Brandon Bornancin: The Ultimate Guide to Breaking into Tech Sales

The Secret

This is what I call sales pitch mode where you start covering needs, wants, goals, dreams, desires, and negotiating tactics – and you essentially influence the situation to go in your favor.

I learned one of the most important secrets to success in business and in life. The # 1 reason why people succeed over others is because they know how to sell better than you and better than the masses.

The vast majority of the most successful people in the world are salespeople, have a background in sales, or they spent a significant amount of their time mastering sales.

There are over 3,311 billionaires and over 62 million millionaires. Only 10 % of the 3,311 billionaires inherited their money from their families.

Everything in life is a sale and sales isn’t just an exchange of money. Sales can be an exchange of ideas, solutions, agreements, or decisions.

EXAMPLES OF SALES BEING MADE EVERY DAY:

Getting a raise: No one is going to give you a raise or a promotion just because you want one.
Growing your network with super wealthy, valuable contacts: In order to connect with people who are richer and smarter than you, you need to sell them on investing their time in meeting with you.
Picking a vacation spot: If you want to go somewhere on vacation with your friends or family, you have to sell them on where you want to go and create the business case for why your location is ideal.
Getting someone to agree with you: Let’s say you’re debating with someone and you’re trying to convince them to not only admit they are wrong, but to also take your side.
Getting the table you want at a restaurant: When you spend a lot of money to go out to eat at a nice restaurant, you want to have the best seat in the house.
Checking out late at a hotel: Checking out late at a hotel is a sale.
Entertainment: Picking the entertainment you want is a sale.
Bank loans or credit cards: When you go to the bank to get a credit card or a loan to buy a new car, this is a big sale.
Skipping the line at the nightclub: Skipping the line at a sold-out nightclub is a sale.
Getting someone to go out with you: Getting someone to go on a date with you is a sale.
Getting a new job: To get a new job, you have to sell yourself to the employer on all the value you can bring to the table if you joined the company.
Politicians are salespeople: Politicians want to sell you on their vision to change the world so you’ll give them your vote when elections come around.
The news is always selling you: My sister works for the news and I know for a fact that the news is trying to sell you all the time to pay attention to their story and stop scrolling through other tv stations.
Waking up early: Getting up early to get ahead of the competition requires you to sell yourself on waking up when the alarm goes off.
Selling yourself to study: As a student, you have to sell yourself to stay up all night to study for a final exam or complete a term paper.
Having a positive mindset no matter what: Everyone faces hardships, problems, and pain in life.
Working out & eating healthy: Forcing yourself to go to the gym and get a good workout in is a sale.
Being happy is a sale: You get to sell yourself and decide every day whether you are going to be happy or miserable.
Getting rid of toxic negative people in your life: To get rid of the toxic people in your life you have to convince yourself that your network is your net worth.
Winning friends & influencing people: To win new friends, keep old friends, and influence your friends to do what you want to do, you need to sell.

Sales is a life skill that all of the most successful people in the world have mastered.

If you don’t want to leave your career, your success, and your life in the hands of “luck,” “hope,” and “wishful thinking,” you have to learn how to persuade, how to influence, and how to sell.

A product that eliminates a customer’s pains, helps them solve their biggest problems, or achieve their greatest dreams is much easier to sell.

I love tech sales and you should too because it’s REPEATABLE, PREDICTABLE, & SCALABLE.

Albert Einstein once said, “Compounding interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it earns it; he who doesn’t, pays it.”

Tech sales is the only job that is highly repeatable, predictable, and scalable to millions.

You see, during my time at IBM and Google, I found that I wasted 50 % of my days on non-selling activities like list-building, CRM data entry, and scouring millions of websites looking for people’s emails and phone numbers.

So, with an amazing team of engineers, we built a search engine powered by artificial intelligence that does all the hard work for you, and we called this search engine, Seamless.AI. Seamless finds all the contacts and companies in the world you need to sell to, and then uses artificial intelligence to research their perfect cell phones, emails, and direct dials in seconds.

By automating the majority of my tech sales work, I quickly went from making six figures a year in sales, to making six figures a month in tech sales …

The top reason people fail at tech sales is because they aren’t sold on going all in with this profession. As they prospect for tech sales jobs, they keep thinking, there must be something better out there that I could be doing than this.

