Ep.154-Why Expense Management is the Simple Lead-in for Complex Solutions- with Jared Parker
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Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus and this is Next Level BizTech. Everybody welcome back. We’re on with a new topic for you this week. We’re talking about why is expense management a simple lead in for complex solutions. A lot to unpack there. On with us today, we’ve got Mr. Jared Parker, Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships and Marketing at One Source. Jared, welcome on, man.
Thanks, Josh. Thanks for having me on board. Looking forward to unpacking this a bit with you and seeing where it goes.
I love it. We got a lot to get to. But first, let’s start with you. Tell us just your story, how you got into this field, where you started windy, you know, anything embarrassing, funny, serious, all all are accepted.
Yeah, so I think what’s interesting with my story is that it’s probably not that dissimilar to anybody else’s is I had no idea that I would ever end up working in this industry doing what I’m doing specifically. So from a young age, wanted to be a doctor, wanted to follow in some family footsteps on the medical side, got to college, realized that wasn’t for me, actually did computer programming. So computer science, thought I’d just come out and do some programming first job out of college sales role at Bell South back in 2002. So cut my teeth on dial tone and the old frame relay ATM networks of the day. And that’s where the journey started. And it’s funny, like a lot of people probably tried to get out of it about 10 times. And every time I came right back to it. So it’s really been an interesting journey. And then what’s funny is as that sales journey went on, I had a successful sales career, it just didn’t really inspire me the same way that the aspects of building and growing and seeing an organization expand their revenue reach. And that led through some decisions that I made over time to go back to school, try different roles, try different things. I’ve been on the customer side, I’ve been on the seller side, I’ve been on the agent side, I’ve been on the VAR side. So I got to try a lot of different things. And now here I am at one source, building out a go to market strategy to take our products and services that we have out to the market and engage with the the channel community.
Love it. Love it. From Doc that I don’t think we’ve had that done 150 or so episodes. We’ve had, we’ve had bartender to Bible connoisseur. But I don’t think we’ve done doctor to computer programmer.
So yeah, yeah, doctor computer programmer, technology, sales, technology, marketing and partnerships. There you go. You know, it’s a very linear journey.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s what you said. I totally figured it out. I love it. I love how we get where we get.
Right.
All right. So we’re talking about the products and services at one source. Tell us a little bit about how you go to market. What do you do? You know, and how today we’re talking, obviously, we’re going to dive into this expense management component. But tell us about kind of how you guys stand out and really what some of these are.
Yeah, so it’s an interesting question, because it is somewhat complex at at one source. And we actually just went through a whole rebranding initiative, dialing and our messaging because the business like any business has evolved and continue to evolve over time. And when you think about what one source does, we’ve married together this concept of advising customers, as well as providing managed services for them. And I think if you really want to unpack what that all looks like, we have to step back to the beginning of how one source was founded. So managing the original owner of one source had a series of retail franchises that he needed to get connectivity service and voice services for. There were about 14 of them,
complicated to manage, complicated to source, complicated to support long term. He saw another opportunity like many entrepreneurs do and started building the foundation of what is our technology expense management practice at one source. And so in order to scale that it needed to be automated, it needed to be an actual tool that somebody could use. And so when you look at that, that’s how we got to going beyond just providing the services, but also to actually delivering additional value for corporations because we uncovered everybody has this problem. There’s no organization that didn’t have it. Now, as we collected more and more information about our customers and the network, we actually started saying, hey, I got all this really rich information all the way down to the MACD addresses on the routers that they have. I can see their modems, the IP addresses. Why am I not exploring and managing that part of their world?
So we have all this amazing visibility into the customer’s environment. Now we’re getting into how can we deliver and support those components. So that was around 2014 or 15. Then slightly afterwards, you’ve got this just massive increase in people adopting technology, moving to the cloud,
more things are becoming digital, security risks skyrocket.
So not only are we delivering that, we’ve got the opportunity now to manage and secure. So that was the start of our security practice, which as we continue to take those three components, you can see how they kind of stack on top of each other, where expense management leads to the baseline, the foundation leads to now providing the core infrastructure, which then leads to providing the security. And so that’s the kind of the linear market of how we, or the linear way of how we do that.
