Latest / The ROI Online Podcast / Author Chad Burmeister on the Power of AI for Sales & Management: The ROI Online Podcast Ep. 54

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Author Chad Burmeister on the Power of AI for Sales & Management: The ROI Online Podcast Ep. 54 · The ROI Online Podcast

• 0:03
  Chad Burmeister: And so that's what that's what sales is really about. It's not, I'm going to sell you this real meaty sheep, or this middle looking kind of cruddy looking sheep, or this one features and functions. It's the vision that you have. What does that sheep look like? Why does it look that way? And truly understand a good one of the best sellers out there right now is Keenan who wrote the book gap selling. And he talks about, okay, if you don't have the sheep, that's that particular way, then what's the gap? What's the impact? If you solve the gap? What's the impact if you don't solve the gap, and it's so simple, and 99% of sellers miss it?
• 0:46
  Steve Brown: A lot of the time.
• 0:46
  Steve Brown: Hi, everybody. Welcome to the ROI online podcast where we believe you, the courageous entrepreneurs of our day, are the invisible heroes of our economy. You not only improve our world with your ideas, your grit and your passion, but you make our world better. I'm Steve Brown. And this is a place where we have great conversations with winners just like you while we laugh and learn together. Chad burmeister Welcome to the ROI online podcast.
• 1:23
  Chad Burmeister: Man Great to be here. It's a it's it's such a great world we live in these days. And I'm always excited to talk with smart individuals like yourself and and share some of the lessons that we're learning out there in the market.
• 1:39
  Steve Brown: Well, shucks up, you know, first of all, you've got this great name if I don't know if you were in a fraternity, but that's an immediate, like, competitive advantage as far as being like one of the favorite guys burmeister
• 1:53
  Chad Burmeister: Well, I wasn't in a fraternity, but I did play lacrosse. And I remember on the back of the jersey when they started printing the names, you know, it was always a little longer than the average bear.
• 2:02
  Chad Burmeister: So, you know, we had to use the smaller the smaller letters for my jersey.
• 2:09
  Steve Brown: Anyway, that's a great name. So you're an author, on several books, you're CEO of a couple of companies. You have a podcast, ai for sales podcast, as well. Your books are the One Stop titled AI for sales. And then there's a couple of versions of sales hack. Is that correct?
• 2:30
  Chad Burmeister: Yeah.
• 2:30
  Chad Burmeister: Originally sales hack came together. Because I'd wanted to write a book for 12 to 14 years, I kept building the chapters out and I was on planes all the time. But when I when I get on an airplane, I fell asleep in the first 20 minutes on takeoff.
• 2:43
  Chad Burmeister: So writing the book on the plane, never worked over 12 years. And and so I wrote the book sales hack by aggregating a lot of very, very good sales people. And, you know, very good sales people. I said, What's your biggest sales hack that you can share with the world. And within within days, I had gotten 30 chapters of contributed sales x. It was it was quite the sales hack in itself to put that book together.
• 3:14
  Steve Brown: I love sales, I've been doing it. That's where I always got pigeon toed or pigeon holed. I'm not pigeon toed, but I got pigeon holed is very similar, but different. And but I always would an organization be the salesperson I just I was okay, being everybody knows whether you're doing great or you're sucking, they know what your quota is, they know when you hit the quota. But when we don't have a clue if accounting is hitting their numbers, and we don't know what production is really doing. And so, but to be in sales, I think the thing I really liked about it is I looked at it more as this is my little business inside of a business. And if I just apply myself and spend a little time, after hours, I can really get good at this. I used back in the day, Outlook started to be a little more functional, where you could set these reminder tasks. And I set up a little system. That was my first foray into a CRM, if you will using technology to supplement my sales process. But what it did is it helped me sell about 20% more than the guys that I sold with or against, because it wouldn't let me if I would just be diligent and put a reminder when that person said why don't you come back in six weeks. And I'm going to actually come back in six weeks. And it was a great way to confirm whether that was just an objection or legitimate and I would get accounts that most people wouldn't get just because I followed up cuz I took advantage of technology. So the scale the sales will sales classes teaching but your scale up x.ai tells us A little bit how technology nowadays is really supporting the sales process.
• 5:06
  Chad Burmeister: Yeah, well, there's a, there's a great author named skip Miller. And he's been an author, a trainer for many, many years. And I went to one of his early classes, when I first got into sales, in fact, my second job out of college, and I had the luxury of meeting him very early. And one thing that always stuck in my brain was revenue equals frequency times competency.
• 5:26
  Chad Burmeister: Right, the more frequency, if you're early in your sales career, you don't have a high C or a low C. I mean, there's a few naturals out there. But generally speaking, we as sellers start out early, and we don't know what it is we're doing. So you have to focus on the frequency. And then over time, the competency comes up through repetition, right, just like riding a bike, if you ride a bike, the first time you scan your knee, the second time, you get a little better by the 10th 25th time, you can jump off of off of a ramp and land right and do fun things. So what AI is allowing people to do is I think what a lot of people think of is the frequency side, let me just email blast my audience. Let me spam everybody. And sure some people are inadvertently doing that. And being very impersonal.
