid-market deal is probably 50 to 100K enterprise deal. 100k to a million. Um, but the majority of the deals are like the SMB mid market. So >> those are my favorite. >> It's high velocity and and I love that too because I used to work at IBM Interactive. There were million-dollar deals. Like you only got seven a year, 10 a year. Like >> it's a lot of waiting. (26:56) >> It's a lot of waiting. And it's not a lot of at bats. Like when you're doing 5, 10, 25k deals fast every day, dozens or hundreds of deals, the amount of learning, and that's also where AI really comes into play. You could learn a lot. You could use AI a lot to optimize the sales process and the strategy. It's been a lot of fun. (27:17) >> Yeah. All right. Well, let's talk about all this makes perfect sense, by the way. Um, let's talk about whether or not you agree. Is the outbound model broken? Right. I mean, this debate's been going on for for years now. I think it's probably subjective and and whatnot, but but what's going on for you guys? Is traditional outbound, you know, still working? Have you had to make some major iterations to to what you're doing? Take it away. (27:43) >> Yeah, great great question, Colin. I think everything works if you work. Now, are all the channels harder? Yes. Like cold outbound email is hard. Like when when you and I were doing it, you could do get a Gmail inbox, 2500 emails or 2,000 emails a day. We get one of those, okay, if it's 2500 limit, set it at 2,000, blast everyone with a template and get a shitload of meetings. (28:13) And then like, you know, Google cracks down. And now I'm hearing from people, you can't do more than 35 cold outbound emails per inbox. That just one like completely blows my mind. I don't know what numbers you're seeing, but it's wild to me that I hear different experts say like 35 an inbox. (28:32) So if you wanted to do 10,000, 100,000, a million a day, you need a bazillion different inboxes and they all need to be warmed up, whatever. So, I think >> yeah, >> cold outbound email is harder than it's ever been to distribute content. I think for writing hyperpersonalized content, it is the easiest it's ever been. So, you take leads from Seless AI, you use the AI to write the hyperpersonalized content with any of the LLM models, with all of our data, you've got automatic hyperpersonalized campaigns ready to go. (29:04) Like [ __ ] you and I would have paid a million dollars back in the day when we were doing this to get that. >> Yeah. >> Now, but now the crazy part is you've got the most hyper personalized messaging in the world at your fingertips and we can't distribute it to anyone. >> Yeah. >> Which is just like bizarre. (29:23) So I think outbound email is hard. looking at outbound cold calling like cold prospecting or sales calling whatever you call it because I don't believe anyone should be just blindly calling a list of people like you should pick a niche you should know a lot about those people industries segment personas needs wants problems pain points challenges goal streams desires and then write your messaging if you're you're sales calling to those people and make the calls now it's harder than ever with sales calling for people to pick up for people to (29:52) connect for people to this in. However, it works. So, you just need to do a lot more volume to get the same connect rates that you did 1 2 3 4 years ago. So, just like cold emailing, you're going to need a shitload of inboxes to match the old cold email outreach calling, you need a lot more calls to get the same number of connects because you've got iPhone call screening, you've got spam blocking and detection, you've got all these different things, right? >> And people just don't answer the phone like they used to. Right. (30:24) >> People don't answer their phone. Like like for me, if if you call me all all my me all my phone calls go are automatically sent to voicemail. >> Same. >> Like I I don't use the call screener thing cuz like I don't care. Yeah. >> Who calls me like it's just going to voicemail >> and I'm unfortunately one of the CEOs. (30:44) I never check my my voicemail thing. Like I I never check it. Like >> Yeah. If you don't send me a te like if I know your number, I'll answer if I'm available, right? If I but it's it's only if I happen to see it cuz my phone's on do not disturb anyway all day long. So unless I'm holding it in my hand or it's in my pocket, then I don't even know that it's ringing and I don't really care. (31:06) Um but if I know who's calling and I see it, I'll answer. If not, you got to text me after, right? Don't send me a voice. Like send me a text. Let me know who you are, why you're calling, and then maybe I'll I'll call you back. That >> I think texting is is one of the most powerful channels. I think emailing and calling so that your call name and who you are and what you do shows up on the phone, right? I think that's