On top of that, our go-to-market strategy is through our indirect channel. That’s how we go to market. We do it through partnerships that we have with our technology providers. We do it through partnerships that we have with what I call ancillary partnerships, where we’re not even in the same industry, but there’s overlap and where we can deliver value for customers. And then most recently, within the last year and a half, two years, really has been the delivery through the TSD channel and working with sales advisors. And so when we look at how we generate new revenue for the company when it comes to our managed service offerings.
It’s slowly reliant on our indirect options.
Love it. Love it. And partners love to hear that, right? So that’s awesome.
Okay, so we’re going to come back to the expense management thing here in just one sec, because I think you’ve got such interesting dynamic and we’re really starting to see success in this.
But in this, you know, I’m going to talk about a difficult time or a hard lesson learned just personally, right? Whether it’s medical, whether it’s sales, whether it’s, you know, whatever it is, everything in between, or maybe just a great mentor. Anything that you’ve learned over these last few years? That
is a great question. And it’s one I, there are actually a lot of lessons that I’ve picked up, especially if you’ve moved through a couple of ideas of where you want to be and then ending up where you where you are today.
One of those has been, it’s a sales lesson that I learned, but it’s translated into being a leader at an organization to really trying to change and transform another business. And that is when we are making decisions or when we are making a sale to a customer, we have collected information along the way. But if we take a step back, so like maybe we know why a customer is buying, or in my case, maybe I know in the direction that the company is going. But regardless of where we are, information is always limited to what it is we’ve collected or what our experience has taught us. And so I’ve had opportunities where you make a sale and everything is perfect. You check the boxes, the customer wants to do this, the partner is trying to do this, and then you get down to the decision making from the customer and they don’t go your way.
And I had a mentor along the way who actually taught me this, which was, you didn’t have all the information. There’s always some condition missing that you don’t have. So as you go through the process, the lesson I learned was to always check and revalidate. Okay, this is the information that I’ve collected. This is why I’m making the recommendation or feel the way that I do. What am I missing?
Right? And get the other person to try and give you the missing information. That works internally as well.
If I’m making a recommendation of, “Hey, I want to go down this market route,” and I’m having a conversation with Tim Ming, our CEO, or Eric Gressel, our CRO, they look at the business at a level that I’m not looking at it. Just like someone else in the organization looks at it a little bit differently.
So if I can get them to be a part of that journey and get that missing information, sometimes they will tell me why they’re either for or against the decision I’m trying to make and the direction that we’re trying to go. So it’s always don’t assume you have all the answers. It’s okay to be confident. But also remember that whatever you’re doing when you’re trying to make a decision or you’re trying to get someone to make a decision with you, it’s a two-way conversation.
So you’ve got your feelings, your information. Have them share information that maybe that’s going on behind the scenes that you’re not familiar with. And it’s one that’s helped me a lot early on. You just think you know it all. A little cocky, low arrogant.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I’m convinced that, you know, how I didn’t die, you know, doing some of the dumb stuff in late teenage, early 20s, I’m just like, “Oh, my gosh. I get so hurt doing that.”
I think there’s even opportunities for, you know, I look back and go, “Man, my kids, I would never let them do the stuff I did.” You know, that’d be insane. No way.
All right. So let’s talk about, I want to talk about some of these challenges. So we’re, you know, we’re talking about why this is a successful lead in, you know, expense management for these complex solutions. So let’s talk about maybe some partner struggles. So you just talked about, you know, having all the information and things that kind of come up to bite you. But what are some of these common challenges that you think some of our partners might see if they’re talking about managing expenses or really just how do they position it to solve some of these immediate pain points?
Yeah, it’s a really interesting conversation. I think there are several things around expense management because it’s not new. It’s been around.
There are a lot of different ways to look at expense management based off what the customer is looking to accomplish.
However, where I find that partners get held up, and this is just an observation. It’s not a blanket statement. It’s just in several cases where we’ve struggled to see it materialize is when partners have built their business, their traditional business, based off being the person that can actually evaluate a customer’s expenses, help them save money, help them, you know, get their hands around this really complex environment. A lot of them will come back when they hear what it is we’re doing and say, “Yeah, but I do that for them.”
