Ep.161-Tech Stack Mastery: Secrets to Sell across Cloud, Connectivity, and Security with Tim Basa
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Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success 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 got a new track for you this week and a never before on guest. We have got Tim Basa, SVP of Sales for Telarus. Tim, welcome on.
Hey, thanks for having me, Josh. Also, I heard there’s a milestone. Are you you’re over a hundred episodes now? Is that right?
Yeah, they haven’t. They haven’t shut me off yet. So we’re still cranking, man.
That’s amazing. Well, I think you’re going to be on for a while. The rumor is it’s the most popular podcast in the channel. So you’re doing great work. Thanks for having me.
I love it. I appreciate it. It’s exciting. We’re learning a lot.
Cool origin stories. Everybody’s got a windy path and we happen to talk a little bit about technology and tech stack too. So we’ll dive in. So today, today we’ve got tech stack mastery, secrets to sell across cloud connectivity and security. So I figured you and I have had so many of these conversations. You had so much experience,
so many kind of inspirational thoughts of how to get people thinking differently. I figured we should dive into this because you got so much to share here.
So start us off for anybody that doesn’t know you. You got a cool past, cool history. How did you get into this field? Is it windy? Crazy stories. Start us off.
No one’s ever said it’s cool, Josh. So I’m flattered.
It really, look, it’s a weird story. I’ll be brief and you can ask me questions to unpack it if you want because you know it as good as anyone. You’ve heard it a few times, but for the purpose of the audience today, I was the first person in my family tree to go to a four year university.
And my family, including my parents, thought that I punched a golden ticket. I’d go to college. I’d get out of college. I’d get a great job that I could work at for 40 years. I retire with a gold watch and a turkey. I’d have stability that they never had or couldn’t give me. And I disappointed them. I exited college, graduated, and instead of taking a job in a big shiny building, I answered a tiny classified ad in a newspaper that said, “Aria Entrepreneur Seeking Five People to Teach His Craft.” Well, it turns out, Josh, that was a network marketing company. Yes. So I got into a network marketing company and from that network marketing company, I met another person who was selling long distance service door to door. And I thought that was pretty cool because they were earning residual income. The same thing that I was pursuing network marketing for, they were doing, but they weren’t doing it selling vitamins and lotion and dish soap. They were selling technology and that really appeared to my ego. So I took a job with a little long distance reseller, a little switchless reseller and authorized agent for Ameritech back then. Remember, there was R-Box and I sold small businesses, mostly long distance services and Ameritech calling plans door to door. So that’s how I got my start. And I sold back then very small businesses, junkyards, dry cleaners,
real estate offices with a bunch of folks that looked like Betty White. No offense to folks who look like Betty White. They were like chain smoking in their office.
Genuine slim one twenties. Oh, yeah.
That’s exactly right. So, you know, I got chased out of junkyards by pit bulls. I had, you know, grumpy old people yell at me. I snuck into businesses through the back door to sneak in to see Mr. Big or Mrs. Big. And it turns out I was pretty good at it. So I got promoted pretty quickly to be a sales manager and helped expand that company and got recruited out of that company to go to another company that was growing really fast and rose to the top of that firm. We had over 300 sales reps feet on the street and in our region. And I learned a lot. And then, you know, selling mostly those same services, long distance. We’re starting to get a little bit into Internet then, you know, early days of T1, early days of DS3, of course, DSL and a lot of lot of voice services and learn how to sell more enterprise. And, you know, my career sort of took off from there and it became mostly I started in the channel, didn’t know I was in the channel until I went to the first ever, I think was the first ever channel partners expo that looked like a high school science fair back then. Tabletop displays, like 15 people in a little ballroom. You know, now there’ll be thousands of people out in Vegas. But that’s really how I got started. You know, cold calling door to door. But since then, I’ve sold to Fortune 500, Fortune 50 companies. I’ve been involved with some people who will probably watch or listen to this podcast and sold shoulder to shoulder with them at some of the biggest companies in the world and learned a lot. And my greatest, really greatest accomplishment if I’ve had them is helping advisors achieve their most ambitious goals. You know, it’s on my LinkedIn profile. You hear me say it in front of whether it’s partner summon in front of thousands of partners or in front of a small coaching session. You know, my career has been a wild ride. It’s been a lot of fun, but it’s all been sales, marketing, biz dev in our channel, Josh.
Love it. One thing that maybe I’m going to get called out for not knowing this,
the college path to graduate the Rolex. What did you say about a turkey?
Oh, gold, gold watching a turkey.
What’s the turkey coming?
Yeah. So there’s this whole there’s this whole thing that like you work for a big company, you do good. You have a job like you go back to the network marketing. They say you have a job. Job stands for just over broke. And you go to work for a big company and they pay you for your time, not for the value you bring to the marketplace. Right. And when you leave the company, they never recognize you after that. And they barely recognize you while you’re there. And when they leave on the way out the door, they give you a gold watch and a turkey for your accomplishment, your life’s work. So that’s actually how I would try to recruit people into network marketing and full admission. I’ve never admitted this. And if there’s folks on this call who I recruited into our industry, I would use some of the same analogies and say, hey, look, you can go work for a carrier in a big, shiny building. And they’ll pay you a salary and commission, but that doesn’t compare to what you can earn as an independent business technology advisor, business solutions advisor, where you give up a little in the short term, but you really maximize the long term. You build a base of clients, you build a stable residual income, you get to adapt to the change of this industry. And it’s been a wild ride since 1994. And people aren’t going to run out of ways to use technology. They’re not going to, they’re consumers of this business, no matter what. Good times are bad. Financialcrisis.com bubble.com burst COVID. You know, we saw Josh, you and I had a front row seat to that. People took a COVID vacation and lost business and others leaned in and had a COVID elevation, right? And now they’re doing better than they ever have. So all that to say, this is the best business in the world.
