How to Improve After Failure

Darryl: It's another week here on the INSIDE Inside Sales show. How is everybody doing? Myself, how am I doing? Darryl, how are you doing? You know what I'm going through? Tell me if you can relate to this, I'm going through just these machinations lately around sales processes or processes, Canadian, American picky, is it O, is it A? You figure it out. And I can go into schedules and schedules if you want to, but that's a whole different story about what are the right processes to actually succeed. And I've been having this conversation with my team over and over again. And I find, as you might imagine that we can create a standard process that we follow, that we say, this is how the team sells. These are the various stages and on each single stage, this is what you need to enter the stage. This is what you need to leave the stage to go onto the next stage. There's gates that are put into our CRM to make sure that it's all captured. We do all this to make sure that we have a repeatable sales process. We've got tech stack up the wazoo. We've got sales enablement, and we've got sales engagement. We've got CRM. It's all about making sure we're asking the right questions and everything else. Yet, despite that there are some reps, tell me if you can relate to this, some reps who struggle with the process, they generally struggle. It's not natural to them. It's not intuitive to them. It's not how they sell. They're not perhaps the most organized and this process is trying to drive organization. They're not perhaps, it's not them. It's not them. And what they end up happening is you have how they want to sell versus how I want them to sell, because I want a repeatable model and they just want to selfishly understandably, succeed, hit their own number. That makes it difficult for me to forecast. And then I have to do the CRO thing and I have to drop the hammer on them and be just a and say," This isn't working. What are we going to do about this?" And when that happens, if you're that rep you view that as just a failure as a setback. And maybe you lash out to me," Management is stupid. Their process is stupid. They don't understand what the hell they're doing," because not living in my seat. You're not reporting to the board or to the executive, the CEO, the CFO. And you're not the one saying," Yeah, the reason that we're missing our numbers is because Julie didn't want to follow the process." You're not the one having those hard conversations, but you are having a hard conversation with me. So one way is you will lash out at me. But the other way, what a lot of reps too, is to take it personally. They're like," Oh man, I suck. Why am I in sales?" And it's interesting, right? Because if you think about it, we talk about the rejection that you face when you're selling, like when customers and prospects hang up on you and they tell you to F off, they tell you don't know how to sell. They tell you that this email template you're using is so overused and you suck, they do public shaming and you go," Oh my gosh, how do I deal with this rejection?" But what they never talk about is the setbacks and the failures we have in our daily job, just trying to be a successful sales rep. I remember the challenges I had when I first started. It was just not natural for me to call up strangers and have conversations with people I didn't know, with people that I didn't even feel worthy of having a conversation. I'm 25, 26, 27 years old and I'm talking to this person in his 50s and this person in his 50s is a rock star making mega money that I'll never probably ever see. And I can talk to this person and have reasonable conversation and they'll give him the time of day. I don't even know what to say. That whole idea of what do I do? Am I a failure? And when they hang up on me, is that rejection? And when I miss my numbers or I don't follow the process, or my manager comes down on me, is that a setback? How do you deal with that? I've talked before about mindset. Mindset is huge. For me, I had a couple, I probably had two distinct moments in my life that I can think of that really had dramatic shift on me. One was when my sales manager completely abandoned me and gave me zero guidance and after three months, I thought, for sure, I'm getting my fired because I'm not hitting the numbers. And he was useless. He was beyond useless. So I made a decision just to do what I thought needed to be done and if I'm at least going to fail, I'm going to fail on my terms. Fortunately, that worked out really well for me. The second time was after I was hired to flip a company within three years. We flipped them within nine months for three times revenue to the number one player in the space. And they bought us not only because we were kicking their in such a short amount of time, but they wanted the management team because if you can do that to kick our, within nine months of time, we want you in our team. And then 30 days later, me and the rest of the team got let go, and you go, holy. I didn't see this one. I thought I was a rock star. I thought I was on my game. That is a setback I didn't plan for. I'd have never been laid off. What do I do? And we've all been there, right? Whether you've been let go before, or you've never been let go, I got news for you, you will be let go at one point in your life. What do you do when you have setbacks and failures and rejection. And I thought to myself who is kind of the walking poster child of about mindset, of about positivity, of about dealing with losses, about dealing with achieving your goals, pursuing your goals, who is the manifestation of that? Who do we all point at? And of course, I think you'll all know that the right person to ask to get the advice in that one would be Brandon Bornancin. He's the number one best selling author of 10 plus books, a serial sales person having sold over$ 100 million in sales, an eight figure entrepreneur twice over, inventor of Seamless. AI, motivational speaker. He is obsessed with helping you maximize your success. Brandon is going to talk to us about how we can deal with setbacks, failure, and rejection. Brandon, my friend. Welcome to the show.

