Ep.203 – The New CX Stack: AI, Automation, and Revenue Impact- Brent Wilford of Telarus

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. This is Next Level Biz Tech, we are on talking about CX and AI. Title of the episode today, the new CX stack AI automation and revenue impact. That’s a lot of words. We need a smart guy on to help us and on with us today. We got Mr. Brent Wilford, solution architect over CX. Brent, welcome on dude.

Brent Wilford (00:33)
Thank you, Josh. Great to be here.

Josh Lupresto (00:35)
⁓ We got a lot to cover man. ⁓ I know a lot of people know the Brent Wilford experience They know who you are, but for anybody that is new and does not know Just give us a little background on How you got started take us back? How did you first get into tech and sales and kind of now here we are?

Brent Wilford (00:55)
Yeah, so if you want to go back, it’s going to have to go back to Red Robin. And I know that sounds funny. But working through college, I worked at Red Robin. And I was doing graphic design for the Yellow Pages. I wanted to be an advertising major. I was going to make funny beer commercials. That was the goal. But you have to kind sell yourself. You have to be able to know people in the industry before the internet. Like, people had desk phones. So when I graduated college and I couldn’t get a job by myself, I spent a lot of time looking for work in graphic design and ways to get in the industry. And I failed so much and I rejected all kinds of sales jobs. I didn’t want to be a vacuum salesman. I didn’t want to say, hey, let me put this dirt on your floor and vacuum it up. And how many do you want? That was not me at all. I didn’t want to bother people. So I kept getting these sales jobs thrown at me. And I’m like, no, no, no, I want to make ads. I want to create copy. I want to do these things. But I kept working at Red Robin and I kept singing the birthday song and kept driving me nuts. And I eventually got offered an inside sales job at Nextel.

Right? Two-way radio, cell phone company. This is 1999. So like beginning of, you know, commercial cell phones for most people being affordable. And I said, what’s inside sales? Do I have to bother people? And they said, no, you don’t have to bother people. They call you and you just sell them. I said, no more birthday songs. I want to do it. Right. So I said goodbye to Red Robin. I said goodbye to the Yellow Pages. No more tracing bouncy houses and pizzas. And I learned how to sell. So worked in a call center. Right. I calls delivered to me.

I learned the pitch, I learned how to talk about the next sale benefits, and I really excelled at that. I got good at selling, you we could only sell five phones at a time kind of thing, but I moved in the outside sales for a year and it was terrible. They had all these high expectations of me because I was so good at inside sales, but cold calling, like going back to the vacuum sales apprehension analogy, I really, really hated cold calling. Like getting told no affected me and it wasn’t, my personality wasn’t able to come through. So even when I got a meeting, I was still nervous in the meeting kind of thing. Like I would screw up a, you know, ⁓ a natural sale. got a, I need 10 phones. Let’s come talk about it. And I couldn’t, I couldn’t make it happen. So I was getting ready to quit Nextel. I really liked the product. I could understand it. I could sell it well, but I just wasn’t being the salesperson wasn’t for me. And they came up with this job called DAE data account executive. And it was when 2G networks were first released on cell phones. They really didn’t do much, but on the Nextel network, you could do a few things. You could use it to track devices you could do address book updates. So one of the big things with Nextel was the two way radio and these construction jobs, but guys came in and all the time. And so you had to update who this user was a lot and you to do it manually was a real pain. So over the 2G network, you could update the address book. And then there was some other, one other product, I forget what it was, but like they wanted someone to four legged call these sales calls. So I didn’t have to prospect, but I went on the call. I helped sell Nextel and sold these data products. We all made way more money than we should have for what we were selling.

That’s how I got started in tech sales was Red Robin to 2G data. Yeah, that’s kind of the impetus of the BWE experience, the BWE that we talked about.

Josh Lupresto (04:00)
I mean, you just, nobody started out to do this, it seems like. This industry, this world, that’s my favorite part of doing this show is that you just, I think it tells you that anybody can do anything and we just all have this kind of weird, windy path. And you just, you know, it’s like talking to the kids, like you don’t need to have figured out what you want to do at 16. I mean, it took me a long, long time to figure that out. Just try things, figure out what makes you happy, figure out, some experiences and struggle a little bit.

So I love hearing that example. So take us through, I always like to hear hard lessons learned, mentors, mean early on, anywhere in your career. Great mentor, gave you a good piece of advice, anything that kind of shaped how you sell or even kind of how you think about this whole customer relationship thing.