Get all the turkeys you want. Have a turkey farm.
Get all the turkeys you want.
Now’s your choice. You’ll think about food, Josh. All right. All right. Okay. So we’ve talked a lot about lessons, mentors.
Walk us through anywhere, door to door, previous sales jobs, whatever it is, what’s a good lesson or two that you’ve learned the hard way or just a good mentor that you had?
Yeah, I think, you know, this will go a few different directions through our conversation, but I’ve had some great mentors and mentors could be coaches, athletic coaches. You know, I played basketball in high school and college and had lots of great coaches there, business coaches. There’s definitely some standouts.
But I think the biggest lesson is communication, like becoming a good communicator, becoming a clear communicator. It helps you in your personal life with your friends, your family, your kids, helps you in business, whether you’re dealing with a prospect or a customer, helps us as teammates, Josh, to communicate, to create clarity and trust. And we can unpack that more as we go if you want. And I think that was a big lesson for me is how to communicate and also when not to communicate. You know, sometimes you’re excited about something and you want to communicate it. One time, I’ll tell you, this is just my brain, the way it works. You ask me questions and I’ll tell you a story. So one time, hard lesson I learned as a manager, we were getting close to announce announcing presidents club winners and I had the preliminary results. And I was so excited about one of the one of the people who was going to win that I called him and I hinted that he was going to win. Well, it turns out he didn’t win. So I had to call him and let him know that he didn’t win. And he said, well, what am I going to tell my wife? She bought a dress.
So I had to unwind something that I did. So I learned like you don’t let the cat out of the bag until something’s fully baked. And that’s a story about presidents club, but that could be with a prospect that could be with your family. So I think, you know, making sure you validate all the information, check all the boxes, like one, a one minute delay or in some cases, a one day delay might make all the difference in the delivery.
I love I love that advice. Just sleep on it. It can wait. Nobody’s going to die.
Like, that’s right. Yeah, that’s right. No one’s going to die. And sometimes that one final turn, a couple of things you check the box at the data is valid. But also you reread the email in the morning or the memo or whatever it is you’re doing, the post that you’re going to put on LinkedIn. It’s going to be one turn better the next day. It’s always better the next day. And that heartbeat of time is going to make you a better writer, better communicator. It’s going to be clearer. You know, especially when you read it through the reader’s eyes, you know, there’s a great quote that says to understand why John Smith buys, you need to see the world through John Smith’s eyes.
And that’s not just a buyer. That could be your wife. Like, you got to see it through your wife’s eyes, too.
Yeah, it’s good. Love that advice.
OK, so let’s talk a little bit about leadership philosophy, right? You’re leading a sales team. You’ve let out sales teams. You’ve built organizations. What’s a core set of principles that guide your leadership style and kind of how do they how do they influence the way you’re helping advisors grow?
Yeah, sure. So I have I have a simple pattern that that I follow. I’ll recall it as best I can. It’s it’s pretty much the same, but it’s not like a memorized thing. The first thing I look at in you experience here with me because we’re both on the leadership team is you have to build a cohesive team. And that takes it’s part art, part science. But if you have a lot of turnover, if you don’t have cohesion and how you communicate and in the way you operate, that can lead to a lot of bad things. So I think cohesive team is is number one. The next thing is we kind of touched on it. And and I believe in and you have to communicate clearly and create clarity in everything you do. And some of the stuff sounds like busy work, admin work, but having templates and standard operating procedures and just expectations that. You set for your team and they set for their team. And we have as a company, we all hold ourselves to those standards is really important. And that that also creates trust. And I think you have to have trust. You know, if you and I are on the same team or the listeners have a team and there’s no trust or people think that someone’s backstabbing them or working in their own personal interest. That’s where organizations start to break down. And I learned I doubled down on this after I read Ray Dalio’s book Principles and and this and also the book Radical Candor where radical candor. It sounds radical. It’s really just like accepting constructive criticism, giving thoughtful constructive criticism. And if you and I are trying to figure out which microphone to use, we don’t care. I don’t care if you’re I use your microphone or you use mine. We just care about what sounds good. Right. So what focused on what’s what’s best for the company, what’s best for our customers versus who’s right or who’s wrong. So I really think about that. I think about over communication.
