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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 got a fun episode for you today. On with us. We have got Adam Burke, VP of Sales at Quest. Brother Burke, welcome on my man.
Adam Burke (00:26)
Hey Josh, thanks for having me again. This is awesome. I always love listening and catching up on episodes and when I get a chance to join, it’s always a pleasure.
Josh Lupresto (00:35)
Yeah, you didn’t bomb on the first one, so we figured, like, hey, why not have you back? So no pressure. But hey, let’s give it a try, right?
Adam Burke (00:43)
Hey, you didn’t bomb. Welcome back. Thanks. That’s awesome.
Josh Lupresto (00:45)
It’s
a backhanded compliment for a Friday. Today’s title, we’re talking Channel Myths, Mistakes, and Million Dollar Moves. We talk a lot about lessons learned, things that we’ve gotten wrong in the past. We’ve got some secrets that we hope to help uncover here to help partners get these things locked in and deals locked in. ⁓ For anybody that hasn’t heard, Adam, we had another previous episode, episode 132 that Adam and I were on.
We just talked lot about security and negotiations, and think you got a cool background. So for everybody out there, go listen to that if you haven’t heard that one yet. Lots of good stuff on there. So ⁓ Adam, let’s think about here, you’ve got this cool military background and as you come from that, mean, maybe start us off with how did that shape your approach to negotiation, leadership, and how does that carry over into kind of working in the channel?
Adam Burke (01:37)
Yeah. So, so been with Quest going on 15 years now after finishing up a short ⁓ stint in the United States Army. And my first getting involved in the channel was basically trying to understand the landscape, understand the players, understand the rules of the game, rules of engagement, if you will. And it took a lot of time. So when you, when we were talking about this episode and what we’re be talking about, kind of, you know, definitely had a lot of failures early on.
Um, uh, understanding the rules of the game, the players involved took me about four years to figure out what a TSD or a master agent was, uh, coming from our VAR background, um, and, the different ways to engage there. But from a negotiation standpoint, when we’re talking to partners and we’re going through the sales process with folks, really understanding the game. And when I say game, I mean, the, engagement that you’re in and the services that you’re, that you’re providing.
⁓ and who are the other players? What are the motivations of the partner? What are the motivations of the client? And then ultimately knowing, ⁓ you know, what’s important to our organization and kind of trying to, trying to figure out the VIN diagram and the overlap where it can be a win-win for everybody. and, and really trying to be honest about that. A lot of people we found when we’re working on opportunities, you know, sometimes
Sometimes they don’t even know the game that they’re playing necessarily. They don’t know how to negotiate a software licensing deal versus a product resale purchase or a data center engagement ⁓ or ⁓ a complex system integration application development job. These are all ⁓ different maneuvers. So in the army, we had battle drills, right? ⁓ Basic thing is you have different battle drills in different scenarios.
⁓ so, ⁓ just, you know, just for my army buddies, no, I’m not that weird officer who wrote a handbook for my sales team on battle drills for, ⁓ you know, so don’t make fun of me. ⁓ but we do, we do have certain moves and certain kinds of standard operating procedures for, Hey, when this type of an opportunity presents itself or this type of a challenge, you know, here, here are the courses of action you can take to, accommodate that shift. ⁓
And you try to standardize while at the same time, not becoming too rigid, where you have 10 skews and those are your 10 only skews and hopefully the customer fits within those 10. That’s definitely, you know, there’s, risk both ways from becoming too bureaucratic and too regimentalized, regimented versus, you know, staying flexible. You got to, you got to maintain that balance to be effective.
Josh Lupresto (04:29)
Yeah, you know, it’s kind of a, it’s a blessing and a curse, I suppose, to have all of these skews, right? I mean, you know, we, we grow up in this space in the channel of going, okay, this, this provider has product A, this provider has product B, this provider has product C, you know, which, which one does your customer need? And when the customer comes back and says, well, I have this weird, you know, cobalt thing, or I have this weird infrastructure or data center project doesn’t really fit into that, ⁓ that structure per se, right? So we are kind of
We’ve had a lot of lessons learned, I think, over the past few years, and I’m excited to kind of help others kind of learn from of how do we avoid some of these in the future, but also the end goal is how do we help translate these things that may be seemingly binary into a world that is not binary, but how do we operate within confines so that we can know consistently what people could bring you or what they can’t bring you or what’s a deal or what’s just an exercise, those kind of things. So think there’s a lot of good to be learned there.