Brandon Bornancin: Darryl, thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. Awesome show, love it. And excited to dive in and just share anything I've experienced with the world to help them do it smarter, better, faster, and bigger.

Darryl: And I love what he says there. Did you catch that? Most people would stop at smarter, better, faster, but Brandon went one step further. He said bigger, like that's better, right? That's what I'm talking about when I say mindset. So Brandon where do I start? Because you've got a big salesforce yourself. So you were a sales rep multiple times over. You had your wins and you had your failures and you ultimately learned from that and became a rock star sales rep. And then you've been a multiple entrepreneur and at Seamless, you're doing it all over again. And you're coaching a big team there and they're going through, I'm sure the exact same challenges of dealing with setbacks and failures and not just rejection. What advice do you give to those who worked for you? What advice do you give those whom you mentor when this happens?

Brandon Bornancin: Yeah, I would say we've got four major core values that I think are absolutely critical to achieve lifelong success. If you're at five figures, and you want to get to six figures, these core values are critical. If you're at six and you want to get to seven, these are critical and they are, number one, you have to approach everything in life with a positive attitude and mindset. The whole world is so negative. My parents are negative. My family's negative. My uncle's negative. My grandpa's negative. The news is negative. Your coworkers are negative. Everyone around you, your friends, people that you know are negative, that all of that stuff kills your potential. So I have a positive, only attitude, mindset, belief system that anything that I'm faced with, I can do, I can achieve. I can find the solutions and I will figure it out no matter the failure, no matter the problems. And that's step one, you got to be positive about everything. If you wake up and you feel like, be positive about it. If you don't want to work out at 5: 00 AM and you'd rather sleep in, it's like, Hey, attack it with positivity. I think that's one of the core pillars to my entrepreneurial and sales success that I've leveraged. And it's just like having that attitude of gratitude, the positivity that you could do anything and everything in this world, no matter what. And a lot of people don't approach life that way, like we have so much potential in us, every single salesperson out there like salespeople or entrepreneurs changing the world forever. Nothing happens in this world without sales people selling something to someone. If you think about it, right? You think about Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, George Washington, Christopher Columbus, Christopher Columbus to find the United States of America had to sell England, give me the boats, give me the money. I got to go check out this land. And he changed our lives forever for the better, because he was positive. And he was eager to say, Hey, there is opportunity out there. I don't even know if it exists, but I'm going to be a pioneer. I'm going to be a prospector. For those of you that don't know what prospectors are. There are people that go find that never existed before. Like that's a prospector like in the gold rush, they would go digging for gold and then find gold. That's what salespeople are. For salespeople to maximize their sales, their revenue, their income, their potential, the only way to do that is to wake up every day, positive and excited that every next sales call, email, social dage, video pitch, text, direct mail discovery, all of that follow up closing objection handling, your next call is your best call. And the only way to do that is to exude core value number one, you got to be positive.

Darryl: All right. So let's stop there for a second. Before we even get to step two or three or four because I want to hear all of these. So you say have a positive attitude, but I'm going to I'll play devil's advocate. You know dude, I've missed my number two months in a row. I'm doing the activities. No one's taking my calls. No one's responding to my emails. I'm using the same templates that my coworkers are using and they're getting, just ballers results. How do I have a positive attitude about that?