Brent Wilford (04:49)
Yeah, well, it wasn’t necessarily the customer relationship, but it was that it was that inflection point. the the D.A.E. role there at Nextel was really lucrative for a few years. And then, Nextel eventually figured out, hey, we’re paying these guys to sell, we’re paying them way too much to sell what they’re selling kind of thing. We can do this more cost effectively so I could see the end of the line to the kind of the gravy train that we were on. And I’m like, OK, well, this is going to end. ⁓ I can either go back into sales, which I know is terrible.

Or there’s that one guy, that one really smart guy, Mark, his name’s Mark McEvee, he was the sales engineer. And whenever he’s in meetings, IT people really listen to him. Like he speaks their language, he doesn’t flinch, he whatever, it doesn’t matter what they say to him, he understands what they’re saying and understands how to position this technology to solve that problem. And that interests me because one, I was terrible at sales, right? It’s like option B wasn’t really there. But I was very curious, I was intrigued by… what he knew and how and where he learned it and how he got to where he was and where, how do I, if I want to do that, like how long does that take? Like, what do I need to do? And I asked him, that was the one cold call that I was successful at was going to Mark and say, Hey Mark, I’m really interested in what a sales engineer is and what do you do? And, and can I be one? Like, how do I, what would I have to learn to go be one? And he was so naturally willing to help me. And he was so generous with his time. I remember we sat down this one meeting and he, he kind of mapped out some things. They didn’t make sense to me. I was still just a guy living with my college buddies and hanging out on the weekends. But he helped propel me to where I am today because he helped me understand, the internet is becoming more widely available. And you need to go back to school. And you need to learn TCPIP. And you need to learn networking. And you need to learn how data packets move around. then this is how the next tell. This is how the cellular network works. And there’s the core.

And so if you can answer these questions, then this is what IT people need to know about cell phones specifically, right? And we were doing a lot of sled work. you know, police and fire work and how the modems in the car would help power the laptop so they could either run the license plate or they would get their cat dispatching ⁓ for fire and EMS emergencies. And so he really was generous with his time. He helped me understand there was an entire world of technology that if I took the time to go learn it, that I could then use my personality.

and my ability, the beginnings of the customer relationship that I was beginning to form, personality and my comfortableness in front of tech folks and IT folks, that I could probably give this a go. And that really started, so the DA thing was one thing. But when I asked him about what an SE was, and I went back to local community college and I took two or three classes on how to design a Wi-Fi network and what, it NetBio or NetBooie or whatever Microsoft came, like all this weird random stuff.

Josh Lupresto (07:36)
Yeah.

Brent Wilford (07:38)
that stuff you just threw away, understanding the basics of networking, understanding TCFP protocol, the OSI layers, ⁓ all of that stuff. That’s what allowed me to make the transition from underperforming tech guy to overpaid DAE to an actual sales engineer. And that’s really where we go. So Mark McAvee, if this ever makes it to you, thank you so much. I appreciate your help.

Josh Lupresto (08:03)
Shout out to Mark. Love it.

Brent Wilford (08:05)
And he went on to be like super smart Microsoft. Like he’s done like amazingly, you know, highly, highly technical things far more than I was capable of, but he was generous enough with his time and I was able to take that little bit of information and make, make, make my own career out of it.

Josh Lupresto (08:19)
So I have my own answer to this to some extent, but what was your perception of what a sales engineer was prior to that? What was your thought, kind what happened behind the scenes?

Brent Wilford (08:29)
Mm-hmm.

No, and this is really, this isn’t a good question because it changes over time, right? But originally it was just answer questions, yes or no, like that was it. Can I do this? Can I do that? Yes or no. And you just let the chips fall where they may. And I wasn’t a great sales engineer for the sales part. I was a great engineer. You know, was truthful. Can I do this? No, it doesn’t do that. See you later. And then the sales people always be like, well, but I have a quota to hit. You like, what are we supposed to do here? I’m like, not my problem. You know, doesn’t do that.

And I learned when I got to Fuse, right? So I like, we skipped over quite a long time there, but another major mentor I have is Michael Musselman was my sales engineering manager at Fuse. And he helped me really understand along with medic sales philosophy, right? M-E-D-D-I-C. ⁓ He helped me understand, hey, the answer might be no, you know, and a lot of times the answer is no, but we also have a sales process to hear. So can you just be curious enough to find out what they’re trying to accomplish?