Adam Burke (05:29)
Yeah, and something that I’ve learned is ⁓ there’s no necessarily wrong strategy in the channel. It’s just what is your organization built to support, right? So our organization is built in a certain way that, ⁓ and sometimes can be viewed as, well, that’s a little bit different than the way this provider does it. So for example, a lot of providers really want to do one or two things.
And scale to the moon, right? Rinse and repeat and do those one or two things really, really well. And that’s a fantastic strategy, right? And they do that one or two things really, really well. They grow. ⁓ They have a couple offerings and that’s what they do. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. So sometimes we’ll get into ⁓ passionate discussions with partners about the way that things should be done. That’s the way.
maybe one supplier does it, we tend to take a little bit more of a customization system integrator approach where you can’t scale because it’s so diversified, right? There’s so many different aspects of the technology stack that we’re okay with the one-off conversation. We’re okay kind of moving outside that box. And that’s one of our strengths. But at the same time, if you’re looking to scale from, you know, ⁓
a thousand managed service clients to 10,000 managed service clients in two years. Um, that’s not necessarily going to, that’s not necessarily going to be the game plan you go with. So, and again, there’s nothing wrong with that. We use, we use partners in the channel that are single threaded on, you know, secure storage operations or, know, they, all they focus on is endpoint protection. We’ll bring those providers into a use case and bundle them in. But.
But that’s kind of, it’s a decision that you have to make as far as, you know, are your strengths and weaknesses wanna be? I don’t know if you remember back when you were kids, I was a nerd. I’m guessing you were probably definitely one of the cool kids and not a nerd. But. ⁓
Josh Lupresto (07:40)
Yeah, yeah my bull cut
my bull cut my cargo pants like really put me at the top but yeah, go ahead
Adam Burke (07:46)
Yeah, yeah, but you remember the old, I just always think of the old Marvel cards, right? Where you look on the back of the Marvel card for the superhero and they have speed, agility, durability, flexibility, all those different kind of rankings for their use case there. Or if we really want to get geeky, we could talk about Magic the Gathering, but let’s not go there yet. So there you go. Yeah. But sometimes, you know,
Josh Lupresto (07:59)
Yeah.
sell them and make money. There’s my investment advice. Yeah, go ahead.
Adam Burke (08:14)
you build your strengths based and you build your company based on what you want to do. And so what we’ve been really successful at doing with partners is understanding the business outcome. And then we built the company to have those different battle drills and have those different resources brought to that opportunity as a specific engagement. But the downside, I want to be 100 % candid, is we don’t have the ability sometimes to
sell that client on why that methodology is better than the person who’s scaling 10,000 times. And that’s the reality.
Josh Lupresto (08:51)
Yeah, fair.
Yeah, no, no, no. Fair point, right? I think the game is about finding out who’s really a fit for what. I mean, I think that’s all of our jobs, delivering up and helping these customers at the end of the day and mating that certainly to the large vendor ecosystem, the supporting OEMs, all of those different things. And so that’s the matchmaking job, right? And that’s where we hopefully come in and help. So let’s talk about maybe…
First lesson, so you think back about the past few years, what’s a hard lesson learned? Maybe one that you’ve learned, you’ve seen or a partner or just maybe kick us off with that. ⁓ When it comes to what’s it take to win the business?
Adam Burke (09:39)
Yeah. So sometimes, sometimes the hardest lesson to learn with a, with a partner is you, you see them going down a path where you’ve, you’ve been down that path before with a client. might be, responding to an RFP. It might be, you know, leaning into a pre-sales engagement and ignoring potentially what we, what we call yellow lights and red lights when we’re evaluating how to engage a classic one. We’re an MSP, right? ⁓
There are MSPs that are considered the incumbents and there are some serious red lights when you’re coming in to help an organization that is considering transitioning from one MSP to another. And sometimes a really frustrating scenario for partners is they’re told one thing by a client around their transition from one MSP to another and the opportunity that’s in front of them, but they kind of ignore
⁓ the red and the yellow lights that maybe signal that client’s not quite ready to move away. And we’ve been through hundreds of these, right? We’ve been through thousands of engagements where we’re talking to clients, understanding their transition plans, who owns the assets, how long does it take to actually move from a firewall provider and a Azure partner or a hosted instance partner and all of that to a new organization. And one of them is just time.