So some people don’t like to sound like a broken record or they say, well, we already trained them once. Well, there’s a difference between training and development. Right. So think about in your life how many times you you’ve had to be trained on something or even though you were trained, you might have to just level up your status, the new technique or replay the tapes of a podcast to learn. You know, maybe you should have zigged when you zag. Right. So I think, you know, being able to over communicate sometimes when I give these live seminars that you’ve been to, I have the whole audience raise their hand if they played sports. And then I’ll say, OK, if you played sports, then you had a coach. Put your hand down when you hear your coach’s voice saying something that they repeated all the time, like a broken record. And for me, it’s something like if you’re earlier on time and if you’re on time, you’re late. Well, I think that’s the same in business. You have to have something that echoes in your head. It gives your team guidelines. So when they’re not with you, they still hear the voice of the company that keeps them on the straight and narrow. Right. And maybe that sounds overly simplistic. But so I think that’s another one. The next thing would be reinforce all these things with systems.
So people systems and business systems. And before we had Salesforce and Tableau and all the business reporting we have, we had to have people systems and, you know, note card systems and maybe you had ACT CRM. But a people system is just what you do probably every day. You get up, you brush your teeth, you make breakfast. That’s a people system. Right. And we talk a lot about even here how you start your day and how you end your day is really important. Those are people systems. You control those things. So, yeah, I think, you know, the last thing is, you know, you run experiments.
I’m a big believer in, you know, a lot of people get into this is the way we do it around here and they don’t try new things. So I think you need to think yes before no, knowing you’re going to have to say no sometimes. But let people run experience, experiments. You know, you talked earlier. Hey, it’s not a medical emergency. No one’s probably going to die if you hold that email overnight. It’s the same thing with running an experiment. You know, if you let someone on your team, you know, JW run experiment, experiment, probably not going to burn down to Laris, but it might make us iteratively better. 10 X better if you let them try it. So, yeah, I think, you know, four or five core principles, you know, we want to build trust. We want to have clarity. We want to over communicate. We want to run experiments. We want to empower our people to make decisions, do the right thing for the business. It sounds kind of simple. It’s hard to do in practice. You know, you and I probably aren’t perfect at these things, but those are those are the basic principles.
So as you think about this, we’re talking about we’ll get into some more specifics on accounts strategies and things like that. And some really good foundation. But you know, as you as you walk as you’ve done a lot of these sales trainings and you kind of walk through these conversations, you’ve been in partners offices, you’ve helped them build businesses and grow through tough tough times and figure out how to turn the corner. What are some of these foundational elements from a sales strategy perspective that I think we can all learn from here as we grow?
Yeah, I think the first thing is you can’t be all things to all people. So this is going to sound overly simplistic, but you can’t be all things to all people. You know, I’ll talk to people about who their ideal customer profile is or who their perfect prospect is, or if they could only have one type of customer, who would it be? And I inevitably get someone who they’ll say, well, any business owner or any business type when all the businesses all the time. And that’s that’s a fun conversation, but you can’t do that. So the first thing is you have to have a sales strategy. You have to have a sales process. And it doesn’t matter to me whether it’s three steps to the sale or seven steps to the sale or, you know, the things we teach at our sales training or something someone learns in a book.
A sales process is a good thing to have. You have to have a way to identify, qualify, propose and close businesses. That’s the core. How you do that’s up to you. And we can get into that a little deeper if you want. But having a strategy on who your ideal customer profile is being able to say to someone that you meet at your country club or at a kid’s band concert when they say, so what do you do? You have to have a way to answer that in a way that says, oh, that might be for me. But if you just say I’m in sales, well, you just missed a lead.
If you say I’m in technology sales, that’s too generic. So you have to have something that peaks their interest. The other thing is you have to train everybody in your business to have that same pitch dialed in just a sentence or two. They don’t need to know the whole pit, but they’re all dealing with folks in their lives. And you have to have that base. So the basic strategy is, you know, have a sales strategy, identify, qualify, propose, close. You don’t want to give free consulting away. You want to have a natural path. You want to document it. You want to build all of the documents. So client profile form, checklist,
professional material, professional proposal. I’m digressing here so you can always snap me back into line, Josh. One of the things that drives me crazy is I see a technology advisor who’s a pro forward a quote from a provider to the end user. And it says, hey, Josh, see attached from provider.
That’s the laziest thing ever.
Yeah. And you’ll get look, you’ll get beat like you’re setting yourself up to get beat because I also know advisors who would say, hey, Josh, happy to present the quote. From blank. See attached here are the highlights from my perspective. One, two, three. Why the why you are that? Yeah. Here are the yellow lights from my perspective. One, two, three. Don’t worry about these. We’ll work through them together. Here are the red lights. The big caution that I want you to take a look at. Also, if you if you like this provider, I’m happy to help you navigate this. Then check out these three links. These are the YouTube videos from the provider on this product in case you haven’t reviewed them. Now there’s a perfect at least some assemblates of professionalism team.
That’s not like a team. I doesn’t even matter if that’s a one person shop like that’s right. That’s right. You guys got a group of people helping.
And we’ll back to the group of people.
There is a group of people at that customer who are going to see that email. It’s going to get forwarded someplace or passed around. And if you make it hard for the decision maker to do it, now you’re not as good as the other person. But if you’re the easy button and you give them an email or documents that they can pass around the org. Now, not only do you make it easy for them, but you you become known to everybody else. So if they leave the company, they know you and they’re going to bring you into the next business. So it’s a bit like outbreak, right? That’s how you can get more prospects from referrals. So, yeah, I think you have to have a sales process. I think I got to touch on a couple of things that are really important. You have to be the most persistent person you know.
Yes.
