Ep. 172- Who’s Calling the Shots? Salesforce, Voice, and the Co-Sell Conundrum- Meagan Thai-Telarus
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Transcript is auto-generated.
Josh Lupresto (00:01)
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 biz tech.
Hey everybody, welcome back. We’re on with another new topic this week talking to you about Salesforce, voice, all kinds of good stuff. ⁓ Today we’ve got on with us everybody’s favorite, Meagan Thai CX architect here in the West for Telarus Meagan, welcome back on.
Meagan Thai (00:32)
Yay, I’m back! That’s a good sign. You keep having me back. So great to be back.
Josh Lupresto (00:35)
Hey, it is,
it is a good sign. ⁓ So today’s episode is a unique one. It’s titled Who’s Calling the Shots? Salesforce Voice and the Co-Sell Conundrum. That’s a lot of words. ⁓ But we’re gonna get into this idea of, you know, there’s a lot of things cooking. A lot of customers have Salesforce from a CRM perspective. So let’s kind of kick this off.
You’re in the trenches every day. You’ve got this frontline view. You’re out with Sam at some of these ascends. You’re on customer calls. You’re partners with strategy. How has your role evolved to become so much more central to this sales conversation?
Meagan Thai (01:19)
my gosh, it, it’s definitely evolved. It’s so many changes. I’ve been here. It’s coming up on seven years. So many changes. ⁓ when I originally came to Telarus, it was all about, Hey, let’s build out a CCaaS practice. We didn’t even have one. And back then all we were talking about was CCaaS. What does it stand for? What does it mean? Well, how’s it different from call center? We weren’t even talking about CX back then. Right. So back then it was a lot of educating our partners. Hey, you’ve got to be talking about CCaaS. and what does it mean? How do you sell it?
And while we still do that today, I still do that a lot, but I feel like the role itself has really evolved into more of a, I’m your subject matter expert. I’m here to help you with this opportunity for your customer, Mr. or Mrs. T.A. How can I come in and help you have that conversation? It’s very sales driven and it’s very opportunity driven, right? know, Telarus as a whole, we’re very much focused on less help with these opportunities to help get.
our TA is the win and of course the win for ourselves. But ultimately it’s become more of a role where we’re helping with that sales cycle, that process itself, doing discovery recommendations, trying to figure out what the customer needs, how we can help them. It’s all that encompassing. So I feel like it’s transitioned more of just a, it’s all technical. You know, here’s what it is. Here’s what it can do to, hey, how do we help you through this whole sales process and stay in the deal with you all the way to closure? That’s what I feel.
So we’re doing a lot of that. That’s been a huge focus for myself and of course our entire SE team and Telarus as a whole.
Josh Lupresto (02:51)
So let’s think about some lessons from the field here. We call this lessons, ⁓ hard lessons learned, mentors, just collective opinions, things like that. Walk us through something that you try to carry with you here as you go into every conversation.
Meagan Thai (03:07)
Sure, yeah. So, and this is not necessarily one specific experience. It’s a compilation of a bunch of experiences right over the year. And Josh, I think, you we talked a little bit about this before where we see it happen from time to time. And it’s instead of coming to us and saying, hey, customer wants this, just this, right? It’s about, wait, hold on, hold on. Let’s take a step back. Do they really want this? ⁓ Let’s have this conversation. Let’s talk this through. If you…
Have ever attended if anyone’s attended the CX ascend trainings with Sam Nelson, you always see her hear her pitching. It is about outcome based selling. We’re not selling just to make a sale. So if we have something come to us, especially with AI these days, right? It’s the biggest buzzword. So we have customers coming to us saying we want AI. We need AI. Well, let’s talk it through. What do you mean? We want conversational AI. Are you sure that’s what you want? Or what are all the pieces and parts that are touching it?
Let’s have that conversation. think the lesson here is I’ve seen it happen more often than I’d like, you know, where opportunities come in, customers saying they want one thing, but that might not be it. They don’t know what they don’t know, right? They don’t, they think they want something, but that might not be it. So I think the lesson here is let’s have that conversation. I know it takes time, a time commitment from us, from our partners, but I think it’s so critical. Let’s have that conversation, whether it’s between us and the partner first.
to further flush us out. If we can get the customer on the phone, that’s even better. Because what we tend to see, and I’m speaking personally as well, is if we can have those conversations early on, it typically leads to more success, a higher success rate, meaning a higher closure rate. Because we’re actually uncovering everything that needs to be uncovered, and we’re giving or we’re to the customer the solution that they need. We’re not selling just to make a sale, right? We want to give them what they need to help solve their problems. Again, outcome-based selling.