One of them is just the time to migrate and the cost of migrate and the associated kind of risk and benefits of that move. And sometimes partners are really, really reluctant to ask those questions and kind of really dig into the idea of, are you kind of, ⁓ are you kind of understanding what else is in the market right now? And would you like some consulting around, you know, what’s the MSP landscape?
Or are you seriously wanting to move and we need to do a full redesign effort and documentation and everything like that. And, and it’s a hard lesson for, for partners to experience that after, cause sometimes they’ll kind of, they’ll kind of give away the consulting and give away the engagement on the upfront and spend hours and hours and hours only to find out, you know, a couple of months in that there’s no revenue there.
They’re not leaving from their incumbent. They get the Dear John letter, ⁓ know, hey, sorry, business reason we had to renew with this organization. And that can sting for them, especially if you kind of at the mention at the outset kind of called out, hey, these are some things you might want to be aware of and here’s some gaps in your plan. And again, I fail on this all the time, like all the time.
I get duped and ignore yellow lights and red lights, but that’s probably, it’s a hard lesson to learn.
Josh Lupresto (12:35)
Well, let’s,
this is a fair point, right? I think we all want to be myself included, right? ⁓ You know, when I was going door to door, I thought that everybody told me that they really wanted to buy my $3,000 vacuum. And it turns out that’s a lot of money to pay for a vacuum. And people didn’t like telling my smiling face no, because they felt bad. And so I learned, I learned that maybe I maybe I could uncover that ⁓ a little differently, a little better, right?
in a parallel, I guess, what is a, because what we want to be, what the partners want to be is they want to be fast. They want to get an answer, right? We know that customers have a sense of urgency, right? So we kind of want to relay that sense of urgency. But what’s a, when somebody comes and says like, Hey, I got some MSP needs, I want to swap some things out. What are the things that make you say, Whoa, red light, yellow light. it the, Hey, we want to do everything.
I don’t want put words in your mouth. it that? What are the things to look for in a conversation like this that we could do a better job of flushing out?
Adam Burke (13:41)
Yeah. So, so we, tend to really focus on, know, why do people make changes? Oftentimes people are going to make a change in their life or in their technology because of some type of a pain or some type of an event. So when we’re trying to understand why someone’s doing something, we’re typically looking for, is there a pain that’s driving this? Right? Is this a, did, you know, did someone change the licensing scheme? Did someone, you know, did they get bought and all of a sudden their pricing doubled?
You know, did, ⁓ did they, did they totally drop the ball on a remediation effort? Was there an outage? Was there a breach? So was there, was there, was there a pain that was significant enough to mandate a move? ⁓ you know, or, or was there, was there an, is there an impending event that’s happening? They’re going for a certain certification. They have to go through an impending audit. ⁓ you know, the, the managed service provider that they used to work with just went away.
or they lost a key person or they lost their one engineer. Those are typically what we call catalyst events. So we’re looking for that catalyst or that reason. And a great way to figure that out is just ask the question. I know sometimes people get uncomfortable about this, but ask the question like, well, hey, what happens if you don’t do anything?
Josh Lupresto (14:59)
I love that question. I don’t think that’s like a level of inception in the conversation, I think, because I think it throws people back because they’re just not thinking like that.
Adam Burke (15:00)
You know?
Yeah. And if they can’t, if they can’t answer that question, and sometimes partners will interpret that all of a sudden, well, we’re not interested. No, it’s not. We’re not interested. It’s just, Hey guys, I don’t, I don’t think they’re, they’re ready yet. They’re not, they don’t, there’s no impending event. There’s no driver here. Would it be great? Would it be awesome? Like are the, is there all sorts of cool new technology that they could, we could leverage for them? Could we help them? Could we be thought leaders and
All that fun stuff. Yeah. But really kind of peel it back to why people make decisions and why people do something different. It’s there’s some type of a catalyst that’s driving them to make that decision. Or, ⁓ there’s an impending event or there’s an impending pain point that’s, that’s been, that’s been identified. Everything else is a much lower problem in our, in my opinion, most of rest of it is a very low probability of success. ⁓
And to your other question, Hey, another red flag or yellow flag is, we want to do everything scope out every aspect of our MSP and our stack and our MSS and all every service you have. I mean, we’ve done it. We’ve landed the plane on some massive deals, you know, with your partners, but starting, sometimes starting small is a much more attainable green light to, Hey, let’s start with a database assessment.
