AI-Powered Seller

Personalization at Scale Isn’t Dead—You’re Doing It Wrong

• Jake Dunlap

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Most sales teams don’t have an email problem—they have a relevance problem. Spray-and-pray activity chases quota while buyers tune out anything that doesn’t speak to their world. We bring on Brandon Bornancin, founder and CEO of Seamless AI, to unpack a simple but powerful fix: combine persona, industry, and trend to deliver outreach that earns attention, and use AI to get to version one faster without removing the human touch.

We walk through a practical system you can deploy this week. Start by obsessing over personas: goals, KPIs, constraints, and dream outcomes. Add an industry lens to reflect real differences between SaaS, manufacturing, finance, and healthcare. Layer current trends—labor markets, tech stack shifts, budget cycles—to show you understand what’s changing right now. Then put AI to work: build rich profiles from job postings and public data, enrich accounts with signals like job changes and funding, and generate first-draft emails and call scripts with tight prompts that skip fluff and get to the point. Keep a human in the loop to edit for tone and truth, and use discovery that blends open-ended questions with multiple-choice options to surface priorities quickly.

Brandon shares how Seamless AI helps teams move “data to deals,” automating the invisible work—list building, enrichment, and drafting—so reps can focus on high-value conversations. We dig into why scale doesn’t mean full automation, how to avoid AI’s telltale patterns by swapping models and editing, and the skills that now matter most: curiosity, strategic thinking, and empathy. If you’re tired of 0.02% reply rates and want a playbook for high-quality meetings, this conversation lays out the path: persona-first, industry-aware, trend-informed, and AI-accelerated.

Enjoyed the conversation? Follow, share with a teammate who needs a new outbound playbook, and leave a quick review with your biggest takeaway. Your feedback helps us bring more tactical, high-signal conversations to your feed.

SPEAKER_02:

Why are reps still getting.02% reply rates? Like, why is this concept of personalization slash you know relevancy at scale struggling so much?

SPEAKER_01:

I think it's mainly because a lot of people are just lazy. Like it just comes down to they don't want to put in the work. Um, so it's easier to set up a template with dynamic fields of name, title, company, and just spray and pray a thousand people at once. So you've got all these reps who possibly are college graduates or a few years in, they've got a quota number. Their director, VP of sales development is on them 24-7 to hit two meetings a day, one meeting a day, four meetings a day. So they've just got this insane pressure from management. So they're just like, okay, I just have to get as many activities going because my manager manages me on activities. So I got to get my emails out. Right. I got to try to hit my 50 to 100 to 200 dials. So it's a lot of like mass action, limited personalization. Can I wish and pray that anyone would reply to book a meeting? And that's that's what we're seeing today. The great news is there's an easy way to fix it.

SPEAKER_02:

Instead of helping, you know, our reps to understand, like, look, if you want this person to meet with you, you got to add value. And if you're not adding value, and I don't see in this conversation or this note or this LinkedIn or whatever that you can add value, I'm not gonna meet with you. And so I feel like we're in this kind of chicken and egg where it's like, no, we're not hitting numbers, so we're like, just do more. People are leaving too soon, so people aren't investing in them. And so, what are some of the things, right? When you think about like what good enough looks like. And I think that that's that's what a lot of people are looking for, which is okay, I get it. I want to be able to do it. Like, what does good enough look like? AI powered seller. What is going on, everyone? Welcome to another episode of the AI Powered Seller. Today's guest, okay, he runs a company that has generated over$250 million in revenue. He's authored six best selling books, including Whatever It Takes and coming out this month, Scale Your Sales, where he doesn't just talk about the theory, he talks about what he does. He writes down his goals every morning. This guy is motivated on some other level. And I think when I talk about people, I like to chop it up with about AI and also sales and just like being very real about the future of sales. Uh, Mr. Brandon Bornassin is one of the guys that I go to. And so I am super, super excited to have the founder and CEO of Seamless AI on the show. Brandon, welcome. Pumped for the conversation today.

SPEAKER_01:

