The evolution of artificial intelligence is now inevitable. Soon enough, it will find its way to more industries and even the trivial things we do every single day. What does it mean in the realm of sales? Derek Dombeck sits down with Chad Burmeister of BDR.ai about understanding and unlocking the immense power of today’s ever-evolving AI tools in sales conversations. Chad explains how to train AI to become more human-like when handling sales transactions and negotiations, cutting down costs for lower-level monotonous jobs. They also discuss how to maintain machine learning as ethical and socially responsible as possible, particularly in this fast-paced world.

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The Full Potential Of Artificial Intelligence With Chad Burmeister

I’ve got Chad Burmeister with us. This is a topic that is awesome for me because I am not technologically advanced at all, but there are so many new AI tools that are coming online and changing literally daily. Even somebody as ignorant as myself when it comes to tech, can utilize a lot of this stuff. Chad, thanks for giving us some of your time. If you wouldn’t mind, tell everybody a little bit about yourself.

Great to be here. I was born in Madison, Wisconsin. That’s the first point that probably puts me in the plus column for readers of the show. I will tell you, I’m in Denver, Colorado. That might put me in the minus, maybe. We’ll be neutral on the show. My dad went to UW Wisconsin. I still have a lot of family that’s back in Wisconsin. A great place, especially if you love the cold in the winter.

I, myself, is an avid skier since I was five. My son’s a snowboarder. My daughter skis. My wife skis. We’re a ski family. I’ve been in and around AI for years since I started the business. It’s called BDR.ai. For those that don’t know, BDR stands for Business Development Representative. In technology, I’ve lived in the Bay Area, San Francisco, SoCal, NorCal, Arizona, and as well as North Carolina.

Most people that are in the tech world know of a BDR. It’s a discreet individual person whose job it is to build pipelines and book meetings for the salespeople that they support. We created BDR.ai to be an AI or automation to help book pipelines and meetings for salespeople without the need for the full-time quota carrying $7,000 a month resource. That’s what I’ve been doing for years. I learned a few things along the way.

Were you in sales before? What led you up to the start of this business years ago?

I’ve been in sales since I was probably ten years old, riding the bus to school in the morning. I’d buy a gross of suckers. We probably paid a nickel each, and we sold them for a quarter each. I’ve always been in the art of sales. Over the years, I’ve had teams of a hundred or more salespeople, then smaller teams in that, and done sales myself on an individual basis as well. Anything and everything. I’ve always loved sales. I’ve always been ahead of the curve when it comes to technologies, processes, and ways to attract customers.

 

Benefits Of AI Tools 

Specifically to my niche, real estate investing. Not that this has to be about real estate investing, but where do you see AI being helpful in as a sales tool? I’m a little old school. I like to be at the kitchen table across from the person I’m interacting with or negotiating with. From what I’m hearing, and I’m coming at you from a place of infancy in the AI world. What can AI do to help me? Is it lining up that appointment?

I have some customers that are in the investment real estate space. There’s a gentleman in Florida that comes to mind. He approached us and said, “I need to meet with people in family offices. How do I approach them?” That was one of our first projects. It was pulling a list of people who are in family offices.

The very first part where AI can come in is, “Who do we need to reach?” A family office could have a dozen or two dozen different titles. Who’s the right title? You go to ChatGPT and pop open a prompt. Who within a family office should we reach out to regarding investing in real estate? A list of seven different titles popped out. I’m like, “I wouldn’t have thought of that. I’m new to the family office space. Perfect.”

You could jump over to your data tool, copy and paste those seven titles, and say, “I want a list of people in Florida that are family offices, maybe a million dollars to $50 million in revenue. Go pull me that list.” You’ve got your list of hundreds, if not thousands, of people, then you go jump over to your BDR.ai tool that does LinkedIn outreach.

You schedule a pre-configured connection request, “Looking to connect with you. I’ve been doing for 38 years in the process of helping raise debt equity, capital raise, and a number of different ways that we help investors raise or help people raise money. Would it make sense? Let’s connect on LinkedIn?” They wait 2 or 3 days and send the next message, “Glad to be connected. Did you see this article in the Wall Street Journal?” It’s an education.