• 6:18
  Chad Burmeister: What, what's most exciting to me is bringing the personality and bringing better communications so that you're not just getting frequency up, but you're doing it a better competency level. So you know, I, I'm actually going to an event this week, I'm going to have 18 CEOs at an off site location and Winter Park. And I'm talking to them and I've got a revenue equals frequency times competency, a little nap back in the napkin drawing, and it says on one side, here's a T chart.
• 6:54
  Chad Burmeister: Here's you, and here's me. And I'm going to say okay, how many data records Do you pull every month of people that meet your ideal customer profile? Right?
• 7:02
  Chad Burmeister: You personally as a founder, CEO, whatever, then how many emails do you do? How many social touches do you do? How many dials do you do? How many personal video messages? How many voicemails? How many paid ads? So all these different layers and channels. And when you add it all up? The number that I'm doing personally per month is 60,000. Sales touches.
• 7:24
  Chad Burmeister: Wow. And one would think Holy cow. That's what that's what companies that's what entire companies do. Exactly. So when you're an army of one and best guess what to get to that level?
• 7:36
  Chad Burmeister: You might I ran the math, if you did it on the cheap, you could probably do 60,000 touches for about 30 $500 a month. So who can't afford 30 $500 a month to go from 1000 touches a month up to 60,000. Right? That to me is the power. So So then I go through and I say Okay, now let's look at the competency side. What are you doing to enhance your competency? So I read two books a month, I attended at least 10 webinars where I listened to other people's content, I like to do the on demand, because then I can fast forward to the deal of the tape. I have hired multiple coaches. So I have not just 123 I have nine advisors on the board of directors on the board of advisors. And so I talked to them at least once a month. Some of them I talked to once a week, I am on 60 or more sales calls.
• 8:30
  Chad Burmeister: Sometimes on a big month, I might do 100 I host a podcast and then I joined a podcast. So about 15 between hosting and joining. And then I try to I try to take one class per month. So it sounds like a lot. Yeah, and you can get efficient at building this out into your day in life. I don't I don't really work hard on weekends anymore.
• 8:57
  Chad Burmeister: Because I've gotten good at delivering all of this in a five day workweek. I used to work eight hour days on both weekend days. Yeah. So to me, the power of AI is that you can now automate yourself into how you would normally send an email how you would respond to an email, how you would reach out on social with your kinds of emojis with your with your format and authenticity. But you could do it at scale to a level that you've never been able to do for
• 9:29
  Steve Brown: Seattle. So your little tagline on your shirt digitally human. And though for those who are listening, we have video versions of all these conversations. But here's the trap and I just had a great interview with someone is that there are humans on the other end of the sales calls. They're humans visiting your sales assets they have. They have brains, they have families, they have names. More importantly, they have dreams. They have kids They have hoax. And we're, we're in an environment. Now, that's a virtual environment that we have to take care of, and exploit data in digital. But I think the trap is most people fall into thinking of a consumer on the other end of nameless, faceless thing that has a credit card that we're trying to use technology to manipulate to get more sales. And what you're talking about the competency part really addresses that cliche. And sales I hate is like, well, it's just a numbers game. No, that's a component, you can't sit and do nothing.
• 10:43
  Steve Brown: But it's a human game.
• 10:48
  Chad Burmeister: Yes. Well, and so I did a podcast here. Very recently, with someone who's a coach that has worked with a company called code breaker technologies for the last five years. It started as a card, right? You're either card yellow, red, green, or blue. And so that was the early days, well, now, this AI can go in and read your LinkedIn profile, or take this audio file converted into text and tell you beyond a reasonable doubt. What is your bank code? And there are four, you know, four cards, but there's different orderings, right? It could be B, A and K, K and V, etc, etc. Bank of us?
• 11:32
  Chad Burmeister: Yeah.
• 11:33
  Steve Brown: Explain that. For those of us like me that?
• 11:36
  Steve Brown: couldn't explain it with Yes,
• 11:37
  Chad Burmeister: yeah. So the bank code is are you an action person? Is that a right? Okay.
• 11:42
  Chad Burmeister: Do you take actions, the k and m because I don't necessarily know all the B in the end, I remember they in the K right now.
• 11:51
  Chad Burmeister: knowledge? And that's probably because my to our action and knowledge. Yes, knowledge is another one. So the K stands for knowledge. And so I think mine was action, the knowledge right action supported with knowledge, and then the other the other two and I'm surfing through to figure out if I can tell you what they are, right? I'm what
• 12:11
  Steve Brown: I'm guessing what bank is right now. I mean, the being the B would be buoyancy, or, or.