Super grateful to be here today.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, man. I'm pumped to pumped to have you, pumped to talk to you. I mean, you're a guy who gets a chance to see, you know, what hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of companies are doing around this kind of concept of, you know, personalization, really candidly, you know, modern outbound and you know, where this thing's going. You know, you got people like you know, the head of sales loft saying, you know, right? Like whacking like SDRs, like we're gonna whack them all. It's like that seems counterintuitive to your business model, but you know, so I think we're kind of in this weird state right now when it comes to outbound. And I think this concept of you know, personalization at scale, uh, et cetera, is something that, you know, I don't I think a lot of people, I don't know if it was a myth, but I do feel like a lot of people never actually really understood what that was or even gave it like a real chance because their definition was, you know, a couple custom fields. And so, you know, to kind of kick things off, I'm curious, you know, when you're working with clients in particular, there's a lot of tools, all right? A lot of tools that are like, hey, we're gonna help you personalize at scale. Because I do believe the concept is the only way to win today. I believe, and I also believe the bar is lower than ever. That like people are sending out such garbage that if you actually do some level of like, I get you, that you can cut through the noise. But like, why are reps still getting, you know, 0.02% reply rates? Like, why is this concept of personalization slash you know relevancy at scale struggling so much?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I I would say like right off the the rip, Jake. I think it's mainly because a lot of people are just lazy. Like it just comes down to they don't want to put in the work. Um, so it's easier to set up a template with dynamic fields of name, title, company, and just spray and pray a thousand people at once. So you've got all these reps who possibly are college graduates or a few years in, they've got a quota number, their their director, VP of sales development is on them 24-7 to hit two meetings a day, one meeting a day, four meetings a day. So they've just got this insane pressure from management. So they're just like, okay, I just have to get as many activities going because my manager manages me on activities, so I got to get my emails out, I gotta try to hit my 50 to 100 to 200 dials. So it's a lot of like mass action, limited personalization. Can I wish and pray that anyone would reply to book a meeting? And that's that's what we're seeing today. The great news is there's an easy way to fix it.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I agree. I agree. And I think that that's a really good. All right, let's caveat. So let's chalk about it, man. What is the easy way to fix it? Because I think you really hit it on the head. And when you say lazy, I think it's leadership, man. If I'm just being perfectly honest, I think leadership, we are looking for an easy button versus developing talent. I think we're looking many times to say, instead of helping, you know, our reps to understand, like, look, if you want this person to meet with you, you got to add value. And if you're not adding value, and I don't see in this conversation or this note or this LinkedIn or whatever that you can add value, I'm not gonna meet with you. And so I feel like we're in this kind of chicken and egg where it's like, you know, we're not hitting numbers, so we're like, just do more. People are leaving too soon, so people aren't investing in them. And so what are some of the things, right? When you think about like what good enough looks like, and I think that that's that's what a lot of people are looking for, which is okay, I get it. I want to be able to do it. Like, what is good enough look like? You know, and and obviously we're gonna talk a lot about AI and how it's you know, you know, ingrained as a part of the process, but you know, what does good enough look like?

SPEAKER_01:

I I would say, you know, the way that I've got 150 reps, we went from zero dollars, me founding the company to doing over 250 million in in revenue and sales, stripe transactions, right? Like got the receipts, pull up stripe, you see 250 million, literally like with my bare hands from nothing. Yeah and and this was started 10 years ago. And when I we did that, the way that I drove personalization, and I agree with you, like it comes from the top with management. The way that I drove personalization at scale at that time, where you just had dynamic fields was just go buy personas. So, like at the core, my main number one user were SDRs using our software seamless to book appointments. Then you had AEs, then you had sales ops, then you had VPs and CROs. So what we did was to do personalization at scale. We laid out all of the personas. What are their biggest problems, their pain points, their challenges, what keeps them up at night? Okay, that's their current state. Dream state. What is their dream outcome, their goals, their dreams, their desires, what are their KPIs, their responsibilities, their specialties? What are they held to every week, month, quarter? So once you have the personas, okay, you uh now you customize your campaigns, your calls, emails, social touches, you customize the persona, and now you're already going from spray and prey to anyone to very specific to persona. That works really well. And then what we did to do even more scale is we went from personas to industry personas. So now I'm talking to the SDR who's in the trenches in San Francisco, in SaaS, trying to scale from 50 million to 100 million in ARR. Build a massive list of 10,000 AEs who are in B2B SaaS in San Francisco, trying to go from 50 to 100 million in ARR. And now all my messaging feels like holy shit, this guy knows what keeps me up at night, holds me back, problems, pain points. They've got my dream outcome. They're telling me how they could help me go from current state, pains, problems to dream outcome, dream state, and they've got the solution. But in reality, like I didn't write that custom for one to one. I wrote that for one to many, but when you match the personas with different filters, I always think like building a search engine, I always think in terms of search filters, like yeah, okay, I'm gonna combine the titles with an industry. Now I can go hyper-personalized because the pain points of a VPS sales in tech is different than the VPS sales in finance, manufacturing, healthcare, you know, consumer goods, retail. They're all different. And when you combine the two, that is like step one person, persona in industry, and then there's AI for number three, which takes it the next step further.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, let's and we'll get into that. That's it. So it's so hard to think exactly what we talk about, right? And I think this is where we'll get into AI, which is the person, right? Like I think this is the easiest thing. Guys, your products, if anybody listening, your product solves for like three to five things maximum. Maximum. And if your sales team doesn't know that what that persona, the three things that they like have challenges with, that's step one. And you you literally hit on the head. We even call it, we take it a step further, we call it sub-industry, Brandon, where we say, look, in today's day and age, and again, AI is helpful, it says it's not manufacturing, it's not industrial manufacturing, it's heavy equipment machine manufacturing. And it's easier than ever to be like, Do you know? Well, not you know, because you see a lot of these emails, right? It's like, I work with other VPs of operations that do this. It's like, no, I know that a VP of operations in industrial manufacturing has these challenges, and someone in consumer package goods manufacturing has these challenges. And, you know, then that's where we we talk a lot then about AI, which says, hey, what are the headwinds? What are the trends that the person in the industry called the triangle, kind of the person in the industry and the trends they're facing, and you know, how we solve that? And I feel like that to me is the big unlock. I uh in my career, uh, my first job outside of sports was with a company called Career Builder. And I ended up running the Pacific North Northwest Territory. We had I had 10 plus people on my team, and so we were geo-based. And so, Brandon, I had to learn all these industries. We had a binder.