I think that’s just a lesson that I keep learning the hard way, ⁓ but we just want to encourage our partners. Let’s have those conversations early.
Josh Lupresto (05:10)
There’s a couple of ⁓ parallels here in life. I’ve been told as a person, think maybe this is a male thing, I don’t know. Some of us are just engineered to be fixers. We see somebody suffering, we see somebody in pain, or somebody tells us this thing is wrong and our instant switch is, we gotta go fix it. We gotta get them happy, or we need to fix the problem, or whatever. Whatever it takes to make that person smile again kind of thing.
And sometimes that’s just not the answer. The answer is just listen. Just listen and understand and let somebody talk it out, right? So there’s this kind of innate ⁓ reactive sense in some of us. And I think we see that as a little bit of a parallel to your point when we see the customer come to a partner. We all think that that customer just knows if they’re asking for this thing,
then they must surely know that that’s the thing that they want. And I saw a great example of this, if you remember, Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfour, he was at a sales conference, and somebody said, Jordan, know, sell me this pen, you know, one of these most just aggressive ⁓ salespeople, right, and Jordan said, this is kind of like a hiring conversation. When you go and interview salespeople, it’s not about
The whole sell me this pen exercise has nothing to do with the pen. You got to get the reps that come in and say like, Meagan, I can sell you this pen. It’s great. You can write upside down. You’re going to be in outer space. This, you know, this thing will last a hundred years, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here’s all the benefit. One, two, three. Got it. These are, these are great. Sign here, press hard. The reality in that the real goodness comes in when you step back and go, Meagan, why are you?
What’s driving you to buy a pen? Why did you change from, you used use pencils. What’s pushing on that? How many pens do you find yourself needing? What’s the reason that you’re even asking for pens to begin with? Like have you thought about using other different means of note taking? Like understand the psyche of the person and to your point, I think when we see that, when we drive into that earlier and we understand that earlier.
I used to think it was cliche to go to just get us on the call like let’s just talk about it. But there really is so much value to your point, because we don’t know what anybody wants. Why?
Meagan Thai (07:34)
So much value. Right. here’s okay,
on the flip side, right? So I had a recent engagement where our partner says, Meagan, we do networking all day long. We’re not that comfortable with voice. Can we bring you in this call? We think we’ve got an opportunity to replace their on-prem PBX. We get on the call. That was completely not the case. But what we did uncover was they need conversational AI. So, you the flip opposite of what the, you know, another scenario that I experienced, but so.
Getting on that call early was uncovering this or in contract. They’re not ready to rip and replace yet, but here’s this one huge pain point that they’re looking to ⁓ change. so again, having that conversation, talking it through and uncovering exactly why we’re even talking to them. What’s going on? What do they want to accomplish? Yeah, hugely valuable.
Josh Lupresto (08:22)
So from your perspective, right, there’s choices out there. Is this kind of CX practice has evolved and we’re gonna dive a little bit deeper here into Salesforce, but I mean, use that as an example. I how do we show up uniquely when it comes time to talk about something more complex than traditional UC and Salesforce? mean, what’s the angle there?
Meagan Thai (08:46)
Yeah, that’s a, this is a perfect segue right from this, this example that I just presented where we were on a call to uncover a lot of things. We had no idea what was going on. I think what makes us different to Laris and our engineering practice as a whole is when we come in and we speak with our partners, customers, we take a holistic approach. love using that word holistic. Cause again, we’re not trying to sell to make a sale on this one piece. ⁓ we want to uncover everything that the customer is going through, what their environment is.
Where are their pain points, the challenges? Where do they want to be between now to, you know, we’re starting at point A, do they want to get to point B or do they want to get to point Z? What does all that entail? ⁓ So what we want to do is we want to talk about the things that they’re needing today to help solve a specific issue. But we also want to think about, on, there’s all these other applications. There’s all these other departments within your company.