• 12:20
  Chad Burmeister: Right? Well, and these are some super people, Les Brown, world renowned motivational speaker is behind this. And I remember hearing Les Brown speak at motivational talks 20 years ago. So this is someone who's been around the block a few times and understands the game of being able to communicate people with people think about, you know, Spanish, Russian, Greek, French, all the different languages the world, but at the core, we all have a code of how we buy and how we communicate. Imagine being able to know that code on the fly.
• 12:59
  Steve Brown: Exactly, in and when you talk to someone you start, it starts to reveal itself in their their vocabulary that the words that they're using, and I interrupted you and got you off thing, but go ahead and and go where you are going with that the red yellow bank code thing? Yeah,
• 13:18
  Chad Burmeister: well, so we're, we're, I'm thinking about this in the future, is that it's difficult to teach someone to learn all the 24 different codes, hey, I'm trying to you in one way, now I need to talk to someone else in another way, right? A short term solution would be, hey, if we're getting leads that come in to our website, and we're getting thousands or 10s of thousands, zoom video, for example, in these times, why route to a geography if you could route to someone who speaks the same language of the person of the buyer, precise skill based routing. So that's kind of the short term would be really easy.
• 13:54
  Chad Burmeister: Let's put a bank of people that no pun intended, yeah. Let's put a bank of people that match these certain profiles. In the future. If I go to send an email, think about Google Mail, you send a mail and it completes the sentence before you've even thought about your GED. Exactly.
• 14:15
  Chad Burmeister: In the future, why not? I write it in my tonality. And for me, I'm a bullet guy. But if I'm sending something to someone who's not a bullet guy, or gal, then what if it could convert the language and round out the words to that buyer?
• 14:31
  Steve Brown: Precisely,
• 14:32
  Chad Burmeister: wow. To me, that's the power of AI, right?
• 14:35
  Chad Burmeister: It helps you with the frequency, but it also helps you with the competency, and then take it a step further. We're in a dialogue and conversation. And I know you're a certain personality type because the AI tells me, well, instead of me having to figure all that out.
• 14:47
  Chad Burmeister: What does this mean? There's so many things I could say and ask.
• 14:50
  Chad Burmeister: It just gives you the questions right there's a tool called Balto software that can listen to the conversation and right there on the sidecar. It can pop up and and say, Oh, that's a really good question that you asked about by appointment only.
• 15:04
  Chad Burmeister: Yeah, they've been around for 20 years. They were amazing 20 years ago, and even 10 years ago, but the world has changed.
• 15:11
  Chad Burmeister: And so from my understanding, they're not used, you know, it could tell me based on you saying the word VA, oh, which happens to be a competitor, then I can start then I can teach my sellers how to respond in real time. Right. And now Now imagine doing that based on who the buyer personality or buyer persona is, it's about to get really interesting.
• 15:37
  Steve Brown: Want to pause here just for a moment and talk to you about a program that we have just released, called the ROI quickstart Academy for authors.
• 15:44
  Steve Brown: Every day, I talk to business owners just like you who struggle with quickly getting their fundamentals in place, we want to create a great foundation, and we want to grow our business. But the things that are in our way, our lack of knowledge about the specifics, we should put in place, what kind of technology what kind of messaging and what kind of campaigns and that problem exists for authors as well. And we just chill so good with authors because, well, I'm an author, and I understand everything that you struggle with, you have a great idea, you have a great book, but what do you want to do, you want to get your book in front of more people, you want to make it easy for them to find you learn how they can schedule a time to talk with you hire you for a conference, or maybe sign up for the services that your book promotes. So what is the Quickstart Academy for authors?
• 16:38
  Steve Brown: Imagine working with a small group of like minded authors, and the experts from the ROI quickstart team, it's a great way to get your message in clear to be confident with the technology in your marketing automation, and how to run a strategic campaign to get you more of what you want from the investment of your book. To learn more about the Quickstart Academy for authors, you can visit ROI online.com or click in the link in the show notes below. And now, back to this episode. So what you're doing is, that's cool, because you're not only impacting the frequency, you're starting to impact the competency. The last hurdle is the authenticity.
• 17:27
  Steve Brown: Because here's here's where I struggled with having to follow scripts, and things that the scripts weren't reflecting my, my natural way of going about things and and thinking so they were really offensive to me, I can understand why you wanted to practice them and, and do that.
• 17:50
  Steve Brown: But the competency area really gets good. I interviewed the sky that started the band, Christopher O'Donnell HubSpot.
• 18:02
  Steve Brown: He's the Chief Product officer there. And he start, I'm just gonna run this big company on the product side animals started band, but he's got this great bass player, and I was watching one of his his videos on how he teaches people to play bass. And there's three phases there.
• 18:17
  Steve Brown: First you imitate. And then you begin to assimilate. And then you can transition over into the Create. So by imitating and then starting to assimilate, then you can go into the creative side.