SPEAKER_01:

I can't, we had a binder. This it's so funny. My uh my head of customer success was the CRO at Career Builder. So I they follow, I totally get it.

SPEAKER_00:

It's a CB. Yeah. Small world. But so that's it, man.

SPEAKER_02:

Study all this stuff, and I had to study the industry, man, and I made a lot of mistakes and be like, hey, look, I get you, I know what you're happening. And then I would, I was, you know, I was 25, 26. Tell me, like, what does a CNC machinist do? Like, I didn't know, you know, and I feel like that to me is still because what you're talking about, Kevin Dorsey calls it relevancy versus customization. Well, we're what we're talking about, and I agree it's relevant. It's not, you're right, it's not a hundred percent personalized, but you are showing such a deep level of understanding. And again, I only solve for three things, and those three things slightly warp based on trends that the person in the industry is solving for. And and I and I feel like that is what so many people are missing. That, and then the other thing, and because I want you, I want to hear your kind of take on AI, um, is because I feel like this bar is so low, yeah, people are just like, how can I templatize this to just like get as many out as possible? Whereas, you know, I had a binder and we had to like figure it out.

SPEAKER_01:

So so how started it, it was like no one taught me, and this is the gap in management. When I was selling for IBM and Google, I had to like do my own research on personas and who they were and what they cared about. Like, step one, massive ball drop. Managers and directors and VPs and leaders, revenue officers, should be having all of their people obsessed with the personas. Every persona should be laid out. I used to go to nd.com, monster.com, and I would read uh job postings to learn about my persona. Like what were their KPIs? What'd they care about? What would they try to do? And what's cool is if you're prospecting into any account, studying the job postings of that department will teach you a lot about that account. What are their goals? What are their KPIs? What do they need to do? How do they need to do it? What tools are they using? You could skip through 70% of your sales discovery on a pitch because you just go through the job postings of that department on the site, get all that data. But that's how I used to do it like 15 years ago.

SPEAKER_02:

We have AI. We actually had to like learn this shit. Like we have to actually learn that, like, oh wait, it's this, it's not that, it's this, this, this, this. Like, we had to figure out how to triangulate it between, like, okay, this is what they do, these are the challenges, like, here's what we solve for. And you'll love this. One thing I did um, a guy in my NBA program, Jim, uh, he was a VP of operations at Bekessen. And go back to the personas, I got Jim to give my whole sales team a tour of the facility. We went in and it was like, Jim, you explain to them what a VP of operations does. Because I knew, like, I love how you said that, obsess over the persona. It's that dumb simple. And like, that's where with my teams, I got I knew if they obsessed over the persona, they'd figure the rest out. You know, they'd figure out how to generate meetings, how to close more deals.

SPEAKER_01:

