In this HITT, Telarus presenters discussed strategies for successfully closing high-value CX technology deals. They emphasized the importance of outcome-based selling, effective communication with various stakeholders, and the use of mutual action plans to track progress. The presenters highlighted common challenges in the sales process, such as objections and the need for faster ROI justification, and provided tactics to address these issues. They also stressed the significance of understanding AI applications and engaging resources early in the deal process. Overall, the session aimed to equip tech advisors with the tools needed to navigate the complexities of CX technology sales.
Transcript is auto-generated.
We’re welcoming back to our Tuesday call today three of Telarus most sought after presenters.
VP of CX Sam Nelson, along with director of CC and UC Solutions Meagan Thai, and solution architect for UC and CC Michael Baillargeon.
Sam, Meagan, Mikey b, welcome back to each of you. Great to have you here today. How are you?
We are great, Doug, and that was a wonderful introduction. Thank you so much.
Alright. We’re just gonna kick it off here. No time to waste. So let me can you pin me, Chandler?
There there we go. Boom. Alright. So we are in production. Just FYI, folks, couple house housekeeping items.
Meagan Thai, and Michael are in the chat. So feel free to stir it up, and thank you so much for the shout outs. It looks like we’ve got a ton of rock stars in the attendees’ list here, so very excited for this conversation.
As Doug mentioned, today, today’s session, I should say, is called the CX deal blueprint, how to consistently close high value CX technology deals. Wanna give you guys a little bit of insight into what’s going on, answer a lot of questions as to the whys. So let’s just dive right into it. Alright?
True Sam fashion. Okay. First and foremost, getting to know you. I always love to know who’s on the call.
So how familiar are you with selling CX technology? In the chat, are you, one, not very familiar at all? Two, just a little, but you wanna learn more? Or three, I’m a CX selling rock star.
Go ahead and type that number into the chat so you can get an idea of who’s on this call. I’m seeing a good mix of ones, twos, threes. Amazing. Love this.
Love the interaction. I got, like, hands going up. I got people are pushing all kinds of buttons right now. This is fantastic.
I love it. Okay. So, as you guys know, I love to keep this super dynamic. I have the chat window open.
But again, Mikey v, Meagan are monitoring the chat as we go through this content. Feel free to ask questions, and I will call them out as they come up. But this is going to be, a good solid hour of your day right here. So here we go.
You jump right in. Y’all know I love to start with an agenda. We’re gonna talk about what’s going on. I’m gonna give you a blueprint.
So we’re gonna review things like deal anatomy, AI, objection handling, and then velocity tactics, and then finally ending with a call to action. But y’all know me. I love starting with story time. Story time, my favorite part of the hit series here.
So, I hear a lot of feedback from tech advisors just saying things like, I don’t know where to start. I’m confused. There’s a lot of different places to start, Sam. When I’m talking to a customer, what do I say first?
I have customers who say, you know, I want a box of AI. Right? Like, they think, oh, I could just go to, the nearby department store and buy a box of AI off the shelf and implement it. Right?
I also hear things about, oh, like, I was in this deal and, like, this other person just came out of nowhere and all of a sudden, is involved in making the decisions around this deal.
And then also I hear, oh, you know, they’re giving me a lot of pushback, a lot of excuses, and I’m not able to move this deal forward. Another thing I hear often is this deal is taking forever. Like, why is it taking so long? Like, yes, enterprise deals typically take longer.
But, there are some very common stall points that we, that we witness where you could, in fact, implement some velocity tactics there. Alright? So that’s the story. That’s what’s happening.
So what in the world is going on? Okay? So CX deals right now are multi stakeholder. K.
What does that mean? That means that there are lots of different, people from different roles within organizations that are now part of CX deals because they’re realizing that CXTech, right, is a big part of the business. It’s the money driver. Right?
And so what we’re seeing now are deals with multiple stakeholders.
Multiples. So that could mean anyone from sales to operations to, contact center specific. I’ve seen even chief marketing officers as part of some bigger deals. Right?
Because a lot of these CX solutions cater well to other departments. Right? And then on top of that, you also have the buyers, right, who are demanding things like faster ROI justification. Right?
They’re like, cool. How quickly am I gonna see ROI? They wanna see it before it happens. Right?
They wanna see it yesterday.
And then you have AI driven innovation just clouding the waters, muddying the waters. Right? Lots of, very niche AI solutions out there, inserting themselves here and there. Some of them are getting swallowed up really quickly.