Mr. Mrs. customer. How is that going to impact them? So we bring in this solution and we have a tunnel vision on what we’re to solve for here. How is that going to impact the rest of your organization? So we take a holistic view. We ask a bunch of questions. Now I was on another partner call where I said, you know what, hold on, let’s what about this or how do they interact here and how do they interact there? And they said, no, Meagan, we don’t want to talk about they just need this piece. And I said, well, hold on. We do want to talk about that.
because they may not just need this one piece. We want to look at everything in general. I’m not trying to upsell them. I’m trying to understand what’s going on in this environment and how can we help so that we can make that right recommendation. And if we do something now today to solve a certain issue, how is that going to impact the rest of the organization? How is that going to look, you know, three years from now? Are we going to have to do this all over again? Because we had a misstep here. We forgot to consider this piece of it. So I think that’s how we’re different, Josh, is, and I like to think that’s how we’re different, is we come in
We’re working side by side with our TAs through that entire process, pre-sales, during the sales process, potentially even post sales, right, with our PM team. But again, we’re taking a holistic approach. We’re talking about everything and anything because that’s how we start to uncover what’s going on and what they really, really need. ⁓ So we’ll stay in there for as long as we need to on the deal. Now, when it comes to Salesforce, and we’ll talk a little bit more about it, is we have to ask a bunch of questions that’s going to uncover.
Josh Lupresto (10:49)
Thank
Meagan Thai (11:00)
You know, how they use Salesforce. What do we need? What are the bits and pieces that we need to integrate with? But yeah, the conversation.
Josh Lupresto (11:04)
Yeah,
let’s go into that. Let’s think about, all right, you’re in a deal, you’re thinking tech stack, you hear Salesforce, you hear we’re trying to voice integrate. mean, what are the aha moments in that conversation? What’s the magic to kind of make some of that click and figure out, okay, it’s gonna go this direction, not this direction.
Meagan Thai (11:24)
Mm hmm. Yeah, so. When we start talking about Salesforce, it can go one of two ways. It could be a customer coming in saying, hey, we have Salesforce. I’m looking at Salesforce Service Cloud Voice. Now, when it comes to that, we would compete with that eventually, right? So we’re either going to compete with it or we can pivot and partner with them on this. So what I would be listening for would be, hey, we want to we’re looking at Salesforce Service Cloud Voice.
But here some of the cool things that we want to use. We want to do real time transcription. We want sentiment analysis. We want a bunch of AI driven insights around this. And I have to stop and say, hold on, hold on. You know, with Salesforce Service Cloud Voice to get these features that you’re talking about, we have to bring in a telephony partner. Salesforce offers a BYOT. Bring your own telephony. So because they’re using Open CTI now, that framework within Salesforce, these are some of the limitations of the real time transcription, sentimental analysis. So if I hear those keywords,
I’m going to say, you know what though? We’re going to need to bring in a telephony vendor, like a CCaaS player that can help you accomplish this. So I love that. So we’re making that pivot. Instead of potentially competing, we’re going to bring in a relationship that can help deliver that. Now what’s music to my ears when I hear things like, no, yeah, we’re using Salesforce, but you know, one thing we can help ⁓ solving for would be our agent average handle time. my gosh, our agents take way too long.
It shouldn’t be 10 minutes. It should be three minutes to handle this interaction. What can we do? That’s music to my ears because now I’m thinking, wow, we’ve got the technology that can help with that. And we have ways to integrate into Salesforce. So can we bring in some cool things like Agent Assist where we’re popping up recommendations to help that agent through this conversation with their customer? Can we give them ⁓ access to the knowledge base? Bring up an article, bring up a link that they can send out to their customer. And by the way, to save time on all this,
Could we transcribe all this and summarize this? Can we do an auto summary for your agent so that they don’t have to spend another five minutes wrapping up the call, taking notes, archiving all this? This can all be done with AI and it can all be saved within that Salesforce ⁓ account contact. So I love that that, again, like I said, that’s music to my ears when they’re looking for more efficient ways for their agents to handle interactions and have it tied into Salesforce in some capacity. So those are the aha moments. That’s the magical thing.