You already know everything about them. And I think like this the step two is like managers, directors, leaders. Now I've got a 30 to 50 page document, one page per persona that goes down top to bottom, like chief revenue officer, VP of sales, VP of sales development, director of sales ops, rev ops, director of sales development, like every role I've got laid out AEs, BDRs, BDMs, customer success, customer success director, VP of customer success marketing. I've got all these different personas for every department. And anyone that comes in and like, for example, I just hired a new social producer, Trinity. First thing that I did when Trinity came on board, you know, she was like ready to sprint and create content. I'm like, for the first like month, I don't want you to write anything. I want you to study and obsess over the personas, know who we're writing to, talking to, like who we're trying to help and create their dream outcomes for. And then once you learn the personas, it was like, okay, then audit the current content we've got, what's performing well, what's not. And now we can create new content because at the core of anything we do, it's like personas, audit, strategy, execution plan, and laying out those personas for your reps to study. And I would give them names. So people like Jim, and who's the VP of sales, and Sarah, who's the director of sales. Like, I would give them names, study them, learn them. Um, this is basic stuff. And now you can use AI, like ask AI, give me the best persona of this person in this role, and you know, use any of the LLMs, Chat GPT, Grok, Gemini, Claude, Anthropic, Perplexity. It's gonna give you a really nice write-up, and then you just templatize that, build it into your go-to-market playbooks.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, okay, this is good. So this is a good transition. Let's talk about this, and then I want to get into let's call it like data and you know how we think about you know pattern disruption, a few other things too. But let's talk about kind of the AI playbook for this concept of personalization or relevancy or whatever we want to call it. Uh, you know, the first thing that you talked about in let's talk about this is the personas themselves. So if I'm a leader out there, or even better, a rep, and I say, hey, man, this makes a lot of sense to me. I need to do better about this. What is one or two things a rep should do now that we have AI in order to get up to speed on these personas, in order to really make sure that I'm able to communicate with them? Because again, think if I'm 25, 26. I was actually doing a session today with one of our clients today. And I had a woman, she was probably, or she's early in her career, I'm gonna guess 26, 27. And she was like, Hey, like, who am I to like talk to these people like a business expert? She's a we work with uh the Atlanta Hawks here, NBA. Shout out to the Hawks. And, you know, she's like, Who am I to be this expert? Like, and so I think a lot of people struggle with that part, Brandon. It's like, okay, I know a CEO is this, but who am I to know that this challenge keeps them up at night? And so how could or how should reps be thinking about using AI to get deeper in the persona and then applying that to you know generating more meetings in the first place?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, like what we coach, so so we've got over a a million sales team, salespeople using our software. And what we teach them, which is like similar to what you teach them, Jake, is how to use AI to research the persona, the company, the contacts, and then everything about them. So like I've got our software and different LLMs researching all of the data. Number one, who's the persona and the full persona profiles that goes into the CRM. Number two, the ICP. Like for me, we sell to sales teams and go-to-market teams. So who that company and that team sells to is really well. So like when someone signs up for seamless, I automatically know their personas. I know every search filter that they sell to, titles, employee sizes, funding, web technologies. Like, for example, Pandadoc is a proposal contract management software. Right when Pandadoc signs up for a license to Seamless, as a free user, I know all of the titles, top 20 titles. It's CRO, VPS sales, sales ops, legal, any, you know, anyone that touches contracts, proposal management. I know that if their top integrated CRM is Salesforce and HubSpot. So the best web technology list to sell to for them is to help them connect with Salesforce and HubSpot customers. I know they only go after really ideally 50 to 100 employee sizes up to a thousand. I know that revenue, they really want them to be at 25 million to 200 million. This is all using AI and data, like from seamless to automate all of it. Then it all gets into my CRM. So I know I have 100 data points about the company, 100 data points about the contact, 50 data points about their ICP and who they sell to. So I know who they're trying to go after, what everything they know about the competitor or sorry, the company, the competitors, the landscape, the SWOT analysis, and then them personally, like contact professionally and personally. What do they care about? What do we found on social? You name it. Do they love watching the Atlanta Hawks play? Uh, and then you pull that all together so that when you're in discovery, like you already know everything about the contact, the company, and what they're trying to accomplish. And like you are the expert because you have the data, and then it's just asking discovery. I like asking both open-ended questions and also close multiple choice questions, like, you know, close multiple choice as like, hey, like what's your biggest goal this next quarter? Is it generating leads, booking appointments, closing more sales, increasing close rate, increasing AOV, driving expansion revenue? So, like sometimes I'll A B test having all this data, open-ended questions, like tell me about your biggest challenges and goals that's holding you back from you told me you want to go from one million to five million. What are the biggest things holding you back from achieving that? I'll do both open-ended and closed-ended questions with multiple choice and kind of show it on the screen. And uh, both of those strategies kind of allow you to quickly ramp the convo and the pitch, use all that AI, and then figure out where's the gap. Current state, dream outcome, how do we bridge the gap from getting B?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, point A to point B.

SPEAKER_02:

Exactly right. And I think then the other part about AI to add to that, what it also does is not only do I have first party data, or even sometimes this intent or third party data, I have industry friend data. And I feel like this to me, when we work with a lot of our clients around relevancy at scale or personalization relevancy at scale, it's I can talk to a business leader and I can say, look, it's what it looks like to me, the labor market over the next 12 months in southern Florida, here are the big trends. How are you thinking about that, Tom? Like that ability, and then it the ability to use that in outreach too, right? Obviously, an outbound to say, look, I know if you sell to we've got a client in the um, you know, it's like payment payment early space with a lot of like blue-collar companies. And it's not like, hey, I work with other McDonald's franchise. And it's like, no, I know as a franchisee in Southern Florida, here are the top three trends in the labor market over the next six months. And I know that this is what's gonna happen. And that to me is like the trends for me when it comes to AI, brand, and are some of my favorite, like just like it adds that extra layer of like, whoa, this this person is a true because I really believe this in the future, no one's gonna want to talk to sales rep unless they can add incremental value. If I can't see from your email or from your note that this is someone who knows stuff, you know, not just knows their own product. Because guess what? I can find out about your product with ChatGPT. I can say, tell me all about their products, what do they do, compare them to what I'm doing now, build a matrix, give me one wildcard player to compete against them. I can I probably know more about your products than you do when I come inbound. But I feel like the ability to be that industry advisor, and and I think when it comes to outbound in particular, I just feel like it's going to be such a critical, you know, component of this. So we've talked about um, and just to kind of keep keep us going here, we've talked about the persona piece. We're talking about, you know, how to again engage during the call, and I think that's a really good call out, too, because man, if you're just asking the same questions, there's nothing that's tailored, they're not smart, and you know, you're not going the next layer deep. Why would anybody talk to you?