Yeah, because professional persistence beats resistance every day of the week. We all have examples. Everyone listening, watching can think of a time when they wanted to give someone their money, but they couldn’t get someone to follow up with them. Maybe it was a contractor for your new roof. Maybe it was someone who you wanted to buy a car from. And you just couldn’t get a follow up. It’s OK. Also, we all probably get email in our inbox every day that we think maybe we should unsubscribe. But then you go to unsubscribe and you think, but maybe not because I might want to buy a suit from that company someday. I might want to buy a sono, another sono speaker from Sonos. So you keep them. Those emails are professional persistence and it’s a way for you to stay top of mind. It’s just a branding impression. So you don’t want to be a past. Your job is to go from unwelcome past to welcome guest and then stay present until someone wants to buy from you. So I think you have to be persistent. And I also think that I’ll tip into marketing really quick because I just talked to an advisor who’s about to spend well over one hundred thousand, close to two hundred thousand on a branding exercise. The branding exercise was to create a new logo and new color scheme and new font for their website. But there is no guarantee of a lead, Josh.
So that’s a waste of money. You’re not Coca-Cola. You’re not Rolex.
We’re technology advisors. This community, when I talk to advisors and you tell me if I’m wrong here, Josh, check me on this, because you talk to a lot of people. What I hear is my close rate is great. What I need is more leads. So any money you invest in marketing and your sales process should be designed to capture more leads,
convince prospects to go from lookers to interested and be top of funnel for you, convert them to buyers, then onboard them and generate referrals. You want to get people to know, like, trust, buy and recommend you. Period.
Yeah. Think about that from a comparative perspective. We all get a zillion cold, horrible DMs on LinkedIn.
A hundred percent.
I want to sell you some this. I want to sell you some that. And I know absolutely nothing about your business. I think about one in every 200 of those that I get has somebody actually spent time to understand what we are, what we do. Right. Does this apply to me? So if that’s the I’m no math expert here, but that’s a really low percentage. And if that’s that case, imagine what your customers are going through. Right. People are trying to skip by. People are looking for the easy button. You show up and you differentiate with this. Here’s an explanation. It might be this simplistic product set, but the amount of energy and effort that you put into kind of defining what these things are and kind of the why and differentiating yourself on a cold reach out or on a cold whatever. Like, I love one of my favorite adages that I learned this from a partner was.
So how do you do? What are you doing for discovery calls? Right. As you guys was kind of becoming prominent. He said, I just walk into their office and I look over over the counter and see what they have, or I would call in and I would see what the experience is like. And then I would show up and say, hey, I went through your your customer experience team and I noticed there was a like weird 20 minute on hold thing in this one area. Are you familiar with that? How differentiating are things like that for these guys?
Totally. Look, if you’re if you’re not doing that, you’re an amateur period. So I’ll give you two things. The first is my biggest pet peeve right now. And it’s driven by the thing that’s most exciting in our business, which is A.I. How many direct messages or emails are you getting right now? Josh, that say, I hope this email finds you well. All I know for sure that that was written by A.I. So don’t start your emails the way everyone else starts their email. Number one. Number two is your point is spot on. And I have a hundred or more stories about either things that I did as a sales rep. My teams have done or others I’ve taught these things to to stand out in a crowd. And you just nailed one of them, which is if you’re selling a solution and you can somehow access either a user inside the business who uses the solution or you can access the solution, which is you call in and you hear their auto attended. OK, so I’ll give you a real life example. We are selling. This is my enterprise sales team was selling to a big restaurant chain. The restaurant chain we go and meet with and the CMO happens to be in the meeting, which was great. So we had in our presentation some pictures of the restaurant. So my team would go out and we’d all dine at the restaurants and we’d collect stories from the users of the technology. And in this case, we’re selling unified communications. So old school voice over IP. And what we found was every location, almost every location, typically by region, had a different message on hold. And at every single restaurant, there was a little tent on the table that said you could order carry out and skip the line. But when you call to do the the the registration for online for seating, like to be put on the wait list, the call head seating, sorry, call head seating. So you call for call head seating and the call head seating would be like, hey, thanks for calling restaurant name. But there’s about a weight of X. And then the person would pick up and say, OK, you’re going to you’re on the call head. Your estimated arrival time is six, six, ten p.m. No mention of carry out. So in the meeting, we talk about this and we tell the CMO, how cool would it be that if every time someone called for call head seating, you said you can skip the line and have hot, fresh, delicious restaurant name food ready for you in about 20 minutes.
And she said, you guys can do that. I said, yeah, not only can we do that, we can give you a board that shows how many calls are in. If a call abandons, we can give technology that calls that person right back that says, hey, you called restaurant name. Don’t order pizza. We stand ready to give you your delicious Italian meal. Right.
She was blown away. Guess who made the decision there? Not I.T. Marketing. Marketing. Because we did our homework. So we did our homework. Same thing. Big sporting good company that we probably all have a pair of these shoes in our in our stable.