Right? And then last but certainly not least, like, with the ROI, buyers want proof of outcomes. They’re not just looking for features. As cool as features are, the key to winning is about the outcomes.
So I I did a hit on this previously. So if you guys go back in time, check that out. But I will talk a little bit about that. Okay?
So here we go. The blueprint.
Five key building blocks to help you excel in selling CX deals. And this could be any kind of deal. It doesn’t have to be an enterprise deal, folks. CX deals happen all the way from SMB all the way through mid market.
Okay? I have seen deals with five to ten, agents, seats. Right? But they’re doing tons, the hundreds of thousands of interactions per month.
Right? So it doesn’t matter the people. What matters is an amazing experience and how much that company is willing to invest in the experience. Alright?
So here we go. Deal anatomy.
Number one, outcome based selling. K. If you have not incorporated outcome based selling, it is the future of the complex sale.
Always, always, always anchor to measurable outcomes and not features. Okay?
And what I mean by that is you wanna start with the outcome and work your way backwards. So in other words, start with number one, which is what exactly do they want? Number two is why does it matter? And then three is, okay. Now let’s figure out what the solution is. For example, like, how would AI help this situation?
Right? If you go backwards, right, you’re not leading with features and, capabilities and all the bells and whistles. Right? What you’re actually doing in this process is you’re inserting yourself as like, with a seat at the table, right, to be part of how they actually solution for these outcomes long term, not just like a quick fix Band Aid. Okay?
Alright. So let me give y’all an example. And if at any point we’re having technical difficulties, folks, just chime in. Let us know.
Can’t hear me. Can’t see me. We all know technology loves to fail us. Alright. So, for example, a CRO.
Okay. What is the outcome of a CRO? What is, like, their main outcome? Any guesses?
Any guesses at all?
This is the participation point.
Great. Yes. Revenue. A hundred percent. Awesome. Yes. Winning, winning, winning. Love it. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yes. Okay. So, revenue goes up. Alright. That is the outcome. Alright.
Number two, the KPIs or the impact components. Right? Figure out what KPIs map to this revenue. So when we break it down, we look at things like, okay, acquisition. Right? New customer acquisition.
You think, expansion. Right? Like cross sell, upsell.
Right? So think of it this way. Here are the outcomes. Here are the KPIs that contribute to this outcome.
And then now we look at okay. Let’s look at specific technologies that help with these things. Okay. So when we’re, thinking a new sale.
Right? A couple things that could maybe help in this situation are things like, well, agent assist. When you have a salesperson on the phone and they’re not sure how to sell further or maybe answer the question that a customer has, you have a bot that’s listening in already and then popping up answers or references for that particular salesperson or support person, right, to assist in real time. Amazing.
Right? For expansion, think of things like quality assurance, quality management. Alright? So what these tools will do is they will assess, all of the interactions that come into a business.
And then, you know, from a compliance standpoint, make sure that, people are saying the right things. But even more importantly, in, the department of sales, what are people not saying? Right? That is really important.
Like, are they saying, do you want fries with that? Right? Obviously, I’ve got fries on the brain, but maybe that’s not the the product or service. But just what are they not asking?
What are they not saying? Right? So you can actually use this in reverse.
Right? And so lots of different things here. What’s interesting about QAQM now is that you have solutions not just assessing live people, but you have them assessing bots. Believe it or not, they’re assessing the bots.
So now you have a lot of QA QM companies that are coming out with their own bots, right, to marry the two processes together. So if you see what I did here, I went backwards. Right? I didn’t start with, hey.
These features are really cool. I started with, hey. CRO, this is how you get paid. Right?
You’re in charge of growing revenue. This is how you get paid. This is how you get promoted. This is what your success is measured on.
Great. How you measure revenue, customer acquisition, expansion numbers, churn, things like that. And then we go down to, okay, here are the solutions or the capabilities or feature sets that can help support those different KPIs. Alright?
Cool. And, yes, awesome. Success KPI will double down on this today. What questions do you guys have while I clean up on my side? Y’all know I love to do the window cleaning live in action.
Any additional input? Mikey, b, Meagan, Ty.
Are we seeing this total rubbish?
No. It’s not total rubbish. We are totally seeing it. I was gonna say, oftentimes, the auto QA, QM, and agent assist comes with it could come with a CCaaS platform already, but we do see a lot where, hey.
Customers already have a platform in place. They don’t need to rip and replace it, but they want something added onto it. Could we get some additional agent assist or QA, QM? And so Mikey and I talk about that all day all day long.
We’re bringing in some point solutions that can help with that.
Yep.