Something that you might want to send to an investor. “Check this out. You’re a family office thought you might be interested in this. It might not have anything to do with the product or the company, but it’s just something of value.” I’ve walked you through how you start, and who I want to reach, then here’s the list of people I need to reach, and you start with the LinkedIn campaign. Within four days, he got three potential projects. Two of which are multi-million dollar projects. He’s like, “Chad, this is awesome.” Now he wants to meet with me once a week to help him configure new campaigns all the time.

I have so many more questions now, Chad.

I figured that might happen.

 

BDR.ai

That’s the whole goal of me hosting this show. It’s very self-serving and it’s fantastic, but it helps the readers at the same time. BDR.ai, your company, your solutions company. Is that like using a LinkedIn campaign? That’s one small segment of what you do. What else does BDR.ai do?

There are three parts to a program. There’s the data, underlying data, then there’s digital outreach. It could be through LinkedIn, Facebook, or any other social media channel. There’s dialing. If those other channels don’t work, then we might need to call the person. Data digital dials are the three areas that the company focuses on.

That was a great story about that guy wanting to deal with family offices. What am I missing? What else can it do? I’m not asking a specific question.

We talked about it on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, you can only connect with 25 new people a day. That’s the throttle limit that LinkedIn allows you to do. Over a month, that’s 500 people. That’s a pretty fair-sized list. The way that the LinkedIn AI works, it’s a connection request, then there might be a like of their three posts, and all that can be automated.

We follow their profile, that’s automated. When someone replies, so let’s say this investor or family office representative replies, then it’s incumbent on the rep. You or someone on your team would go in and handle the reply from there. This is more an opener tool than a closer one. The fake AI we launched weeks ago. It’s fully powered by ChatGPT.

It not only opens the conversation, but it also has the conversation. We program the AI to have 1 of 3 different outcomes. Maybe we want to say, “Let’s try to offer downloading a white paper. Second, let’s offer the $99-a-month subscription to our show or service or whatever. Third, we’re having a cruise ship in February. Let’s see if we can have the AI sell $997 cruise ship attendee.”

It’s powerful because now you point. The Facebook AI gets pointed at groups. You go and you say, “Let’s look at real estate investing groups in Green Bay.” I’ll bet you there are ten of them. You can be very focused and pointed to say, “I noticed you joined the Green Bay Wisconsin real estate investor group.” Now you’re training the AI to say, “When did you first become interested in real estate investing?” Once the fish gets on the line, now the chatbot has the entire conversation.

All we’ve done is train it. I’ve been told that it’s more human than human because you can teach the AI to say, “Misspell a word once every two sentences,” for example. “Speak like a 10th grader.” You can make the AI behave in whatever way you want it to. If we do 100 outreaches a day, maybe only 10 or 12 people get on to engage in conversation with the bot.

I did this for Patriot Mobile. They’re a cell phone provider. They’re the only Christian mobile provider in the country. They said, “We would like to test it, but we don’t want to sign up yet. Can you show us what this does?” Within the first morning, I had at least ten dialogues going back and forth. These were business owners, because I pointed the AI at business owners and entrepreneurs. We knew they had at least 100 employees.

We’re not just going to sell a single phone plan for $50 a month. We’re going to try to get the whole hundred or more employees. We opened up the dialogue, and within two days, I sent this enterprise salesperson 10 or 15, “This one’s warmed up. They’re ready for a conversation.” Facebook AI, if I fast forward to where things are going, that’s what you’re going to start to see, much more AI-powered chatbots that become extremely intelligent and have the ability to have full conversations from start to finish.

That’s the part that’s obviously scary and threatening all at the same time because humans won’t even be interacting at all in the near future. That’s neither here nor there for the purposes of this discussion.

I had a conversation with the CEO of a tech company that uses AI to listen to sales conversations and then surface the upsell opportunities. They plug into a tool called Gainsight. Gainsight is the number one when it comes to customer success for tech companies. Imagine you have gigabytes of data. In the past, the rep forgets something or misses it because they’re new to the business. Now the AI is able to listen to it, serve it up, and then a human does the follow-up.

