Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
This week on How to Win: Brandon Bornancin, founder and CEO of Seamless.AI, a platform focused on sales, lead generation, and prospecting via an advanced search engine. Launched in 2018, Seamless.AI grew out of a list-building agency called Seamless Contacts founded three years earlier. Seamless.AI recently completed a nearly $100M funding round, and in under four years has earned a billion dollar valuation. In this episode, we take a look at Seamless' decision to stay focused on their core product, the outbound sales strategy that has allowed them such rapid growth, and the upside of entering a big category with a lot of competition. I weigh in with the model I used to grow a SaaS company from an agency, winning through relentless focus, and the importance of thought leadership in today's marketing strategies.
Hear how successful B2B SaaS companies and agencies compete - and win - in highly saturated categories. No fluff. No filler. Just strategies and tactics from founders, executives, and marketers. Learn about building moats, growing audiences, scaling businesses, and differentiating from the competition. New guests every week. Hosted by Peep Laja, founder at Wynter, Speero, CXL.
Focus-fueled growth with Seamless.AI's Brandon Bornancin
Brandon Bornancin:
The thing that you can't copy is the results, the revenue, and the sales generated for all of our users and our customers, and I think that's what will always differentiate Seamless from anyone else out there.
Peep Laja:
I'm Peep Laja. I don't do fluff. I don't do filler. I don't do emojis. What I do is study winners in B2B SaaS because I want to know how much is strategy, how much is luck, and how do they win. This week, Brandon Bornancin, founder and CEO of Seamless.AI, a platform focused on sales lead generation and prospecting via an advanced search engine. Seamless.AI was launched in 2018, growing out of a list building agency called Seamless Contacts founded three years earlier. Having recently completed a nearly $100 million founding ground, Seamless get a billion dollar valuation in less than four years after founding. In this episode, we discussed our decision to stay extremely focused on their core product, the outbound sales strategy that has seen them grow at an incredible pace and the upside of entering a big category with lots of competition and lots of demand. Let's get into it.
Brandon Bornancin:
When I got started with Seamless and entrepreneurship, I was selling full-time for Google and IBM and over half of my day was wasted on looking for the people that I needed to sell to and then figuring out how to contact the people I needed to sell to. It was this endless time wasted on list building, prospecting, appointment setting, manual CRM data entry, copying and pasting first name from a website into the CRM, last name, copy and paste, scouring millions of websites, looking for emails and phone numbers.
So it literally made me want to quit sales forever and live in a van down by the river, and instead, I was just like, you know what? Is there a way to automate all of this work, and I was like, if Google can find information about anything, why can't we build a search engine that finds all the contacts that you need to sell it to, all the companies you need to sell it to, and then why can't we use AI to research, validate and verify cell phones and emails for everyone in the world, and that's how Seamless was born and it took years to build.
Peep Laja:
So the company launched in 2018, but while you were building it, you were making money through services.
Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah. Yeah. So I had the idea in 2014, launched a manual list building agency to generate the revenue and income to then go hire engineers. So for a few years, while I was trying to recruit engineers to join me on building this crazy platform, in parallel, we were selling custom manual built lists to customers, and as you can imagine, that was very tedious and time consuming. However, it proved out the concept, hey, would you like to buy a list of everyone that you need to sell to? Yes. Okay. I'll build it for to you until I've got my software built, which is called Seamless.AI.
And what was cool is the first 100 to 500 customers through this custom list building agency called Seamless Contacts at the time, once we launched our software, we actually were like, hey, you don't want us to build your list anymore. Now you could build it, and we got the majority of the customers that are transitioned to the software and that's when Seamless.AI launched of May of 2018 and it was awesome.
Peep Laja:
Lots of SaaS companies get started by offering a service first. You learn about the buyer, you learn about the pain points by doing the work by hand, and you learn what people are ready to pay for. You can also validate new product offerings before writing any code by doing it manually using no code tools. Writing code is expensive. We built the test version of Wynter by hacking to get a web flow in Typeform, and by doing a bunch of work manually behind the scenes while simulating what the software will do one day. This enabled us to learn so much faster and build what actually matters.