Awesome. And someone mentioned, hey. Where does the CXO fit in? Okay. This is a good one.
Chief experience officer. So these guys, it’s a fairly newer role. I will say that.
But they do fit in very broadly. So what they’ll actually do is look into all the different departments that engage with clients essentially and look at the overall experience. So if you find a CXO or a CX specific role, that’s gold. Absolutely go after that person because this is the type of technology that they are literally looking for.
Alright? But, again, more of a newer role. Alright. So my step aside here, I knew my weather thing.
So here’s a mapping template for you. Okay. Yep. Looking a little cloudy in this area.
I’m just kidding. Alright. So outcome, impact, metrics, and a potential AI powered solution. So we’ll send this to you afterwards, folks.
But this is just an example of a list of outcomes, list of the impact, that, you know, why does it matter essentially, the metrics used, and then, potential matching to solutions as well. Okay? So, again, a reference for you. Alright.
The next thing is AI advantage. Folks, again, you cannot go to a store and buy a box of AI. There’s no SKU. As Mikey mentioned in the chat here, and Meagan took a good guess with zeros and ones.
There’s no SKU for AI folks. And you have to consider there’s a a huge, huge gap in the market right now. People and I’m gonna come up with a a big piece on this, so look out. That’s a teaser.
Is what’s happening is people are implementing these AI solutions, and, they’re not producing the return that they expected. Right?
And so at a minimum, you should know what the differences are between something like generative versus agentic when you’re talking about some next gen AI solutions. Okay? So when we say generative, it’s think of creation. Right?
It’s the personalization. It’s the self-service components. It’s actually generating, like, responses, or generating an experience versus agentic, which is, like, automation or even decision support. So, think logic.
Right? And agents are agentic is learning essentially, and it’s handling and actually making its own decisions. Right? And when you position AI, here are a few things that you want to harp on.
Right? Don’t don’t lead with, like, the, oh, yeah. AI is gonna replace humans and all this other stuff. Right?
No. No. No. No. K? Start with, one, revenue protection. Right? It’s gonna help retain customers because it could take a lot of the mundane tasks out of the hands of people who could be much more effective, doing other things, maybe dealing with more complex tasks or more complex interactions.
Right? Like, do you really want a bot? Like, as a business owner, do you really want a bot, trying to, save a potential churn customer, right, a really high value customer? Probably not.
Right? You probably wanna have a human, who can express empathy and things like that. Right? Handle those interactions.
Revenue growth, the upsell cross sell capability, absolutely. Using AI in this component, not necessarily the AI doing the upsell or cross sell, but identifying areas where upsell and cross sell can make a difference. And then third would be, in fact, cost efficiency. So, again, automating a lot of the mundane tasks.
Okay? And, yes, I love this comment. Start with getting Telarus involved. Like, took it right right out of my mouth.
Yes. Get us involved early and often. But this is just generally, like, the AI advantage. Know the differences between your generative and your agentic, and then don’t lead with right.
Like, lead with the money making stuff. Right? Don’t lead with, oh, yeah. You know, cut your people here.
Cut your people there. This AI looks really good. I’ve seen this. Right? Like, use those things to get them excited, but point to the dollars.
Point to the dollar. Alright?
Okay. Third thing on the map, executive alignment. This is a big one. I can’t tell you how many people come to me saying, man, I thought I had this deal, and then all of a sudden, there was, like, this guy or this gal, who came in and all of a sudden is just blowing up the whole thing.
I don’t know what happened. Right? So just be ready. Folks, be ready. When someone from finance comes in or sales or IT, learn the c suite language.
Now this is something that does come with experience, and you’ll learn it over time if you don’t have it. But just understand, that finance folks speak very differently than sales folks, than IT folks, than operations. Right? So just like some keywords you hear, are in finance are things like ROI, efficiency.
Sales is all about I I wrote down acquisition, retention.
Right? It all about the integration. Is it going to work with everything? That’s all I care about. And and also, is it secure? Right? Like, in other words, how much work is this gonna be for me, and is it safe?
Number two, use an action plan, and I’m gonna show you this again. But three, also prove impact with use cases. So come ready to speak on potential use cases that this company has. In other words, do your research before you have the call, with whoever it is.
Right? So that you are ready. But also, if you’re talking maybe to someone in, operations, but you see a sales use case, what operations will probably do is say, hey, sales team, you know, sales team has the money to spend. Right?
This solution can also help you, by the way. Right? So come with use cases. Come with use cases.
Okay? So let’s head to the mutual action plan piece real quick, and we can send this out to you as well. Something I’ve used in the past. Okay.