Josh Lupresto (09:16)
Yeah.

Brent Wilford (09:31)
and maybe we can accomplish it a different way. So it doesn’t have to be black and white, no, all the time. You can still work, move forward because even though the customer thinks that’s the requirement, it doesn’t always mean that’s the requirement or doesn’t mean that they can’t do it a different way or accomplish the goals somewhere else technically. So originally, yeah, the thought was I just answer questions just to know I sit there and someone pays me. And that can be true, but to really be a capital S sales engineer.

You have to embrace both the technical aspects of what’s possible and not possible, where we’re trying to go with a sale and find an ethical middle ground to continue down that sales process as long as it is ethically possible.

Josh Lupresto (10:09)
I love the, let’s see if he listens to this. Shout out to Scott Forbush. He taught me that there was capitalization in lowercase in S and E. We ⁓ can’t go down that road. All right. So, you’ve gone, you’ve been on the TSD side, you’ve been on the supplier side.

Brent Wilford (10:17)
Scott Forbush can teach a lot of things to a lot of people, but we don’t have time for that on this podcast.

Josh Lupresto (10:35)
As we get into this idea of the new CX stack, AI automation, and it’s just a little bit different now, is there anything that you’re seeing, ⁓ what do advisors maybe misunderstand about how these CX deals are won in the trenches? For anybody that hasn’t really ventured into this yet.

Brent Wilford (10:51)
⁓ It’s not a short answer to that question, but if I could pick out the highlights to that, ⁓ it still involves being curious. ⁓ CX is a complicated sale, even if we’re just selling voice, which is rare these days. But even if we’re selling voice, Contact Center was a cost center for decades and decades and decades. How do we pay these people the least amount of money to answer these calls of with people we don’t want to talk to, right? We just want them to pay their bill and not cancel, but we have to somehow have this call center to get people not to cancel kind of thing. And the world has, know, the digital front door, the way that social media, the way that digital entry points to communication have changed our communication as human beings, but specifically as B2C or business to customer or consumer. ⁓ Contact Center is a profit center. It is a brand ambassador, right? It is the way that people of all ages whether we’re talking about Gen Alpha all the way through Boomers, maybe not Boomers because my dad can’t really work computer that well. But the way that people communicate has changed so much that if you just approach contact center as this is how voice calls get connected to people and we’re just going to deal with it on a minimalist attitude, then you are decades behind. You’re the Stone Age. You’re crafting a wheel out of stone kind of thing. And you’re not going to find a lot of success because the contact center is now a sales center. is, like I said, the brand ambassador, its reputation alignment. ⁓ It’s keeping people from canceling, going to your competitor. The statistics are everywhere for trusted advisors to find. But one bad experience sends people running out the door to a competitor. And in a world where there’s more competitors than ever, and it’s easier to find them than ever, ⁓ you have to work hard. You have to invest in this technology, in this contact center. ⁓

for it to be everything and all things to your customer and for the agent that’s representing you. If your employee has a bad day, if you give them technology that stinks, if you don’t give them access to find information and say, hey, Josh, I know you’re calling about this specific product that you bought last week and how can I help you? If you make it hard for the agent, they can’t be friendly and they can’t fix problems for someone that’s calling in that is on the precipice of canceling or on the precipice of placing a huge order. You don’t know what’s on the other end of that call or that chat or that digital interaction.

Yeah, this is complicated, but what trust advisors need to know that if you help businesses find the right technology that allows them to communicate fluently in multiple different ways with customers of all ages and generations, you are not only fundamentally changing the success and the trajectory of that customer and allowing them to succeed in a world that is more competitive than ever, but you are able to take that story to the next customer and the next customer and next customer and say, I’ve done this before. I haven’t seen everything but I’ve seen a lot and I think I can help you because at the end of day, advisors are doing this for their own benefit, right? For their own revenue, for their own success. And the ability to replicate success is the key to all of us doing what we want to do in life, right? Where you pay for our car and our vacations and our homes and all that. But work can be easier if you just take joy in aligning technology to desired business outcomes and helping those businesses succeed because then your success comes from their success.