I believe that this AI, the low-level person that was doing this chat, from $8 an hour job or $2 from the Philippines. That may be at risk. I look at this technology as augmented intelligence as opposed to artificial. At some point, a human’s got to get involved. AI can’t build rapport and trust. They can’t even look in the eye. I do believe that AI will first maybe disrupt some of the lower-level monotonous jobs. When it comes to a salesperson, I don’t see a whole lot of risk there anytime soon.

At some point, humans need to get involved in artificial intelligence. Even though it may disrupt some lower-level monotonous jobs, AI cannot build rapport and trust. Share on X

Responsible AI Movement

I’ve said that because I teach a negotiation training workshop. We had this discussion, and I said, “For me, my belief is I can outsell or out-negotiate about everybody I know because, on the phone or in-person, across the kitchen table, I can feel. I can read somebody’s body language, their emotions, the tear in the corner of their eye. I don’t see AI being able to ever do that.” Never say never, but that would be interesting to see an AI tool that could pick up on the twitch of somebody’s eye as they’re holding back tears.

I learned this from a 25-year veteran of AI. He said that most of the money in the world is being spent on statistical AI. Statistical is one of these kids is doing his own thing. Let’s find the zero amongst all the packs of ones, for example. Underneath the hood, it’s all based on statistical analysis very fast. Where we’re headed, his prediction is that once all the money moves towards cognitive AI, where the AI is smart, not just statistical. It’ll take five years from the time you shoot the starting gun.

It’ll take a good five years to get to the point where it’s smart. Now, Chris Wright is the Founder of the AI Trust Council. He believes that a lot of this cognitive AI has already been invested in by different people in the world. Different governments and other third-party companies. He likens where AI will be headed as a human to an ant as AI is to a human. We as a human race need to be extremely careful because, very quickly, the learning curve of the AI is moving up and to the right faster than you can imagine.

We’ve got to put in code like the US Constitution built into the AI code to protect human rights. Otherwise, it’ll be very easily optimized for pure profit, and not worry about anybody else. There are some definite concerns. The positive that I’m seeing is this term called responsible AI. That came about recently. Now there’s a whole group of people who are focused on how we deploy responsible AI. It’s moving fast.

Which makes great sense. My fear with that is you start talking about regulations and government agencies and stuff getting involved. They always put legislation in place to help, but the unintended consequences or intended consequences depending on your beliefs. Usually end up hurting the people that they supposedly were trying to help to begin with. I love the responsible AI movement. I would be very interested to see how that works out because there’s always the greed factor that comes in and money starts flowing. Pretty soon, the responsible part goes by the wayside. I hope not.

Now, on your point of negotiation, I’m taking a communications course and I’m about six months in. It’s a master practitioner who has 35 years of linguistics and NLP. She teaches it. Being able to understand if the person is using audio, visual, and kinesthetic types of words. Knowing Gen AI, I was like, “Susan, you gave me three pages of words to describe someone that’s visual. How am I going to know that? This is too hard.”

I copied and pasted all those words into Gen AI, into ChatGPT, then I exported a webinar that I did for 45 minutes. I said, “Find all the visual-like words.” It surfaced them, and it was like, “Here it is.” “Show me what percentage is visual, auditory, and kinesthetic.” It’s able to tell me that. Imagine a time when you’re on a Zoom and you’ve got a little sidecar over there that says, “Chad, slow down. You’re not pacing and matching the other person on the other side of the phone. Speed up. Raise your voice. Use kinesthetic audio or visual words in your language.”

The power of automation could give someone who’s not to the level that you are. A new superpower to bring them more quickly up to speed on how to communicate. Where I have a fear is now that I’ve trained the human to read the sidecar. What happens when it’s undetectable that you’re talking to an AI and with the visual? The fake Chad is powered by this intelligence from Susan. That’s going to be a scary time.