Another way of launching SaaS businesses through offering services first is to build them as separate companies. The model I use: number one, build an agency. I started what is now called Speero in 2011. Agencies are cash cows and really, it costs $0 to start. Two, I used the profits of the agency to fund building an e-learning business, also a cash cow. So I launched the CXL Institute in 2016, 5 years later, and then I used the profits of both of these companies to fund building a SaaS business. 2022 is Wynter's second year in business and we're growing over a hundred percent year over year. Being your own VC is a nice gig to have. Tell me more about those early days. So in your first year in business, how did you get customers?
Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah, the early days were a shit storm. It was the hardest thing in the world to go through. You're trying to build a software, you're trying to recruit engineers to build it, you're trying to pitch VCs to invest. None of the VCs are investing. None of the engineers will join you for 40K when they're making 150 to 250K out on the market, and you're trying to sell customers to prove out the market because VCs and investors want you to show a minimum viable product, they want you to show product market fit, you name it. So the early days were extremely difficult. As an entrepreneur, you're doing 50 things at once. You have to do them all extremely well.
You're a team of one, two or three people. At the time, at the beginning, it was me and who's now my chief revenue officer, Mike Hopkins. First, it was all about sales. Can we sell this idea? Can we sell this product, and then we sold a bunch of people, which means we then had to service and build the custom lists for the people that we sold while trying to recruit engineers, while trying to pitch venture capitalists. It was an absolute shit storm, hardest thing I've ever done, and by the way, every time I finally convinced an engineer to join, year after year, they quit. They would go six months building the search engine and then they would quit. Then I'd have to go recruit for another six months, bring someone on.
Then they would go nine months. Then they would quit. So third luck of charm, my last money I had, found Austin, my VP of technology today and he was able to create the MVP of the software, launched zero to millions insanely fast, and the rest is history. So it was three years of hell, rise and grind, never give up, never quit, stay tenacious. Don't take no for an answer. Assume a hundred percent responsibility for your successes and your failures. No victim game, no victim mentality, and because of that, we were able to survive, thrive, persevere, and now have a company that's worth billions.
Peep Laja:
You said first million in revenue insanely fast. What was the average deal size back then and what kind of customer segment were you going after?
Brandon Bornancin:
I mean, shit, we were selling it for $75 a month, $100 a month. I was just like Salesforce.com grew insanely fast, zero to a hundred million in 5.2 years. I want to beat Marc Benioff in Salesforce.com. So I basically replicated their business model and I'm like, we're going to sell it for a hundred bucks a month or 80 bucks a month and we're just going to sell it to as many salespeople, marketers, entrepreneurs, and recruiters at all the B2B companies as fast as possible. So we generated our first million in less than a few months of launch. It was less than a year and then from there, it just scaled insanely fast, 5X growth year over year, 3X growth, just kept growing quickly.
Peep Laja:
You hit a massive pain point. Today, this space is insanely competitive, so many tools. Back then, what was the competitive landscape like?
Brandon Bornancin:
Any industry that has a lot of money, there's going to be a ton of competition, period. That's why I always laugh when VCs are like, and no harping on VCs because I've got 50 or 60 investors. I pitched thousands of investors. Thousands passed on Seamless and me and our team and our company and our vision. So I take personal offense to that respectfully, of course, but they're like, oh, we don't want you to have a lot of competition. Well, if there's no competition, then there's no market. The majority of markets have a ton of competition, and in those markets with tons of competition is where the opportunity lies. Very few companies are like the Airbnbs and the Ubers. That's one in a billion where you're creating a brand new market that never existed before, but the majority of companies that are doing 50 million in ARR, 100 million in ARR, 200 million in ARR were started in a very crowded market.
So back then, and these companies are still some of my competitors, Dun & Bradstreet, DiscoverOrg, RainKing, Jigsaw.com, which then became Data.com owned by Marc Benioff at Salesforce.com, and then you've got a bunch of old school lead database providers and why Seamless was able to shock the market, to shock everyone, and they're like, holy shit. I've never seen anything like this before is because we built the world's first real time search engine for contacts and companies and the world's first AI research engine that could research, validate, and verify everyone's cell phones and emails instantly in seconds using a 10 step AI research engine. That's how we were able to beat the competition and have the opportunity to even acquire the competition. Companies that we were competing with are now like, can you please buy us, and it's insane. We're grateful.