We went there. We used all of their products and their maybe against their wishes. Some of their spokespeople in our presentation. So we use quotes from some of the famous athletes. We use their fitness device. And we showed that we love the brand. We knew the brand and that we were experts in the brand. And we wanted to help facilitate all the things that we saw in their annual report. So that helps you stand out in a crowd. But saying that we’re experts in technology doesn’t
get to know your accounts. Bill McDermott, CEO, ServiceNow, talks about this a lot. You have to know that account more than they know about themselves. If you don’t walk into that room and you’re like, oh, I’m going to get a job. If you don’t walk into that room and know everybody in that room, then you don’t know how to read that room when they come in. So spend that don’t just show up, do some homework, spend some time and just off the minimal. You’re differentiated. You’re already different because nobody’s putting that time into it. Totally. OK, so let’s talk about as we’re thinking about pivoting into different product sets. You kind of grew up in this space where, OK, we started out to your point. We started out with long distance. We started out with this. And you’ve seen so many different products come into this. Walk us through what’s the strategy for the advisors that have been successful going from network to CX to cloud to security. What do you see in?
Yeah, so first, a lot of people started bailing out of this business, right? Long distance rates were going to zero. No one saw the Internet coming except for the people who are a little bit nerdy. Me, you more nerdy than me, by the way. Yup, I’ll own it. But.
You know, they took jobs selling cars or mortgages, but I bet they were there. They wish they were back. Right. So I think the first thing is some of the stuff we’ve already touched on, which is you have to profile your customers. You have to know what’s going on in that business. So when new technology comes into play, you know how it can fit in their ecosystem and you know, the sponsors by department who you can interact with. So I think you got a profile. This next one sort of.
Woo woo. You have to be friends with these people.
Because what’s going to happen is something new comes in AI. And today, everyone just goes right to the Internet, right? They used to call an expert. Now they go to the expert. They go to Gemini or Gronk or chat GPT or perplexity. They start doing all this stuff and they’re learning as fast as you’re learning. And they’ll reach out to something maybe that’s recommended by the Internet. But if you’re a friend, they’ll phone a friend. So I think you have to build professional profiles. You have to know who’s at the buyer’s table, which most of you should know by now. You’re not single threaded. And we can talk about that a little bit more. You have to go deeper in the organization. So profile the who’s doing what you have to know the landscape, know the priorities of the company. And then you have to get yourself prepared. You have to make some of these technologies your hobby. It’s becoming harder. I get it. And Josh, you’re one of the best at this. I mean, I don’t know how you have the capacity to learn all the different angles to the technology you have. And your team is so good at this. But this is this is my job, but it’s also my hobby. Right. So I do, you know, I tell you silly things, but I do a thing called take 10. And when I want to learn something, I just block 10 minutes off early at O dark 30 and I’ll just spend 10 minutes, not 10 hours, 10 minutes. And I’ll watch whatever YouTube video comes up in my feed or I will now use perplexity and I’ll do a 10 minute lesson because I can have perplexity teach me and I’ll say teach me like an eighth grader. Right. And it makes a little eighth grade lesson plan. So I think you have to prepare purposefully and then you have to be willing to partner. You know, there was a day when I was an expert on voice communications and probably pretty darn close to being an expert on network. Really close. I am an amateur at best on a lot of the stuff, but guess what? I don’t have to be a know it at all, Josh. I just need to know who to call. Right. So I think the next part of this is partner. You have to be humble enough to partner with somebody. Now, partner can be with someone at Telarus, right? Partner can be with someone in our provider portfolio that has engineers or a subject matter expert you can partner with. Partner can also be with your crosstown rival who happens to be an expert to if you have an abundance mentality. There’s plenty to go around. There’s no shortage of services we can sell. Josh, there’s no shortage of businesses we can sell to. And I see this spirit across our business across the globe, really. And you see it too. You have a front row seat where people put their egos aside. They lock horns, they partner and they’re they’re the ones winning big accounts.
Yeah.
Right. Because they partner up. They bring their expertise together. Plus your expertise with your team. Plus our marketplace of providers. And man, that’s special. So I think you got to get to know your prospect, right? You got to be friends. Sounds silly. And I have a I’ll tell you a 30 second story because this is funny and just unlocked it. By the way, you can always tell me to stop unlocking aloud. Go ahead. Please proceed. Unlocking loud. OK, so I was at a party at one of our advisors homes and there’s hundreds of people there. It was like a wedding or graduation party. And I said, hey, man, just out of curiosity, who are all these people are like family or friends? He goes, no, no, no. These are my customers. A lot of he goes, there’s guys like you here who I do business with and, you know, something like my kids, friends and stuff. But the majority of these people are like my local customers. I’m like, you let your customers come to your house. He goes, yeah, man, people don’t leave their friends.
So I’ve taken that to heart. This is like 15 years ago now and I’ve taken it to heart. Like people don’t leave their friends. Right. Unless you make a mad. You make a nasty. Friendship. Right. And you’re a technology adviser. You become the guy or the gal. Right. We all have a guy like the person who knows about cars or the person who knows about a thing. You want to be that for business technology solution. So, yeah, I think, you know, hopefully that’s helpful. You know, profile them, become friends, build a network around them, partner up with folks, folks. And we see we have a front row seat to that success.