Josh Lupresto (14:20)
So it’s a good, I think everything up to this point is a good foundation of kind of how you do what you do, right? With your story, ⁓ what some of these examples are. And to that point, let’s go deeper on an example. mean, walk me through a situation where you got brought in, you got to be the architect, you got to kind of do these things. Walk me through what was that experience like, kind of before or after during.

Brent Wilford (14:44)
⁓ When you work at TSD, ⁓ there’s thousands of examples. It’s hard to pull them out. ⁓ But the main goal here, the architect, the role that I bring to Telarus is calm confidence. You may be a one-person shop, you may be a 20-person shop. You may know a lot more about CX than I do.

There’s a lot of advisors out there doing this longer, better than I do. ⁓ But the customer doesn’t know that, right? And the customer is so busy in their day to day and their problems and whatever they’re dealing with. Like they don’t just have time to sit there and research Gartner reports and Genesis versus Nice all day. And then, you know, a hundred different point solutions on AI. like a lot of these customers don’t know what they don’t know, right? They know they need to go somewhere and they know they need something better than they have today. But like what that road to evaluation looks like is so murky and undefined.

That they are simply looking for someone who can help walk down that path with them and provide, you know, and just shine a light in the dark, if you will, to be a little corny. ⁓ And that’s really what we do here. So whether it’s a big, you UCaaS deal like, hey, listen, Mr. Mrs., you know, IT person, you’re doing global UCaaS for 5,000 users. Have you ever thought about talking to people outside of IT on what they want a phone system look like? That concept is so simple, but it blows people’s minds. Because the answer most times is no.

I’ve never thought about asking my end users what they actually want. I’m just the IT person and I just want to tell them what to use and for them to go away. Like that’s kind of how it works. like that’s, you know, it’s an example of just the sales philosophy of, can we get outside voices into this evaluation? So we get a yes from more people than just the signature and the, and the evaluator, the IT evaluator. And then, you know, in contact center, a lot of it is just, it’s just listening. I mean, it’s core sales, but if you just listen and you ask thoughtful questions, like I know the aspects of technology that go into a contact center evaluation, right? We have voice, we have omnichannel, we have reporting, we have AI, and we have all these different things, gates that we need to check and information we need to gather. But when you’re able to just spend time listening to a customer ⁓ and ask them questions, ⁓ it just, makes them feel more comfortable. Not every customer, some customers are just wound up, but most times they’re just happy to have someone listen to them and be interested in what that future state is for their technology and their group, because they have promotions, right? They have goals for their career that they want. And this technology evaluation, if it goes right, helps get them there. And if it goes wrong, it’s a fireable offense sometimes, right? And so, like, what we do here is not trivial. It’s not just saying, well, here’s three contact center vendors. Good luck. They’ll all be fine eventually. It’s really important what we do here. So ⁓ I get involved in a lot of,

Josh Lupresto (17:20)
Yeah.

Brent Wilford (17:39)
contact center evaluations, voice UCaaS evaluations, AI discussions, like what’s the possibility of AI in today’s contact center? And there’s not one thing that I could say where I got involved in this person closed this deal because of one little question I brought up or one feature that no one thought of. It’s a desire to want to help people and then the underlying knowledge of saying, hey, I’ve read all these reports and I’ve been through a hundred different evaluations and I’ve seen the roadmaps of all these people and I can help you get where you want to get. I just need to meet you.

I just need to understand what’s important to you. So there’s a lot of example. I didn’t really answer your question, but.

Josh Lupresto (18:15)
I think it’s even more powerful than a singular sample because it’s a collection that drives home a point of I think the end customers a lot of times are doing this thing for the first and maybe the only time they’ll ever do it in their career. And meanwhile, we might have done it four times that day. ⁓ And so I think just harnessing the goodness of that and I think you put a bow on it well. It gives us this calm confidence of how you walk into these, how you have these conversations and they feel validated, they feel heard, they feel like, okay, this is not like he’s not trying to push a thing. He knows what we’re going through and he’s seen it before and we’re probably not that much different, even though they might feel like they’re different. It’s not really that bad.

Brent Wilford (19:02)
Yeah, and you know, and that’s a huge difference here. Like I like working at a vendor is fun. Like you get really deep into technology, really get to, you know, box out other competition or really out trying to win, right? Like the goal is to win. ⁓ But you really forced a lot of square pegs around holes working at a vendor, not only, you know, not unethically, but you know, like there’s always things that your software, your product doesn’t do well, or it doesn’t do as well as XYZ or doesn’t do the way this customer’s asking for. But you only have so many opportunities on the phone.