To get you sold on tech sales, I want to highlight some of the top reasons why this is the greatest job in the world:

You can make more than everyone you know: Tech salespeople are some of the highest earners in the professional world.
You can work from anywhere: You can sell from anywhere in tech sales.
You get to positively impact other people’s lives: Sales allows you to enhance someone’s life, their business, and their success by introducing them to a solution that will solve their biggest problems and help them achieve their greatest dreams.
No college degree required: One of the greatest perks of building a career in sales is that you don’t need a college degree.
You get rewarded by a meritocracy vs. political bureaucracy: Sales is a meritocracy, which means the harder you work and the more results you generate, the more you get paid.
Tech sales is repeatable, scalable, and predictable: Once you figure out how to prospect, pitch, and close new customers in tech, you can easily scale or multiply the results you drive with more work.
You get to become an intrepreneur vs. losing it all as an entrepreneur: When you work in sales, you get to become an intrepreneur at your own company.
You get 100 % control: Unlike other careers, where your promotion and the money you make are determined by someone else, in sales you have total control over the success of your career and the path you take.
You never have to worry about finding a job: Tech salespeople are always in high demand.
It’s easy to get into tech sales: Most sales jobs have a low barrier to entry, which means they don’t require special training or certification to get started.
Investors love tech companies and tech salespeople: On average, investors give out the largest valuations (10x to 30x) per $ 1 made in sales at tech companies.
You get the ultimate freedom: Few jobs provide the freedom that salespeople enjoy.
You learn the soft skills that employers are looking for: Recruiters love candidates with soft skills (i.e. great communication skills, ability to work well with others, etc.) because these are skills you can’t teach.
Tech sales gives you work-life balance: Every salesperson is given a quota for the year.
You learn the tech skills that employers value the most: By learning the ins and outs of the tech product you sell, you learn important skills and gain a ton of tech experience, which is always in high demand.
You get to rub shoulders with BOSSES: You get to put yourself in front of decision-makers, leaders, and department heads and introduce them to the latest & greatest tech.
You feed the success of every department at your company (total bragging rights): Many tech companies look to their sales talent pool when they need to fill positions in their marketing and customer success departments because it’s less costly to hire internally than to recruit outside candidates.
You experience unlimited personal and professional growth: With all the training, practice, and improvement you have to make every day, sales will whip you into shape and turn you into the best version of yourself.
Sales works for any personality: It doesn’t matter if you’re an introvert or an extrovert, if you learn the key sales strategy, secrets, and principles, you can sell anyone on anything that you need to.
You can get promoted quickly: Entry-level sales reps can get promoted to higher titles like “Account Executive” and even managerial positions FAST.
Your network becomes your net worth: With tech sales, you get to work with new people every day.
You learn how to sell people on your ideas, your talents, and your abilities: Whether you’re interviewing for a job, asking for a salary raise, or a promotion, sales will help you advocate for yourself and get what you want.
You get to join a highly motivated community: The team atmosphere of sales allows you to share all types of experiences.
You get to travel the world: Whether you’re hitting the airport for conferences, huge deal opportunities, networking opportunities, or new market research – sales allows you to travel the world.
Tech sales is fun: When you have an amazing product and you’re great at what you do, sales will feel less like a job and more like a fun game.
You learn a necessary life skill: Because everything in life is a sale.
You get to educate people on the latest trends and greatest products: As a salesperson, you get to play “teacher” to your prospects.
You get to positively impact the world: It’s literally your job to make a positive impact in the world.
Every day is an adventure: No two days are alike in sales.
You are one of the most important people at any company: From new projects to new programs and policies, sales is the fuel that brings in the money to make everything else possible at any business.
Winning new sales boosts your confidence and is the greatest feeling in the world: Winning new sales will give you one of the greatest feelings in the world.
You learn how to become unstoppable in good times and bad: Sales teaches you lifelong lessons because you have to perform during good economic times and bad economic times.
You’re forced to constantly level up your game: At every company, the sales must grow month to month.
You get to interact with a wide range of people: If you’re a people person, if you love meeting new people and you’re a great conversationalist, sales is the career where you get to express that passion for people.
You get to make an immediate impact at your job: As a salesperson, you bring in the revenue that makes it possible for every department to thrive, from contributing funds to salaries and budgets.
You get to build lifelong relationships: It’s hard to think of a profession where personal connections are more foundational than sales.
Tech sales is fulfilling and helps you become the best you can be: A career in tech sales is stimulating and fulfilling.
Tech sales will set you free: I hope with my story you can see for yourself that not only is sales the greatest profession in the world, but tech sales is the greatest job in the world.