Josh, let’s let’s think about that. We get kind of towards the end of some of the cross selling. I want to put a bow on this at an account level. So it seems to me that we’ve seen really effective strategies when people go multi pronged. You can’t just lean on one person. Right. Obviously you laid a foundation to expand. But what if I’m what if I’m stuck? What if I’m trying to cross sell into an account? I’ve been brought in for this, but I just feel like I don’t know how to go from cloud to security. Like maybe I don’t maybe I know who the person is to kind of navigate some of that. But what are you like? What’s your way out of that if you’re stuck in that or they think you can only help them with this?
Yeah. Well, you can always ask for help, too. So there’s some unique psychology about if you stop someone on the street and say, hey, Josh, could you help me or hey, stranger, could you help me? Most people’s immediate impact or impact in function function. That’s not right.
Expectation reaction impulse.
Impulse. Impulse. I can’t. There it is. Impulse. There it is. I had a loss for word.
So most people’s impulse when you say, hey, can you help me out is yes. You know, you can test it with a stranger at Starbucks. Right. So I think if you have a good relationship, so back to the friendship relationship with somebody and you know that you’re single threaded technology wise and you don’t want to get wedged out by somebody who may have a relationship on cybersecurity or our contact center, you just say, hey, Josh, I’m curious. I was wondering if you could help me out and they’ll say yes, usually. Hey, is there is there other people inside the organization that I should get to know help set for that threading? Right. At the same time, you can reach out to us if you have a confidence issue. You want to know more and say, hey, you know, Telarus representative or a carrier representative. I was wondering if you could help me out and you you want to you want to get help. You want to seek help. So you put your ego aside, you seek help. The next thing I think you need to do and then this is a I think a best practice is you have to make proactive recommendations because they won’t fall on deaf ears. They might get shelved. They might get put in a desk drawer. They might get stored in a file. But if you I’ll use you know, this will this will be dated a little bit when we say it. But Kobe just put out a great guide on a I readiness. Right. So if you use that as a resource or maybe it’s an article in the Wall Street Journal or you just have a way to feed your customers and the people you’re doing business without your customers because you’re not single threaded. If you have a way to feed them information that’s proactive recommendation. So about cybersecurity, about customer satisfaction, about these things. Now you’re the expert. They’re going to ask for your opinion. So it becomes more natural conversation than you saying, hey, do you want fries with that? You know, the way we think about cross cell where when you do a quarterly insights review, if you’re a pro, you’re doing these things with your clients quarterly or annual at minimum annual, but hopefully quarterly. You’re going to bring up some of the materials that you’ve given them in your newsletter. Maybe you mailed them, you know,
contact center for dummies or A.I. for dummies book. People laugh at that. But it’s true. We have an adviser who does that and kills it. So you’re going to reference that and they’re going to say, oh, yeah, you know what, there is something floating around here right now at S.L.T. where M.P.S. scores becoming a bigger, bigger thing. You think you can unlock some of that? Now you got it. Right. So I think when you’re stuck, you got to take a little risk. You got to get over the fear and have some conversations.
Yeah, I love it. All right. So if we if we fold this up into an example, maybe walk us through where you saw a partner get into one of these with a customer and they didn’t cross sell. They stayed where they wanted to stay versus I don’t know the opposite. Yeah.
Yeah. So I’ll give you some some contemporary like real time examples because this is happening in front of us right now. And I don’t want to offend anybody, but this has happened in the MSP space. So we have more MSPs, I think, coming to tell us than ever before. So traditional managed service providers, they’re very focused on doing things their way. A lot of them, not all of them. So they have customer control. They build a customer. They take the customer calls. They do break fix. They do all the things. And they’re very, very good at it. Some have been in business for a very long time. And what we’re seeing in real time is because of the amount of services that are available to an end customer. It’s it’s this many, you know, bigger than I can reach. And the MSP is selling their stack that they’ve been selling for a while. Maybe they pivoted some more modern solutions, but they’re still selling their white label voice over IP solution. They’re selling their security solution. They’re selling things that they can build. It’s kind of the easy. But for them, their customer is. Their customer is now putting pressure on them to pivot into some of the services that are in our marketplace.
And when they resist that, they’re getting beat. So I think the way to think about it is you have to start to pivot into some of these services. So that’s an MSP example where they’re just getting wedged out by a full a full service and a broad thinking technology advisor. Now, take that and just go to a technology advisor who has what I call specialist syndrome, right? So they’ve been so focused on being the specialist in a thing, cybersecurity,
voice services, whatever that is, that they haven’t deviated from that. And they’ve watched the players sort of be around them and they’ve been aware of those players. But what’s happening now is people are pivoting to becoming general contractors. So if think about in your own personal life or if you’re listening, think about if you wanted a pool or if you wanted brand new landscaping at your house or you wanted to build your dream house, you wouldn’t call the bolder guy for landscaping advice. You wouldn’t call the tile person about building the whole pool. You wouldn’t call the plumber to build your dream house. Call the general contractor. So the specialist syndrome is getting in the way. And I’ve seen it when I’ve gone on appointments, you know, every once in a while I get asked to go on an appointment, you and I ran an appointment together, a couple appointments together.
I see it in real life where people are so focused in their narrow lane, they just have to get over. I say fear is false evidence appearing real, right? They have to get over the fear that if they pivot away from being the cybersecurity expert that they’re known for that they’re going to lose their cybersecurity business. They’re not. They’re going to unlock the next door that opens up a whole new world for them. And guess what? They can be this. They can still be the cybersecurity expert or they can bring in others and they can just manage projects, whether they’re midsize or super large. They just become better. So I think when it comes to real examples, you have to get over some of these stigmatisms you got going on maybe inside you in the six inches between your ears and just take some risks.