Josh Lupresto (19:28)
Yeah.

Brent Wilford (19:31)
And so you got to figure out how to win even when you know you’re like 80 % of what they want, maybe not 100 % of what they want. And so here, we almost always get to be almost 100 % of what they want. We have so much available technology, so much insight to what’s coming down the pike, and the ability to shape the customer requirements. Because as a vendor, I can’t shape the customer requirements. They’re given to me. But if I come in in the discovery phase, if I come in with a customer really as

Josh Lupresto (19:38)
Yeah.

Brent Wilford (20:00)
asking for that help, asking for that vision of what’s possible and what could they really do. You have the ability to retrain their thought process and their expectations of what software is and what customer experience is. And you’ve got to say, hey, I know you’re talking about it this way, but if you just tweak it a little bit, you’ll probably provide a better CX to your customers. And you’re going to align with where the technology is today as opposed to asking for something that’s got to be custom built or hard to develop or something like that.

It’s really, really interesting being here at the TSD because there’s just, you know, it’s the Cheesecake Factory menu of technology, if you will. But sometimes you’re in the mood for a sandwich and sometimes you’re in mood for a salad and sometimes you’re in mood for a steak. And that way we have all of that here.

Josh Lupresto (20:35)
Mm-hmm.

That’s right. So.

Brent Wilford (20:45)
I keep going back to restaurants. I gotta figure that out.

Josh Lupresto (20:48)
Hey, you got it locked down. know, I’m fine. Free breadsticks, unlimited breadsticks. No. We’ve had some Olive Garden folks on before. ⁓ So CX has changed, obviously, a lot. ⁓ We could look back, let’s just look back, I mean, 18 to 24 months. We got a lot of TAs that have been doing this a long time. And 18 to 24 months, we’re talking about the new stack.

Brent Wilford (20:51)
Just no birthday songs. No more birthday songs. That’s it. No OG. We’re not doing Olive Garden here.

Josh Lupresto (21:17)
We’re talking about how that’s different. What’s changed? mean, what’s fundamentally changed? Obviously, AI, AI, AI, but in your perspective, discovery calls, customer conversations, TA conversations, from your seat, what’s changed?

Brent Wilford (21:17)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

I think vendor maturity, I worked at a TSD prior and then I was at a vendor. ⁓ I was out of that game for about 18 months and now stepping back into it. ⁓ The vendor maturity ramped up in those 18 months. People went from, hey, we’re toying with this stuff, we’re in the beginning stages of these things, to we’re now in stage three or four. We’re past the ⁓ idea of agentic AI. We have the ability to automate things. We have the ability to give ⁓ agents autonomy.

In terms of processing your claim and your refund to your credit card and rescheduling your appointment. It’s not just trial and error with one simple thing. Like, OK, Mr. Lopresto, you want to make an appointment here I’m going to schedule this appointment in this one API. And that’s that. And it’s so minimal that if I screw it up that there’s a human in the loop checking each one and we’ll get it figured out. I saw a demo last week where an AI agent was processing four or five things on a call. And it was showing me in real time on the back end how it was changing those things.

Yeah, we went from concept to production pretty quickly here. ⁓ I hope we don’t get to Terminator that fast. ⁓ But the vendor maturity has really ramped up, not only from the Core CX players, but the individual point solutions that are in the ecosystem as well. And they’re starting to get more use cases. Nobody wants to be first. So everyone’s like, hey, that sounds great on paper. But if I’m going to be your first customer, that’s a lot of risk for me.

They all have these use cases under their belt. Like there was a lot of trial and error in those 18 months of customers deploying AI, whether they did it themselves or with, you know, vendor one and maybe vendor one was successful. Maybe they were in lot of cases they weren’t, but the customer learned a lot about what it can and can’t do and how to manage it. And the vendors learned a lot about how to present it in a more cohesive manner, I would align it with ROI and business objectives. So that landscape really matured over 18 months and I’m excited.

To hit the ground running from where it seems to be now.

Josh Lupresto (23:32)
So we talk a lot about use cases, or if somebody jumps on the Tuesday call, or if we go to one of Sam’s trainings. I think we do a lot of great conversations around use cases. And I think that’s important to talk about it again, from an AI perspective. What are the AI use cases that actually matter that you’re seeing get funded, and why? Why is that now? What are those cases?