And that’s an interesting statement because, yes, you have done that for them and you’ve built a really strong, successful business off of that. But the question you have to ask yourself is continuing to do that, doing that. Is that going to allow you to take your business to where you want to take it? So there’s the personal side for the partner about,
you know, where do I want to take this? And we’ve got data that supports them. Think about the traditional MACD order. Maybe I’m going to take a customer from 100 meg to 300 meg. I’ve got to place it. I’ve got to price it, place it, get the customer to sign it. Now we’ve got to make sure the implementation is smooth. After the billing, we want to make sure the billing is right. You might spend 15, 20 hours over the period of that order engaged in something that might make you $6 or $7 more per month in commission. It’s not a really fair trade-off. It’s not a great trade-off in time for money,
especially when– Personal leverage, I guess is a great way to consider that.
So sometimes it is that, “Hey, let’s step back and take a look at this and go, “Yeah, that is what I built my business off of.”
The other side of that is from the customer perspective and, “Oh, well, the customer perceives this as my value.” And I think it’s fair to say, though, that if I’m as a partner to go back and say, “Hey, I have been delivering this for you. However, there’s more value I can deliver to you by helping you navigate the process of designing, procuring, implementing, and supporting technology if I’m not spending all of my time doing this.”
Now, I’ve got great partners that align with the approach that I’ll bring, and they are an extension of my team. They’ll be an extension of your team, and we’ll be able to generate more value. So there’s ways to overcome that objection from the customer of, “Yeah, but this is what you do for me as well. Why do you want me to pay for a service?” There’s a lot of ways to look at that. Yeah,
I like that. I mean, it’s a story of scale. It’s a story of personal leverage, and nobody… We’re going to get to customer feedback here in a second, but I don’t care if you’re the customer. I don’t care if you’re the advisor. Everybody wants to scale the business. So inevitably, that customer’s business is going to grow. That partner’s business is going to grow. So how do we make the most of scale and leverage because that partner wants to go get 10 more of those, right? Exactly. So you guys are a huge enablement, I think, and I love that position.
And we see that happening a lot. We call them internally, we call them plateaued agents, plateaued partners, where they’ve built an amazing business, say anywhere between $300,000 to $700,000 in annual revenue. Great business. But they’ve been that way for a period of years because they just simply don’t have the time or even the tools necessary to find those next growth opportunities in their accounts. And that’s something we’re really passionate about is, hey, we can help you here. You’re still going to maintain your revenue stream. In fact, you’re going to start getting paid on all those MACDs that you don’t want to do, but they’re still going to happen. But that’s also going to give you greater visibility into what the customer has, not just the products and services you sell them. It’s also going to provide you the time now to engage in, okay, how do I position data center and hosting opportunities, AI conversation, security conversations, all the things that we know that we’re going to be able to do.
And then we’ll be able to do that in the long term as we stack commissionables. Those long term, larger opportunities pay really high commissions.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think it kind of creeps up on you because you, in the beginning, right, as you’re building a business,
sell, sell, sell, sell. And then you support this one, support that one. Some need a little more help and others, some don’t need as much help. And just, you know, you don’t, you don’t see how you can’t keep doing that, right? Because that’s the, that’s the beauty of the entrepreneurial spirit. Nothing will get in your way. And I love that. And then you come into one or two of these larger, these larger customers. And you realize, oh my gosh, I’m, I’m spending so much time managing. I don’t, I don’t know the last time I was able to go find new customers, right? So you guys are a little bit of a key unlock, I think.
Right. And that’s, I think the other piece there is if you think about what are the, if you, if you sit down and think about what are the ways I can unlock and grow if I’m in that situation, I can find somebody who can help me grow or I can go take on overhead.
I’ve got to hire somebody who can do the management, the day-to-day management. And that’s okay. Some people want to build a business. They want to grow and hire people. A lot of individuals got into this business because they don’t.
Or if they do want to hire people, they want to hire people that can help drive revenue for, for themselves, for their teams, et cetera. Hiring support people is valuable and it’s needed to grow your business. But if you have resources that you could bring in from the outside, you don’t have to take on that overhead. Sure.