super powerful to complement calling with the emailing to mainly warm up the phone so that the person knows who you are when (31:33) you're calling so it shows Colin's calling me. Oh, I know him because I've seen his five emails but I don't have time to reach out to him. Hey, I'm busy. You know, what can I help you with? Whatever. I do that. And then LinkedIn, like if you're a persona, like I've got I don't know like 10,000 LinkedIn inbox messages. (31:53) Like it just gets worse and worse every day. >> I can't keep up with mine. I try so hard. >> Yeah, there's no easy way. Like LinkedIn does not do a good job of making it easy for you to manage your inbox effectively with rules and automations. >> Well, there's no spam filter, right? I don't even think they have one. >> Yeah, it's it's so tough. (32:10) >> Gmail has gotten so good at that. Although it's super aggressive, but like it certainly filters out a lot. Like if I go in my spam box, I can empty it every day and it's always full. It just I go back, it's always full in Gmail. >> Nuts. Yeah. LinkedIn the the channel works, but it's also kind of reminds me of um emailing when cold mass emailing just started where like now LinkedIn's just spammed like crazy. (32:36) >> Yeah. >> So, I think it all works. You have to get better at using the channels. It's like people saying Facebook ads don't work, LinkedIn ads don't work, Google ads don't work. Like all the channels work if you work. Are they harder than ever to make work? Yes. That's why you need a great offer, great messaging, great pitch. (32:58) You need to know the personas. >> That's it, man. I think that's that's like the big piece is so many people are selling [ __ ] right? And and they're just spray and prey. But like if you actually reach out to the right person with a compelling offer with something that actually can make their business better, that's when it works. (33:15) And I think part of the reason, and I agree, by the way, like it's gotten harder for all of the reasons you listed and we've talked about them at nauseium on this on this show in every episode. There's so many of them. But I still do think that a large part of the problem is there's so many people out there just selling [ __ ] that no one faking needs or they're calling on people who simply don't need what they're selling. (33:35) And then they're like, "Well, cold calling sucks or emailing sucks or none of this works." And it's like, and you hear a lot of this too with the AI SDR, right? The people go out and they can't figure out how to do outbound. They can't figure out how to generate pipelines. So, they're like, "Fuck it. Let's just go set up an AI SDR and it doesn't work. (33:53) " It's like, well, no [ __ ] You couldn't get a human to do it. Like, no one wants who you're selling or the way you're nail. You got to you got to nail with the human before you can have AI automated. >> Of course. Yeah. Yeah. So, there's a lot of that going on out there, too. But, um, what would you say if you look back at the last five years, sort of like since since the COVID change? Um, and maybe it's going remote, but maybe that one's too simple, but what's what's been the biggest change in how you guys operate and sell over the last 5 years? (34:22) You know, maybe besides remote, because that's probably pretty obvious. I have everyone's emails and phone numbers with Seamless. So, I'm blessed. um you know because I built a product that finds the world's best leads and I I feed it to our sales team. So we've been able to sell extremely fast and well over the phone and complement it with great emailing and LinkedIn messaging. (34:50) And I think um when COVID hit having everyone's mobile phones was critical. So like we we experienced some of the fastest growth rates ever >> when everyone went remote because competitors didn't have mobile phones for all the prospects and we did. So, we pivoted from just like being primarily emailing with adding some calling, you know, like you'll build out an eight or 12 sequence campaign and like six out of the 10 are emails and maybe they'll do a call here, a LinkedIn message here, a call here, a LinkedIn message here. We flipped it (35:28) where we're like, we're going to do triple the phone calling and then we'll we'll bake in two to four emails, two to four LinkedIn messaging. And when you've got everyone's mobile phones plus really great training and role playing for selling over the phone and delivering on the painpoint like you know we know every sales leader is missing quota right now. (35:51) You know, I I hear rates of 40, 50, 60, 70% quota tamement. Reps are waking up with their CRO's on their ass and they have empty calendars. Like the SDRs aren't booking enough appointments and and filling the pipeline for them to actually hit their quota. They don't have enough quota coverage. Like, so we know these things are holding all these sales