Tech sales radically changed my life, and it will change your life too!

A list of the top sales myths out there, and how to overcome them.

MYTH: I NEED TO HAVE SALES EXPERIENCE. Truth: You do not need to have any experience to be successful at your first sales job.
MYTH: I NEED TO BE SMART. Truth: You do not need to be a tech genius to thrive in sales. If you want to be a top performer, you just need to be positive, coachable, hard-working, and willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done!
MYTH: SALESPEOPLE ARE SCAM ARTISTS SELLING THINGS PEOPLE DON’T WANT OR NEED. Truth: Some people look negatively at sales because there are a select few who have given the profession a bad name.
MYTH: I NEED TO BE A SMOOTH TALKER. Truth: Salespeople have a reputation for being smooth talkers. But with all my experience in this industry, I honestly don’t even really know what a smooth talker is!
MYTH: I NEED TO BE CONFIDENT. Truth: Most salespeople aren’t confident. Believe it or not, there are more introverts in sales than extroverts.
MYTH: I NEED TO BE POPULAR AND HAVE A LOT OF CONNECTIONS TO BE SUCCESSFUL. Truth: Everyone starts with nothing in sales.
MYTH: I WILL BE ON THE PHONE ALL DAY. Truth: Luckily for you, this is not Wall Street in the 1980s where the only way to reach a prospect was on the phone.
MYTH: I HAVE TO USE SHADY TACTICS. Truth: This is a flat-out lie, and one of the reasons that sales gets a bad rep.
MYTH: I WON’T MAKE ANY MONEY IN SALES. Truth: You will make more money than you ever dreamed of in sales.
MYTH: I WON’T BE HAPPY. Truth: Yes, you will! You will love your job.
MYTH: I WILL BE SUPER STRESSED ABOUT HITTING MY QUOTA EVERY MONTH. Truth: The only people who are constantly worried about quota are the ones who don’t have a repeatable, scalable, and predictable sales system to generate results.
MYTH: I WILL HAVE TO PRESSURE PEOPLE INTO BUYING. Truth: Despite popular belief, sales is not about pushing a product down someone’s throat who doesn’t need it or is not interested.
MYTH: SALES IS NOT A PRESTIGIOUS CAREER Truth: Sales is the wealthiest occupation in the world.

The Mindset

To make over $ 100,000 in sales, you need to embody the mindset of doing “Whatever It Takes” (W.I.T.) to be successful. With the right habits, mindset, and W.I.T. principles, you can accomplish anything.

Listed below are the top operating principles or traits all recruiters look for when hiring entry-level and mid-level salespeople.

POSITIVITY. Always have a positive mindset. Become bulletproof to negativity and don’t let anyone hold you back.
COACHABILITY. Be humble, hungry, and the hardest working person in the room.
STRONG WORK ETHIC. Be the first person in, and the last person out.
INTELLIGENCE. Smart people who can’t apply their knowledge during a real-life crisis tend to work slower than others because they overcomplicate things.
INITIATIVE. Don’t wait around for your manager or boss to walk you through your tasks.
INTEGRITY. If a company hires a rockstar with amazing talent but no sense of right and wrong, their reputation is on the line every day.
SOCIAL PROOF. You want to show a recruiter that they won’t be taking a risk hiring you. Present a history of success with references (past employers, teachers, advisors, etc.).

Top salespeople understand that failure is inevitable, however quitting is never an option.

The Math

The sales math is critical for your success because you need to understand all the leads, appointments, and job offers that are required for success! To do the six-figure sales math, you first need to learn the elements of a sales funnel.

When we break down your sales funnel for your job search, there are 3 core elements: Leads Interviews Job Offers.

Leads are the amount of contacts and companies you put in a list and prospect for a tech sales job.
Interviews are the amount of interviews you have for different jobs.
Job offers are the amount of job offers you receive from different companies to get hired.

On average, leads convert to interviews at 2.5 % – 10 %. The term for this in the tech industry is called “conversion rate.” The conversion rate from interviews to job offers (in other words, the number of interviews you have that turn into job offers) typically ranges from 20 % – 40 %.

The Marketing

If you want to get a dream tech sales job, you’re going to have to learn how to market yourself well. You want to have a strong LinkedIn profile, a solid resume, and a great cover letter (that cuts through the noise). And you always want to dress your best.

You’re going to take the information that you provide for each of these categories and repurpose it for all the marketing you will do for yourself.