So I’m gonna step aside here. So the mutual action plan. This is page one. There’s two pages.
Alright? So the mutual action plan, the kickoff, in other words, the, the day where they want to go live goes there. And then what you can do is have all these target dates on the side here, auto calculate to potential milestones. Now this is something set up for, like, say, potential, like, mid market to enter price contact center deal.
Right? But you can adjust all these dates based on, you know, average sales cycles, things like that, or as they are. Now the beauty of something like this mutual action plan is it’s super basic. It’s a it’s an Excel doc.
Right? How many days? What’s the milestone?
Who’s the owner of this milestone?
Right? At which company? And then the outcome. Right? What is it exactly that you want to cover on this by this target date, between all these days?
Right? And then even more importantly, the second page is this. It’s a team member list. Now you might not think this is super important, but guess what?
Okay. I like to say, yeah, like, god forbid you get hit by a bus. But, you know, let’s say you’re sick. Okay?
Let’s say you’re sick or you, like, had some unplanned PTO or whatever it is. Right?
Okay.
What you can do here is indicate who from your company and then who from the, customer’s company is involved in this deal. So if you are absent or if somebody falls off the map, you know exactly who is involved in this deal. You can reach out to any of those contacts. Now what I love about mutual action plan, folks, is it is exactly as it says, a mutually agreed upon action plan.
Okay? So when I go back to this and I say, okay. Here’s the milestone. We’ve all agreed to this.
Right? If we don’t meet something on this, excuse me, on this chart, right, I have every right to go to my champion or whoever it is who’s supposed to help me complete this milestone and say, hey.
Based on this mutually agreed upon action plan, we were supposed to meet on this day about this this topic.
What has changed?
That gives you the right to go back and ask and test them and say, hey. Are we still good for this next meeting? Right? To complete this thing on this day by this time with these people. What, with whom, by when? Alright? So that gives you the right and that seat at the table, essentially.
K. Mutual action plan. Cool. A hundred percent accountability. Yes, Kyle. Hundred percent. Alright. Action handling.
Objection handling. Action handling. Objection handling. Okay. This is a big one.
How do you combat objections?
Especially in the world of AI, you’ve got a lot of stuff floating around there. Right? How do you get ahead of it? It could be challenging. But here’s what we are seeing, and here are some neutralization tactics that you can incorporate. Alright.
So some common stalls that we see, especially with, CX and artificial intelligence today is, one, there’s an objection around risk. In other words, they want to prove that it works. Right? And this is a huge, huge, huge challenge for, the entire industry right now is does it work?
Number two, cost. Okay? We we continue to see this. Oh, we don’t have budget for that right now.
Right? Or we you know, it’s just not possible. It’s not in the numbers. Three, change management.
Now this is a fairly newer stall, because of the artificial intelligence capabilities. So in other words, it means, like, oh, our agents are not gonna do this, or our people will not adopt it. Do you remember when, like, we first moved to cloud communications and they were, like, no. People still wanna pick up a physical phone.
They’re not gonna move to a headset. There’s no freaking way. And guess what y’all? Like, there’s an AirPod in my ear.
Like, come on. Okay? So we are in this era where, you know, we’re doing this again, but it’s with artificial intelligence. And so if you think of it that way, if you’re around for that era, you witnessed it, it’s gonna happen, but it’s gonna take some time.
And people naturally don’t like change. And that’s okay. Right? So here are some neutralization tactics, that we would recommend.
Alright?
So number one is case studies and benchmarks. I cannot tell you, just how effective these really are.
And let’s say, for example, you’re like, hey, Sam, I have a meeting coming up in, like, half an hour right after this call. I don’t have time to pull, together a case study. Guys, like, go into chat GPT and be like, hey, I’m talking to this person at this company. Give me a really awesome case study to position CX or artificial intelligence technology to this person.
And guess what? It will absolutely generate a case study for you, and it will pull in real statistics from real sources if you ask it. Right? Like, get super creative.
Now that’s, like, a last ditch effort, but what I recommend is going to our supplier community because these guys are the proof in the pudding. They have put together numerous case studies, on different verticals, different, you know, size companies, just so many different case studies out there. So I highly recommend you get in touch with your, like, local, right, supplier managers and, I’m sorry, supplier channel managers, I should say. And get a like, just build yourself a bank of case studies and benchmarks.
Alright? Number two, a lot of these AI companies do offer pilots. Right? So, get, get familiar with who does, who doesn’t, and that kind of helps with the risk component.