• 18:31
  Steve Brown: And that's what you're facilitating or that example, helps you facilitate that. That transformation in in competency in the sales process.
• 18:44
  Chad Burmeister: Well, it's funny, I had this conversation with Mark hunter and Dr. Howard Dover from the University of Texas at Dallas A while back, and Mark said, hey, look, I'm not a script person. This sounds great for entry level people.
• 18:57
  Chad Burmeister: But Chad, you can you know, this isn't gonna work for the top end of the curve. And I said, Okay, so think about this. What if you took the mark hunter questioning and philosophy around the right questions, you program it in the AI? And for the first week of the rollout, you do the training, maybe it's a one hour webinar or something? And everyone says, Yeah, sounds great. Well, then what do they normally do, right? If you fold a piece of paper in half, that's day one, day two, day three. By day five, you've forgotten 80% of what it is you learn exactly.
• 19:31
  Chad Burmeister: Now imagine putting Balto software in and it having the mark hunter conversation questions come up and the first week you say I need you to be with the 90% of the words on the page. By week two, now I need you to be at 60%. Week Three, we can be at 40%. Week Five training wheels are off. So you're rolling out a new product. you're rolling out a new sales philosophy and technology. You can push a button and It pushes it to every single human that's out there, where you traditionally could do that digitally. If you're doing a paid ad, for example, or an email, you can a B test, but you couldn't do it with a whole group of humans. And so now I think the answer to the question there is, the unconscious competence, or the assimilate piece that you're talking about, starts to assimilate, and you can get to creativity for weeks or now, right? Or maybe you're just an advanced seller. And look, I'm gonna give you the questions. And because you're so good, you can I'm gonna put it at zero percent, you don't actually have to use any of the things that I'm going to give you. If you're an advanced seller.
• 20:43
  Steve Brown: Hmm.
• 20:44
  Chad Burmeister: Right. And so much flexibility with these technologies is pretty neat.
• 20:47
  Chad Burmeister: Well, what I love about that,
• 20:50
  Steve Brown: there's a framework to get there. Whereas sales has always been this mystical thing that, hey, this guy's good at sales. And people don't realize that there's an innate kind of this innate competence of a process that person follows. But because most of us are oblivious to whatever, processes recognizing them, but also sales, more importantly, it's that person that all that knowledge dies with them when they leave, or when they if they, they just wing it, but they have this innate ability to do it and to be able to replicate it or teach it is huge.
• 21:30
  Chad Burmeister: Yes, yes. Well, it's um, it's certainly an interesting world that we live in when it comes to AI and AI for sales. I who was I talking to just the other day, that that we were talking about the ethical side of this, because this other company, codebreakers that I mentioned that? Does the personality mapping and the buyer mapping? They spoke at a conference and said AI for good.
• 21:59
  Chad Burmeister: And it's good to have that North Star that, that AI's for good.
• 22:04
  Chad Burmeister: Who's the definer of the word?
• 22:10
  Chad Burmeister: Good, right? We've all been exposed to a very interesting year in 2020, serious, right, a seriously unveiling of the mask and flipping of the pancake. And so if you think of the word good, you could one person's good is another person's evil.
• 22:26
  Chad Burmeister: So figuring out the definition, and who does that? Is it a committee? Or is it one person, I think there's going to be a chief ethics officer with major fortune 1000 companies for for AI. And there might even be a team of people that are involved in looking at it to make sure that the AI once it's empowered to do stuff, doesn't do the wrong thing for the wrong people.
• 22:54
  Steve Brown: Right. Yeah. So you know, I, I've thought a lot about that. And, you know, and this this time, Who would have ever thought you couldn't go to someone's office and shake their hand and sit down in a conference room and, and have a conversation or meet them at your warehouse and walk through the warehouse? Yeah. All of a sudden, we've been thrust into this environment where we need to meet virtually like we are now we need to be able to read body language, we need to do all the things we naturally do in person, but but it's like, what can you do to up your competency level, in this new environment that you can feel really out of water. And I really thought about it. I think where I land and what I like about the word human on your shirt, is that when we think about, you know, in my book I talked about, you know, our world is really changed, but our brains remain the same. Okay, and that brain was designed to help us survive and thrive and flourish. Before we even had written text. Even before we had really languages.
• 24:03
  Steve Brown: And but yet, we were able to compete against dinosaurs and saber toothed tigers and all those those things, right? And we weren't necessarily weaponized with fingernails or something. But that brain is designed to tell us when we're safe. And when we're understood, without even processing language. And so, in a sales process, like you and I are talking about remotely, to be able to discern what that person's vocabulary is, what is it that they're wanting to do, what are they struggling with?