Starting With AI

That’s the part where, for me, getting face to face with people. Not virtually, but shaking their hands and talking with them. I don’t know that you can ever replace that. Many years ago, I would have never predicted that I’d be running the business that I do now the way I do now. Lord only knows. This stuff is fascinating. We know it changes by the minute. Where does somebody start? If somebody’s coming in and they have no experience with AI whatsoever, maybe they’ve been on chat a couple of times. What’s the starting point for a business owner that wants?

There’s a lot of great newsletters out there. We run our show; it’s called AI for Sales. A new episode comes out every two weeks. It goes back a good five years. You could randomly pick one from four years ago or five years ago, then stay up to speed. We also have a newsletter on LinkedIn that goes out every Saturday. It points to the most recent episode. It uses AI to pick out the salient points. That’s our stuff. There are conferences now that are being put on for two days. There are newsletters and aggregators. One is called Ben’s Bites, if I remember right, because I see that every day.

It’s good to have in your inbox. Sign up for two or three of these different newsletters and skim it. Whether you read the whole thing or not, stay on top of it, just the headlines. What I will say is most technologies now, when you buy any software, it’s going to have AI under the hood. The good news is, you don’t have to go out and be an expert. Whether you’re an early adopter or a late majority. It doesn’t matter where you are on that. You’re going to get AI, and it’s going to be consumable and easy to use the further we get down the path.

Whether you are an early tech adopter or a later majority, you will get AI. It will be consumable and easy to use the further you get down the path. Share on X

That’s the part where every time I switch phones or update phones, it frustrates me for about six weeks until I get used to it. Weeks later, you don’t know how you live without it. That’s me being non-techy. I can embrace it. I’m seeing what my staff is doing with AI already, which is a drop in the bucket. What do you have available? I know that you have a solution service. What do you offer for people that are more like me? I want to step on the shoulders of a giant and have an expert just start to do it. What does that look like?

The good news for us is that my son graduates from Colorado School of Mines in May. By the time this episode airs, he may have graduated. He’s already been working with customers. He’s bringing over a colleague of his who’s also from the Colorado School of Mines. It’s nice when you’ve got someone who has four years of AI-related experience in computer information science because a lot of what we’ve done for years now, as I said, it starts with data. Who am I reaching out to, then the digital outreach, and which social channel is the best fit for that market? Any or all of the above, then dials.

We offer software and services anywhere from do-it-yourself and we’ll teach you how to do it at the lowest cost to done with you or completely outsource done for you. Packages start as low as a couple of hundred bucks a month. You can use AI to do outreach to sign up new customers very quickly and very easily. I believe that as people like Brendan and Kyle come into the business, the things they’ve seen for the last four years in their college and have been using daily are going to be a huge benefit to the customers that we serve.

Net Job Creator Vs Net Job Destructor

Chad, what’s a question I should be asking you that I’m not? By the way, I do this on almost every show because it’s easy for me to jam with you and think of things, but I don’t know what I don’t know.

The one question I was asked on a Newsmax or one of those shows, Ticker Tape, is what it was months ago. They said, “Will this be a net job creator or a net job destructor?” I didn’t necessarily know the answer, so I went out and researched it. The overall consensus is that over the next 5 to 10 years, there’s going to be 100 million jobs worldwide lost from AI.

I’m going to leave it there for a second because that’s 100 million out of the 3 billion jobs. It’s substantial. You could feel it. If you were the head of the world labor force and you lost a hundred million jobs but here’s the kicker. There are 80 million to 90 million added jobs that are directly attributable to AI. We’re talking 10 million gap across 3.2 billion labor force workers in the world. That’s a rounding error. What that means for all of us is amazing things because productivity goes up and the monotonous jobs go down.

People are afraid of the elephant in the room, what’s it going to mean? I’ll give you one other example from my conversation. She said, “When algorithms came out for investing, which stock should I pick?” You would have thought that would be the end of the world for investment advisors. She goes, “No, it’s flourished. There are more investment advisors now than there ever have been.”