leaders back. (36:14) So then when we're selling over the phone and complimenting it with email and LinkedIn, we're just hitting on these pain points and making sure that like, do you have this problem? I believe in problem prospecting. Like um you can do personalization, but if I'm like, hey Colin, I know you're in New York and you saved a shitload of money and you're a finance guru. (36:32) Like, hey, I like I want to get you everyone's mobile phone numbers with Seamless. You're like, dude, I'm a oneperson shop. I've already got 10 clients. I can't have any more clients. It's like there's not an amount of personalization that I can do that would convince you to do that. That's why I believe in like problem prospecting with personalization cuz if you don't have a problem like there's no nothing to solve. (36:56) >> Yes. Yes. >> Pause on that for a second cuz I've said this I I this is specifically how I've taught people to cold calls. The first mission of the cold call is to align on the problem. For exactly the reason you said, if you cannot align on the problem, it doesn't matter what you're pitching them, right? When we sold doctor. (37:17) com, we were calling people doctor's offices asking like, "Are you guys accepting new patients?" >> Boom, you're qualified, right? Like, cuz that's what we're going to try to send you, right? And like you you just start at the top with that. If you can't align on that problem, it's it's so horrible. And you can actually insult people. (37:30) Like I've had people reach out to me trying to pitch me website design services and this and that and they're like, you know, I could see your website needs this and I'm sitting over here thinking, I thought my website looked great. I built it myself. I'm pretty darn proud of it. Right. (37:44) And like and yeah, so you can actually go down the wrong road insulting someone. >> Yeah. They basically say like, this is messed up. This is messed up. >> Yeah. Spirit sucks. Yeah. Yeah. I don't like that. I don't like that. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> It's with anything you sell, though. It's with anything you sell. If they don't agree they have a problem, you actually could be insulting them, right? >> Yeah. Or or just wasting your time. (38:03) Like, yep. >> There there's 8 billion people. Like, why why are we wasting time trying to convince someone that doesn't believe they have a problem >> Yeah. >> to buy from us when there's so many people that do. >> Yeah. Yeah. Sell sell the problem. Align on that problem. Then and only then does it make sense to to start talking about a solution. (38:25) And I think that I think that's where you were going. I didn't mean to cut you off. I got excited there because >> No, you're good. I I I think like yeah you sell the problem or you sell the gap like and I always believed in current state future state gap before Kenan wrote gap selling like >> I just always believed in that strategy like when I was doing consulting at IBM interactive it was like okay >> when we're talking about online stuff I I' I'd go meet with Microsoft Xbox or YouTube or Victoria Secret or Express or the Limited all these different (38:57) companies spec products Apple like to sell more iPhones digitally. I'd be like, here's your current state. You've got x amount of phones sold online, you need to go to why online, why are you here and not here? What's holding you back? And then, okay, once they figure out and tell you where you help them understand what's holding them back, boom, I'm going to help you fill that gap so that you can get to the future state of what you want. (39:25) So, I think it you like you got to be prospecting with either of those strategies. Um, but you got to do problem prospecting to really figure out the goal anyways because they're not going to really open up and tell you where they're currently at, where they're trying to go. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's like if you're selling the cure to a disease, >> it's really not exciting to the people who don't have the disease, right? Uh% maybe they have the disease, but they don't know or they don't believe in it or they're not convinced like Yeah. (39:51) So your goal of prospecting and this is the mindset that I've always tried to train people to get in because it really is just part of it is just in your head as you're plowing through those cold calls like are you just in the mindset of I just need to get someone to agree to a meeting just to a meeting meeting and those are the people who might book a bunch of meetings they tend to be pretty crappy but your mindset needs to be like I need to find someone who can genuinely benefit from what we have and they agree (40:15) and they see it like that's when your AE is excited they get on that call they're like oh [ __ ] this is a great demo, right? Like this person, you know, the conversation's