Brandon Bornancin: Yeah. Great question. Darryl, I think everyone out there has been there, right? We've all been behind our number. We've all had bad weeks, bad months, bad days. I get stuck at least once a month, right? Like I'm a multiple eight figure entrepreneur, a hundred million dollar sales person, number one bestselling author. Every month I get stuck and depressed or stuck and just down and out because I've got these massive goals. I'm not achieving the massive goals. And the one way I've figured out how to get unstuck a storm is by assuming full responsibility for everything good and bad in my life. Never playing the victim game and just taking ownership of every single thing in my life. And what that means, Darryl is like, Hey, if I'm big into working out, I'm whole food plant powered vegan, and I've got these aggressive, I want to be the number one, most fit, whole food, world's best plant powered athlete. And every day I'm going up against people who are 10 times more fit than I am. Like every day I'm way behind. And I step up and I assume responsibility. I'm not eating right. I'm not working out right. I'm not sleeping right. I'm not drinking enough water like you, when things are bad, you just have to assume responsibility, never play the victim game. So in sales, when I was selling for IBM, it was my first sales job. My first startup at the age of 18 to$ 12 million in sales, then I launched a second startup that lost$ 4 million in sales and it went bankrupt. And then I had to get a job and sell for IBM. So like that second startup, I could be like, as an entrepreneur salesperson or the world is against me. I can't believe this happened to me. It was because I grew up with a poor family. It was because I didn't get the education at Stanford, all this, right? You can blame everyone else. But, and I did that when my second startup failed, I blamed my family. I blame my coworkers. I blame my investors. I blamed everyone but myself. But then after a few weeks went by, it's like, dude, I got to look in the mirror, that's the only person holding me back from success. The person holding you back from success is you, you can never play the victim game. You have to assume responsibility. Hey, I failed because number one, I didn't know how B2B sales worked. I was 18, 19, 20. And my second startup was 21, 22, 23 years old. I just didn't know B2B sales. And that was the B2B text messaging software company. Also, I didn't know how to build a list of all the B2B salespeople and marketers I needed to sell to. That was the second big failure. Also. Number three, I didn't know anything about objection handling and closing. So when I would pitch, I would never close deals on my second startup. So it's like taking it extreme ownership. I forget who wrote that book, extreme ownership, all the books and things like, Whatever It Takes is all about this, by the way, this is all about doing whatever it takes. Never playing the victim game, assuming responsibility and going all out to achieve your success. I just wrote this because of COVID and I was worried people would underestimate how bad stuff was going to get during the economy collapse of COVID. And I just shared all my habits, my secrets, my strategies there to have that multimillion dollar mindset.

Darryl: So those who are just listening to the audio version of the show, Brandon was just holding up his most recent book, Whatever It Takes. So go check that out as a wonderful place to start, if this is where you're struggling, love it. I want to focus on a couple of things though he really hit on here, right? So even though he said it's about having a positive attitude and mindset, part of the mindset and he's hammered this home is taking ownership. It's actually a lot easier to be positive when you feel in control. Okay. I suck here, but I'm owning it and I'm going to take control to fix it. And then when you feel in control, suddenly it's weird. You've got a good mindset again, because you're like, yeah, I suck right now, but I got a plan. Whereas when you're just going on, whoa is me then you're going to suck forever. One of the things he made a mention of, he talked about a couple of things, he talked about working out as an example, and he can look ahead and say," I'm not there yet where those other people are," but sometimes you look behind you, you can say," But you know what? I'm not there where I was a year ago. I've come so far. If I look and have perspective, I'm moving in the right direction." The idea of extreme ownership means you learn from others. Taking control, taking ownership simply says what I'm doing, isn't working, who can teach me. Maybe I go read, Whatever It Takes. Maybe I reach out to Brandon directly, maybe I reached out to that sales rep beside me, who's killing it. I don't know. Maybe I join RevGenius or I go to Thursday Night Sales and learn from them. Whatever works for you. Maybe it's just your style. I remember talking a while ago with Brian Smith and he was talking about how he struggled with his emails, but he was good on the phone. So then he made a conscious effort and he measured himself on what he did on emails to try to increase that skill. And in fact, for a while, he forced himself to only do emails knowing that he was going to dip down. So then he could actually learn from it and get better. So he took a short term loss for a long- term gain, he had a plan. He took ownership.