What have you achieved so far in your professional life that you are the proudest of? What big accomplishments have you achieved at every single job you’ve had?

What soft skills and hard skills do you have that would be an asset at a sales job? Hard skills are usually job-specific abilities that can be measured and quantified. Whereas soft skills are typically interpersonal abilities that can’t necessarily be measured.

What awards at school or previous jobs have you won ?

What big projects have you completed at past jobs? What were the goals and objectives? What was the outcome? What impact did the project have on the organization’s bottom line?

While you don’t want to frontload failures in your resume or any other application materials, during the interview process you may be prompted to discuss a time that you failed at something.

Be strategic about the failure you share, and highlight the lesson you learned.

Because your profile picture is one of the first things people see, I would advise you to hire a photographer and get professional headshots done.

With a cover photo, you have the freedom to showcase more of your personality with a live-action photo of yourself.

To make your marketing and self-promotion more competitive, I would advise you to hire a designer.

The more you invest in your success, the more success you will get. The more you pay, the more people will pay you.

To get a job in tech sales and make over $ 100,000 a year, you need to have a top 1 % LinkedIn profile. Hire an expert LinkedIn profile writer to update your profile.

The headline is prime real estate on your profile page. Yet I see so many people waste this space on generic information like their job title, where they work, or their educational background.

Instead of using passive language like, “I was a salesperson at company X,” use action words that describe the work you did like “managed,” “led,” “grew,” “reduced,” “saved,” and “sold.”

Below are a few of the most desired skills to have on your LinkedIn profile if you’re looking to get into tech sales:

Cold Calling
Sales Emailing
Social Selling
Prospecting
Appointment Setting
Pipeline Management
CRM
Persuasion
Critical Thinking
Problem Solving
Adaptability
Time Management
Tenacity
Emotional Acumen
People Management
Analytical Reasoning
Creativity
Data-Driven Decision Making

Your resume should include the following:

OBJECTIVE STATEMENT: At the top of your resume, you should have a FIRE objective statement. Think of your objective statement as a two to three-sentence pitch, where you are selling the hiring manager on you, and why they should choose you for the job. A great objective statement encapsulates who you are as a professional, the results you’ve delivered at past jobs, the impact you can drive at the job you’re applying for, the “secret sauce” that separates you from the pack, and what you’re looking for in a job.

Unless you are applying for higher-level manager or executive roles later on in your career, as a general rule of thumb, your resume should be no longer than a page.

Richard N. Bolles’ What Color Is Your Parachute? In What Color Is Your Parachute? Bolles helps you identify your work-related strengths and weaknesses, so you know what to play up in your resume and what to work around.

Dan Clay’s How to Write the Perfect Resume: Stand Out, Land Interviews, and Get the Job You Want Clay breaks down how to play up your greatest achievements and shares his tested and proven system for writing an exceptional resume that cuts through the noise and helps you land an interview.

A testimonial is more persuasive than a sales pitch because the person giving a testimonial has nothing to gain or lose by sharing their story. They simply came across a product that changed their life, and they want you to know about it so you can see the same results.

The Tools

To get a job in tech sales and make $ 100,000 a year … you need to get all the best tools that the best salespeople use to generate millions in sales. Not only will these powerful platforms make job hunting and prospecting easier, but once you start your tech sales job, these technologies will make your day-to-day tasks much easier.

The sales tools that you need to succeed are the following: SEAMLESS.AI – THE WORLD’S BEST SALES LEADS Seamless is the # 1 sales software in the world that uses artificial intelligence to find accurate emails and cell phones for any professional in seconds.

A CRM helps you keep track of your leads, contacts, accounts, and opportunities, as well as the tasks you need to complete with each contact.

The Lists

If you want to get a job in tech sales, you need to build a list of all the companies and contacts to sell yourself to. Nothing gets sold to anyone without first building the list of people who desperately need what you have to offer, and then selling to everyone on the list.

To start building your lists to prospect for a job, you’ll want to first create a company list which I call “The Dream 100.” The Dream 100 is where you build a list of all the top companies you would love to sell and work for. The companies at the top of your list should be organizations you absolutely love. You should love the company culture, the product, the customers, the branding, and the target audience. All of it.

Picking a company industry is a great place to start with building your dream 100 company list.

Another one of my favorite company search filters when building my Dream 100 is using employee size.

Location could be a big factor in selecting the companies to put on your dream 100 list.