Peep Laja:
I've been studying high growth companies for a while now. There are many ways to get there, but almost all of them share one thing, they tap into a preexisting demand. People already want to do this and solve better for their job to be done, or they solve a previously unsolved big problem. Tapping into preexisting demand is much easier than raising awareness about a new problem. If the space you're in is huge and you solve a huge problem, even a mediocre product can make a lot of money. Even those who have had success with category creation recommend the preexisting demand route, as we heard from Drift's David Cancel on a previous episode of How to Win.
David Cancel:
If someone were to ask me about category creation, my advice was not to create a category, for sure. The more powerful thing and the better thing is to really focus on an existing category. Ideally, a very big category that's moving slowly and try to segment out parts of it, reimagine parts of it, but not to create a category. I think that's a crazy thing to do, but because the category again is not about you willing it to existence or educating your way into existence. It's about really a change that, in some ways, has nothing to do with you or your product or service.
Peep Laja:
So whenever there's a big opportunity, a lot of players jump at opportunity and your company succeeded where a lot of competitors did not. They just failed or remained small. So looking back, what were the strategic decisions you guys took that made you succeed where others did not?
Brandon Bornancin:
Early on, I made one strategic decision that really changed everything. When I first launched Seamless, I wanted to do everything in sales. I wanted to do the data. Then I wanted to do the email. Then I wanted to do the calling. Then I wanted to do the calendar. Then I wanted to do recommendations. Then I wanted to do coaching. Then I wanted to build a CRM and I'm pitching my tech accelerator at the time, we're going to start with data and then we're going to do this and then we're going to do that and then we're going to do this and then we're going to do that, and one of my mentors at the tech accelerator at MVP, they're like, Brandon, if you're starving on an island and you try to catch three rabbits at once, you will catch none of the rabbits and you will die on the island. So what the metaphor was like, hey, if you try to build 10 different platforms to solve all these different problems, you will not gain traction.
You will not achieve success. You'll be spread so thin and you'll be solving too many problems all at once that you will fail. They're like, pick one. What's the one thing, and I was like, the whole reason why this company exists is the list, so I went all in on Seamless. We're going to build a billion dollar company building this search engine, building this real time data platform, and luckily, that helped us. Once we launched it, it gets a billion dollar valuation in less than four years and that was probably the most strategic. A lot of people still today knew investors and whatnot. They try to get us to look at other things outside of the data and we have a maniacal focus. No, no, no, we're sticking with exactly what we know. Google stayed all in on search for over a decade, multi-billion dollar company built in revenue by going all in on search for over a decade. So I'm like, 10 years, all in on data, on search for data, and until we get to probably 500 million in revenue, we'll stay highly focused on that.
Peep Laja:
You might not have more money or a bigger team than others. So figure out what you can and want to be the best at and develop a relentless focus for achieving it. Becoming the best takes a lot of reps and fast feedback loops, but there's always room at the top to be the very best. Few are willing to put in the effort and to say that much no to different opportunities. Mediocrity on the other hand is very competitive. Don't get distracted. Decide on what your core goal is and make it happen faster than the competitors can. That's what Ryan Smith, founder of Qualtrics learned in the early days of his business when his target customers were in academia and his focus was simple. Get 250 universities on board.
Ryan Smith:
Execution's an amazing barrier to entry and hard work is too, and I remember talking with my brother and it's like, you're all over the place, Ryan. You're thrashing everywhere. So he would just say, don't talk to me about anything but 250 schools. So I'd call up and I'd be like, hey, guess what? He's like, 250, and I can't tell you, there was probably 50 conversations where it was 250, 250, 250, and I firmly believe it. I mean, I was the one that came up with the number that if we got to that, everything else would take care of itself. I play golf. It's kind of like everyone wants to go revamp their whole golf swing, but it's amazing if they just keep their heads still, a lot of things are taken care of.
Peep Laja:
When we look at the competitive landscape today, there are the ZoomInfos and the Apollos and all those guys. Now, what do you think is your competitive advantage?
Brandon Bornancin:
The biggest difference is a realtime search engine. All of these platforms are old, stale purchase databases. Seamless is a realtime search engine. So all the data about a contact or a company out there, we will instantly find. This is why the founders of Google invested because of the power of our search engine and the power of us being able to sift through all of the data about contacts and companies and being able to prioritize it. What's important, what's not important, what's accurate, what's not accurate, what's relevant, what's not relevant.