Brent Wilford (23:56)
You know, it’s so funny because when I talked about AI 18 months ago, I said, you know, the safest place to use AI in CX is ⁓ in the non-customer facing realm, right? So put it in your backend, put in the analytics. So you have a gold mine of all this data, right? Your observe AIs, your level AIs, all these people analyzing data and they’ll help you make decisions. You’ll understand trends in your data area and call center. You understand trends like why are people calling about XYZ product or sales are up in this month and down in that month. Use AI in a safe way where it’s not customer impacting. You won’t be the next Air Canada or whatever embarrassing chatbot experience you want to see on the internet is. And you could harvest all that data and then go make a ton of great decisions and everyone looks good. And 90 % of the conversations I have are still on the front end. They’re still in chatbots and voicebots. They’re still customer impacting. So what’s getting funded is revenue driving stuff. Whether that’s solving the problem of agent attrition, right? If I have a hundred agents and I roll over 25 a year, people don’t want that pain of rolling through 25 agents. They also don’t want the pain of agents sitting there and answering, what’s my account balance? Or I want to reset my password, like the really simple stuff. So it’s funny to me that the easiest, most non-threatening part of AI is not what’s coming up in these conversations. It’s the most forward-facing, customer-focused, highest risk for failure.

Or embarrassment is still getting funded because it has the most tremendous impact on customers and on reputation and revenue and on ROI. So the questions that we keep getting, I still can’t wait to have these back-end data conversations because I just think they’re so much fun. And agent assist in the middle is there, but it’s a big umbrella there. But all the attention is on when a human being interacting with AI and how do we keep that customer happy while reducing the strain on the the human load of the contact center. That seems to be what’s getting the most attention right now.

Josh Lupresto (25:57)
So I love to always make sure whatever our topic is, I’m a big, you we talk about what changed us early on as an engineer. For me, it was reading the right strategy to ask questions and learn that people didn’t want you to vomit everything that you knew and that wasn’t value. It turned out we need to know what they want. ⁓ And then we talk about that. That helped me get a lot better. So from your seat, what’s the angle for the TAs listening, right? What’s the angle of getting these executives to take a CXAI meeting right now, how would you frame that up as they’re prospecting out there?

Brent Wilford (26:34)
Well, this could get me in trouble, but I always make the analogy of sales and dating. And I promise we’re not going too far, But think back to dating, Like if you sat there and talk about yourself for two hours, you’re not getting a second date. A lot of great things to know about me, but it doesn’t matter. The person on the other side of that table doesn’t care. You just have to be curious about what the customer wants.

Now you have to have the ability to handle that conversation, right? Like if I’m on a date or I’m on a sales call and I’m asking questions, I have to be able to follow up and actively listen and have a complex set of knowledge, whether that be things for a date or things for a conversation. But you have to actively listen. You have to be interested in the answer. You can’t just say, uh-huh, and pretend to take notes. You have to actively listen to this customer and make them feel like whatever they’re seeing is the most important thing in the world because they will keep talking.

And they will keep telling you eventually, like they’re going to be guarded up front, right? You’re a salesperson. I want you to sell me. But if you truly listen, they will eventually relax, right? Their shoulders will drop. They’ll sit further back in their chair and they will start telling you what is important to them. And maybe it’s just saving money, right? Maybe it’s, the last two software installs went terribly and my job’s on the line, like, or the, the company’s going to fail if we don’t get this right kind of thing, like whatever it is.

Be curious, have a fundamental knowledge of context center and AI and what possible business outcomes are there. Be genuinely curious about the customer, about where they came from, what’s their current state, where are they going, why is it competitive pressure, is it board pressure, whatever it is. And just don’t say, you need to talk to XYZ vendor. Like that’s not the job. The job isn’t to say, I’ve listened to you for five minutes, you should go talk to this vendor. The job is to say, that’s so interesting. Let me.

Work on this for you. Like, let me come back to you with this because I have a lot of options for you. I don’t want to make sure I the right one. And so TAs, it’s no different than when we were selling anything 20 years ago, but it’s being curious, being inquisitive, following up, right? Ask second and third level questions and really come back to the customer with documentation that says, I listened to you. Here’s what I think I heard. Here’s what I think you’re trying to go. Is that right? Because if it is,

Here’s two great options. And I have this engineer over here who can help us map this out or ask other questions or vet these vendors for like really, you know, ⁓ make sure that they’re accurate and their answers. But the fundamental part of tech sales isn’t any different than that than it was 10, 20 years ago. It’s still, it’s about listening to the other person, right? It’s basic communication and psychology. I will buy something from you if you convince me that I want it.