SPEAKER_01:

You got to act like a business consultant there. You gotta act like uh like when I was in IBM Interactive as a 23-year-old pitching CMOs of the Fortune 500. If I just came in there and just started asking them, like, you know, what do you want to do in marketing? What are your marketing goals? What are your marketing strategies? You know, they'd look at me like I'm an idiot. I I had to come in there and know everything about what they're doing in digital marketing, what they're doing in acquisition marketing, how can I share strategies and audit and execution? I had to come audit strategy, execution plan, ROI plan, and then roadmap on how to achieve the ROI by filling the gap of the current state versus the dream outcome and the recommendations that we tied back to our services. You got to be that business consultant, and AI can help you become a quick, amazing, fast business consultant. And we didn't even talk about the third layer, the third layer of using AI and personalization at scale. So, like I love this part. You you could actually be an idiot and not know how to do the personas and not know how to do the personas in industry content, and now you can use AI prompting with Seamless Connect or Workflow Automation Tool or other tools, bake it into just GPT or Perplexity or whatever you like, Claude in Gemini, where you could just write the prompt email or call script, like, you know, hey, uh, you know, you are a top email copywriting expert who is tasked with writing this email to insert dynamic field title at company. Don't use any pleasantries like, hi, how are you doing? You know, I hope you're you're doing well. I hope you're having a great day. Just go straight into like share one of the top problems that this contact is having at this company, offer a solution to help, and then a call to action. Like, and and the AI LLMs could really hyperpersonalize the scripts for your emails, your call scripts, everything you got going on. So it is pretty damn good. I like to keep the AI emails to three to five sentences spaced for each. And then now you can fly through super hyperpersonalization at scale by contact using the LLM to customize each email, to customize each call script. And then you're making the calls, you're making the emails, everything is custom to the contacts and the company, their goals, their problems. And that's just all about prompt engineering. You have to get really good at prompt engineering.

SPEAKER_02:

All right. This is big, great point, and I'm super excited. If you have not signed up, we are launching the first ever sales AI certification program. It starts October 21st. This is not theory. This isn't some dumb Zoom webinar. This is role-based training uh that is going to save you five to ten hours a week. Okay. There are six weeks, one hour, there's a certification at the end, and I promise you, your money back guarantee that if you sign up and at the end of the course, you do not go, this changed the way I sell or the way that I lead people. I will give you your money back, right? We're going to teach you how to build custom agents, custom workflows, and you are going to be AI empowered like none other. So head to scale.com. We've got a link in the show notes to reserve your spot before they fill up. Yeah. For a lot of people listening, what I like about what you're saying, and I do believe this is this one thing I believe is the culprit for quite a bit of this, which is scale doesn't mean everything's automated. And I feel like what's happened is we have started to, and people who, you know, follow my content know I say this a lot, but we have confused scalable and automated. And everything that Brandon is talking about is scalable, like mad scalable, like extremely scalable.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

And and the human should be in the loop, my friends. What we're just talking about is getting to V1 faster. We're getting into V1 of those insights that are going to resonate with somebody faster. And then the human turns on the brain and says, hey, okay, this makes sense here. I'm going to tweak this here. Because my friends, if you're just copying and pasting AI or you're just sending AI-based emails, that is the sh most surefire way to be unemployed in the next two years. 100%. Because what do I need? If AI can look at the website, look at the person, and do this and write the email and hit copy and paste and send, you will be unemployed. Because the then the guy, you know, we haven't seen any outbound agents like AI outbound work at scale, like with you know, insert like early stage startup burning through their TAM. You know, can it help you to generate millions of dollars, a few million dollars, maybe? Um, but I do feel like this is what everybody needs to start to realize is that we need to start to build scalable personalization and relevancy. And AI is the backbone to get the research and the insights, like you talked about, Brand. It's like boom, boom, boom. And then I'll get another kind of piece that I'll add is what we'll tell with reps and some of our clients is we'll say, okay, because we'll get this question. Well, are they actually learning anything? Are they learning it? You know, et cetera. And we'll say, well, okay, I get that. That makes sense. Then what you can have them do at the end of the prompt is you say, hey, I don't know anything about HVAC. Create a 10 question trivia game with multiple choice questions and and quiz me on HVAC. And then guess now I'm learning. So not only am I getting ahead, I'm putting together better messaging, now I'm learning the industry. And so I really believe right now that this is the only way to win. Like I really do not feel like, you know, all the people are saying outbound are dead if you go look at their emails to the people that are not doing what we're talking about.