Josh Lupresto (13:44)
Is
it fair to say that, you know, look, Salesforce is great at advertising. Matthew McConaughey has got, you know, the cool factor for sure, right? All right, all right. But is it fair to say that there’s some presumptions from the customer side that, you know, this stack of tools within Salesforce is equally as competitive as our, you know, top CX vendors out there and surely Salesforce has all of these things. And I think, I guess, to your point, like how,
How do you want partners to kind of understand that of, okay, is it those things? it once we hear Agent Assist, once we hear all the, we just realize that you’re gonna have to do more than even bring in a full telephony. You might have to just look at something, you might have to look at a whole solution. Like where do you see that kind of feature, how do you make that distinction when it’s time?
Meagan Thai (14:34)
Yeah.
So I think the minute you start hearing a customer bring up Salesforce, the first thing you want to do is figure out who in their company is using Salesforce. Is it the sales team? Is it the support team? Who is it? Is it the marketing team? So I need to figure out who’s using Salesforce within the organization and how are they using it? And if we can figure out what pieces of it, if they’re looking for a full contact center solution to do a bunch of the work in, they’re working.
We need to figure out then, okay, so what pieces of Salesforce are you using or do you envision using? We can combine that to the context center play and the Salesforce play. Are you using it for outbound marketing and you want to keep that in Salesforce? Fine. We don’t have to look at a dialer or anything like that. Are you using Salesforce chat feature? Are you trying to queue emails in Salesforce? And if so, do you want to leave it there or do you want that to be done within the Ccast platform? So I think.
These are the questions that we have to further uncover as a conversation progresses is that’s cool. We can integrate the two, but we need to understand what are the pieces you want to keep in Salesforce and what is it that we can bring from a contact center perspective? Let’s marry the two together because there are definitely ways to do that. And Josh, I did create, you know, this, I had a partner asked me about it. He’s like, Hey, I got to show that I know what Salesforce is all about and the value it brings versus the context in or so. Can you help me come up with a bunch of questions? And I did.
So I created a list of at least 10 questions about the different data points in Salesforce and how you want it. Do you want your contact center agent interface embedded in Salesforce? Do you want it separate? Do you want simple screen pops and color, know, click to dial from Salesforce or is it going to be way more in depth? Do you want it to auto create a ticket, create tasks and all these questions that come into play that you have to think about? I don’t expect our tech advisors to ask these questions out of the gate. It’s a conversation that will progress.
But I think from the get go, let’s understand how are they using Salesforce? How do they want to continue using it versus what do they want out of a contact center platform? And we can figure that out. What pieces play where we can help them have that conversation.
Josh Lupresto (16:42)
So when you’re in that, I love the discovery questions. And we may come back to some of those too. When you’re in that conversation, we’re talking about this idea of this co-selling conundrum. We know that in the TSD community, we can’t sell Salesforce licensing. And we’ve been asked that many, many, many times, right? It would be awesome if we could, because our partners would be able to sell a ton of it. But when you’re in that and you’re doing this kind of BYOT stuff, are you finding or just exploring this conversation?
Are you finding that, are we competing to your point? Like is the Salesforce rep ever in the conversation with you as a partner? Do we know that they’re always there trying to push this and we want to push BYOT if they are, if possible, because that’s a great advocate to kind of align with. Any thoughts on that?
Meagan Thai (17:29)
Yeah, yeah, they, are times where some of our vendors that play really well in the Salesforce space, ⁓ someone like a Vonage, for example, if they come in and we know that they can integrate very well, with Salesforce, there may be a time where it can get complex, where the integration needs are much greater. They would bring in a Salesforce rep. Okay. Into a call with the customer and that’s fine. So in some of those cases, that’s great. We need to be able to co-sell to, be able to.
to come up with a solution that’s going to work perfectly for our customers. ⁓ But what needs to happen is setting that expectation before these conversations happen where they’re bringing in a Salesforce rep. Let’s set those boundaries. Hey, we’re the vendor here. We’re bringing in our platform, Salesforce. This is where we can use your help. But we own this customer. This is our customer for this specific opportunity. So let’s set the boundaries. Let’s figure out who has what role and not step on each other’s toes.