Brandon Bornancin: One of the rules that we've got at Seamless is everyone has to get better 1% every day.

Darryl: Exactly. That's the mantra of this show.

Brandon Bornancin: If you're not trying to improve 1% every day, you will hate working with me. You'll hate working with our company and I don't want you around me because if I'm not making everyone 1% better, including myself, then we're going backwards, if you're not going forwards. So you just have to say, Hey, this is going to be hard. This going to be tough. But if I improve 1% every day, the multiplier on that is you actually improve by 30X, over 365 days. Have you improved 1% every day. And you just got to be obsessed with that improvement.

Darryl: All right. Step number two. If number one was positive attitude mindset by good friend, what is step number two?

Brandon Bornancin: Step number two, actually, I mean, Darryl, you hit it right on the head, improvement. So step number two is coach ability. Coachability. What this means is you're eager to learn. You're eager to improve. You're open to feedback to get better. And coachability could mean buying the books, reading the books, paying the masterminds. Like I spend multiple$25, 000 a pop on different masterminds with different experts to help me go from where I'm at today, to where I need to go tomorrow to be successful. I've got mentors that I pay 50 to a hundred grand for that coach me every week and every month. Like that's coachability, doing all in feedback from investing all of your capital into yourself because you are your greatest investment. And then also working with your peers, your bosses, your managers, your C- suite, investors, anyone in your network, reaching out to people that are smarter than you, faster than you, better than you to get their advice, get their mentorship. And just in this constant state of improvement, where, and people give you advice that you're reaching out to you like this, you're not analyzing it and being like, no, I don't think that will work, but you have to take a step back almost like you're meditating, view it from an external viewpoint, no opinion from yourself. And when people are giving you this advice... By the way, when I say people, I mean people that are performing at the top of their game, or that are way ahead of you, you name it. I don't really take advice from lower performers. I'm typically trying to learn something from everyone, but you got to watch who you take advice from. So the people that do know more and have accomplished more than you make sure that you listen intently with the advice and then apply it. And that's what coachability is. It's that hunger to improve 1% every day and looking and seeking the knowledge from the experts.

Darryl: So I'm loving. I want to jump in here. So for those that don't know the way this works, I mean, you can tell all of these conversations I have every single week are completely unscripted. We started off with a topic we want to go after, and then it's unscripted. And what I love about how I work is that when my guests like Brandon, right now, he's just hammering it, boom. This is what you do. Bam, bam, bam. I'm secretly down here, I'm taking notes of what he's saying that I find notable. And then I'm adding my additional thoughts that I might want to come back and cover off on him because I don't want to lose that thought because he's just going a mile a minute with great stuff. And it's a ton of followup questions, just like you would ironically in a discovery call. That all said, I'm laughing because it's like, we're finishing each other's sentences. And I'm going to explain what I'm talking about right now. Brandon talks about coachability. I want to take a different angle on coachability to support everything he's saying. What coachability is not just about learning. This is a really, really, really, really big thing. If your boss is saying, you're not coachable, you're like, I don't get it. I read the books. I learn, I apply it. That's not what they're saying. What they're saying is coachability means you parked your ego. They're going to say about you that you're not going to like, you're going to be off. You're going to be annoyed. What the hell do they know? Okay, fine. You can have that reaction internally, don't let that show. But after you have that reaction, sit back and go, is there a little truth to what they're saying? Is there a little truth to what they're saying? And if you still don't believe it, then tell your boss," Next time I do this in the moment I'm doing it, I want you to stop me and say, now, right now," this is what I mean by when you make that mistake, because then you'll see it and you'll have context. So you got to park your ego. Two, on a related note, stop being so defensive coachability doesn't mean I listened to a non- stop broken record of you give me excuses while you suck at what you're doing. I know you suck at what you're doing. Your numbers convey that you suck at what you're doing, but don't forget, I sucked once, Brandon sucked once. So now we're going to show you how to get so you don't suck. So stop with the defensive, stop making excuses, shut the hell up and listen, it goes a long way and that's why I was laughing because I wrote down, I said, apply the coaching and listen intently. Brandon sits around and he goes, exactly, I'm quoting him. He said, listen intently and apply it. That's coachability. Are you coachable? Because if you're not, you're standing in the way of your own success. Simple as that. Step number three, my friend, what is it?