SPEAKER_01:

And I think everyone's like everyone's trying to sell you something, right? So the sales tech will tell you marketing's dead, the marketing people will tell you sales tech is dead, inbound's dead, outbound's dead, all bounds dead. Uh, you know, it's all a bunch of bullshit, essentially, where it all works if you work. You got to put in the work. And if you put in the work in outbound, it will work. If you put in the work in ads, marketing will work. So yeah, if it's not working, there is something that you don't know, KNOW, that you need to figure out, whether it's with AI, personas, studying the market, the industry trends. I totally agree with you. Like the latest industry trends, right now, everyone's trying to learn and master AI to scale and automate and grow. Like, how can your product leverage that to connect with your personas to help them achieve their dream outcomes, to cut the waste? Like, it's interesting because we've automated our support. So we went from like 25 support people down to three. I've got automated chat, email, phone support, uh 24-7 at a 90, 87% to 92% resolution rate. And like, we're taking the same tech that we use to automate support, and we're then applying it to like, how can I help all my employees at my company have auto email drafts and auto like everything? Like I think that you could have hyper personalization, but then you also need the human value add element, like you had mentioned, where like I'm trying to help our people become much faster and Better and smarter so that they can focus on higher ticket problems versus low dollar problems. And I think you get paid the most when you solve really big problems for people versus small, tiny problems. And we try to use AI to help all of our employees help our customers with the big ticket stuff.

SPEAKER_02:

You have to. I mean, I think I think and we're all ahead there. The frontline CS, inbound lead management is another one. Who like the inbound SDR to me is one of the craziest positions? It's like, I'm interested, these are the things, and you're qualifying me? Like what what like what what planet are we on that you're you know, again, and that's where I think AI is like I can get answers, etc. Let me ask you this on your product side. So, you know, how are you, when it comes to seamless, how are you for your customers, you know, balancing this concept of automation, human insight, you know, human insight and generating outcomes, you know, because at the end of the day, that's the goal. And obviously you guys are, you know, can you know we've been kind of AI forward for a long time. But you know, as you think about what the product is doing now, how are you helping clients to balance that, you know, like AI versus human and how it all fits together?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, like our our big mission is to help customers automate sales from data to deals, like from data to sign contracts. How can we automate as much of that as possible so that they could focus on the selling and the pitching and the closing versus the non-selling work? So, you know, at first it was like 10 years ago, built a search engine to find all the context and companies in the world, use AI to research, validate, and verify their emails and their cell phones using a 10-step verification engine. That's why like Sergey Brandon and his wife from Google invested, Guy Kawasaki, Amazon, all these done at Bradstreet, all these big companies, um, they invested because 10 years ago we were trying to be all in on AI, like at the start, um, because our competitors had these like stale outdated databases. So once we solved the data, it was like, okay, and you've got all the signals. Like, I think it went from finding your TAM to then signal-based TAM, like how can we have funding and tech and uh news and job changes and all this stuff automated? They mentioned you on social media, they mentioned you in the news, they mentioned you all over. Competitor wrote a bad, like someone wrote a bad review about your competitor. You got all these signals, so then like staying on top of your TAM, sitting on top of signals, and now we're trying to automate or helping our customers automate, you know, everything from data to deal. So that means like workflow, creating the campaign. So like using AI to auto-create the multi-step, let's just call it a 12-step campaign, four emails, four calls, two LinkedIn messages, and two direct mail pieces. Okay, that's 12 steps over 12 days, and then filling in the content for those, but letting the rep or the user customize it and edit it. And then we just build all these agents and automations where, like, okay, Jake changes a job. Our platform automatically tracks that. We automatically find the email, the cell phone, the information from him. We add him to a new job change campaign that's got AI prompts in it. Those have been edited, that gets sent out automatically. It emails him. Jake responds, I'm interested. We've got an email draft pre-populated for you. So, like then ideally, automating even the email reply back and forth for outbound. You know, there's TCPA and a lot of phone regulations where you can't automate outbound AI calling. Um, but we do have AI voice and AI emailing that's uh, you know, possibly 90% better than a lot of reps.