Or let’s audit your controls around your firewall, or let’s see how your, your internal network is segmented. Let’s do a little bit of a network audit or a health check around your security. Or, you know, we can put together a, let’s put a little phase one engagement around a data center move. If you were to do this, let’s keep, let’s, let’s flush out some budget numbers for moving you to Azure or AWS, just so you’re going into it eyes wide open. But here’s the thing we, we would charge for that type of a thing.
Right? would put together a design and kind of go in with a lead with that, ⁓ you know, that on the front end as a billable engagement. Whereas sometimes this ⁓ is an area that we had to learn as far as communicating with partners. A lot of partners will kind of give that away and they say for free, but it’s not really free. It’s included in their service on how they’re getting paid on the backend from suppliers.
So it’s not really free. We’re doing things for an expectation of a return. At Quest, we typically are a little bit more upfront with that idea. Hey, we want to help you. We would love to help you. And here’s what it would cost for us to help you.
Josh Lupresto (17:53)
Well, you okay, so you bring up a couple key points here. I want to speak to some history that’s been successful with this strategy. I do want to come back to the idea of Bant when it comes to qualified leads and things like that and see what your perspective is on that. But I but I do like your start small approach because also some people that are you know, a customer that’s meeting Quest for the first time has no idea who you are. So the idea that
that a CIO is going to cough up everything. I maybe that’s maybe like a private equity portfolio engagement and they’re trying to slim down and, you know, they want to kick out an MSP and there is a justification to kind of rip out all that. I guess I could see that’s a much more, you know, realistic scenario. But if I look back at some of the deals that we have done, you know, we may have signed a very low, I’ve seen the customer sign a very low near zero dollar MSA to get it agreed upon.
slated hourly rate for XYZ services. And you guys are kind of a, you could do the bill of materials based on the hours need, pull from your bucket of resources and people are like, ⁓ okay, I use that guy for database. okay, I use that person for an Azure migration. And here’s 10 hours that were slated to be billed. And we thought that’s all that was gonna be billed was 10 hours. And then we look at the commission reports and the order reports and we see this thing that was supposed to be a couple grand is now.
10, 15 grand and we call you up and say, that, is that right? Did you guys overpay us? You go, no, they just turned out. they use this for a bunch of stuff and then they discovered, well, yeah, they actually helped us execute on that. wonder if they can help us with this thing. So there’s this never ending thing of the deals never seem to, ⁓ stop where they start necessarily. Right. If we do good on that little first piece. So I’m a, I’m a big fan of kind of the MVP idea, ⁓ of, that. So that’s been cool to see.
Adam Burke (19:49)
Yeah. And that’s kind of that, that, land and expand, you know, virus theory, if you will, like just get involved in something small, you know, work with them mutually, you know, it’s a mutual benefit, right? We, we get a small contract, get a new customer, ⁓ you know, partner gets to introduce maybe a service that they’re not typically engaging in. ⁓ and we just kind of help out on an ad hoc basis. ⁓ we call that our technical on-call support engagements.
⁓ extremely, extremely successful in the middle market. ⁓ And yeah, and then it just kind of grows ⁓ to kind of evolves from there. Some of our largest contracts have started out with something as simple as a database administrator, helping with a SQL query that was taken too long. So, yeah.
Josh Lupresto (20:37)
Yeah.
What’s your perspective here? You know, this is a little more of the old school smile and dial. I got a call center, I’m cold calling, right? Everything needs to be banned, right? I’m a big fan of the ban methodology though. You got budget, authority, need, and timeline. And does my deal or does my prospect have that? Does that strategy still kind of relate? Like, should we be trying to connect those dots on every deal? What’s your, I guess, perspective as you think about
opportunities.
Adam Burke (21:09)
Yeah. So I think that has to do with the level of energy you’re going to commit to that deal. Right. So if it, if it, if maybe they don’t have budget authority or maybe they’re not the decision, maybe they’re not the decider. I do my George W. Bush, your first nation. but maybe they’re not the decider, ⁓ or have decision-making authority, but, but they do have influence or they do have a couple other things. It just depends on how, like how much you’re going to charge into that opportunity with resources.