Is this new or is this old, you name it, and then also is this relevant based on a user's search history, and then so it's the search engine and then the way that we research, validate, verify cell phones, emails, company phones, direct dials, thousands of hundreds of insights about the contacts and the companies and having that happen in three seconds or less is really the power and competitive advantage of Seamless. Seamless is just always growing, always getting smarter, always being validated in real time, always being researched in real time, and it gets smarter every day that there is more data out in the world about people and companies.
Peep Laja:
There's prevailing wisdom or opinion in the tech world that technological advantages is transient, that eventually, the competitors will catch up, will copy you. You only have some years of advantage. What do you think about that and are you preparing for copycats to catch up with you?
Brandon Bornancin:
We see companies, people trying to copy all the different things that we're doing, and at the end of the day, they don't have the technology, they don't have the artificial intelligence engines that we've built, the IPs. We're working on a ton of different patents that we're going to register over time. The biggest thing is you can't copy these results. So we launched President's Club, which means when you make over a million dollars in sales, I actually print and ship you this thousand dollar, seven figure club award, and then when you make over six figures in sales, I print and ship you this six figure President's Club award. We've generated over $27 billion in revenue for the 500,000 sales teams that use the product.
We've got 13,886 six figure club winners. 13,886 people have won this award. 4,218 people, companies, teams have won the seven figure club award. 489 have won the eight figure club award, which means they've generated over 10 million in sales, and then we've got two nine figure club winners generated over $100 million in sales using the software. So the thing that you can't copy is the results, the revenue, and the sales generated for all of our users and our customers and I think that's what will always differentiate Seamless from anyone else out there is that customer obsessed, we will help you generate more revenue, sales, income, appointments, opportunities faster than anyone in the world and we will never stop working on it around the clock to make it happen.
Peep Laja:
In addition to product, how are you guys competing on brand and marketing, differentiated value propositions, things like that?
Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah, I think one of the ways that we've done it is we're very out there. I made a conscious effort probably since launching the company. I'm in a live stream building a company to a billion dollar valuation. So at the very beginning, I had a video team following me, a social team following me, we document and share secrets. We've written a number of different books. I don't know if you've seen our best selling book, Whatever It Takes. This is about our culture and the mindset to succeed in business and in life. So I love writing books. Sales secrets, we've interviewed hundreds of sales experts and shared their secrets to success. So it's a lot of, how do I give everything I've got to our audience of sales people, marketers, and entrepreneurs to help them get to the next level without any expectation of anything in return.
And I know if I give enough, if our whole company continues to give, give, give to everyone to help them get to the next level, eventually, someone's going to be like, I should work with Seamless. I should refer Seamless or I love Seamless even if I don't even use the product because they help me win. They help me succeed in business, in sales, in life, and that's our philosophy. All of the things that we do on social, all the things that we do with our blogs, podcasts, whatever, if we can help you connect opportunity, create opportunity, we know eventually, something will come back around.
Peep Laja:
Demonstrate expertise, offer value, start building an audience. Modern marketing playbook is less about gated content and drip email and cold email. It's about creating demand and awareness via proactive thought leadership. This involves building content hubs for potential buyers conducting and publishing original research that's interesting for the buyers. It's about content co-creation with target accounts and collaboration with thought leaders. The best companies will own a topic in their customer's mind. So content plays a huge role. What else can you tell me about your, let's say acquisition mix? How are you acquiring new customers today? How big is outbound sales versus inbound?
Brandon Bornancin:
So we're big on drinking our own champagne. Obviously, we have everyone's cell phones and emails with Seamless. So the majority, the media mix of Seamless for the first few years, it was 100% outbound selling, and then when we finally had money to invest in marketing, it was okay, go 80% outbound, 20% inbound marketing, Google ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, content marketing, social media, video, you name it. It's still primarily outbound because obviously, we built an outbound sales platform, sales leads platform. We've got one of the top 20 largest SDR teams in the nation. I think we're at 240 SDRs now, and why we're able to sell so much is because of the list. If you have the list of everyone that you need to sell to, you can sell anything to anyone. So every single day, our SDRs, they wake up, they build a list in Seamless.
They sell the list in Seamless, and then we're booking 500 appointments a day, selling those appointments. Our sales cycle's pretty fast, 30 days or less. It's typically a one call close or a two call close, so the sale cycle's fast. We do a lot of retargeting. We do do a lot of cold ad advertising and it works really well. We just love outbound because you could figure out who you want to sell to exactly, precisely, and then go sell to them and what's cool too is if you take a Seamless list that you build, feed it into custom audiences, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, now you've got ads going to your custom audience list for people that you're selling to outbound. So now you've got the outbound engine and the marketing engine targeting your niche. We you believe in, you got to pick a niche and get rich. So build your outbound list, then put it into the marketing engine and now you're hitting it on all fronts.