SPEAKER_02:

Like send in the template anyway.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, we don't let go of a lot of like we had to let go of some people who were just like sending like worse messages than like what our AI could come up with because they weren't putting in the work, you know, working remote, it's easy to be lazy, it's easy to not want to put in the work and really deliver an amazing message to the user or the customer. But if you combine hard work as a human tied with the messaging of like AI and the research of AI and the automation, you can make magic happen. Like, this is the best time to be in sales because you could go from the average making 100k. If you use these tools in tech and you really give a damn and you put in the hours, you can go from 100k to 500k to a million very fast. Like it took me working 18 hours a day days a week to become a millionaire in sales as a normal salesperson 15 years ago, and I didn't have AI. Like nowadays, you could be a kid out of college that's working hard, knows a persona, uses AI, and goes from you know a 50k base to like 250, 500 a million fast.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. What I love is just this concept of how these two are so intertwined. What you haven't heard us talking about is trying to automate 100% of things. You know, what's seamless, you know, obviously what you're doing is it's like the data, the research, the behind the scenes. And this is where, again, and I'll have to turn your brain on. You have to see all the studies. It says, look, the skills we're gonna have are creativity, strategic thinking, curiosity. This is it. This is what we got. Like, this is the knowledge.

SPEAKER_01:

Three, I agree. Like strategic thinking number one, you gotta be able to think and and solve problems and think outside of the box. And I think curiosity, like probably curiosity would actually trump the strategic thinking. Because if you're just curious on how to help them improve and asking smart questions to help them improve, like you're you're there. You're you're right there. Like then you can figure out where they at today, what's their dream outcome? You ask curious questions, like you'll learn what's holding them back, new ideas, new strategies to help them get there. And I think if you apply those things, that's what's going to take it to be ultra successful. And you could do anything applying, you know, the strategic thinking, the curiosity, the empathy, and care to your customers. You do those things with AI, you know, you're you become superhuman, and that's what it's about. It's serving more people. Like we all have these amazing gifts, we all have these amazing talents. How can we serve as many people as humanly possible so that they can benefit from what you've got to help them? Hey, do those things, you'll be able to crack the code.

SPEAKER_02:

You mentioned, yeah, you mentioned the word consultant. Like that's always, you know, and I don't know. I mean, I, you know, look, I went to Missouri State University, right? So I didn't go to a consulting school university, but um, you know, I I always took this kind of consultative approach, and then people put labels on all of it of what it means. And that that to me is still the universal truth is your ability to help ask questions that help people uncover the answers for themselves. I think it's what made me a good leader at times as well, too. Where, you know, I'm not the advice, you know, giving you all the advice. I'm pulling, I'm letting you realize by asking the right questions, you know, pulling it out and saying, like, look, wherever your path is, amazing. Let's get you on that path.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

And not feeling so desperate to say, hey, you have to buy from me, as opposed to like, look, you came to me, I'm an expert, let me help guide you where this might go. If it's with us, fantastic. We'd love to work with you. If not, here's another path, too. And and that that's universal. I don't feel like that's going to be in a doctor.

SPEAKER_01:

If you're sick and you go to the doctor's office, the doctor isn't going to just like prescribe medicine to you without doing a full audit and a full QA. And like, you got to act like a doctor. Like, okay, I'm here to cure you from your problems to help you achieve your dream outcome of being healthy, being successful, being rich, whatever it is. So if you approach sales like a doctor, okay, I'm gonna ask you a bunch of questions, I'm gonna see where you're all messed up, and then I'm gonna fix you.

SPEAKER_02:

Like, you'll be golden. That's always I mean, it's so funny. That's such a good analogy. That's what I tell is again, speaking of consultants. Um, I tell our consultants all the time, guys, our job is not to recommend, our job is to prescribe. Nobody is coming to you saying, give me options. They're coming to you because you're the expert. You need to prescribe the solution. Right now, you know, and chances are it's you know you're not gonna prescribe anything that's like crazy, but I do feel like that is is a part of this that and even it when it comes to outbound, you need to say, look, I know that enough about you and your persona, etc. This is probably what you're facing, and I think I can help you to solve that and you know let's set up time so we can prescribe the right solution. But I you know directionally, this is probably where we're going, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Like as a part of the I like the audit, basically audit the the diagnosis and then the prescription. I think going in that order, um you can find out anything to help to really help anyone for sure.

SPEAKER_02:

You have to. Uh all right, man. Like as always, it's always like, oh man, all right, we're almost at time. Um where are we headed, man? When you think about let's talk about you know 2026 is around the corner.

SPEAKER_01:

It's big. It's big. Super artificial intelligence, like SGI, super artificial intelligence, AGI is is here, artificial general intelligence. It's coming, it's here, it will be here faster than any of us know. You can use AI for for really anything, like automating all of your data needs, automating your research needs, automating your writing needs. Um a lot of people can tell if it's written by AI. It's like so.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, it goes it goes bold, point, point, point, line, next one, upper signs, or what are those called?

SPEAKER_00:

Those lines and that.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know what the I don't what I don't know what the long dash lines are, but we're talking about yeah, the long lines.

SPEAKER_01:

I don't know what the dashes are everywhere.

SPEAKER_02:

I don't know what the long line is called. It's like a page break or something.