All right. Let’s, let’s shift gears here through a little bit of a different lens. Let’s look through this, this customer lens. So when you think about expenses, you know, we all think about customers that scale big. We think about runaway IT, all those things.
But what do you, when you see it, right, what are the customers bringing to you, top couple, top one, two, three, typical problems, right? Is it things that we’d already assume? Is there other things? And then obviously, how are you positioning this to help solve some of those and uncover more?
Yeah, it’s, there are several, there are several key pain points. I think the first key pain point is that I have yet to find a company who has not invested a lot of money and resources that has been able to do this internally on their own really, really well. And back to my previous conversation about hiring overhead, how many organizations, like that’s not a core competency of a business. We’re really good at managing our telecom expenses. Except if you’re a one source or one of the other, you know, managed providers, that’s what we do, right? So spending money on that is actually part of our solution. But if you’re a bank, if you’re a healthcare organization, if you’re a manufacturing firm, you have other things you want to put your resources towards. And so what often happens is we end up in a situation where customers have taken the bits and pieces that come with managing expenses around technology spend and divvied it up a bunch of across a bunch of people.
And nobody has a full time 100% I’m looking at this. And what happens is because it’s distributed, because no one’s focused on it all the time, you have a lack of communication. So someone order something here but doesn’t tell this team. This team disconnects something here but doesn’t tell this team over here. And so that’s where you start to get that snowball and expenses.
And then customers take a look at it over time, especially when you have economic changes and they start looking at their books going, “Wow, I didn’t realize we were spending this much on telecom.” And so that’s one is like these organizations that have grown quickly, organizations that are distributed. They finally get to a point where they say, “I want to get a hold of this.” Now, where we get a tremendous amount of value for customers is not going in and saying under the traditional sense, “I can save you 30% or I can save you 40%.” It’s true. We can probably do that just by trimming off the top of that. There’s value though and not only can we reallocate how you’re spending your technology spend, because if you’ve ever had a budget, the one thing you don’t want to do is say, “Hey, I just saved 30% off my budget.” If you go to your leadership, they’re going to be like, “Cool, you can do what you’re doing now with less budget.” You want to reallocate that budget into other projects.
So that’s where having technology expense management, having a practice that can go in, do this audit with you, not alone. Remember, this is not a, “We’re going to replace the partner.” This is with the partner and extension of their team. We’re going to not only make those changes, but important to that is you’ve got to maintain those changes, those savings, because we’re going to reallocate that somewhere else in the business. If you’re not monitoring it, you’re going to end up in the same snowball cycle. So that’s number one.
Number two is customer pain points that go a step beyond that is, “My environment is really complex.”
I’ve got 35 different providers because I’ve got maybe I’ve got Comcast here, I’ve got Mom and Pop here. You can think about all the different ways you can get complexity, maybe voice providers. That’s where you get a lot of complexity. All of these are in place, but what happens when that connectivity, which is so basic in nature, is so critical to how you do business? Here’s an example.
I’m sure you’ve been out on the road and you want to go to a restaurant six o’clock in the morning to grab quick breakfast.
What happens if their point of sale system is down? At six in the morning for a place that sells breakfast, that’s their key time of day.
Chances are that went down middle of the night.
No one knew it. When you look at technology expense management, you start to break it down, but it’s not just about savings. It’s about reallocating and providing better experience, providing better uptime. Now we’re taking a look at, “Okay, that circuit went down the middle of night.
What if you had somebody on hand who could make sure that, hey, that was opened? Let’s look at the equipment. Let’s look at the network.” Who was it? If it was the network, let’s go ahead and get a trouble ticket opened. Let’s track that trouble ticket. Maybe we’ll get it fixed before the store even opens. Or what happens if it opens and, hey, we’re up at seven instead of having to wait till 10 or 11? There’s real money savings at the operational level. That’s what some organizations are struggling with today is how do I maintain everything relies on these base core foundational services? How do I make sure I’m up and reliable?
I mean, I can start just keep unpacking customer pain.
Those are good.