And I think even beyond the whole Salesforce conversation, Josh, we see so many times where our vendors are saying, you know what, this is going to be much more complex integration. We’re going to need to bring in a third party to help us with this integration implementation. I see it happen all the time, especially in the healthcare and in the finance space. Healthcare, you’ve got, you know, EMRs like Epic, Cerner, these things may have closed technologies or they have specific APIs, but unless we’ve got a vendor that has out of the box.
integrations that have pre-built this, we’re going to have to bring in a third party. In the finance world, my gosh, you’ve got the core banking systems like the Jack Henry, ⁓ the Pfizer, the Symmetars. What I hear time and time again is, my gosh, you’re such a pain to integrate with. They’re so closed off and we’re to have to have a lot of conversations. Let’s bring in, from the healthcare side, maybe we bring in a spin side, maybe from the fintech world, we bring in a novel box or something. But here’s what my concern is.
I love that. Let’s bring it. It takes a village to deliver what we need right to to our customer. That’s fine. Let’s bring in these all these parties. But what I don’t like is being blindsided. So I’ve had this happen before where you get on a call with a customer. We’re going to talk integrations today guys and there’s someone sitting in there in front of you like who in the world is this person? They’re not with the supplier. Who are they? It causes a lot of confusion for the customer for myself or our TAs. Let’s be transparent about it.
Josh Lupresto (19:43)
Mm-hmm.
Meagan Thai (19:51)
And so what I tend to do these days is I’m having a conversation with our customers. say, Hey, by the way, I know that these suppliers are notorious for bringing in a third party. Let’s have that conversation. When we start talking about implementation, let’s find out what we need a third party for this. Cause if so, I want to have that control. I want my TA and myself to call the shots on this, right? Like, by the way, we’ve used these third parties. We trust them. ⁓ we know they’re going to do great job. Can we control who we bring in as a third party to help us with this? And by the way,
It gets our TAs compensated. Huge, right? So I want more control over that and I’m all about being transparent. Let’s have that conversation early on. I’m open with a customer to say we might need a third party, but we can help you with that. You know, and just just be transparent about it. I want to be blindsided.
Josh Lupresto (20:37)
I love this call out. This is so important. And I think it’s a testament to the amount of work that goes into some of these deals that may not seem that complex on the surface. And it may seem like, Magic Wand got waved and poof, the deal closed. Like if you’re not really involved in this. I think it’s a great thought to the TAs to listen in and see
how some of these really, if it feels like it’s gonna get weird or if it feels like it’s gonna get complicated, use that as an opportunity to kind of just listen and learn and dive in. if you see something there to your point, question about it, ask about it. Because the more you can control that sale, I have this forever overarching goal that whatever we do, we need to make sure that it is accomplishing the task of making
the end customers as sticky to our partners as possible. And there are a lot of, you know, the call before the call, the call after the call, the pre-call of the pre-call. mean, all those seem silly if you look at that and, you know, try to look at efficiency of time, but they are so necessary for what it takes. Because to your point, like, third party might not even know how to spell TSD. They don’t, they don’t, they’re just getting on another call, right? They’re an implementer or they’re an integrator or they don’t care. They don’t care, they just don’t know.
Meagan Thai (21:58)
Mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (22:04)
See, I love, love that call out.
Meagan Thai (22:06)
Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny, right? Ironically, we’re trying to help our customers improve their own customer experience. We need to remember to give them that customer experience, right? The utmost positive customer experience throughout this whole process. That’s part of it.
Josh Lupresto (22:20)
All right, from a discovery call perspective, I always wanna leave people with even more questions that they might not have thought of before. So as you’re sitting in on some of these discovery calls, what’s the best way? You started it earlier with we’ve gotta understand who’s using, whether it’s Salesforce or who’s whatever, but mean, walk us just through.
Is it a who’s involved in this process? Is it a why are we here today? What’s your favorite kind of first couple steps in this path?
Meagan Thai (22:54)
Yeah. I think some of our partners think, should I just out of the gate ask them, what are they using? What’s your entire tech stack? What are you using today? Which yes, we need to know that information. We will get there. But I think to start off the conversation, let’s do it in a more natural consultative way. And I’m all about use cases. You you’ll hear me say, and I’ll say this to our partners too, or even to customers. I’m not afraid to say this on the call. I’ll say, look, I’m the solution architect to help you through this, but I’m not going to get technical on this call. I really don’t know how to be technical.
