TAKING ACTION: Find Solutions That Could Mean the Difference with Brandon Bornancin

Every company has breakdowns in their revenue process. Sure thing. Deals slip into next quarter, competitors creep in and swipe deals away at the last minute, and deals getting single threaded that don't get to power. These are just a few examples of revenue leak, but there are a ton more and they're preventing your team from reaching their sales targets. That's why I'm such a big fan of Clary's Revenue platform is the only tool that actually helps leaders take control of their revenue and thrive through any market conditions, especially when things get tough. You can't afford to miss a single detail, but you also can't be leading by gut. Clary combines the science and the art of sales and sales leadership. So go to clary.com if you want to answer the most important question in your business. Are you going to meet, beat or miss on revenue? Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders, where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how.

To book more meetings, close more deals.

Faster, and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management, and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExCexcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready, and let's dive into the good stuff. And what I want people also to remember about virtues and values here is they're all intertwined, right? Because Brennan's not talking about taking blind action. It's taking action with the premise of the other values. Are you taking action that's aligned with thinking bigger? Are you taking action with whatever it takes? Are you thinking action of doing, like, what's right by our customers? The virtues guide each other. It's not about blind action, but if they're all working together, that's where it comes through. So we got six of them. You got two left for me. What are the last two?

Yes. And what was up there? Real quick. B rocks. So this is a big one. Find solutions. So this is something that I try to coach our team on a lot. Like you got to be positive with everything, you know, Quick story for everyone. So I pitched 300. I prospected thousands of venture capitalists and angel investors to fundraise cold outbound prospecting using seamless with the list cold emailing with outreach IO cold calling literally every angel investor in venture Capital that you could find on LinkedIn, that you can find on AngelList. I built the list with seamless LinkedIn Crunchbase. I start cold call prospecting because I'm like, okay, to really build this search engine that finds everyone in the world their contact info. Like, I need some money and I need a shitload of engineers. So I'm going and I'm pitching all these investors. And that. What. What happened was I literally a week before demo day, we, the venture capital firm, I went through an accelerator in. In Newark, New Jersey. Part of the accelerator accelerator was I had to live in downtown Newark, New Jersey. And I was pretty much in the ghetto with gunshots and people in my backyard, gangsters in my backyard. Newark, New Jersey. And no offense to Newark, New Jersey, because I'm Italian and there's tons of Italian people out there, and I fucking love New Jersey. The whole state of New Jersey actually invested in Seamless. But long story short, so doing whatever it takes to get funding in New Jersey, and we're prepping for demo day, and I'm like, dude, this was my last year. Three years trying to build Seamless. We're out of money. Demo day goes bad, we're bankrupt. It's over, game done. So the. The. The managing partner says for the last two weeks of demo day, no one's allowed to travel. No one's allowed to do anything. Last week, it was the fourth day leading up to demo day. We're on stage at the hockey rink. I don't even know what it's called, the Prudential Hockey Rink. I get a call, my Danielle calls me. She's like, yo, you gotta fly to LA asap. She's like, your. Your mom's on. On the deathbed. And, like, if you don't get out there, like today or tomorrow, she's gone and you're gonna regret it. I'm like. I was like, I got demo day. I gotta go, though. So I called the managing director. I saw him. I'm like, dude, mom's about to die. I got a bowl. So I literally go fly there. See my mom for the last time, you know, get to say my piece. She couldn't talk or anything, but she was grabbing my hand and stuff and it was amazing. And then literally flew back in 24 hours, and I'm on stage presenting to a thousand people like. Like nothing ever happened. And I. This is an example of finding solutions, not problems. I could have sat there and weeped for a day, a week, a year, a decade, and said, woe is Me, I'm a victim. Life is over. Like, or I could look at the situation and appreciate and be grateful and, and realize all these different gifts. Like, dude, life is short. Leverage every second. Like my mom passing and you know, and she had Alzheimer's since I was 21 years old. Finding solutions, not problems is like finding the answers and being grateful and happy that you're alive because there's a solution for everything as long as you're positive and you're looking for that opportunity. And I just leveraged so many learnings from the demo day and my mom passing with like appreciating life, being grateful for everything. And, and by the way, that made me go vegan. Whole food plant powered. I changed my diet because started researching Alzheimer's, cancer and diabetes. And like a lot of why people are sick is because of their, what they eat, right? Like if you're smoking cigarettes and you get lung cancer, you, you can't be like, oh, how do I cure lung cancer? Well, guess what? You know how you can cure heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's and diabetes? There's one thing and it's, and it's what you eat, you know, so I'm a big proponent of like what you eat to maximize your health. So I just learned all these things and finding solutions during problems, during tough times, good and bad, you name it. And that's, that's the other core value and then the others real quick just because I, you know, I know we've got a lot of them do the right thing. And I think this is a better way to say integrity. You know how you said Enron says integrity, 99 of people don't even know what the. That means straight up. I, I actually don't even know what the definition is.

I'll Google it right now because I'm sure it's not Google the definition, but.

Our, our way of saying the same thing, I believe is do the right thing. Like no matter what you're doing, do the right thing. Like what you know is right and wrong. Don't do the thing that you believe is the wrong thing and do the right thing.

Yeah, well, it's funny because. So integrity, right? The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles. Because what's funny again, integrity is a belief. It's a characteristic, it's not a behavior. You do something with integrity. Whereas if you just believe in integrity, it doesn't mean anything. You have to do with integrity. You have to go through it. And so we, we had our core virtues for our sales org and Same idea. Ours are all behaviors. Take care of the person and salesperson. Seek perpetual growth. Own your shit, Help ytp, help yourself, team and prospect, ecm. Every conversation matters. Plan and play to win. Celebrate the process. Those were ours, right? And we defined them. They were documented. We knew what good look. Every single one of those had nine or ten examples of here's what it means to plan and play to win. Because that's also where a lot of companies go off with their values, their virtues, their cultures is they define it, but they don't document. Like, what does it mean? Like, what are examples of doing the right thing?

Oh, yeah, I love that. And that's what you showed me. You showed me in because Kevin Dorsey's been, we love talking about leadership strategies to maximize people's successes. One of the things that you did where I'm like, oh, great idea, is you had examples of all of the values. And like, because people can hear one thing and it doesn't resonate. Here's another, like, way to train culture, teach culture. I tell the same like, like, thing that I'm trying to teach, but I, I share it with like five to ten different ways. Five to ten different stories, five to ten different examples. But it's the same thing, like, fail forward, don't quit, don't give up. Like, these are different operating principles. But I'll talk about different stories and themes and, and ways to do it because one way may resonate with someone and another way will resonate with someone else. And I love that how you had that laid out in the Google Doc.

That's genius. You have to. Because if you think about even something as simple as do thing, giving examples of what that means is important, right? So here's the situation. A customer calls in, they are still under contract. They want to cancel because budget's tightening up. What's the right thing? Right. As a company, you need to understand and define, like, what is in a situation like that, what is the right thing? Well, the right thing for the customer might be to cancel. The right thing for me is the rep. A lot of reps might go, well, I don't want to make them upset, so I'll let them cancel. The right thing for the company might to be able to keep them, but the right thing for the customer too is like, wait, wait, wait, you're tight, so you want to take away something that makes you money. So budgets are tight and you want to take away something that, like, what is the right thing? And defining that is very, very important throughout all this process, but where I want to go next, because this is really, really important. Companies don't even take it this far.