That if I convince myself that I want to, sorry, I messed it up, right? If you’re selling me, I’m going to resist that, right? That’s human nature. But if you listen to me enough where I make my own decision and you’re just providing the input, then that’s how we get to a tech sale. And contact centers no different. It’s just insanely complicated and detailed. And there’s a lot of different ways it could go. ⁓ But that’s what, know, the really, really good advisors, listen. The really good sales engineers, listen, right? Customer does more talking.

Josh Lupresto (29:31)
Yeah.

Brent Wilford (29:56)
I do more listening. I’ll talk more on the next call. And I think that’s generally where we find success.

Josh Lupresto (30:02)
I love it. ⁓ I love that too. know it’s fundamental or might feel fundamental to some, but just being reminded of this, you know, whether you’re wrapping the meeting or whether you’re beginning that kind of second meeting, it’s, hey, you’ve deemed that this and this and this and this and this. If you did what Brent said, have followed these steps, right? And you pull that out, we’re going to cover this today. Is that accurate? Right? Is that the direction you want to go? Or has anything changed? Because these things change. Somebody gets a board mandate or whatever ⁓ handed down, just the validity and I love the psychological component of this. mean, there’s two paths to it seems right on the shortest path is the one that we want to go. And if that’s where we know how this meeting is going to go, we know we’re going to get there. I could come in and I could vomit on you and then you’re going to be like, that’s gross. Or we take Brent’s advice and we go, hey, we want to go around about this way and it’s going to take us a little longer to get there. they go, my gosh, this Brent guy.

⁓ he listened to what we needed and I feel like he understands us. Yeah. You’re we’re, going to Chili’s man. Like this is great. Like two for 20, baby. Yeah. One day, one day. Yeah. No Sizzler though. Who’s Chris? Like, well, hey, little Caesar’s isn’t wrong with the cheesy bread. ⁓ all right.

Brent Wilford (31:00)
You get a second date, second date, Josh.

Only mid-grade restaurants in this conversation. No, no Rooskris. No. Well, that cheesy bread, that’s good stuff,

But no, mean, it’s funny you say throwing up, Like going back to like when I was the first SC, yeah, my job was just spit all this technical jargon out there and then you’re going to buy it because it’s so amazing. And like, that doesn’t work. ⁓ I had, I forget where.

I think it was at Sprint, but there was like a ⁓ vendor, like the Sprint network and we sold, it was like vehicle tracking or something like that. And the CEO of that vehicle tracking company was in LA and he wanted to go on meetings and he wanted to present. I was doing big government accounts. brought him to like either Department of Water and Power, like some big Los Angeles kind of thing that had a need, they expressed a need in vehicle tracking, right? There was something there. And I’m like, well, I’m to let this guy handle it today. He’s a CEO.

DSE and the guy literally turned his laptop around and pressed play on a video and to the customer and the customer fell asleep. Like customer dozed off and I’m looking at going, I have my sales reps fisted me and I’m pissed at me and this customer’s fisted me and the CEO thinks he’s doing a great job. And it’s like, we could have got something done in that meeting. We probably could have sold something eventually that meeting, but the delivery was awful, right?

It was just playing a video after lunch that no one wanted to listen to. And like, no one was actually listening. The customer was just trying to wow someone with the art of the possible and just hoping they sign an order. And it doesn’t work that way. So that asking questions thing, like keeping them involved, it’s poker. It’s back and forth. You bet, I bet, check. Who’s reading who in the room? But it’s always the customer first. And for us, it’s the advisor and the customer. We have multiple customers in a deal.

But it’s my job to listen to the advisor on how they’re trying to ⁓ craft a deal. And it’s my job to listen to the end customer to make sure that everything there is aligned. And then it’s my job to go coach the vendors that we’re going to bring in to say, hey, this is how this deal is going to go. And this is what success looks like. And if you’re not going to do X, and Z, then you’re not invited to the first call. And you won’t be invited to the next call if you don’t listen to that too. But it’s our job to make sure that everybody is focused on that end customer.