I got to be honest. I, my approach is use cases. Let’s have this conversation to figure out how what’s happening today. How are you using this? So the thing that I like to do is say, can you walk me through, you know, customer here, can you walk me through how, how customer interactions are happening today? So from a customer standpoint or patient or member, whatever, reaching out to your teams, how does that happen? Is it just a voice call?
Are they chatting with you on a website? Are they emailing with you? How does that interaction come in? And then which teams within your organizations are touching those interactions? What are some of the commonly asked inquiries or whatnot? Talk me through that whole process of what happens. And this opens up the whole dialogue because they’re going to start telling you, it does this, but here’s where we struggle. Or does this, my gosh, if we could do this better.
You know, that kind of stuff, opens up that whole dialogue. They’re telling you now what the challenges are. And then in the back of your mind, thinking, okay, now I know where to get them to, right? I know what the outcome is that they’re looking to accomplish. And they’re helping you understand their workflow, right? That entire process. I love that approach instead of just, well, what are you using today? What’s going on? You know, just be natural about it. Just trying to figure out the use cases and you dive deeper and deeper into it. And as you’re uncovering little bits and pieces of the pain points,
you can have a further discussion about that. So that’s how I would do it. It’s all about the use cases. It’s all about what departments are doing what for them today. How do they interact with one another, not just to the outside world, but how do they interact with one another too? And that really gives me a lot of insight into, okay, that holistic approach. Remember, it’s not just this department that might need help. It’s the entire company. So just use spaces, just be natural about it. Don’t get technical.
Josh Lupresto (25:15)
⁓
I
want to push on this a little bit. I’m reminded back, there was a couple episodes ago, we had Trevor Burnside on. Trevor’s got some great military training. One of the things that he talked about that they teach you in military training is basically to figure out your five or 10 things that you’re going to talk about. Procedurally, every time you go into that conversation, whatever those five or 10 things are that you’ve uncovered with the customer or you deem that are important, grab thing one.
Go deep on thing one, get back out of that rabbit hole. Go to thing two, go down that course, get out of that rabbit hole. Do not miss the opportunity procedurally to go down the rabbit holes that you need to, but again, it’s a rabbit hole, right? You quickly realize, my gosh, we only have 30 minutes or my gosh, we have an hour. So how do you, I guess in that framework of that process, right, that everybody kind of follows or we want everybody to follow.
Are there what are the what are the best green flags and maybe what are the best or I guess this would be worst red flags in that to go who if you hear that go deeper or if you hear that steer it a different way I don’t know.
Meagan Thai (26:21)
Mmm.
Yes.
Yeah, ⁓ the green flags, would say are, if you start to hear a lot of frustration, and I love this, when you have a discovery call with more than one person from the customer side, and they all start to pitch in, my gosh, yeah, so so this is this, ⁓ so frustrating, and our customers are saying, you know, they can’t get ahold of anyone, but the time they do, it’s, you know, it’s the wrong person, they got to be transferred again, they’re so sick of it, blah, blah.
you hear that that’s like, I love this, I love this. And you just keep digging for more information. So tell me, so what happens? What are you hearing? So when it, so the customer’s on hold or are you able to see that they hung up? Are there events? you don’t even have visibility into that. You just hear the complaints by the time you get a customer live, all these things I’m listening for. And if they’re starting to show more frustration and they’re getting animated and more than one person from the team is starting to say the same thing, that’s what I zone in on.
Let’s talk more about this. Let’s talk through that process. What’s happening here? Where’s the, where’s the falling off? Where’s the mishap? You know, and my gosh, what if we presented you with a, automation or a conversational AI or a voice bot on the front end to help with this? You know, like I had one recently where it was that one that we thought, ⁓ we have to replace their on-prem PBX come to find that they’re like, no, no, no, no, no. We still were in contract there. Here’s where we need the help.
Right? As we’ve got six folks sitting here, they’re taking calls, but by the time the call gets to them, they’re spending way too much time talking to them because they can’t help this customer or this patient. was a healthcare company. So we’re like, okay, cool. This is how we can automate this with some voice AI or AI agent is the term that we use. And here’s what we can do some call deflection and offload it and just send it to your, your agents if needed. So that’s a huge green flag to me is these pain points. There’s multiple people saying the same thing.