• 24:40
  Steve Brown: And what's the transformation they're wanting to do? That's a story based concept. Stories always been impactful. And so to be able to go Alright, I'm think I understand what you're trying to do here, Chad. you're wanting to get all these sales people that are a little out of water, fish out of water and really adapt to this and Excel. So the processes of training that you have, imagine doing it this way, well, your brain is designing that story in the imagine part.
• 25:21
  Steve Brown: You're giving them a glimpse, but your brains filling in all the details. So therefore, they feel safe. But more importantly, they feel understood, because you communicated that you get them. Yeah.
• 25:35
  Chad Burmeister: So I just read this book, that it's funny. I don't think I'd ever heard of it. The Little Prince. Have you heard of this book?
• 25:42
  Steve Brown: Yeah, I've heard of that book. I got socks. That little prince.
• 25:46
  Chad Burmeister: Oh, that's hilarious. So it's apparently a very famous story by this, this guy who flew an airplane when he was 12. And then went into the military. He was from France, I believe. And then he crashed in the desert one time he crashed in New York. And they ended up crashing the plane off the coast of the Mediterranean somewhere.
• 26:06
  Chad Burmeister: And then his plane was never found Intel it was the person. I know the person who lives in Arizona. And her uncle is the one who found the plane. Oh, and so she's like, Yeah, you've never heard of this book, because I'm looking at writing my next book, The fifth now, but much more of a human spirit, human condition, kind of a story. And it might even be fiction. I haven't decided yet.
• 26:34
  Chad Burmeister: And so this, this book talks about, the Little Prince comes, and it's a little kid that's in the desert, with the guy who just crashed his plane, right, this. And twins de Saint exupery. Right. Super easy.
• 26:50
  Steve Brown: Other it's easy for you to say easy.
• 26:53
  Chad Burmeister: Yeah. And so the Little Prince says, Hey, I want you to draw me a sheep. I heard you can draw, can you draw me a sheep? And he's like, what?
• 27:01
  Chad Burmeister: This is weird. Okay, and he draws a sheep, because that's, that's not very good. And it's like, wait, I've only drawn one thing in my life. And it was the snake eating an elephant. And it's like, that's the only thing ever true. So it goes, shoot dropped again. So he tries it again. Then he drives it again.
• 27:19
  Chad Burmeister: 33 times a charm. Still not.
• 27:22
  Chad Burmeister: Finally, he draws this little picture at the bottom of a box with some holes in it. Yeah. And he goes, the little kid that prints is like, yeah, that's awesome. Because he goes, What do you see inside of the box?
• 27:34
  Chad Burmeister: Right? The sheets inside? Yeah.
• 27:39
  Chad Burmeister: So it's your sheet, you own the view? Right? actly. And so that's what that's what sales is really about? It's not, I'm going to sell you this real meaty sheep, or this middle looking kind of cruddy looking sheep, or this one
• 27:53
  Steve Brown: features and functions. It's
• 27:56
  Chad Burmeister: the vision that you have. What does that sheep look like? Why does it look that way? And truly understand a good one of the best sellers out there right now is Kenan who wrote the book gap selling. And he talks about, okay, if you don't have the sheep, that's that particular way, then what's the gap? What's the impact? If you solve the gap? What's the impact if you don't solve the gap? And it's so simple? and 99% of sellers miss it? A lot of the time?
• 28:28
  Steve Brown: If Yeah, because they're waiting to pounce on the, the stated, obvious problem, but they're not waiting to explore and reveal what the real problem is that we're trying to solve here. And that real problem is going to involve some emotional insecurity about this decision. It's an illogical component of this whole thing.
• 28:56
  Steve Brown: So yeah, I've had sales where everything made sense. It's gonna save you money, do all this. And they still didn't decide. And it was like, what was illogical that I didn't realize that I needed to address, it could have been that there's too much at risk of my personal stock price here. If I make this decision to get off of the process we're doing and do a new one. And it could go sour, it could crash and then I'm going to lose all my stock value and look back. That's right.
• 29:35
  Chad Burmeister: Yeah, so interesting, interesting world we live in these days.
• 29:41
  Steve Brown: So there's a book made me I think one of the best books I ever read has like the worst title, but it's a great sales book. It's called conversations that win the complex sale by Peters. And it's a great by Eric Peterson and Tim rester. And it's an excellent book on how to start to hang out in the areas of that emotional part of the conversation where you figure those things out. How is Gail x.ai going to resolve my insecurities about this new world? We're walking into where it's a lot of remote selling a lot of LinkedIn, a lot of other where am I going to find these people other than just cold calling?
• 30:34
  Chad Burmeister: Well, Rob would had that question. And we I met with them early in 2020, when I could still get on an airplane.