Cause we all have limited resources on how much we want to spend with time and people and things like that. So you got to kind of pick your battles. so if it’s fully qualified, it’s, you know, it’s ready to rock. ⁓ okay, let’s get an assessment. Let’s get a, ⁓ an advisor. Let’s get a consultant in there and start, you know, ripping things apart and taking a look at what we can do. But if it’s not, then that’s okay. You know, maybe you get in there and you have a capability discussion around what could happen.
when they do have budget or what could happen in that when they, when they do have the authority to make the decision. It’s all relationship based. And what we’re always trying to do ⁓ is, cause our, like I said, like I said before, our strategy is based on pain and events, right? And if you’re not around when that event happens or when that pain occurs, you’re, vulnerable. Your pipeline goes away.
So strategically for us, we want to talk to and meet as many partners, as many people as possible. So in the event they have trouble, they think, those Quest guys were creative and they could help out in a couple of different areas. This pain point that I have right now does not fit cleanly into that one box of MDR provider or that one clean box of data center or infrastructure.
that qualification you’re talking about fantastic for assessing, okay, green light go, everyone hit the door, we’re going in versus, ⁓ we’re not there yet. Let’s throw up a drone, right? We’re not gonna commit. We’re not gonna commit. And again, to all my army buddies, really, I I apologize. I apologize for the, that’s so lame. But anyways.
Josh Lupresto (23:21)
Is this a battlefield reference? we like saving infantry soldiers? I get it. I respect it. It works.
Adam Burke (23:30)
You know, throw up, throw up some, some, you’re not committing boots to the ground, but you’re going to observe. You’re going to talk to them. You’re going to see how they’re doing. You’re going to plant the seed for future opportunities. And something we do, we’ve, we learned that the best way to, kind of, ⁓ to get that going is, through what we call capability reviews. So we’ve incentivized advisors. ⁓ Hey, let’s do a capability review. Let’s get on the phone, talk with your client, understand what they’re trying to do.
and walk through the capabilities they could leverage if they want to.
Josh Lupresto (24:06)
I like it. I like it. ⁓ Let’s talk about a previous, mean, let’s layer in maybe a previous misstep. Let’s protect the innocent here, but let’s think through, okay, we’ve got some lessons learned from missteps that I know you’ve kind of got in the coffers. So how do we take what some of these lessons are and recognize that customers are buying, they’re buying a little bit differently. It’s a different buying cycle.
It’s an explorer. It’s a, have to, I’m expected to do something with AI. Some people are coming around to what they want to do. Some things we’ve already sold and they didn’t realize the ROI would come so quick. And so we’re kind of meeting people at all these different stages. And I’m not saying like everything is about AI, but how do you take that and just recognize it seems like the buying cycles are changing a little bit. So what do we learn? How are we moving it forward?
Adam Burke (25:04)
Yeah, lessons learned for that is definitely go into these opportunities not expecting and not pretending you know exactly what’s driving the decision. We had a classic scenario the other day, a long-term partner, advisor within the Telarus partner network. They had a client who we had thought
was very price sensitive. ⁓ We had done a massive deployment for them. They were adding additional sites. And some significant things in those sites changed. We went from five doors to 20 doors for our access control system. We went from three cameras to 15 cameras. Our wireless access points went from A to Z, or from, excuse me, from three to about 12 at this site. It basically,
the site at least doubled in the infrastructure requirements. We had thought, and the partner had thought, that the organization was going to be extremely price sensitive and really, really upset about the change request. ⁓ And so we had talked to the people who were making the decisions there, and we came to find out after kind of, know, you know,
worrying about the shift and worrying about the issues. They were not worried about the price. They were worried about two things, delivery timeline and our ability to operate as trusted partners and advisors and give them a transparent update as far as what the change was. Now, we probably had five or six internal calls burned, you know, multiple hours of our time, probably a couple of your engineer’s time.
⁓ on that call, kind of worrying about, Hey, how are we going to, how are we going to address this with the, with the end user? ⁓ cause it was a significant, significant change. ⁓ but that wasn’t the driver. weren’t worried about funds. They were worried about hitting their deadline for their, for their board and about making sure it was a, we were a good partner that could, you know, ⁓ communicate that, that change request. So the drivers aren’t always, aren’t always the same and the buyers are changing too. Like.
how they’re buying, how they’re subscribing to things, how they’re evaluating partners. Short answer, Josh would be.