And I’ll go down a rabbit hole on that, because my conversations are very organic. I’ll, like I said, I’ll zone in on the one thing that if I hear, my God, this is a huge pain that we have to try to solve for, we’ll keep talking about it. And then just go back and forth. On the flip side, the red flag. my gosh, this is where it gets really tough. And I’ve had this recently is, ⁓ well, we’re happy. You know, we’re on this solution today. We’re actually pretty happy with it. No complaints.
But we think we might be paying too much for it. So we want to see what else is on the market. I’m thinking, my gosh, there’s no outcome we’re looking to accomplish here other than this is a pricing exercise. Okay. You know, you just have to identify that quickly and say, fine, tell me some of the things I still go through the whole discovery or what are the key things you’re using this platform? What do you love about? What do we not want to lose? ⁓ what can we improve upon it? And then I figure out what recommendations, but again, in the back of my mind thinking this is a pricing exercise.
So that’s the case. We may not have a real opportunity, but let’s just get our TAs what they need to present this to the customer. And then we may just walk away from it. So it’s that. Another red flag, or it’s a red flag, but for me, it’s more of a challenge is when customers just don’t have a clue. Is there not an outcome that we’re trying to accomplish here? Then they always say, we don’t know what we don’t know. So OK, let’s do some educating. Let’s talk about, and I hate this term, the art of possible, right?
Josh Lupresto (29:43)
Yeah.
Meagan Thai (29:43)
Essentially,
that’s what it is. Is, hey, did you realize you could do this? Let’s talk through what’s going on with you. Maybe we can do things more efficiently. I’m sure we can. But that’s always a challenge is they really don’t know. So again, there’s no compelling reason for you to help them through this process to get them to the finishing line, the finish line. so you’re just going to have these conversations that’s ongoing and you don’t know where it’s going to go. I think that to me is the red flags are the more challenging opportunity.
Josh Lupresto (30:09)
Yeah,
that ⁓ compelling event to your point. And I think, know, I’m a big fan of objection handling, right? So, you know, if the first layer of the objection is, hey, this is a price thing, then naturally, I think we have to say, and this is where we need help, you know, with the TA, maybe this is not with the whole audience of people that we’re on the call with, but hey, if we’re able to get you to a point of savings, what is the point of savings that would be
that would make it interesting for you to make a change. I’m happy to get to a yes, of course, but I want to get to a no faster because then that saves everybody the time. We know that this is just an exercise and they may have thought that there was going to be some compelling savings. So they may have had honest intent, no Machiavellian intent to come into this conversation. But if there’s not a number that they can go, I have to save 70%. Okay. Probably not going to happen.
Meagan Thai (30:42)
Mm-hmm.
Josh Lupresto (31:06)
Well, then we maybe pivot that to somewhere else in technology. Like, is there a cost-cutting exercise that you’re really being tasked with doing right now? Because a lot of people are going through that. So I think it’s just depending on the nature of the customer, I suppose it depends, but everything to your point. love being aware of those flags, but I do love the frustration flag. Push on it, understand it. That’s a great call out.
Meagan Thai (31:29)
because that’s where we can make the most impact, right? To help them eliminate that frustration. And I guess to close this out too, is to your point, Josh, what I love asking towards the end of a a discovery call, whether it’s a green flag or red flag, I always say, tell me three things, three criteria that’s gonna help you come to a decision on whether or not you’re gonna move to another platform. If you’re gonna move to another platform, what are those three things? What’s gonna tell is it redundancy, pricing, is it?
know, whatever it is, it’s a feature, it’s a support, tell me what those things are. And I put the customer on the spot and they tell me. So that helps me also figure out, okay, what’s it going to take to take this to the finish line.
Josh Lupresto (32:09)
I like it, I like it. All right, guess final thoughts. know, we get paid by the amount of times we say AI. We’re not gonna have a big bonus this call. We’ve only said it a few times, so I’m gonna have to throw it out for us for a few more here. ⁓ As we think about how AI is modernizing all of these things and the customer expectations are evolving, mean, how do you see, how does that change what we’re doing, I guess?
Take us home on this thought, however you want to talk about it.