• 30:44
  Chad Burmeister: Meet, meet live. So I was in Arizona, we went to lunch. And and he had the same question getting into the relationship with scale x, right? Hey, what is this AI? And, and then he thought, you know, if I hired to bdrs, to go do the work and make calls send emails? Well, the challenge is, I have to go first find them. This was a very tight market in Arizona, I have to train them up on my product. And then if in two to three months, like he's a good family, man, he doesn't want to fire people. And so he was like, This is not good. Like, why? I don't like that equation. Right. And he's been doing that for 2530 years of his life. So he said, When Chad when you came to me and through referral, and you said AI for sales? I don't know if it's gonna work or not. But what risk do I have? Well, his original signup with scale X was for a $500, a month product that does a lot of LinkedIn outreach.
• 31:47
  Chad Burmeister: And he said, I don't have to fire a person, it's just the contracts over. And so he just kind of looked at it like I'm using AI when I buy a book on Amazon and recommends me some other book to buy on top of it.
• 32:05
  Chad Burmeister: I served up AI when I go to Facebook, Amazon Alexa has AI built into it. So I'm using it in my personal life. Why would I not at least dip my toe into the proverbial water and try it. And that and then I and they said worst case scenario, he goes Chad, honestly, you look me in the eye, he goes, I could have I could have fired you and not felt bad about it. Because you're just a product technology company. You're not, you know, and you have 150 other customers. So it's not like hiring these two people. So I think, to me, that's, that's the uniqueness about AI for sales, you don't have to go and spend$100,000 on something, you can dip your toe in the water, use a$500 product to help you close a couple deals that are $30,000 deals, then use some of that investment and put it back into the larger AI rollout. Right, we look at it in three, three vectors kind of data, digital and dials. You got to buy the best gas in the tank so that your data, then you've got to do digital outreach, that could be through emails, social phone, commerce, sorry, phones, the last one, it could be paid ads, it could be a video message through Vidyard, or loom could be a message to an influencer in your social network and asking them for a meeting for you an introduction, and then doing the standard dial. So there's data to dials, and then all the digital outreach and in between, a lot of customers say, look, we'd need all the pipeline we can get. Let's start with everything. And then after a month or two, Let's peel off the channels that aren't getting us the results that we're looking for. There's other customers who say no, no, I want to start with one small piece of the equation and add from there. So don't think AI for sales is a boil the ocean approach. It doesn't have to be at all.
• 34:03
  Steve Brown: The question I have I made the mistake of signing up for an AI tool that followed up with natural language sounding emails. And you would set up an assistant, I called her and or whatever. And she would do the follow ups and it was like one off emails. But the problem was, I think the concept was excellent. But I didn't have enough contacts to really exploited at scale, like it was designed for this scale x allow for, you know, a smaller application with a small business person that maybe only has one salesperson.
• 34:49
  Chad Burmeister: Yeah, well, that that's where a lot of people start with the social outreach platform. It's, it's has a negative churn, which means for every 10 clients who sign up, we actually end up Getting 12 seats, the end of the, at the end of the trial subscription because they expand it to other people. So a individual user who's using LinkedIn navigator to build an advanced search, as long as there's more than let's say, 1000 people that come up in that advanced search, then yeah, you could automate the outreach, instead of copying and pasting from Word doc and sending the same message over and over and over again, you can do more of a mail merge kind of a concept through social just like you would with sales, laughter outreach in email, but now you can do the same thing for for social. So yeah, we had a customer. Just last week, Arjun, who was the former CMO of Papa John's pizza, called me. And he's like, Hey, can you talk? I was like, Oh, great, what's this gonna be about? And he said, I just got the meeting with one of the people in the world that is perfect for my product, I would never have known about him, he would never have known about me, if it wasn't for this platform, running in the background, and getting me hooked up with my ideal prospects.
• 36:08
  Steve Brown: So one of the problems I've seen, we work now clients get their act together online. And everyone approaches us on the marketing doorstep, what they really need to be addressing immediately or to kind of trick them into doing is really solidifying the sales compliment, you know, the marketing should be supporting and complimenting the sales process. What do you need to have in the follow up of your product? We would get people sales leads, we would get them people filling out form submissions, etc. But they wouldn't be following up on them because they didn't have the system in place to explain it properly. Talk to us a little bit about that.
• 36:51
  Chad Burmeister: Yeah, it's, it's interesting, because for the first three years of our existence, we're going on three years. 98% was outbound, right?
• 36:57
  Chad Burmeister: Hey, solve the outbound problem for us? Along the way, once we did an outbound program for someone, they were like, wow, you can do 10 dials against this outbound person who's never heard of us, send them four emails and send them three social connections. And oh, yeah, by the way, you could send a Vidyard message, an SMS message, you can do all that.
• 37:24
  Chad Burmeister: And then they came to us and said, well, could you do that for our inbound leads that we call these dormant leads that have just been sitting there, we gave them to the sales team, and they never never converted. So we've done at least a dozen projects like that one was with ringcentral. And they we've done about five after we did the first one, because it worked. It worked so amazing, right? They generate so many leads, and each reps only allowed to work 60 or 70 active opportunities at a given time. Well, that means all these other ones are just sitting there in the mq l bucket. And so when they went back and said, Hey, anything that's three months and older, three months to 12 months, we're going to run it through the scale x engine. And then they started moving it up, right, let's move it to two months old, let's move it to one month old.