hot, right? >> Um but but yeah, so totally aligned, man. I want to ask you about AI now. I know you've got AI built into your product as well. (40:33) You talked about, you know, a lot of the personalization stuff. Are you guys using AI tools outside like separate from seamless AI? Have you brought in any other AI tools to help either going remote or becoming more efficient or any automations? Anything uh in those areas? >> Yeah, for sure. I mean like in our product we're trying to automate all of sales development to help humans get more meetings faster. (41:00) So I think like you know we've come out with a lot of CRM AI automation features um automatically we want to give you your total addressable market all the contacts and companies that you need to sell to with hundreds of data points prioritize based on lookalikes of your customers pipeline opportunities etc. So, like you always have this scored amazing list of like who to sell to top to bottom that would make you the most money, the least money. (41:27) >> I'm trying to like make I want I want everyone to be able to be super lazy and do nothing. So, like to do that, you sign up for Seamless. I automatically know who you sell to. I automatically score the entire world contacts and companies for you. I automatically write all the campaigns, calls, emails, social touches. (41:47) I automatically send all of that outreach for you. So like figuring out the TAM, building the list, creating the campaigns, launching the campaigns, and then I also want to manage the replying and booking via email. >> So are you guys social? >> Are you guys now replacing like sales loft and outreach? Is that >> Yeah. (42:08) So we we were coming out with an AI forward connect product. It's called seamless connect. So now you could take all of the leads that you get from Seamless. It goes into Connect. Connect uses AI to automatically create the campaign, write the emails, the call scripts, the social messages, the voicemails for you, and then send them out. (42:30) And then we have our seamless reply agent coming after that. So like your whole inbox will be automatically managed for you. And then it could like automatically reply to emails, do all the campaigns, reply to your emails. um eventually take all of your calls make >> you're basically building the AISDR into into seamless >> or is it different? >> That's that's the goal. (42:51) Yeah, that that is the goal. It's basically I want I want to provide you with two options. If you want to do the the SAS AI on your own and you do the whole thing yourself, you can. But then also, if you're an SDR that wants to automate most of your work and you're kind of just managing and training the AI, I want to empower SDRs, AEES, sales leaders to be able to launch their own clones of themselves. (43:14) These >> basically AI sales agents and employees that could work for them. I want to turn STRs and AS managers of AI employees and AI agents. And I think when you do that, when I went from a sales rep to a manager and I could 10x my output, my results, like you want to double your business, you have to double your leads. (43:37) >> So like the fastest way for any SDR AE to double their meetings, double their leads, double their sales pipeline revenue is to get more hyperpersonalized outreach at scale to their dream customers hitting the problems that they have. So we're building seamless to be that horizontal platform to do that. Historically, we were just sales leads, contacts, companies, best data, and now we're automating that whole process. (44:02) And then we've also got AI to research, write, do anything that you want. Like, so if you want B TOC versus B2B on contacts, if you want to know their tech spend, if you want to know anything like do they have a Sock 2 on their website, like you could create these little AI data columns that will research for any contact and company that you research. (44:24) Then that data could get inputed into the campaign automatically. So now you've got these super hyperpersonalized campaigns going out to any prospect and then when they reply you could have the email reply agent automatically book provide five times per day over the next five days get it booked. (44:43) Uh and I just want to make it seamless for everyone to connect to opportunity. Well, I like the way that you worded it because you said something in there and I don't know if this is very intentional, but the wording was was really good and I haven't heard people refer to it this way and we all should. (45:00) You said managing and training an AI agent. I think that's so important for people to realize and and Jason Lumpin's been playing around with this stuff, talking a lot about it, too. But I think people need to realize like this AI concept of like, you know, automating human work, especially with sales outreach. (45:16) It's not like a set it and forget it. It's not like you're