Seamless Contacts Building the Next Google & Facebook of Sales

Written by Robert Leitch.

It’s easy to take for granted the level of information we have at our fingertips. If we have a question, we turn to Google for the answer. If we want to find an old classmate, we consult Facebook or LinkedIn. With just a few words and a few seconds, we can find what we’re looking for. It’s all of this intelligence at our fingertips that inspired Brandon Bornancin and Granville Schmidt, the co-founders of Seamless Contacts, to start their company.

“We’re on a mission to build the world’s best sales automation software. Think of it as the Google and Facebook of sales,” said Bornancin. “It’s a search engine for professionals. With every lead you add, we build out a robust Seamless Contacts profile on the person and company. Seamless Contacts profiles are similar to Facebook profiles, just with more information to make them valuable for salespeople and marketers. You can search by title, company, industry or revenue and in real time, we pull professionals from all over the world who meet those criteria and then build rich sales profiles.”

Once a professional is added, Seamless Contacts’ automation technology takes over. The company verifies each person’s email address and phone number, plus thousands of data points about the business they work for. This automation allows salespeople to stop searching millions of websites so they can dedicate all of their time to closing deals.

Bornancin developed the idea for Seamless Contacts after spending more than a decade in sales. Like most salespeople and marketers, he faced yearly sales quotas that he had to reach. This meant trying to build relationships with hundreds of people at once, scouring the web for every bit of useful information on the person and company he wanted to develop profitable relationships with.

“First you have to identify the companies you want to prospect, and then the contacts at those companies. After that, you have to search millions of websites to find their emails, phone numbers, relevant research, news, financials and company information. This process can take weeks or even months,” said Bornancin. “By the time you are ready to execute your sales campaign, your sales pipeline is dead. I knew that by automating the sales research process, I could generate much more revenue.”

By using a prototype of the Seamless Contacts software, Bornancin was able to increase his income ten-fold. After his own testing, Bornancin gave salespeople in his network access to the software. They all had similar results.

“Salespeople were crushing their quota by 300 to 700 percent,” said Bornancin. “That’s when I realized this was going to be something special, and my passion shifted to helping others do the same thing. I want to help everyone increase their income tenfold.”

Bornancin and Schmidt began focusing on developing Seamless Contacts full-time in June 2015. The company received its first investment from Rev1 Ventures, a central Ohio partner of Ohio Third Frontier. The funding was used for development and building out a robust sales team.

“Rev1 helped make sure we were building the right product the first time. They helped us listen to what customers wanted and needed, not what we thought they needed,” said Bornancin. “One of the specific reasons we wanted to work with Rev1 is because their venture advisor network includes some of the best startup advisor talent in the space. Since we were building a search engine, we were ecstatic to work with Mike Blackwell, who ran all of AOL’s search team. The insight we’ve received from Rev1 has been invaluable to our company.”

Seamless Contacts currently has hundreds of users from companies like IBM, Salesforce and Marketo. The company has ten employees, the majority of which specialize in sales or engineering. By the end of 2016, Bornancin would like to increase these numbers to a 30-person engineering team and a 100-person sales team — something he’s confident can happen thanks to his company’s location in central Ohio.

“The engineering pool here in Ohio is amazing,” said Bornancin. “We have some of the most talented developers, engineers and salespeople right here in our own backyard. Columbus is home to top universities and many profitable, game-changing corporations. You can build a company anywhere if you have the right team, the right product and the hustle. We are going to build a billion dollar company right here in Columbus.”