“A powerful leader is someone who leads from the front and does not manage with an iron fist. Understanding yourself is the first key to great leadership – how can you lead others if you do not understand yourself to the core of who you are,” believes Chad Burmesiter, the Founder & CEO of ScaleX.ai.
Chad has a successful career in building high-velocity sales teams at companies including Cisco-WebEx, Riverbed Technology, ON24, ConnectAndSell, and RingCentral. He was the Founding Chapter President of the AA-ISP Silicon Valley Chapter which was voted two years in a row as “Chapter of the Year”, Director of AA-ISP Frontline Friday, and Colorado Chapter President to help advance the profession of inside sales to the next level of professionalism and performance.
Chad is currently on the team who launched the Denver Enterprise Sales Forum. He has been voted Top 25 Most Influential Inside Sales Professional by the AA-ISP 10 years in a row (2010-2019).
Chad is also the author of two books called SalesHack and more recently ScaleX.ai, Multi-Channel Sales Acceleration, Powered by Artificial Intelligence.
In an interview with Insights Success, he shares some valuable insights of his journey and how he continues to be at the forefront of inside sales and high velocity selling strategy and execution.
Below are the highlights of the interview:
Brief us about your journey and tell us why and how you chose to venture into your respective industry.
As a child, I was very interested in magic. When I could show an audience a magic trick, or even in a one-on-one setting, the pure joy and amazement of the other person was a real thrill to me. I was also extremely competitive. When asked, “do you hate to lose, or love to win?” the answer is both for me. I guess I started selling when I was under 10 years old because I would sell suckers on the bus to school. I became sure that sales was for me while studying abroad in New Zealand. In a marketing class at Lincoln University in Canterbury, I came across this page which led me down the path of sales.
Please describe in brief about your company and its services/products.
ScaleX is the leading provider of Pipeline as a Service. Since launching in December 2017, ScaleX continues to double every year – thanks to our team of Pipeline as a Service Experts including sales, marketing, operations, and client success.
What were the challenges you came across in your career as a business leader?
Understanding your why is the first key to becoming a great leader. As Robert White, author of Living an Extraordinary Life, asks, “What is the purpose of you?” and “Why are you here on earth”? For John Denver, after a four-day workshop with ARC International, he came up with these lines – I am a song! I live to be sung! I sing with all my heart! As a leader, we need to connect with our purpose and when we do – the hand of God comes into play and can become an unstoppable force of change for you and others.
What unique ideas have you implemented as a leader of your company that makes it different from competitors?
ScaleX.ai lives at the bleeding edge of technology. While other companies find a niche, and stick with it, the world changes. And these niches get exposed to competition, and the effectiveness of the “magic trick” goes away, because everyone else learns how to perform the same “magic”. What worked in 2017, does not work as well in 2020. An example – ScaleX Introductions uses AI to determine who the influencers are in your network that could make valuable introductions on your behalf to your top prospects. With AI, this exercise takes 8-12 minutes on a network of 10,000+ connections. A human would take months to perform this task (especially when you look at 2nd connections on LinkedIn – for every 10,000 first connections, a person usually has 1M or more second connections). Emailing influencers to introductions yields 70-80% open rates, and 10-30% reply rates. Add video, and watch out, even better yield.
What is your take on a positive work culture within a team or an organization and how do you bring positive work culture within your organization?
I am lucky, my parents must have done something right, because I look at the world as a cup overflowing with possibilities. So generally, I’m a positive person to be around in the virtual world of selling that we live in today. I tend to look for positives in people, and align them in a role that they can thrive in. When there isn’t a fit, rather than prolong the bad situation as many leaders would do, I’ve gotten better at identifying the issue early and “failing fast”. What used to take me six months to a year, I can now identify in 1-2 months, or better yet, before they are hired – by leveraging partners like Score More Sales and their sales profiler tools and methods.
How do you keep up to date about the technological advancements and changing market trends in your industry?
We invent the change, and we live it for and with our clients.
How do you strategize on scaling your career and your company in the future?
Remember Robert White’s advice on discovering the purpose of you, mine goes something like this – there are 86,400 seconds in a day, invest them wisely!
What would your advice be to the aspiring entrepreneurs and business leaders of tomorrow?
Find mentors – a few of them. Perhaps a financial mentor, a marketing mentor, and most important, a mindset mentor!