• 38:11
  Chad Burmeister: So yeah, and honestly, we're into a new planning for 2021.
• 38:16
  Chad Burmeister: And we're planning to do the same thing for current customers client success. So hey, you can only handle 150 customers. Well, if you put AI on top, maybe now a single person could handle 300 or 500. Because we're going to automate a voicemail drop 60 days before the renewal, we're going to send an SMS a couple times where Hey, I thought about you this week. You know, you should check out this very cool webinar that's with one of our biggest customers. You can automate all of that. And yet, it looks like it's coming from the individual. Even a personalized video, we've started to dabble in automating video outreach and follow up
• 39:02
  Steve Brown: exactly, we use vid yarn. And so that's such a powerful tool brings you to the landing page, you have all these other offers.
• 39:09
  Chad Burmeister: Yes, big time.
• 39:09
  Chad Burmeister: So help help
• 39:11
  Steve Brown: those that are listening. I'm going to give you an example. And we have what's called the Quickstart Academy.
• 39:19
  Steve Brown: So everybody knows you can sign up and watch a video course to get to learn some knowledge.
• 39:22
  Steve Brown: That's where a lot of the world is going. We do more of a it's not a live group, but you you get to get coached by our team at the aspects of the things that are involved in that Quick Start. And I need to sell more of them now. Okay, so I want people to come and self purchase access to this Academy where they get personalized teaching from a group of coaches, if you will. Mm hmm. So help me envision help me imagine how you scale x Study I would fit into that problem or challenge that I want to solve?
• 40:06
  Chad Burmeister: Yeah, I always try to solve for the biggest impact at the lowest possible cost. Mm hmm. And so I've seen other companies and other sales leaders go in and say, hey, how big but that problem be? And will you pay me 10% of the savings and all that kind of fluffy sales? midship sales methodology? I'm dry, I guess there's the question I would ask is, who could be potential buyers? It's it's unlimited.
• 40:36
  Chad Burmeister: Right? There's any CEO and founder of any company size or Mark? Yeah. large audience.
• 40:39
  Chad Burmeister: Yeah. Yeah. So with LinkedIn, there's tons of groups that are out there. So one of the hacks is, you go find the right geography, the right title, the right company size. And then, and they're in a group that that matters, right? growth, growth hackers, or maybe they're part of certain groups or technologies, Salesforce user, group, whatever. And then when you build your campaign, inside of the social outreach tool, hey, because you're a vice president, or a founder or CEO.
• 41:16
  Chad Burmeister: And because you're in this group, so you're relevant. And it looks as if you personalized it. And by the way, you're you're doing emoji at the beginning, you're making it look human, you're not making it look automated. Instead of AI with the capitalized Apostrophe S, you're putting AI in a lowercase m, with no apostrophe. So it has to look as if you just short handed it. Because you're scaling yourself to be able to reach out to these folks. And I see you're in this group wanted to invite you to this VIP event that that and then give something of value, we're not going to be selling you anything. Just you know, you might like to attend this VIP event, for example, gotcha.
• 42:01
  Chad Burmeister: Well, I would automate social to the tune of 50 to 100 outreaches a day, then you do 50 to 100 emails a day to a similar group of people. And it's it's very personal, because it's got to have your title, where you're located, what group you're part of, and why you reached out. And it's give, give, give, then you might ask for a get it's not.
• 42:22
  Chad Burmeister: Hey, thanks for connecting with me, I'd like to meet with you.
• 42:25
  Chad Burmeister: So I could tell you all about this fancy program. And wrong answer. You've just got a bunch of OPT outs. So that'd be my first step is just using the social because it's so we're getting eight to 12% reply rates. You don't get an email or any other
• 42:40
  Steve Brown: channel. No, you don't. Right
• 42:42
  Chad Burmeister: then to again, keeping costs low. There's voicemail drop capability. One of the platforms we use is called drop cowboy. It's kind of a funny name. I think they're Utah based. Typically, we hide all this behind the scale x survey, right, exposing to you some of the little Excel. So at the start of COVID, we had a company that converted their entire production line over to masks. And they called me and said, Hey, can you help us? I said, Yeah, I just tried this new thing for myself. Let me let me show you how it works. So we dropped 1200 voicemails from Danielle, to Chief procurement officers of Fortune 2000s. And her voice was authentic. It's her. It's not contrived. It's Hey, it's Danielle calling. I'm with Bella canvas. And we are the number one provider of masks in the country. Amazon just ordered 100 million masks from us. The purpose of my call is to see if I can get five minutes with you to see Have you standardized on a mask company mask provider yet? Because I know it's going to be important to you. Here's my cell phone number. Right? She got five callbacks for every 50 that we dropped in an hour. She sold $10 million in masks. So if the product can hold up. That's the million dollar question for a lot of companies that we work with. They come to us we fast forward the tail of the tape.