SPEAKER_01:

I don't know but you know, that like people could tell AI wrote it, and you know, this is why it'd be good to like swap LLMs or use multiple LLMs so that you're just testing and changing, and like I would never just take an answer from an LLM or from AI and just blast it out to people. I would edit it, I would customize it. Turn the brain on the execution, use use human input, customize it. It's a good hot start.

SPEAKER_02:

Like, you know, you to V1, Brandon. That's exactly it.

SPEAKER_01:

Andrew Chen from uh like he started a company that sold to Uber, then he was the head of growth at Uber, then he went on to uh I think Anderson Horowitz is a VC partner. Like he wrote a book called The Cold Start Problem. And like why SaaS companies fail is because they all have these cold starts. Like you sign up and then you never achieve the first aha moment or success. And we see that a lot, like same with go to market. Salespeople will get a new job, but they can't figure out how to build the list, how to write the emails, how to do the calls, how to do the pitch, how to do the sales discovery. I think great sales leadership solves that. And I think great training on using AI solves that. And you combine those things, like you can do anything, but I'd go all in on leveraging AI to make your team faster. You're gonna see organizations with lay less way less employees because employees become superhuman, you can do way more with less people. Every company's doing it. Oh, and by the way, I call BS. You want to know what I call BS on Jake?

SPEAKER_02:

Yes, I'd love to.

SPEAKER_01:

Like, no one knows this. This is something that no one's shared yet. In the news, we see that Mark Benioff is saying, I whacked 4,000 people. You remember you like this had this now? My theory, and I'm gonna put big money on this, is that that is not true, and he's actually using the press to sell his AI agents.

SPEAKER_02:

To sell, yeah, agents more.

SPEAKER_01:

I I don't even think he whacked 4,000 people. I've literally I literally think he called the press. Hey, we no one calls the press and says I have to let go of a million people. Yeah, exactly. Like you didn't call the press to let go of a million people, you didn't let go of 4,000, 5,000, 10,000 people. You literally just wanted to create a marketing hack. Right. People think that you were letting go of 10,000 people due to AI. Genius marketing strategy, but I call complete and utter being six.

SPEAKER_02:

I Benny Al. Yeah, I don't disagree at all. I think that he's he's the king of being able to do that.

SPEAKER_01:

And hey, look at the 10K of at the end of this year employee size compared to the end of last year, and let's see if the 10K employees.

SPEAKER_02:

June Forrest really just all of a sudden replaced everybody, which is I seriously doubt. Uh and I think look, as we kind of go forward, you're hearing it the same from 85 angles. It's the people that know how to leverage it, that understand the art of possible that are going to win. Um and Brandon, you know, talk about where people can learn more about, you know, kind of your approach. Um, obviously, you know, you've written a few books as well, too. Um, or even, you know, even try seamless AI. Where's the best places to kind of come, check out what you're doing, check out what the company's doing? Because I think everybody needs to understand, you know, solving the data layer is such an easy, kind of dumb no-brainer that it's just like it's just get move on. Like go, like, do this, so then you can move on to the value add stuff. So where's a good place to find you and also you know get started with seamless?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, definitely. Thanks for asking, Jake. We so we've I would go to seamless.ai, we've got free software for you, our sales leads AI platform, our sales automation platform right there. I've got free courses at Seamless AI, I've got free books at Seamless AI, audiobooks, courses, you name it. So I would just recommend go to Seamless AI, sign up for free. You know, we're gonna help you automate going from data to deals insanely fast. Um, we've got a free Connect product that will let you create AI campaigns for emailing, calling, social selling. We've got a free data product. Our goal is to provide a lot of free products that make more money than the paid products, and then eventually you become a paid customer because of all the value that was created. Uh, and also I've got a new book called Scale Your Sales, how we went from$0 to$100 million in sales and turned prospects into high, high prep paying customers. Uh, wrote that to basically document what were all the strategies that we went that we used to go from zero to$250 million in sales in a few years. So we're gonna be releasing that book here on Amazon later this month. You can get it, and then we'll have the free courses and workshop stuff there.

SPEAKER_02:

Always adding value, man. That's why I love it, dude. It's been, I'm so glad we caught up. It's been it's been too long, actually. Yeah, it has been a little bit, but you know, I really feel like you're one of the guys that I can talk to, and it's like, okay, but what about this? And then this and then this and this. It's like, okay, good. Like we can just kind of keep going. So I'm sure the listeners got a ton out of this. Uh, and I know I did as well, too. It's always good whenever like I'm filling up like notes over here, like I'm like writing down things. I'm like, okay, yeah, that's good. So man, I really appreciate it, Brandon. Thanks for joining so much. Uh, amazing value, super tactical, which is what I love.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02:

All right, amazing. All right, everybody. We will see you next Wednesday on the AI Powered Cellar.

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Jake Dunlap

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