Does that align with what you’re thinking there? No, it’s horrible. Thanks,
Josh. 100 percent. The later in the day you get meaner. Is that how this works?
Yeah, 100 percent. No, I think it’s great. I think it’s fascinating. I think the common theme, if I look at the thousands of tens of thousands of opportunities that we’ve been in in the past number of years,
so rarely do these deals when we do get to explore, when we get an opportunity to explore. You and I were just just talking about before we hit record of we thought that the deal was going to be this one thing. Right. That one thing in itself was a huge opportunity, but everybody wasn’t really sure. So we got asked to kind of sit in the call, not really sure if you’re going to have an active part, but just sit in it and listen. And then it went a completely different direction. And thankfully, we were all prepared. We were all ready. We had plenty of ammo and resources on the call. And you have that one shot to make that first impression. Right. Don’t get me wrong. Like fail fast, fail often, all that stuff is great. But when you have somebody’s time, the CEO’s time of these organizations, it is so precious doing your homework and doing your work before the call and going, you know what? I think we could take this and I think we could explore this a different way. I’m not exactly sure. And so love it. The adviser leaned in and we’re all glad we were there. That’s the best hour that we spent all day doing those discussions. So they just they wonder. These deals wonder. And nobody ever nobody ever got in trouble from asking a question of can I help you with this other thing? No
way. And you said something that’s really important, which is listen to understand not to respond.
And then there’s a skill that goes with that. That’s easy to say and hard to do, which is clarify and confirm. And I’ve just had it emblazoned in my head because when I say things, people hear what I say and they might think they know what I say. But if I say the color blue, for example, you get a you get a picture of blue in your head. And I get a picture of blue in my head. I may be thinking Navy and you may be thinking Robin’s a blue. So if I don’t give you an example to confirm what I heard, we’re going to be two ships passing in the night. So you have to clarify, confirm, and then you have to unpack that to make sure you really got it. And then you got to put it in your notes and repeat that back to make sure you’re all on the same page. The next thing you said, and this is a CEO thing and not all CEOs are the same. My experiences could be different from a lot of experiences, but CEOs generally want what’s best for the company and their team.
So if you can be candid with the CEO and they’re in the room because sometimes they’re not going to be in the room and you help them give you what’s most important to them. Take care. Check these three boxes and you got a deal. I’m making it more simple than it is. But some people are afraid to interact with the C-level or with the biggest title in the room because they’re used to dealing with Schmecklehagen, right? And there’s nothing wrong with Schmecklehagen. Good guy. Good guy or gal. There could be Susie Schmecklehagen or Steve Schmecklehagen. They’re Schmecklehagen.
So good.
Bless your heart. But when Mr. and Mrs. Big is in the room, you have to have the confidence and be prepared to say,
hey, you know, Josh, before you leave, this is a corny thing, but this will really help me navigate the solution with your team. If you could wave a magic wand, how would this end in 12 months? Like, what’s the perfect scenario? You go to a board meeting and you say, I’m happy to report this, this and this. Or, hey, I saw in your annual report, I read last year’s annual report, I read last year’s annual report and your quarterly’s. And I saw you’re very focused, you’re acutely focused on this. But what it didn’t tell me is the result you were trying to get. Can you tell me in one sentence what you’re trying to unpack? And if we do that, is that a home run for you? Does that get published in next year’s annual report? And if they smile, you’ve got them, man. And now you got a friend because you’re connected with that person. And you’ve got your marching orders and the whole room now sees, oh, wow, this guy, he did his homework, right? By the way, AI can unpack all those annual reports for you now. I used to print them all off and read them.
Show me that 10K baby and break it down.
I used to put post-it notes and all this stuff. And like, I’d walk, by the way, it’s not a bad thing to do if you want a quick prop. And I know you got other things you want to talk about, Josh. You want a quick prop? You print off a bunch of stuff, you stick post-it notes in there. And then you say what I just said and said, hey, I did some homework before coming. There’s a few things that stood out when I was reading through, you know, 419 pages or 316 pages. Here’s two things I picked up or three things I picked up. Tell me how we can help shape the future of this that you said in your business documents or whatever the things you read. People will be blown away by that. It’s magic, folks.
It’s so differentiating. It just is. Like we, I think we get a special kind of spoiled seat to give this advice, but we come from this place of we just see so many different ways, different strategies, different deals, things that work, things that don’t work, things that go really bad and things that go really great.
And it, as it turns out, you know, when I was, when I was growing up in life, I thought that, you know, everybody competed at the same level when, when, when you worked at wherever you worked. And the more you realize it’s people just want it more and hard work can outpace talent any single day every day. And I think that’s the most exciting thing and rewarding thing about this is all I got to do is outwork the other guys. All right.
