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Welcome to Inside the Win. We’ll break down real world wins, showing you exactly how strategic partnership with our experts empowers you to tackle your most ambitious opportunities with confidence. Let’s jump in.
Well, hey, everybody. Welcome to another for another episode of Inside the Win.
Yeah, I’m wonderful as always, man. Busy, busy, busy. I love doing these kind of videos. It shows our advisors out in the world that not all deals are monsters, not all deals are easy, and not all deals are deals, right? Some of these just take some time.
Yeah, and actually perfect segue to this one, right? Because let’s talk about this. You guys, you got engaged with a large legal firm through one of our tech advisors. They brought it in and this started out like you said, there wasn’t a deal here right away. This was more just conversation. So talk a little bit about how the engagement started.
Yeah, I think, I mean, the engagement started where there was a bit of a relationship from calling in state of the business, how can we help or whatnot, but engineering really wasn’t engaged. Eventually the partner engaged engineering and got us on a call and we really spoke about the value of the indirect disti channel versus the direct disti channel. The comeback to the customer for months was always, why wouldn’t I just buy direct? Why would I buy from you? I don’t understand the value. It took some time to get them to understand that we’re not here selling things.
We’re in here trying to help create business outcome. Once they realize that after Graeme, I wanna say seven, maybe nine months of biweekly calls, just chit chatting with them, trying to build credibility, they finally gave us a shot at a quote.
Yeah. And that the shot of the quote wasn’t anything remarkable really. Like, right? It was a single site cable circuit. They said, finally, all right, guys, let’s try this out. Let’s see how this works. They gave you a shot.
Dude, it was borderline offensive.
Nine months of hour long calls for here, I’m gonna give you a shot at one hundred and forty dollars circuit. I was like, come on. Hey, we gotta do what we gotta do, right? So that was that was the initial. Yes, let’s do it. And we got it done, we got it quick, we got it turned up, no problems, everything just went easy.
And that’s really kind of what opened their eyes to, hey, maybe this whole indirect channel, maybe this thing’s got some legs.
So, you guys come in there, you finally get a shot after nine months of meetings and I think probably somewhere along the line, you were probably saying, hey, it’s time to cut some bait here, right? We’re not getting anywhere but they save it. They send out the cable circuit. You guys do it. You execute it flawlessly. Flawlessly, then what happened?
Yeah, I probably said the word to the agent, we got to punch this customer probably ten times, right? But then what happened is that first little deal just went smooth and easy for these guys, right? Internal IT really didn’t have to do anything. Was like, wow, this was kind of easy.
And now I’ve got problem children all over the country, right? They had multiple locations everywhere and it was a lot of the calls were were like complaint calls. I can’t see this location. I can’t see circuits at that location.
I can’t see my contracts. My accounts payable girls are are they’re paying bills and we don’t even know why. We we we don’t even have like contract management in place, right? We need to get our hands around what are we spending and why.
And that started another evolution of conversation around your contract management, your telecom expense management, your mobility expense management, your technology spend management. So we said, let’s bring in one of our suppliers and do a demo of their solution that will show you every division, what they’re spending, where their contracts are at, what’s next, make sure that things aren’t auto renewing. Let’s just get our hands wrapped around so we can see where our money is going. So we brought in one of our suppliers for that. And that went slick, but they didn’t buy it yet.
What it did is it opened their eyes to, oh my god, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And then it was a, you know what, why don’t we collate all these locations? Why don’t we bring them all into one network aggregator instead of I’m gonna have circuits from this company over here and that one over there and this one over here and I got a hundred and something locations, right? Why don’t we bring it into one aggregator that’ll give you network operations center as a service, give you visibility to everything, get your hands wrapped around at least circuits and transport, and then let’s bring in expense management. But let’s get our hands wrapped around management, right? So we brought in one of our great network aggregators full network aggregation, and it’s clockwork. Every month there’s another ten, twelve circuits.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, all managed, all clean, all done, no problems, no visibility issues, everything’s clean and smooth and now they just keep, it’s like every month it’s just another project on top of another project on top of another project which literally started one hundred and forty dollars a month circuit and now we’re at I think over two hundred thousand dollars a month in mrr it’s incredible and we’re nowhere near done nowhere near done these guys literally the ceo and the cio has literally told their entire it team every nickel you spend must go through this agent.