Meagan Thai (32:42)
Yeah, of course we got to wrap it up with AI. mean, we’d be doing ourselves a disservice if we didn’t talk about AI. So here’s what I’m thinking. I mean, we’ve been saying throughout this conversation how important our role is, right? With Tiller says we’re helping our TAs figure this out. I think though, in the future, I could be wrong. So our role is going to pivot a little bit, I think. I think with ChatGP,
Chat GPT becoming a household name now. We’re gonna have customers who are savvy enough to go co-pilot something. Hey, I’m looking at this, what do you think? And they might come up with solutions of their own. I think maybe by the time they start talking to us to help them through that process, they may already know or think they know who they wanna look at and say, hey, Meagan, can you help me do a comparison chart?
I’m thinking of, you know, vendors A, B and C, can you help me? Am I on the right track? Can you validate what my thought process is? So now I’m coming in. I feel like it would be coming into the middle of it versus hold on, let’s take a step back and start this over and I can help you because chat GPT may not be the end all it’s pulling information from multiple websites. So it’s giving you what you think you want to hear, but it may not be correct. So I think in the future, it could be the TA and us coming in to validate a customer’s research.
⁓ We need to be more, even more of an expert when it comes to the different platforms that are out there to be able to come in and say, yeah, we see where you’re going with this, but by the way, did you know, and here’s the gotchas. Let us, let us help you through this process. So I think that might change, Josh. think it would be our role pivoting from a, how can we help consult with this to let’s validate what the customer is finding on their own. You know, and that’s, that’s going to be a little bit more challenging, I think for us, but we have to remember, just take a step back unless you start this over.
⁓ and do it in a way where we got to be able to make that recommendation that we feel good about. I’m not going to feel good about customers saying, here’s these three and know we’re adamant about these three. What do you recommend? I’m thinking, hold on. I don’t know all there is to know about your environment. So let’s have that conversation. But I think that’s what’s going to happen in the future is it’s going to pivot. We might come in in the middle of things and have to put a different hat on versus coming in from the get-go and doing consulting.
Josh Lupresto (34:57)
Yeah,
⁓ I think it’s a good call out. mean, there’s other similar parallel innovations. think about, and this probably gives people a like, when I say this, but the car buying experience. You think about what the car buying experience used to be, and then what the auto dealer community had to get used to was your buyers became smarter. Your buyers could do research and 90 % of the time your buyer knows what they want before they even get there.
they’ve just made a choice that they’re either going to buy it from you or they’re going to buy it from you. And so I think we have, we have those kinds of buyers and then to your side, you know, we have those buyers that are like, what should I be doing? What’s everybody else doing? Right. And I, and I like where I’ve seen partners be really successful in this is this is such a great reason to have constant QBRs with your top customers and talk about
all the things that are in your Rolodex of products from CX to security to infrastructure to cloud, all of these things that we have in the portfolio that you have access through distribution to do all of these things. And so if you’re in there every quarter, whatever the sequence is that makes sense, I think you’re gonna find yourself opportunistically getting into these conversations at the right time. Because I think to your point, timing needs to be even earlier, right? We always wanna see
We always want to see in those conversations early and not late. And I love it. think it’s a good call out.
Meagan Thai (36:24)
But I don’t have a crystal ball, so who knows? Who knows what can happen?
Josh Lupresto (36:24)
Okay. Good. Hey, you know,
Ms. Cleo had a crystal ball. I mean, she did, she did okay, but she did charge by the minute. So how biased was she? I don’t know. It’s always a good time for Ms. Cleo reference. No. Good stuff. Good stuff, Meagan. ⁓ That, a lot of good nuggets on here today. We talked Salesforce, we talked just deals and trends and a lot of good stuff. As always, thank you. Appreciate you coming on and doing this one.
Meagan Thai (36:54)
Thank you. Yeah, always a pleasure.
Josh Lupresto (36:57)
All right, everybody that wraps us up for this week, don’t forget, ⁓ do the following, do the subscribing wherever you’re coming to us and listening, whether that’s Spotify, Apple Music, ⁓ or anywhere else. Until next time, I’m your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of sales engineering at Telarus Meagan Thai CX Architect. As we talk, who’s calling the shots, sales force voice and the co-sell Conundrum. Until next time.