Brandon Bornancin: Yeah. And you also got to apply like execute.

Darryl: Yeah.

Brandon Bornancin: So when people are coaching on the strategies and giving you the tactics and the strategies and the tools and the playbooks sitting there not executing them is the biggest waste of time for you and for the people giving you advice. It's like almost disrespectful in a way, because they're investing their time to help make you better. They want to maximize your potential. I want to maximize your potential. Darryl wants to maximize your potential. So whatever your coach done, make sure that you apply it because it's being shared with you to take you to where you need to go next. So the next one is-

Darryl: And it is disrespectful. Yes, huge. Go ahead. Sorry.

Brandon Bornancin: The third pillar to being able to achieve anything you want in this life as an SDR, AE, MDM, BDR, BDM, you name it right, is you have to work hard and I've never been the smartest person in the room. I went to a normal grade school. My grade teachers always told me I would never make it. I had girlfriends break up with me because I came from a poor family, because I didn't have all the money. I didn't go to the Lake Ridge academies of the world. You name it. I had people, professors try to say that, oh, I couldn't do this or that when I was trying to build different startups. I've always been the person that people underestimated. And I love that. By the way, if any salespeople listening, the salespeople out there listening who are underestimated by your friends, by your coworkers, by your employers, by your bosses, use this to your advantage. I think you have the greatest advantage in the world because the people that are underestimated, let's talk about some of them, Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, Oprah Winfrey, some of the greatest inventors, Elon Musk was highly underestimated. The billionaire Jeff Bezos, when he wanted to revolutionize book sales forever and take it online, all of these people have been highly underestimated. And it's your greatest advantage. And it goes into our third pillar, which is hard work. Hustle beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. And it's funny when I was growing up, I had this, I had my best friend, Steve, and this is his real name. I don't really hide anything. Steve would spend zero time studying like the calculus, the math, everything, right? And he'd be playing video games. And we were football. I was the running back and he was one of the quarterbacks. And he would literally spend zero time studying and then go take the calculus exam and ace it. And I'd be spending all day and night with his dad who was a mathematician, PhD. And he'd be coaching me and tutoring me from like 5: 00 PM to nine at night for one to two weeks straight. And then I'd get like a B on the exam. So this guy would do nothing, ace it, just genius, pure genius talent. And I would have to hustle to just get by. Well then fast forward to college and we launched startups and he goes to med school. It takes him seven or eight years to pass undergrad school. Then it takes him three years, five years to figure out med school, all this. And throughout that time, I launched a eight figure company when I was 18, 19,20. I sold for IBM and Google and did over a hundred million dollars in sales. And then I launched Seamless which is now serving hundreds of thousands of salespeople, marketers, entrepreneurs, and a multi eight figure business. And I became a multi- million or year over year, over year. And it just goes to show you, it's not about your intelligence, it's about your hustle because if you work hard, you will learn and do anything to learn what you need to do to accomplish and achieve success. If you've got to read, if you've got to write, if you've got to study, if you got a mentor, if you got to make a thousand calls, 500 calls, 800 calls, thousand emails, send hundreds of LinkedIn messages, you name it. Hard work, beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. And now my buddy, Steve, who was pure talent with no hustle is just some average Joe in Sarasota doing nothing. And it kills me when people waste their potential. If you work hard and you're positive and you're coachable, you're 90% of the way there to going from five figures to six figures, six figures to seven figures, seven figures to eight figures in sales and income and commission in your bank account.