I think everybody can resonate with a lot of that. I think that helps people kind of see it differently, right? Because sometimes when you’re interesting these things, it’s like, “Ah, okay. I know it’s supposed to do this for me, but it’s a net new cost.” I think this certainly helps frame it up to what people are going through, but it’s not that.
Right. And we’re dealing with that right now with the customer where the customer actually has another Tim solution. And I think that’s an important part of it. And we’ll talk about this probably a little later is what are the different options that are out there. But the customer is having a poor experience and the experience is impacting the business. But because that other solution is not managed, they view what we’re having the conversation with them as an increase in cost.
But the reality is it’s not just an increase in cost. It’s actually a way to get the outcome and the value that you are longing for within your business, which has already stated is causing impact to the company being able to make money. So sometimes you have to get people out of the mindset of, “I need to control my cost.” That’s just part of the picture.
Let’s start first maybe with, let’s just walk through an example. So give me one that you were brought into what the need was painted as or what the problem was painted as and then business problem or whatever. And then after you kind of did what you did, what happened after?
Yeah, that’s a really interesting one. So take a step back to this customer’s point of view. They’re in the retail space. They have been going through a tremendous amount of acquisition, not in a traditional sense, but in the sense that they are actually buying out franchises and bringing them into the corporate environment. So quick service restaurant. If you think about it, thin margin business, very distributed, not always in the easiest locations to get service to, especially when you go out to some of the more rural states that are out there. And the challenge they had as they went through this M&A process was, “I have no idea what I have. I have no idea what the best expense model is for me. Do I want to go with tier one? Do I want to go with an aggregator? Do I want to go with just the cheapest one that’s out there?” And so they really were struggling with this whole concept of, “How do I control that?” And so when we came on board with them, X partner brought us in on this opportunity, we actually all sat down in a room together. And before we said, we didn’t position this as, “I’m going to save you money.” This is, “I’m going to help you gain greater visibility into what you have.” And then we’re going to take that visibility, and what we’re going to be able to do from it is we’re going to be able to provide better uptime and support. We’re going to be able to evaluate what’s working, what’s not working, what’s the best way to get you the best price per service, because I think that’s the difference is cheaper isn’t always the best service, and the best service isn’t always cheaper. Sometimes there’s a happy medium there. So really sitting down and figuring that out, help them make the changes, help them navigate the changes, and then maintain the value that we’re getting long-term.
What we also were able to do, because we’re not just, in this case, we’re not just ingesting the connectivity, which was their original ask, was they had POTS lines at every location. So POTS lines for alarms, POTS lines for their actual phone system,
pretty old-school setup. Okay, how do we relook at that? Now, for the partner, this is less of a one-source gain. It’s a gain for the partner, because we’re able to look at the solution. We worked with them to get a new solution in place. Our team is going to make sure, because we’re paying for that, that this gets implemented. It gets implemented on time. Now, when it’s implemented on time, that means the partner gets paid on time, too. It means the customer gets the value that they want out of it on time.
And because, through this whole process,
we’re doing that, the customer’s getting a lot of value. So what really brought on this whole conversation was the customer kept missing bill payments, because they didn’t know where everything was, and they would get stores shut down, and then they’d have to get them turned up. That’s what started the conversation. You can see all the things that it led to. Now, we can solve that really easy. We ingest all your invoices. One source pays them up front. So you know they’re going to get paid.
And if something needs to go, then our team is tracking that all on the background, puts it all in one portal, so you’re not having to go to each individual carrier. You can search it. They can do everything there. What the partner gets out of this is, I now have a searchable database of everything that this customer has in their environment, which is pretty darn cool.
Oh, yeah. Something that would have been so hard for them. Right. And they’re trying to get people to pull off on their own.
Yeah. And there’s, I mean, if you think about the data that you have there, that you just have to take a step back and think about is, okay, I have all these circuits here. Okay, now I’ve got this huge data circuit. What’s that? Oh, that’s probably going into their data center. So now you’ve got this conversation, hey, we’ve noticed you’ve got this big circuit going in. Just my experience tells me that’s going into a data center. What are you doing around data center migration? Are you doing anything in the cloud? So you can use this data now to start having an elevated conversation with the customer.