Don’t go into it thinking you know what’s actually driving the consumption until you have that conversation and you try to flush that out. Because you can make moves and pull levers that you don’t even need to. That’s not what’s actually gonna affect the outcome.
Josh Lupresto (27:55)
You know, I want to get on a soapbox for a minute. Let’s see how this goes. ⁓ You know, I used to think growing up when you would see all these successful business people, you know, the infomercials, the real estate guys, the whatever guys, and you dive in and try to get an understanding of how did they do what they do, right? Think the how did Bezos build Amazon or how did this guy build that company or whatever, right? And it was just, I worked hard. I didn’t stop.
I was relentless, I outworked, I gave it all my discretionary effort, I treated people nice, didn’t, I recognized that people were humans and I figured out how to help people have great growth paths. And if I focus on those things and if I focus on ⁓ helping other people, that turns out that it comes back to work in the end, provided you don’t get taken advantage of.
And so I see the similarity in our world and in our industry where when we get in a lot of discussions, the common thread is we have to focus on the business outcomes. And when I see that and I hear that so much, right? And I hear that and I see that from successful people. I see that from our folks. I see that from partners. I see that from vendors, you when we’re trying to flush out how has it worked for you? So this common theme is it’s business outcomes that happen at the end of the day. So if I take
If I take what you’re saying as to how we’ve gotten to some of the, dissect how we’ve had some of these successful engagements, both with you and with others, it seems to come from, man, once we finally understood what they really wanted, we were all wildly successful and much more successful than we even thought we would be. were, we were in it for what we thought it would be, but it became something bigger. So is the.
What I’m trying to figure out here, guess, is the million dollar question, the hard question of, I know you told me that you need these things, Mr. Customer. I know you told me that this is why you’re doing it, but what’s the outcome that you’re driving for? Are we just not asking enough of the outcome questions?
Adam Burke (30:11)
Yeah, it’s, it’s, the challenges in our industry is a lot of the partner, a lot of the customers are waiting to get pitched and they’re in there and they’re in the part of their negotiation strategy on that side of the table is, is to kind of mask the intent of what, of what and why they need what they’re doing because they, because sometimes they think they can get a better price if you kind of keep the person guessing.
⁓ whereas if you’re in, know, there are bad actors out there who try to take advantage of situations and there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of FUD in the IT space. So we’re dealing with an industry that’s kind of brought up a certain behavior. If you can, if you can, if you can build that trust and lower those defense shields from the customer and they can tell you what they’re really challenged with and what their outcome they’re really looking for. Then it’s amazing how much time is saved on.
creation of the scope and creation of the service level agreements and documenting who’s responsible for what and creating that win-win scenario. We tend to qualify very, very hard there because that’s what we’re trying to understand. Can we get to that conversation with the customer? And part of that qualification process is understanding, is this person going to tell me what they’re really trying to do? Or are they…
you know, going to kind of play, you know, some, Machiavellian court games and try to try to, you know, execute the 48 laws of power to get their best purchase on a hardware refresh. Right. I don’t have the energy for that. And then there’s so many opportunities out there for partners that you can play that game if you want to, or you can kind of step back and, and, and wait for the pain train, which inevitably is going to come.
to all everybody, and you can step in and help them at that point. So it is a little bit of a dance. think what your technology advisors can really do is ask the question as far as why are you doing this? Similar to like what happens if you don’t do anything, right? Why are you looking at a SASE solution, right? Why are you talking about ZTNA?
Why are you looking for micro segmentation? Why are you doing data loss prevention? And if it’s the canned like, know, CIO monthly, you know, article that was published by the vendor and they read off the bullet points as far as what Gartner says is why they should do something.
Cool, okay. But if they’re no, this just happened and we saw this as an issue and we ⁓ wanna protect against these things, okay, cool, we’re getting closer to the business outcome. And that’s tough because if that’s your opportunity, if that’s your guy, if that’s your person at that account, sometimes you can…
advisors can kind of get latched on to that opportunity and kind of want to ride it into the ground. in our opinion, it might not be ready for prime time yet. If you can’t get that outcome conversation.