Darryl: I cannot agree enough with this point. I was going to use the studying example myself. Then you went there. I started laughing because we can all relate to that. If you're trying to deal with setbacks and failures and rejection, often the best way to deal with that is simply through working and busting your harder. Brandon nailed it. He said, hustle beats talent. He said hustle beats talent. You know why? Because talent hits a ceiling when eventually everybody's equally talented, but hustle breaks through that. Trust me on this trust, trust Brandon on this over and over again. And by the way, if you're having those setbacks, but your bosses see that you're working your off, you're out hustling everybody else. They will throw the book at you to make you successful because they know you want it. And that is the most important-

Brandon Bornancin: Yeah. It's your hunger.

Darryl: The hunger, you nailed it. The most important thing, if you're going to be successful. All right, Brandon we're almost out of time.

Brandon Bornancin: I'll go all out for salespeople. I'll got all out from resources, money, investments, coaching. So does my VP of sales, my VP of inside sales, for people that may not be at a quota. Maybe there's 70% of quota. You're at 80% of quota, but you're coming in early. You're coming in late. You're you're doing the work you're studying on the weekends. You're doing whatever it takes to be successful. Like managers will overinvest. They'd rather invest in the people that hustle because they will eventually get the talent and then win and hard work to really define that set big goals bigger than your quota. Like most people, they just do what their quota is given to them. Like you guys need to realize your quota is someone else saying what you can accomplish, which is just some number based on the averages that me, the sales managers, CRS like Darryl figure out, okay, this is above the average. We think this is what they can do. Here's your number. You should not let Darryl, Brandon, anyone in this world define what your potential is. I would take that quota and shove it in the trash and I'd figure out, Hey, I'm three times better than this. I'm five times better than this. I'm eight times better than this. I'm 10 times better than this. And then set that massive goal and hard work is doing the daily activity to hit that massive goal all in all out. So if to do a million dollars is your quota and you need a hundred calls, a hundred emails, a hundred leads a day, set it at three million, 5 million, 10 million. Reverse engineer, there's 265 sales days in a year. So figure out what that new annual quota is that you just set divided by it 265 that gives you the amount of leads. You need the calls, the emails, the social touches per day, to book the appointments that close the sales. That's your new quota. You set your potential. Don't let anyone else tell you what you can or cannot do. Hard work then is the daily activity required to hit that new goal.

Darryl: All right. We've gone through three of the top things you can do to deal with the setbacks and the failures and the frustrations and the heartache and the rejection you experienced in your job as a sales professional, it sucks, but there are solutions. I'm on Amazon right now. I'm looking at Whatever It Takes: Master the Habits to Transform Your Business, Relationships, and Life. Start there and then from there, Brandon's going to quote other people that you should go and consume their content. Learn from the masters, that's step number one. Repeat what he said. Top three things. First step, positive attitude and mindset. The whole point is about you taking control and having a plan. If you do that, you will have the right mindset. You will have a good attitude. Step number two, constant improvement, always iterating and being coachable. Step number three, work ethic, work hard, bust your, hustle beats talent. There was a fourth, but we're at a time.

Brandon Bornancin: Yes.

Darryl: So this is the little hook. If you want to know what his fourth step is, you got to reach out to him directly. So how do you do that? Well, let me help you. There's a couple different ways. One, he's all over LinkedIn. All right. And in LinkedIn, it's a classic, he's linkedin. com/ brandonbornancin, nice and simple, right? He's on Twitter BBranson, or you can just email him brandon @ seamlesscontacts. com or more than anything, go to seamless. ai, check out his tool. That's one more weapon in your arsenal of being successful. We're out of time, that's Brandon, I'm Darryl. This is another week in the books. Thank you for joining us. We'll talk to you soon on the INSIDE Inside Sales show, take care.