The Scripts

Whenever you are about to prospect anyone for anything (a product, a service, or a job) you need to plan out your prospecting campaigns in advance. When I say plan out your prospecting campaign in advance, I mean you are going to plan out how many calls, voicemails, emails, text messages, video messages, etc. you’re going to send out across a specific number of days.

To prospect for interviews at your dream jobs, I recommend using a 10-day prospecting campaign across two full weeks. This is because a one-week campaign is too short, and anything over 10 days will be overkill. Ten days is a good sweet spot because if people aren’t getting back to you within that time frame, then there likely isn’t a sales job opportunity there at this time.

Demonstrating-Enticing-Closing with every touch point. With every script you want to demonstrate, entice, and close with a specific call to action (CTA).

If people reading your emails see multiple CTAs – for example, you ask them to call you back, send you more information, book an interview, and hire you – all these CTAs are going to confuse them and they’re going to delete your message, or hang up the phone. So instead of dropping multiple CTAs, drop one.

The Activity

Do you want to know the worst way to get a job in tech sales? It’s going to a job site and just submitting your resume. Then sitting and waiting for the phone to ring. You heard me right. It’s going to a job app site, sending in your resume, and praying and hoping that you land your dream job.

More importantly, just submitting a resume is a terrible strategy because you aren’t doing anything to make an impression or stand out to the decision-makers and the sales team who would hire you.

Submitting a resume and doing nothing else is like having an important test and doing nothing to prepare for it. No studying, no research, and no hard work to make sure you ace the test. We all know if you have a life-changing test coming up, to ace it, you need to take massive action to increase your odds of getting the best grade possible.

Getting a job in tech sales is no different. The only way to win at tech sales, and anything in life, is by doing more activity than anyone else.

Now let’s take these metrics and turn them into a funnel. In sales, a funnel visually shows you the journey a customer takes from initially becoming aware of your product to deciding to buy.

Once you generate leads, you begin the Awareness Stage where you send out LinkedIn connection requests, emails, and calls, make introductions and put yourself on the radar of key people at the companies you’re interested in. Many leads are going to pass on you. That’s why it’s the biggest part of the funnel! The ultimate goal at the leads stage is to book the interview.

The Interview Stage is where those leads who are interested in working with you book an interview to meet with you.

Your goal at this stage is to crush the interview and move on to the Job Offer Stage.

The final stage in the funnel is getting a job offer. This is where the company decides they want to hire you.

I am going to break down 4 key pillars you should work on improving every day to increase your conversion rates at each stage of the funnel. I call these key pillars, LSTA:

Lists: Use Seamless.AI or LinkedIn (or both) to build the list of contacts and companies every day and go after the list.

Scripts: Create a Google doc and re-write the scripts that we give you in The Ultimate Guide To Breaking Into Tech Sales.

Training: Every day you want to train to improve these metrics.

Activity: Every day increase your activity (studying, research, etc.) by 1 % and increase your winning mindset behavior (embracing change, doing more with less, etc.) by 1 %.

The Interview

Before you ever meet for an interview, you should brainstorm every possible question a hiring manager or recruiter may ask you, and prepare your answers in advance.

A job interview is like a sale. Your aim is to sell the interviewer on YOU. You want to convince them that you are the PERFECT person for the job. So, frame every answer around what YOU can do for THEM.

When you are going in for an interview, one of the most important factors you want to focus on is WIIFTE: What’s In It For The Employer? You want to make your pitch all about what’s in it for the employer and how they would benefit if they hire you out of the thousands of candidates who applied to the position.

As a sales candidate, before you have your interview, come up with a list of ideas, strategies, and recommendations, to help the company’s sales, grow their pipeline, or shorten their sales process. What pains does the sales team have and how can you solve that?

During the interview lay out what you would be able to accomplish for the first 30/60/90 days.

The Training

Whether you know it or not, salespeople are just like professional athletes.

You need to practice your offensive plays:

Build sales lists to book interview meetings
Cold email for jobs
Cold call for jobs
Social sell on LinkedIn for jobs
Video message for jobs
Book interviews
Attend interviews
Write follow-up messages after interviews
Read books on sales
Read books on job hunting

You need to practice your defensive plays:

Write interview Q & A scripts
Roleplay
Practice pitching a prospective employer
Practice if an interviewer says, “Cold call me right now”
Practice if an interviewer says, “Cold email me right now”
Practice if an interviewer says, “Why should I hire you vs the other 100 applicants?”
Practice FAQs an interviewer would ask