Yeah, I love that. And partners love that. I think this has been a concern that has happened with other vendors over the years of where, you know, I bring a deal to this vendor, something else gets sold, and I don’t get credit. I think you guys just designed as the opposite of that. Correct. You know, you talked pots. Pots leads to maybe a pots replacement thing. You’re pulling back in the partner. What visibility, where’s the information going? What about the data center? What about cloud? So there’s such a, it’s such an opportunistic product that does one thing and creates seven more. I think it’s how people should really.
Yeah, yeah, it’s a visibility to tool into those, you know, into those core services, but the core services feed more advanced services.
Yeah.
Like I mentioned, I mean, large data pipe going into a data center. It’s a whole other conversation. Maybe it’s an older environment. They got a bunch of PRIs going in, or maybe they’ve got a bunch of SIP trunks that are showing up in there. Could be going to a call center. Yeah. You know, those are just ways to now start to map out your account plan within the company. And guess what? You’re not doing the maintenance for it. So you actually will have the time to go have those conversations.
As we kind of get to the last couple thoughts here, we talked a little bit about, you touched on it, kind of differentiators, right? Yeah. This is the one thing that we always want to make sure that the partners understand. If there are competitors of yours out there in the space doing what, you know, they may say we sort of also do this, but not that. Where do you feel that you guys stand apart? What do you want the partners to walk away with understanding some of your top key differentiators so they can then go roll that into their discussions?
Yeah. To answer that, I think we have to flip the perspective back to what is the customer trying to solve for. And if we go back to those pain points early on, almost every customer has this challenge. And so there are several different ways to fill that void. And the market has come up with various options to do that.
Some customers might say, so if you think about all the ways that you can solve this problem of I have complexity and I need to get a better hold of my expenses. And I want to have a better way of ensuring how I track trouble tickets or how I order new circuits or MACD’s. You get this continuum of options. So on one side, you’ve got aggregation. It’s a great tool. We can ingest that too. It’s not a big thing. But if you think about it, what aggregation really is solving for the customer is I want to get all of my services on one bill. I want to have one number to reach out to to have the conversation.
And I want to just have one view of everything. So I want to have that simplicity.
And that’s a way to do that. It aggregates on the front end. They go out and they get wholesale pricing. They put all this in there. And that works great for some customers. However, in that process, the customer doesn’t have that visibility into necessarily the core of what products and services are being chosen. It’s not a requirement for every customer. So it’s a really good solution in a lot of cases. On the other opposite end of that, you have the traditional TIM software, which is really an aggregation play of I’m going to pull all of the invoices into this tool, the software that I have. And that’s going to help us do the the analyzing of the data. It’s going to help us to process requests easier because it’s connected in LinkedIn. The difference there is the data integrity is all on the customer. If you make changes, you need to make sure those changes are reflected in the system. If you close a bunch of locations or maybe the IT team decides to disconnect a lot of locations,
you need to make sure that we’re reflecting that in the inventory over time. Sometimes that inventory can get a little wonky. And that’s what we found a lot of times is that when we get brought into those solutions, the inventory is wrong. And if the inventory is wrong, the data is wrong.
Now, where we’re one source fit in that link, the answer is we sit in the middle. So we have a tool that’s providing that visibility where we’re bringing in all of the invoices. We’re mapping the inventory to the services, the detail for those services, the pricing, the bill pay, all the things you can get from the software, except the data integrity now sits with us.
And if you flip to the other side where you had one bill and you had one place to go to get those trouble tickets placed, we provide that except on the back end, there’s nothing hidden. The services are all still in the customer’s name all the way down to the last mile. There’s the flexibility for the customer to select which providers are providing either the last mile or the connectivity again, but the data integrity of that now sits with one source. And so they’re getting kind of the best of both worlds, and so it fits in the middle. So there are some organizations who have a great procurement and finance organization and setup and managing through a traditional tool is totally fine. Right? Go for it. And there’s folks where the aggregation fits, go for it. I have this, and I think our organization does an abundance mindset.
All these options exist because there’s a market demand for them.