Peep Laja:
Last year, you said that your goal is a hundred million in sales and IPO in two years. What's the strategy to hit those numbers?
Brandon Bornancin:
It's still my goal. Every year I miss it, I write it down. We're much closer to hitting it right now, which is amazing, but we just take the annual goal. So any goal that you have, you've got a million. Okay. How many days are you actually going to sell? 265 days is the actual sales days in a year. So you've got 365 days in a year. You can only sell 265 days out of the 365. So I would take your annual sales goal, million in ARR, divide that by 265, you've got 3,773. Okay. That's how much I need to make a day. So if my average MRR, monthly recurring revenue is 100 bucks, well, let's just call it 1,000 dollars deal cycle, then I would need to sell four deals a day to hit my one million a year in ARR.
So you just want to reverse engineer what's my annual goal? Okay. What do I need to do quarterly? What do I need to do monthly? What do I need to do weekly? What do I need to do daily? So if I know I need to generate $4,000 a day, I need to make four sales a day. Let's just say four sales, it takes 25% conversion rate. Okay. Well, then I need 16 appointments. Let's just say to book the appointments, do 16 divided by 10%. 160 leads a day to book the 16 appointments to close the four sales. So it's really figuring out your funnel and then do the work every day to hit that funnel no matter what across any channel.
Peep Laja:
If you look back at your most important lessons learned, what pieces of advice would you give to fellow B2B founders?
Brandon Bornancin:
Okay. So number one, and I learned this when in mobile, my second startup failed, the list will make you rich. You can't sell anything to anyone without the list. So period, number one, you need the list. Number two, success leaves secrets. Find the people who have done what you want to do and get the secrets from them. Pay them to get the secrets, give them equity, give them money, beg them for their time for free. Find the people that have done what you want to do and then copy what they do. When people that have done what you want to do tell you what to do and you don't listen to them, you're an idiot. Just straight up, leave your ego behind. Don't have ego with any people's recommendations. Anytime I get advice, I never let myself say they're wrong or they're right. I literally ask for advice and take it in and then figure out how I'm going to apply that advice to grow my business.
And then lastly, paralysis by analysis leads to no action. It's all about activity. You got to put in an insane amount of activity. Dwayne The Rock Johnson, you got to hustle, be humble, and be the hardest working person in the room. You got to put out a ton of activity. The more activity you do, the more you win. For example, let's just say your leads. If you've got salesperson A and salesperson B that have the same funnel metrics, the only way to beat someone with the same conversion rates as you is to increase the activity. So if I'm doing 1,000 and you're doing 100, I'll go 1,000 leads to 100 appointments to 10 sales and you'll stay at 100 leads, 10 appointments, one sale. So I always, massive secret is to just dramatically increase the amount of activity you're doing, and that way, if you're competing with people with the same funnel, you will out-compete them and win if nothing else changes.
Peep Laja:
So what are the three key strategies that spelled success for Seamless? One, they stay focused on being the best at one particular thing.
Brandon Bornancin:
A lot of people still today, new investors and whatnot, they try to get us to look at other things outside of the data and we have a maniacal focus. No, no, no, we're sticking with exactly what we know.
Peep Laja:
Two, they have a highly targeted outbound sales strategy.
Brandon Bornancin:
We just love outbound because you could figure out who you want to sell to exactly, precisely, and then go sell to them.
Peep Laja:
Three, they chose a big category with strong demand and lots of opportunity, and then worked hard at being the best option in it.
Brandon Bornancin:
If there's no competition, then there's no market. The majority of markets have a ton of competition in those markets with tons of competition is where the opportunity lies.
Peep Laja:
One last takeaway from Brandon Bornancin.
Brandon Bornancin:
If our whole company continues to give, give to everyone to help them get to the next level, eventually, someone's going to be like, I should work with Seamless. I should refer Seamless, or I love Seamless even if I don't even use the product because they help me win. They help me succeed in business, in sales, in life.
Peep Laja:
And that's how you win. I'm Peep Laja. For more tips on how to win, follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Thanks for listening.