Let’s go. Yeah. Look, especially when you’re first starting out, right? You just gave me goosebumps because I believe in that hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. And when I first started,
I didn’t know, you know, a pot’s line from a chalk line, man. And I just knew that if I, I was young, ambitious, single, and I would go door to door and tell there wasn’t a business open, Josh, and I would try different pitches. And one of my pitches, silly story, one of my pitches as it got dark was, you know, I’d knock on a door and see, you know, Schmeckle Hagen in there and they’d come to the door and they’d say, can I help you? And I’d say, you know, I’m Tim Bassa. I just got started in sales and I promised I would work until I made one successful sales pitch. And they’d say, you’ve been doing this all day and they let me in, Josh. So I’d have a shot at them, right? Because it was dark. So, but I just thought, hey, you know, the guys and gals with families, they’re, they’re leaving at three thirty four o’clock. They got pickup. They got a cook dinner. I’ll just keep going. And the great thing is whether it’s enterprise sales, by the way, the same, the same laws apply to all things, physical fitness or sales or cooking, which is the law of sewing and reaping and ratios. Right. The more you sew, the more you reap and the more you cook, the better cook you become if you learn with each iteration. And look, if you are getting, you know, one out of one hundred and pretty soon you’re getting 10 out of 100 and you keep doing that and improve as long as you keep going after 100, you’re going to beat the guy that has a higher closing percentage than you, but only has 10 appointments because you just have more. You have more appointments and a higher closing percentage. So that’s how you win. If you wing it, you’re not professional, you’re not hardworking, then you’re just kind of a coaster. Right. And look, that’s it. By the way, no offense to a coaster. You could do what you want to do. That’s that’s your life. And you and I have probably coasted sometimes in our careers. But what you want is iterative improvement. Right. You just keep climbing, man.
Bias to action. Yeah. All right. Final thought. This can be a loaded question to take us out here. So we just came fresh off of the Dallas A.I. Summit. We’re doing a lot of events. We’re out there talking about the productization of A.I. will be in Vegas talking about the productization of A.I. and kind of what that means. And so as you think about that, I want you to think about the future here. Right. So what’s your advice for partners with the paradigm shift happening, A.I. productization happening, customers needing resources and things that are just brand new that haven’t existed for a long time yet. What’s your advice for partners to to get in wherever they need to get in with regard to the next. You know what’s cooking right now.
Yeah. Look, I think about this a lot. You think about a lot. I think A.I. is a disruptor in the same way the Internet was a disruptor. Right.
I think you have to know enough about A.I. to have a conversation. You have to keep getting better. But you’re probably not going to know it all. So it goes back to some of the other stuff we’ve talked about here. I think that people have been seeking advice since the beginning of time.
So advice on how to cook, how to maintain their physical health, how to be a better husband, wife, father, mother.
So you have to be adaptable to change. You have to be a good advice giver. You’re going to be a trusted resource. Right.
And you have to think about you have to put some thought into who’s going to be around as the future evolves. Right. So you and I were joking that I live in Metro Detroit. You made a joke about being fresh off eight mile. I’m actually like 17. Made it out. Made it out. Made it out. Right. But growing up in around Detroit, around automotive, I’ve seen the beginning of robots. Right. Robots came to the assembly line and I heard all these people, you go to a family barbecue or whatever and I’ll tie this all together. People would say, well, the robots are taken over. The machines are taken over. The computers are taken over. We’ve seen this all, you know, depending on your age, you’ve seen the evolution of it’s going to take over. The ATM is going to take over the bank. Now, some of these things are true. Auto workers were displaced by robots. ATM’s displaced tellers. But guess what? I saw that I had a front row seat. One of my good friends in Metro Detroit, their family business was maintaining machines on the line that was worked by humans. Well, they just pivoted to maintaining robots, Josh, and programming robots. Right. So the same thing’s going to happen here. So I think we need to look into the future. If it’s me and I’m a and I’m a business technology advisor, I’m thinking about what are the businesses that are going to be around. People are going to seek advice. I got to be on my game. I got to be all the things we talked about, professional, persistent. I got to stand out in a crowd, all those things. But I want to be future focused all the time. So as the robots come and as AI comes, I see that as a false multiplier for us in our business. It’s going to make the business stronger, more robust. It’s going to open more opportunities than we’ve ever, ever seen.
And it’s going to be a time to stock up and grow versus retreat.
And maybe that’s overly simplistic. That’s just the way I see it. I’m thinking, you know, I have a neighbor who has two robots, like big Roombas that Mo is lawn. So is his landscape or out of business or is the guy who maintains the robots in business? That’s a real story. The first time I saw it, I was freaked out. These two giant things crawling around the lawn. I’m like, that’s amazing. Can they come over and do mine? Right. But someone’s got to maintain those things. Right. So I think new industries are going to sprout up and people are going to come to us for advice on all things technology and how it all works together.
I love it. That’s where we end it. Mr. Basa, good nuggets. A lot of nuggets. A lot of stories. I always love your stories. And I’m glad we got you on. Thanks for coming on.
Appreciate you, Josh. Appreciate everything you’re doing and appreciate all the advisors listening to be great.
Love it. Love it. Love it. All right. Everybody that wraps us up for today. As always, don’t forget these episodes are dropping every Wednesday morning, whether you’re coming to us from Spotify or Apple music. Get them, listen to them, soak it up and find those little 10 minute increments to tune in. So for today, tech stack mastery secrets to sell across cloud connectivity and security. Tim Basa, SVP of sales at Telarus. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering.
Until next time.