Josh Lupresto (33:42)
Yeah. Okay. So ⁓ next couple thoughts here as we kind of wind down before we kind of do the future and things like that, I want to talk a little bit about, I think you guys, as far as a vendor in the Telarus portfolio, you represent a big swath of things, right? We’re seven years into this relationship and I think we’re still
shooting the texts, expecting a no man, I don’t do that. And we’re getting a, yep, we’re here and here’s an example engagement of what we had, right? So we’re still learning all of the things that you have with respective, you your core product sets, you’re supporting OEMs, managed services, all of that. So for anybody that’s not familiar, I mean, walk us through for a second, you’re in security, you’re in cloud, you’re in infrastructure, you’re in managed services. I mean, you’re trying to meet the demand of a customer. you’ve sort of…
you know, put this focus around what the customers need and what most businesses need. I mean, give us the, give us a little bit of highlight of some of the key product sets and focus areas for you guys. So partners can kind of be positioning, Hey, when I have a need, but also when I’m going out meeting with my prospects and just doing QBRs positioning for things that might come up later.
Adam Burke (34:57)
Yeah, so we built the company a little bit different in the standpoint of ⁓ there’s a labor division, right? So you need people to execute on tasks. ⁓ There are vendors and OEMs and software solutions out there ⁓ that you need. And then you need the ability to execute and project manage and deliver, right? So we got people, labor, we have technology, and then we have the process and the project management to deliver.
And then we have very, very strong capital capabilities to acquire assets, deliver them as a service and bundle things together. So when partners are thinking of us for opportunities, know, an MDR endpoint protection, storage solution, manage wifi, you know, those types of services, those all have multiple vendors that we could select and plug in for that use case.
Right? You know, you need, you need flash fast storage. You drop into pure array. need, you know, an alternative to VMware. You can drop in Nutanix. You know, you have, you know, we have our edge cloud compute services that we host. You need help tying into AWS or Azure or the Microsoft stack. You know, we’re a tier one CSP. So we have all these building blocks from a technology standpoint that we help deliver. But really the secret sauce is we, know how to, how to partner.
the technology stack that all of us have access to. We all have access to all of these different software vendors and hardware manufacturers and things like that. But we know how to source it. And we also know how to manage it as an MSP. where we’ve been seeing a lot of growth is helping organizations assess what they have and then plug in the next thing that they might need to help augment that.
Endpoint protection and security conversations across anything in the security stack. can help DR and business replication and business continuity, data center operations, all of that. We built our own data centers. We built two of them and we operate at about 16. So some of your partners are always surprised to learn, wait, you guys can do the digital like migration from, from cloud a to cloud B, but you can also like go in and pick up all the servers and move them from.
California to Texas or from, you know, from a Florida data center to, you know, up the coast further or just digitally move them. Yeah. We do the physical and, and the digital, because we don’t, we don’t see it as, ⁓ we’re, only a DR company or we’re only a data center company in Northern California. So many, so many people kind of put that limitation on themselves that, I’m an MSP in this region. I can only support this region. If we thought that.
And again, that’s not wrong, but if we thought that we’d still be rolling trucks in Sacramento and love Sacramento, great market, but, you know, Hey, you can, we can deliver. just, we just finished, you know, a international 30, 30 country deployment with you guys last year.
Josh Lupresto (38:10)
No, I think it’s wedges. It’s wedges. What I hope people are kind of understanding in that is there are wedges and there are a lot of wedges. If you need a product, lots of wedges there. If we need a service, lots of wedges there. If we need a scope of work, temporary, you know, three to six month engagement and migration.
can help with that. I think at least what we’ve seen in this is that these types of wedges don’t usually stop. ⁓ They tend to end with this unknown date or this unknown, more just seems to come. It seems to be the gift that keeps on giving, I guess, is what I’m getting at.
Adam Burke (38:53)
Yeah, and fully transparent, because we talked about like failures and challenges, that flexibility can hurt on the pre-sales because you guys will call and say, hey, can you guys help with XYZ? Yeah, 100%, good to go. Here’s three examples of a project we’ve done before on that. And then we’ll get involved with a customer and the partner.