A lot of times, we as humans look at the downside of technologies like this, “A calculator’s coming out or the pharma equipment’s coming out. This is terrible. What about all those people that we have in the field that are doing such awesome work? Do they want to be in the field doing such awesome work? Probably not. They’d rather be behind a tractor or driving the tractor with an AI.” That’s the positive of all of this, I believe. It’s a net positive impact. Maybe we can get to that four-day workweek that everybody’s talked about for 100 years someday. We’ll see.

I wouldn’t bet on it because, like most people, even if they could get to a four-day workweek, they would probably go spend more money and have to take on a second job.

That one extra day could mean one more bot gets programmed, or I launch another company. There’s always more to do, isn’t there?

There is. When you’re entrepreneurial, we take it on regardless because that’s what we do, most of us anyway. I can’t tell you, Chad, this is very intriguing to me. Again, I don’t have a lot of experience with it. I’m starting to see it within my staff, and for you to take the time to explain this, we were talking before we started recording that I could probably have you on every month. We’d have completely new stories to talk about because stuff is changing so quickly. That’s maybe something that we should probably plan to do.

Trolley Car Dilemma

We could do a quarterly update or something. The last thing I want to tell your readers is this thing called the trolley car dilemma. What that means is, imagine you’re the conductor of a train. It’s going down the tracks, and it splits into two. It can’t stop. You have to choose right or left. On the right side, there are four people in orange jumpsuits in a chain gang. On the left side, there’s an individual person. Think about this related to AI.

Whoever’s programming the AI, if that’s a human, they’re going to make a decision based on all of the learnings they’ve had over their lifetime. An ethical and moral decision. Let’s say, the one person on the left is your son or daughter. Does that change the equation? Now they’re graduating. They have a cap and gown on. Does that change the equation?

Whoever’s programming the AI, they have to make decisions based on the ethical and moral learnings they have had over their lifetime. Share on X

There’s so much variability that needs to be programmed into the decision-making of the AI that I want anyone who’s talking about this to think about the ethical implications and who gets to insert the code. Is it the US Constitution? Is it the Bible? Is it another religion from another place around the world? Those are very important questions as this continues to go forward. I want people to talk about that very important topic.

You just hit on a point that we’ve touched on throughout the conversation, but the moral and ethical responsibility of AI could be used for a lot of bad stuff. People that have no morals or ethics. Even in my own experience now, you can tell when an email response is generated by chat and they didn’t go and put anything personal into it. People are starting to get almost a negative connotation when you’re saying, “That Facebook post that was done on chat.” The tone in their voice and everything else.

You even talked about LinkedIn, and inside of my head, I got a little bit like, “Am I talking to a human when I’m having these interactions or am I not? I don’t have a problem with talking to a bot. If everybody’s moving forward, the agenda is moving forward, and it’s a place that benefits all of us. That’s great.

You should probably expose that you’re talking to a bot. If you’re the seller, then you can call it a virtual assistant so that you’re not acting like you’re a real person when it’s a bot. There are certain best practices that are going to be important as well, for sure.

I do, too. You and I both know there is a certain percentage of the population that will lie, steal, and cheat no matter what. This is another way for them to lie, steal, and cheat. I love the fact that you’ve got the show out there. You’re pushing the ethical and moral route with this. If anybody wants to get in touch with you as far as what you have to offer, they can go to TheGenerationsOfWealth.com/ChadBurmeister. Again, Chad, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate you.

Thanks for having me on the show.

Until the next episode, we appreciate everybody reading. Please like, share, and get people involved into Generations of Wealth. Go to Facebook, join the Generations of Wealth Facebook Group, and interact there. Until next time, go out and live your vision. Love your life.

 

Important Links

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About Chad Burmeister

Chad Burmeister is an entrepreneur, an author, and a sales expert, Founder of BDR.ai and Director of Sales for Data Integration and Data Governance at Informatica, the leader in AI for Data. He’s also the host of the AI for Sales Podcast, sharing insights on AI integration in sales. Beyond business, Chad hosts the YOU MATTER To Christ Podcast, blending faith and business, and contributes to Ignite Christian Business, underscoring his dedication to spiritual growth.