Rick Cheatham

I’m Rick Cheatham, and I help leaders with two things, in equal depth: how revenue teams win, and how whole companies get their people building with AI, not just using it. The biggest opportunity is where the two meet, now that AI has made “more” meaningless. More leads. More content. More dashboards. All easy. What’s hard, and what moves the numbers, is building better systems: sharper focus, faster execution, and deeper human connection.

Go-to-market

My work connects big-picture strategy to everyday execution. I push teams to drop outdated playbooks, turn strategy into clear choices, and practice until new habits stick. The result is more revenue from the team we already have, stronger customer relationships, and a forecast leadership can believe.

Before BTS, I spent 11 years at Avery Dennison, where I led the sales force of a $1B business unit through a restructuring and a shift in how it sold. At BTS, I built our sales and marketing practice from nothing to more than 20 consultants, then ran marketing as global CMO from 2019 to 2024.

Applied AI

I was one of the founding leaders of BTS’s Applied AI team, and I manage our client-facing partnership with Anthropic. We skip the months of readiness assessment and start with a real team on day one, hands on keyboard, executives included. People learn to work with AI, then build agents for their own workflows in the same engagement, so the skill stays after we leave. Leaders learn when to hand AI a task and when to think a problem through with it. We work with clients across all models, but our deep partnership is with Anthropic.

Where they meet

This is most of my work now: revenue teams redesigning how they find, win and grow customers when part of the work is done by AI. Sellers rehearse the hard conversation with an AI practice partner before they face areal buying group, and marketing, revenue operations and customer success fix the handoffs between them inside the tools they already use, from the CRM to their AI assistant.

I’ve partnered with executives at Google, J.P. Morgan, Cargill, Anthropic and others to diagnose what’s holding them back, scale real practice with simulations and AI practice bots, and align culture with strategy so teams adapt as circumstances change. We rebuilt new-advisor onboarding with a global financial services firm. Time to quota dropped by more than 30%. At a global services company, we put the five functions that touch every major RFP response in one room for a day. They found where the work waits and where handoffs break, and each function left with agent prototypes built that day. I know my clients don’t need someone to tell them about their markets. They need fresh perspective, the courage to challenge old habits, and systems that work under pressure.

I’ve been a sales leader and a CMO, so I take this work personally. The teams I work with usually know where they want to go. What they can’t always see is the path, especially when it runs straight through the habits they’re proudest of.

I’m based in Austin, Texas. Outside work, I’m usually training, outdoors or with my family, ideally all three, with Buck, our Bernese Mountain Dog, along for most of it.

Focus areas: Go-to-market strategy, sales transformation, AI adoption in revenue teams and across the business, AI fluency for leaders, business simulation

Industry expertise: Manufacturing,technology, insurance, financial services

Works with: Go-to-market leaders at every level, from the CRO and CMO to frontline managers

Also works with: Strategy, HR, L&D and line-of-business leaders rolling out AI

Experience:

Partner, Applied AI | Go-to-market, BTS · October 2024 to present

CMO, BTS · August 2019 to October 2024

Senior Vice President - Head of Sales and Marketing, COE, BTS · October 2006 to August 2019

Senior Sales Leader, Avery Dennison · 1995 to 2006

Clients include: Google, J.P. Morgan, Cargill, Anthropic (also our biggest AI partner)

Applied AI: Founding leader of BTS’s applied AI team;manages BTS’s client-facing partnership with Anthropic

Author: Selling Vision: The X→XY→Y Formula for Driving Results by Selling Change (McGraw-Hill,2016)

Podcast host: Fearless Thinkers, BTS