just going to turn the switch on and it's like brilliantly working for you. Very similar to the issues that people saw with like intercom and drift, right? How many of those have been underimplemented and you go to them and they're just garbage and then people are like, "Well, intercom sucks. (45:32) " Like, no, you didn't set it up. You didn't really do program anything in there. You left it like a little baby with a brain that like doesn't know anything and it just gives you shitty answers. You have to manage and train it over time and it's an iteration. In the same way that you write a sales script and you test it and you tune it and you make it better next month and better next month and better next month and you keep training your people and rehearsing it and practicing it over and over and over. (45:58) I think people have sort of blurred the lines on AI and maybe someday it's just brilliant enough that it just figures it out for us. But we're definitely not there today. Like you have to manage and train it. I love the way that you that you worded that cuz it is a job, right? and and someone has to keep putting that effort in or it is going to suck. (46:16) And that's where I've heard like a lot of people [ __ ] talking like AISDR and I'm like it's most likely user error. Most likely if you did the same thing you're scripting the AI to do as a human it also would not work. And so like you just have a product that you can't sell. That's what's going on here. (46:33) You haven't figured out how to sell it. It's not the tool. And and so yeah, I completely completely agree. >> Yeah. I don't believe in replacing humans with AI. I believe in like it's like um when I was selling I hired a bunch of VAS to do a bunch of work for me like when I was selling for IBM interactive and I had a bunch of VAS like building lists and doing research on enterprise accounts and creating 20page pitch briefs for me and I had to manage them daily to do all this work and then I built seamless to automate all of that work the list building the (47:05) research on contacts and companies and I think it's this and and I think it's the same with AI agents teach the SDRs, AES, VPs, how to manage and create these these virtual employees, these cloud employees. Uh, and I mean, can they 5, 10, 20, 50x their output and results and make a shitload of money? That's my hope. That's what we're betting big on. (47:30) And, uh, it's hard, but I'm super excited. I want everyone to be able to live a chill, relaxed, lazy life. Like I think we we all have to work so damn hard to grow, to generate revenue, to make commissions, and I'd love to just hit a button, automate as much of it as possible for my users and customers, and then just let them manage and coach and train people, virtual employees, virtual agents to do it better and smarter and faster. (48:04) >> Yeah, I think it's semantics when people are like, "Is AI replacing salespeople? Is it not?" It's not black and white, right? That if it works, you're gonna have less sales people. You're not gonna have no salespeople. >> Yeah. Like, like we use AI and support, and I've automated all of our support. So, we used to have a support team of like 25 people. (48:22) Now, we're down to three with fully automated AI support, 95 or 90 to 95% resolution rate. We handle thousands of calls, emails, uh, social touches, or like live chats a day. But there's still humans that are like all managing that. They're updating the the knowledge base every day. >> They probably review the interactions and see which ones went wrong and then like do a little new >> program like like if we could tell that we answered something and then the conversation had to keep continuing. (48:57) We didn't resolve that case. >> Yeah. >> The right way fast enough or whatever. Okay. What went wrong there? If someone marks the chat as a thumbs down versus thumbs up, something's up there. How do we fix that? So, I've got like five humans managing this stuff full-time to manage the 10,000 plus messages we handle in any given day, week, month. (49:17) >> Uh it's really good. And then, >> you know, we're using AI, you know, to answer your question to like automate call scoring, automate pipeline reviews, automate forecasting, automate um product features and requests, competitor insights. We're using it on everything. lead scoring like we're we're you and we've brought in every enterprise LLM model from from GPT, Gemini, Claude, Anthropic, um, Perplexity, like we're we're using all of the enterprise models in building our product and also just in our go to (49:54) market operations. Um, and then anything that we know that we could do manually, how can we automate it so that our sellers and our go to market team can focus on selling, closing, and and better marketing and advertising? >> I love it. Last thing I want to ask you is coming from a a crowded market, you're selling against