• 44:12
  Chad Burmeister: Yeah. And so if the tail if you're not selling any of the programs without us, I'm not saying you're not right, I'm talking about right. I'm sure you are. If you're not, and we've had you know 30% of our customers come to us say hey, can you help us we need to figure out our outbound. But we do it really fast. We sold $10 million at Mass. Another company, another mass company six weeks later. Hey, we heard what you're doing with Bella, can you help us 29 meetings later, zero dollars in sales.
• 44:42
  Chad Burmeister: And Megan's like, Hey, we're going to need to cancel early.
• 44:48
  Chad Burmeister: Yeah, this doesn'twork. It's just just isn't working. Okay.
• 44:51
  Chad Burmeister: You don't have Danielle on your team. Yeah, that's the bottom line. It's the same process. So
• 45:00
  Steve Brown: Yeah, it was interesting. Danielle, she got all these job offers a couple of wedding invitations.
• 45:07
  Chad Burmeister: She's a superstar celebrity. Yeah, she was their PR person. And now she works for the company. So
• 45:13
  Steve Brown: love that. So what's a one question, Chad that I haven't asked that you wished I would have that you love to communicate to my audience,
• 45:23
  Chad Burmeister: you know, sales classes, the other company we launched. And if you're a university student, if you're a professor, we're giving away access to the platform at no cost. So we've had entire classes who come to us and say, Wow, we have 50 people in our sales school. And our you know, I was fired from my first job out of college and the sales role. And I was a badass in college. When I was selling stuff that I invented, I was more entrepreneurial minded. And then I got into corporate fortune 500 and failed. So my purpose of sales classes to give back to people after 25 years of learning. And now there's so many great sales people and trainers like yourself that have created amazing concepts. And we bring that to people at scale.
• 46:08
  Chad Burmeister: So it's Netflix for sales.
• 46:12
  Chad Burmeister: Basically, you go in you answer eight questions, and then it'll serve up which YouTube videos you should watch which classes you should take. It's it's a fully functioning LMS powered by a Netflix style algorithm.
• 46:26
  Steve Brown: I love that. Well, awesome. Ted, you're been an excellent guest. And I really appreciate you This is interesting. I thoroughly enjoyed it personally. What's the best way someone should reach out to you should they want to? They want to onboard scale x, or the sales class or not? Well,
• 46:47
  Chad Burmeister: the good news is, you know, we do have a team of about five sellers right now.
• 46:49
  Chad Burmeister: They're commission commission sellers and, and they've stayed with me for a long time. So they're, this stuff's jumping off the shelves, I guess, you can reach out to me personally, it's Chad at scale x.ai, SCA le x.ai. My calendar gets full two days out. But at three and beyond, it's usually pretty wide open. So I do still have one on one calls, whether you're interested in a $500 a month investment or $50,000 investment. I just care about seeing business people be successful. last story, I'll leave you with a bird flew into my chimney recently. And it never happened before. But someone had told me that when when you're in line with the world, that animals will actually behave differently. And this bird flew in as if it was trying to come like how does that happen? Right? There's mash that protects for that? Yeah. So it's a glass fireplace that it couldn't get out of. And so I went and I fried the bird, we got a big sheet and we took it out to the front door. And I asked someone you know, that coaches, entrepreneurs, I said, What do you think that represents? She said, you know, here's what I think it is. I think it's you work with entrepreneurs, you could either let them get themselves out of their own mess, and try to find the way out of the chimney. Or you can open the glass and help them get out. And that's what I enjoy doing is helping good people. Scale. Good businesses.
• 48:22
  Chad Burmeister: If you got a bad business, if you're bad person, yeah, probably not the right place.
• 48:25
  Chad Burmeister: Yeah. Not a good person, and you have a great business. Man, I love to help you get out of the chimney.
• 48:33
  Steve Brown: I love that. That's awesome story. So Chad, you've got a couple of books you can check out Chad's books on on Amazon. We've got AI for sales and sales hack. A new one coming out soon. And his podcast is AI per sales podcast on iTunes and all the places that you would find it
• 48:56
  Chad Burmeister: standing. Well, thank you for having me today, Steve. It's been a pleasure.
• 48:59
  Steve Brown: My pleasure. So thanks, Chad for being on the ROI, online podcast. That's a wrap. Thanks for listening to another fun episode of the ROI online podcast. For more, be sure to check out the show notes of this episode. And feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn where we can chat, and I can help direct you to the resources you're searching for. To learn more about how you can grow your business better. Be sure to pick up your copy of my book, The Golden toilet at surprise, that golden toilet.com I'm Steve Brown, and we'll see you next week on another fun episode of the ROI online podcast.