And there’s the idea that there’s a standardized methodology for that specific use case. And it’s like, well, there’s probably eight different ways we can attack that. So that’s, that’s kind of the thing that we’re trying as hard as much as we can. do boot camps, we come to you guys events, we do training, we do all that kind of stuff to try to try to build up the idea of these are all building blocks that the client.
when they’re discussing the outcome they’re looking for, we can work with them to build that next step. That can sometimes rub partners the wrong way. Classic feedback you’ll get, and this is something we’ve heard before, wait, you want me to pay you to scope this? And it’s like, well, that’s one way to look at it. Yes, you can look at it that way. But it’s also, no, no, we’re helping you to design an outcome based on
on what you’ve told us you’re looking for right now. There’s a significant value to that. ⁓ Whereas, you know, maybe a competitor of ours would listen to the outcome and plug in like 10 SKUs and have their Salesforce instance pop out a quote. That could work. Maybe it’ll work. The sales rep is probably going to pitch it that it’s going to work, but that’s just not our model. That’s just not how we help.
Josh Lupresto (40:42)
Yeah, it’s a long ⁓ game approach. He who plays or she plays the long game always wins. You will not lose in the long game. It might take a second to get there, but ⁓ I do love that strategy.
So I guess as we kind of think about where we go from here, as we wrap this up, you know, we’re writing the next chapter for the future playbook. We’re thinking, of course, AI is a big component of that, data readiness, the Microsoft, the purviews, the data dogs, this getting data ready, building my LLMs, tweaking it, keeping it private, right? Those are all future things that are here right now and going to be here for a while. But if you’re writing that,
⁓ next chapter based on the disciplines, the real-world lessons. Take us home with what’s just a couple must-do strategies over the next couple years.
Adam Burke (41:41)
I think with AI and automation, we’ve been through some automation situations in the past. I know a lot of people think this one’s going to be different. Probably is. ⁓ There are some drivers that I think are going to change some of the economy at a high level ⁓ and change some of the labor situations that we all have.
I think the, from a security standpoint with partners and advisors and people who are out there from a technology standpoint, really need to invest in the idea of helping with an outcome. And the idea of your security as an advisor is in your ability to produce results. So, you know, whatever that, whatever that production means for you and your, and your customers, you have to be able to produce results for your clients.
I mean, personally, I think that in the, services space, in the MSP space, in the AI integration, I think the idea of bringing, you know, ⁓ multiple people into one deal or, doing a broker model is going to, is going to be challenged because if that’s, if that’s the production you’re looking to do, I mean, think about it. AI, AI agents are now handling complex conversations.
If your value is, can bring in three people and give you quotes for three people, that’s going to get automated in the next couple of years. That’s a very, very, it’s a very, very vulnerable place for an advisor to be. I would say the ability to produce results though, and, and help with complex, ⁓ complex designs, complex engagements, you know, bringing together, you know, multiple vendors into one outcome. That’s, that’s definitely the ability to help.
⁓ organizations with their IT stack. And that’s where I see them going. I’ve been seeing some really cool assets getting developed by your team and by others that are helping the advisor community get the most out of the opportunity they have with the customer when it presents itself. And then also communicating with them as far as what they can do to help.
Josh Lupresto (43:58)
Yeah, I think it’s a great problem to have, right? It forces us to get a level deeper. It forces us to get into the whys. It forces us to understand all these things that we know that the customers don’t understand, right? They’re being forced to implement some of these technologies and have no idea how complex, valuable, but how complex some of these things are. So I’ve always been a believer that the harder this technology gets,
While it might be easier and it might automate, the channel thrives in complexity and the partners truly add so much value. The harder it gets, I get more excited, right? Because the customers need the partners more and more and more. So it’s a great, it gets a good time to be and I love, know, I’m a nerd. I might not be able to magic the gathering, but I am a nerd with this stuff and I do love to see all this new stuff come out. Cause I just go, my gosh, there’s so much help that we have to give here. So good stuff.
Adam Burke (44:53)
Yeah,
they love this. The more people standardized and the more people scale, the more pain is going to come from people who need to operate a little bit outside of that standardization. And that’s a fantastic opportunity for the advisors to help.
Josh Lupresto (45:11)
I love it. All right, Adam Burke, VP of Sales at Quest. Thanks for coming on, man. Good topics. Appreciate you coming back.
Adam Burke (45:19)
Yeah, anytime Josh, thanks for having me.
Josh Lupresto (45:22)
Awesome. All right. That wraps this up everybody. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. This has been channel myths, mistakes, and million dollar moves. Until next time.