a lot of similar tools, a lot of similar features, and and I think it's been that way probably since the day you started. (50:22) Um, >> I'm sure there's a lot of like nuance details as to like how you'll you'll sell against them and obviously a lot of the new features that you just announced are going to continue will probably help you in that area. But do you have highlevel advice that could apply to other people who are also selling in a very crowded space? You know, maybe they have five or six really core competitors. (50:43) They all have pretty good reputations. They all have a bunch of happy customers. How do you approach that? Like like how do you do you do you say hey we're going to pick one thing we're going to we're going to sell on price and we're going to have a better price or we're going to sell on you know simplicity like did you have to try to pick one or wherever you want to go on that? I'm curious because >> yeah, it's it's definitely hard, right? Like if you look at any market that has a shitload of money, there are a ton of competitors. Like you you can't pitch (51:11) VCs or PES and say there's no competition in the market. >> They they just won't >> unless your product is useless. That would be the only scenario. >> They like won't invest. And um you know it's it's wild to think like you every market is highly competitive with a ton of you know companies operating in it. (51:32) So I think for us in the sales automation space, sales AI space, there are a lot of companies we've differentiated over the rule the years by just being obsessed with delivering the world's best data and using AI to real-time research, validate and verify cell phones, emails, hundreds of data points about the contacts and companies. (51:53) That was like foundation one. And that allowed us to scale from zero to 100 million in in sales really fast in in a few years. And then go from the 100 to 200 million it was about really focusing on like automation. Okay. So like now that people have all the leads, how can we help them automate connecting with those leads, selling to those leads, um generating more pipeline meetings opportunities with those leads? And I think that helped us stand out. (52:22) Uh but overall like if I'm a you know because my next thing after Seamless if I ever leave is going to be like a PE firm. Like I'll either start my own PE firm or I'll join a PE firm. And when I do that, you know, I would coach anyone listening to me or meeting with me like just obsess over the customer. (52:43) Like what are the customer's needs? What are their goals? What are their wants? And how can you fasttrack the results to the customer as quickly as possible? So, so we're obsessed with I I don't I try not to even worry about the competition. Like when you sign up for Seamless, I want to get you to your first lead as in in 30 to 60 seconds. (53:04) I want to get you your first meeting with Seamless in first 24 hours. I want to get you to your first deal in your first week to first month of using Seamless. And then I want to get you ROI on whatever you spent with me in the first 90 days or less. Because I know if I can get in in a day get you a new lead, in a week get you new meetings and new opportunities and in a month get you ROI, you're going to be hopefully a customer for life or a customer for a very long time. (53:32) And then I just want to repeat that like how can I help you generate more meetings, sales, revenue pipeline to crush your goals, crush your quota, hit your number as fast as possible. And I think a lot of people pay attention to pricing and competition. And I hope that a lot of people continue to do that because I'm gonna obsess over the customer >> and obsess over delivering results to the customer because that's the only thing that [ __ ] matters. (53:56) They don't give a [ __ ] about me. They only care about themselves. So, how can I help them get what they want as quickly as possible? And if you just repeat that cycle of being obsessed with learning, trying to identify the problems that are holding them back with their product to achieve that goal and then repeat, I think you can win. (54:15) Like we thought about building the connect product because people were generating so many leads that these other workflow tools were missing all the AI, they were missing the automation or they just didn't pay for a mid-market enterprise competitor campaign tool. So like, okay, we'll build it. We'll make it AI first. we'll make it stupid simple to use. (54:36) And it was really out of necessity because people are like, I need to sell smarter to the leads that you give me and I need it as automated as possible. And we found too many roadblocks using other workflow automation tools to make that happen. Okay. And then like serum insights and deal coaching, there's not a lot of really good AI deal coaching and forecasting and prescribing what