Yeah, it’s good. All right. So let’s say a partner, I’m listening to this. I want to figure out how to tackle this a little bit more. Walk me out with a couple questions. I got prospects that I’ve never talked to them about this. Good customers, good relationships. One, two, three questions, killer question. What is it?
Yeah, I think there’s always, you go with the challenger method, there’s always the idea of how do you feel about how your organization is going to work. How do you feel about how your organization is managing your technology spend?
It’s really, it’s a great question to get the conversation started because sometimes you’ll get a one word response. Great.
But sometimes it’s a pain point. It’s a pain point for most organizations and they’ll go, yeah, it’s pretty terrible. You know, especially if you’ve got a good relationship with these individuals, kind of challenge the status quo of what they’re doing.
I think if you want to get into the business levels, you can have the conversation as you’re talking about a greater strategy. What is it you’re trying to actually do with your spend? And then it’s an opportunity for you to insert that value, that knowledge that says, hey, what we found is a lot of people have fairly limited budgets. Do you feel that way as well?
What if I could show you a way to better allocate that? Now that’s wordsmithing, but see how that sounds to a customer than savings. Because if you say savings, they’re like, cool, put it in the box. If you say, help me reallocate that is, okay, I’m listening. I have this project I want to fund.
How can you help me fund that while at the same time getting this gain of efficiency,
gain of how we’re actually providing value to the company? I think the other advice is when you take a look, especially if you’ve built a considerable amount of business on your own, and this is kind of the advice for partners is just ask yourself the question,
do I want to continue doing that?
Because there are options now where you can get that back office support. You can get that full service white glove option that you’ve been providing that now will free up your time. So that’s almost like the critical question for yourself inside is before you even start this journey is, hey, do I want to free my time up? And I’m not saying take this into every customer. 80-20 rule applies. 80% of your time is probably locked up in 20% of your customers. Let’s target those first, right? And let’s go in with them and understand what it is they’re trying to solve first.
Awesome.
Final thoughts here. From an innovation perspective, are there transformations happening in this sector that you’re most looking forward to? Any innovations that you think, or just your personally excited about anything to kind of put a bow on that?
Yeah, I’d say from an innovation perspective, if you think about what we’re doing, we’re getting a really rich inventory of services that typically haven’t been inventoried very well in the past for companies.
You look at the evolution of tool, ITSM tools. You’ve got your CMDB.
There are so many products out there that are providing really rich data into endpoints, applications, you name it, throughout the environment. And those are getting pulled into the trouble ticketing tools.
What we’re doing is providing that really rich information. And we’re already seeing this happen where we’re integrating into customers CMDBs. And they’re using their traditional ITSM tools as the front end to open a trouble ticket on, say, a down circuit now. But because they couldn’t have done that before in the same way because they, who do I open that with? What carrier? Who do I have the accurate information as far as IP addressing? Do I have the MAC address for the router? Do I have the DNS? I mean, the things I might need to troubleshoot this aren’t there. And we’re seeing that happen more and more. We’re looking at technology, ways that we can increase for our customers who aren’t going to invest in a large ITSM platform. How can we give greater visibility into a wider swath of the technology environment? And that’s why we, if you look at the naming, technology expense management is really what it’s becoming more so than just telecom expense management. So we have the ability to pull in endpoint information. We have the ability, looking at the ability to pull in application information eventually. So I’m just really excited to see how this evolves because if you think about it from the partner’s perspective, more visibility, more opportunity.
Love it. That’s a great place to wrap it. Jared, awesome, awesome nuggets. Again, more ways for partners to wedge in, come and sell. Got to go back and listen to some of these. These are great. Thanks for coming on, man.
Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. As always, love talking about this. Enjoy our conversations as well.
Okay. Well, that wraps us up for today. As a reminder, everybody, wherever you’re listening to Apple Music, Spotify, make sure that you go subscribe and follow. You get these every Wednesday when they drop out and you can take these tips out to your customers and uncover more opportunities. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. Jared Parker, Senior Director over at One Source. This is Expense Management, a simple lead for complex solutions. Until next time.
Next Level BizTech has been a production of Telarus Studio 19. Please visit Telarus.com for more information.