Well, love that. And know, I think what really impressed me about this one, Josh, is the strategy, right? I mean, I think the tendency would be, hey, we just had a successful install with a cable circuit. Let’s rinse and repeat.
Like, give me all of those you can. Let’s keep going up. But you guys didn’t do that. You pivoted to another solution to really kind of take stock of what was going on in the organization.
And even though they didn’t bite on that right away, right? It opened their eyes to everything that was going on and all the shadow IT issues they had, all of the things that were happening within their organization that they didn’t know.
And again, gave the agent, the TA, the credibility that, hey, look, all this stuff we’ve been talking about for nine months, the proof is now in the pudding.
Yeah, and it’s funny when we brought in the technology expense management platform and showed that portal, they demoed it and then they kind of ran a little test, a little proof right in their own environment. And the customer literally said, I don’t have shadow IT. I don’t have SaaS apps that my lawyers are downloading without IT approval. I don’t have any of that stuff.
Well, ran a test and we found over three thousand applications that lawyers are just downloading on their phones, paying a subscription model, expensing it back into accounts payable. Like nobody knows anything, And now, now they can see everything. Now everything is just easy and seamless. So yeah, we could have just kept selling them circuits and the value, yeah, there’s a value in that is right.
We’re doing it quicker. We’re doing it easier. We’re doing it smoother than the other people.
But that wasn’t really the true business impact. The real true business impact was I’m blind in my organization and I can’t continue to do this. It’s absolute chaos. So we cleaned up the chaos. And now we’re getting everything.
Yeah, yeah, I love that. Great story and of course, one hundred and thirty six a month out of the gate, now over two hundred thousand dollars and more coming, Lots more in the funnel. We’ve got a very happy TA on this and most importantly, a very happy customer that has solved their problems, got the business outcomes they wanted. So good stuff. Last word on this one for you, Haas. What would your piece of advice be to the TAs listening to this as they come into these kinds of opportunities?
I would say there’s a difference between persistence and pestering. You don’t want to just call a customer over and over and over and over with no value, no ideas, nothing to bring to the table except for buy stuff from me.
So the agent’s persistence of just nice, clean, smooth conversations without being pushy, yes, it took time, but the juice is worth the squeeze in this case, right? Now that that CIO and that CEO has told their entire IT team, anything you think about buying, you run through this agency first, give them first crack at it. Graeme, we’re getting weird stuff now. Like we’re working on an opportunity right now. It’s one hundred and eleven thousand dollars in MRR, and you’ll never believe what it’s for.
It’s not tech. It’s not a blinky light. It’s not a circuit. It’s not a router. It’s not what I do. It’s not SD WAN cybersecurity.
It’s a business process outsourcer to handle their direct mail campaigns. Literally.
I need people to stuff envelopes and send out. I need a BPO to do this. Graeme, this is, it’s one hundred eleven, one hundred and ten thousand in MRR a because the team said everything goes through that agent. And the agent came in and said, do we even do this? And the answer was, I don’t really know. So I reached out to one of our BPOs and they said, absolutely, we can knock that down.
We did something. They’re bringing everything, including cleaning the carpet and taking out the garbage. They’re bringing everything to us now.
Fantastic. Great story. Well, thanks, Sohos. That’s a good one. Think hopefully people can take something away from that. And we appreciate everybody tuning in for this, another episode of Inside the Wind. Stay tuned.
Plenty more to come in the future. We’ll see you soon. Happy selling.