you need to do next with all the data that you have in email and calling and meetings on what to do that would actually close that deal. Okay, we're (55:03) gonna build that. And you you kind of build these things to help the customer get the outcome, the dream outcome that they want as quickly as possible. It's funny when I asked you that question, I kind of wrote down my own guess on on what you were going to say bit just based on having known the company for a while cuz the one thing that I think stood out back in the day when I was, you know, shopping around all these different tools and stuff, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong based on what you said, I I I think there's some some (55:32) truth here. I think you made an effort to make it easier to buy from you than other companies did. Um, I remember going through some of those sales process. It was it was very enterpriseish, lots of meetings. >> It was like three meetings plus to buy data. I'm like, >> let's do this on one call. >> But you guys even I think let people start using it like right away, right? Like they could just log in, free trial, they can start using it. (55:55) And I remember that being a big difference because, you know, the way that I dealt with buying this particular tool at my company was I just had to let the team test stuff and kind of let them vote and pick because otherwise it was just too many complaints that we picked the wrong type of tool. (56:12) So for this particular tool, that's how we did it. And then we would pick like we would we would have one as like a main tool and then like one is like a backup. So people had sort of, you know, they could use two different things and stuff. Um, but yeah, I remember yours being just above and beyond easier to use because everyone could just try it out. (56:28) They could get some results. They could have a sense of how it worked. And that was before we even had to like talk to anyone about it. Um, and that's rare in in that I think some people have copied your your, you know, followed the leader so to speak on on that um since then. But but yeah, that >> that was a huge difference. (56:46) So I I remember that. Um, any last things you want to uh to throw in there before we wrap it up? >> Yeah. No, I would just like to say, you know, if you enjoyed this episode, I've got a new book coming out. It's my sixth book called Scale Your Sales: How to Turn Prospects into Highpaying Customers and Make $100 million. (57:03) Um, I poured my heart and soul into this book. Basically sharing everything from prospecting, pitching, sales objections, closing habits, and operating principles that you need to go from zero to 100 million in revenue. It's really for business owners, sales leaders, salespeople, marketers, anyone in go to market. And um I'm getting the proof sent to me now to just review it, make sure that the proof isn't messed up, and if it looks good, getting it out there. (57:29) So, would love to get everyone a copy to scale your sales. I think it will positively impact you and uh hope it helps change your business for the better. >> Do you have a link for that today that we can add in the show notes or you want to give it to me when you get it and we'll throw it in there whenever? >> Yeah. (57:46) Yeah. I would just link them to um Brandon Boransson's Amazon page. Okay. >> So, you'll see all my other different books on there, but it should be coming in a few weeks. I'm trying to get it out there as fast as possible. I believe if you've got content that could help people, don't try to like wait like give it to people as fast as possible. (58:03) Just see if you could possibly impact them. >> Completely agree. Well, I will add your your Amazon page in and then of course check out seamless.ai. And uh anything else you want to plug in there? >> No, that's it. you know, if you need to find and close more deals with AI, get on Seamless for free. (58:18) We'd love to get you on the platform and uh would love to connect on LinkedIn. Thanks, Colin, so much for having me. This has been a blast. >> Likewise. Last thing, any roles you're hiring for that you want to throw in >> SDRs, recruiters, uh, senior AI software engineers. So, go to seamless.ai/careers. We've got about 57 openings right now. (58:39) 55 to 57. I just got out of that recruiting meeting this morning. So, uh, we've got a lot of roles. Would love to interview you and, uh, just make sure you crush it in that first month. The first month is indicative of the next 5 years. >> Yeah. If they didn't learn that by this episode, then they're in trouble. (58:55) Are you hiring globally or is everything US? >> 100% remote, all global. You know, we use a deal for 100% remote hiring and scaling. >> Awesome. Well, Brandon, this is great to catch up, man. I could talk to you for hours, but uh we'll we'll put a pin in it for now and we'll jump back to it next time.