And keeping their future state, their desires, their goals in mind. Because otherwise, we just have a customer that falls asleep because no one’s listening to it.

Josh Lupresto (33:43)
bad day. It’s embarrassing. ⁓ So our goal here is to make sure for you the TAs you don’t fall asleep and the customer doesn’t fall asleep as long as we do that. that’s that’s the bottom guys. It’s it’s I promise you it’s gonna be better than that. All right so final final thought here. I mean we were talking about this evolving stack where we flashback you know 18-24 months.

Brent Wilford (33:44)
It was a long drive home. That’s what that was.

Josh Lupresto (34:09)
So what’s your advice here as advisors are taking you up on these conversations, getting these great foundational data points kind of together and pulled out from the customer threads? Anywhere that the advisors should be leaning now, if they want to stay, is this constantly evolves, constantly evolves just over the next couple of years?

Brent Wilford (34:32)
⁓ Yeah, I mean, you said it before, but this stuff is changing fast. ⁓ And so it’s gonna change. Even if a customer said today, I wanna go evaluate this kind of AI, by the time they buy it, it’s gonna change. Like it might change before the next demo, what’s available or what’s possible or what it can do. So I would think one advice would just be be open, right? To a fast paced moving technological landscape. Don’t set expectations.

that the technology can’t live up to, but don’t set them so rigidly that when the technology expands past it, that that feels uncomfortable to the customer, right? Just know, right, this is like a big tsunami, right, of technology that’s coming, and it’s gonna keep growing and keep changing. But I would really, really encourage advisors to research this technology, use this technology, like bring your own use cases to it. Like, you know, it’s easier to sell technology that you use.

because you can use anecdotal information or examples in your day to day. ⁓ I’m not saying to go become a call tech center agent, right? And use AI, agent assist or whatever to live the life in the agent. But like there’s videos you can watch, right? There’s tutorials you can read. I subscribe to master’s, I love master’s class. There’s so much cool information in master’s class that made you think strategically. So it’s get out of the transactional nature of this and get into the strategic part of this. And use AI, whether it’s Gemini or chat GPT or Clot or whatever, use this technology and your research in your account planning, in your presentation creation, whatever it is, find ways to use it because when you’re comfortable with it and you can bring that level of personal touch and feel and usability into that conversation, it’s going to play off what I’m doing or what Mike B or Sam’s doing. And it’s going to just bring this level of comfort to your customer who’s looking for direction in this world of technology.

And they’re trusting you and us, right, we as a team collectively to help them make the right decision. And if we’re calm, confident, right, if we know what we’re talking about and we know what the technology can do, it’s just easier than having one person be that point person talking about this technology at times. So like just use the technology, it’ll help with your prospecting, it’ll make your day easier, right? There’s a lot of productivity gains with AI, specifically for me around research and things like that.

It’ll make you daisier. It’ll make you more confident in front of your customer and it will help you sell more. So just get immersed yourself in this technology. Read the reports, watch the videos, listen to people explain it. And know, two, three months, you’ll be far more technically adept and you’ll have a, you know, I think you’ll have a greater confidence in your sales motions and you’ll be able to go find more of these because you won’t be apprehensive because well, that’s what the SE knows or that’s what the people at Telarus know. I just got to go to find people.

And we can work together on this thing. And if we both know what we’re talking about, we’re both comfortable in this technology, we can be a lot more deadly in these customer facing scenarios, not deadly and like we’re affecting the customer, yeah, kill it. But we’re bringing that future state to that customer a lot quicker because we kind of understand what the technology is capable of doing.

Josh Lupresto (37:43)
assassins in CX. I was going to report.

Great stuff, man. That is a great place to wrap it. Mr. Wilford, thanks for coming on, buddy. Awesome. Lots of good nuggets here. Appreciate it. All right. ⁓ That wraps us up. Everybody, don’t forget, every Wednesday morning, this thing drops wherever you’re coming to us from. Apple, Spotify. Get this before anybody else does so you can learn some of these pro tips wherever you’re coming to us from. get a lot of people, cutting the grass. I’m working out. Whatever. However you can find a great way to digest this.

Brent Wilford (37:59)
Thank you for having me.

Walk the dog

Yeah.

Josh Lupresto (38:24)
We love it. We appreciate it. So I’m your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of sales and engineering, Brent Wilford, Telarus solution architect, which has been the new CX Stack. next