Like, I wanna prove it works. Right? A lot of them also call them POVs or proof of value. There’s POCs, proof of concept.
Right? And then the last thing is your resources. So someone said it earlier in the chat, but bring Telarus in, bring in your local SCA, bring in Mikey b, Meagan Thai. You can bring in me as well.
Right? We’re more than happy to have the conversation ahead of time. The goal here is to kind of weed these out early, like, as early as humanly possible. In that way, you don’t come across them again.
And guess what? If you addressed this and then it comes up again, you can absolutely use that phrase of, like, per my previous email. Right? I probably wouldn’t say that.
But in real time, say, look. We talked about that. What has changed to bring this to bring up this, objection again? Right?
Like, start just quizzing. Quiz away, people. Alright. Velocity tactics. The goal, shorten the cycle without cutting the margin.
And believe me, we are on this boat as well. Right? Like, how do we close it quickly and how do we get the most out of it? Alright.
Number one is test your champion constantly. This is one of my favorites. So if you think you know your champion, I want you to guess again and again and again. Okay?
So the champion is the one who is literally going to have you in their best interest and really vouch for you. Right? It’s not someone who’s just going to take the donuts when you bring them and not give you anything in return. Right?
So when I say test your champion, I mean test them. Meaning, like, hey, so and so, we’re in this deal now. Where are we? What am I missing?
Right? Like, have them give you feedback and see if they really are truly invested. Because I can’t tell you time and time again, I’ve been in deals with TAs who think that the IT person is really their champion, when in reality, they’re kind of just, like, sitting there or they made, like, a an introduction and they’re like, okay. Here you go.
Like, do your thing. Right? Maybe that person is not the actual champion. Maybe you have to make new ones.
And I always encourage people, make as many champions as you can in a deal. More champions you have, more people internally at the customer who are going to, like, rah rah for you. Alright?
Number two, guys, actually use the mutual action plan. Like, use it. Some people use like, they set it up and they’re like, oh, it looks so great, Sam. Like, check this out.
I’m like, that’s awesome. And then, like, a month later, they’re like, I lost the deal. I’m like, well, did you use the auction plan? Like, well, we didn’t actually pick it up after we made it.
So again, use the action plan. Like, that should be a shared document with you, plus, the customer. Right? So that way you guys can both you’ll see it, you visit it every time that you are on a meeting.
Right? To end the meeting, meeting should never end in, okay, great. Have a nice day. Have a great week.
Talk to you later. Bye bye now. Right? It should always be great. Here’s a summary of what we covered today.
The next step is this. It’s what, with whom, by when. Right? Are we still good with that, mister and miss customer?
And then you revise the action plan if those dates ever change. Alright? Number three, deliver these business case docs early. Someone mentioned earlier, yes, CIOs love this stuff, like, a hundred percent.
Right? Like, deliver these case docs early. As soon as you find out potentially why they are looking, at potential solutions, start digging. Find the use cases, because nothing stirs up FOMO or fear of missing out more for a customer knowing that their competitor is doing something like they’re trying to do already.
Right? That’s what you’re trying to do here is paint the picture for them of what’s possible, but even more importantly, maybe what their competitors have already done.
Alright? Number four, align IT and procurement early. I know sometimes this can be a challenge, but you don’t want to get all the way to the end. You’re like, cool.
We’ve got the buyout from the CRO, the CMO, even the CEO is like, yeah. Let’s roll. AI. Awesome.
And then you get to IT who’s like, I’m out. Right? I don’t know if this is, like, integratable with everything I have. Procurement’s like, cool.
We haven’t even looked at contracts. Like, you wanna ask about this stuff super early. Like, as soon as you know that, like, this process is going, this should be a piece of your mutual action plan. By what date should procurement be able to sign off on something like this, and what is the process?
Right? This right here will be a showstopper. I’ve seen it time and time again even in really, really big deals. Oh, we didn’t talk to procurement, so now we gotta wait another four months.
Awesome. Right? No. Definitely not. And then the last thing is leverage your resources early and often.
So we talked about this already. I’ve been seeing it through, you know, blowing up in the chat here. Bring me, Mikey b, Meagan Thai into the deal. I’m more than happy to assist you there.
And then, of course, we’ve got our huge community of amazing suppliers who can also help with those conversations.
Alright? So in review, okay, your five things. One, deal anatomy, outcome based selling. K. There’s lots of resources out there.
I also did my previous hit series just on outcome based selling. Right? I’ve got some minute snippets out there on outcome based selling. There’s ton of books as well on this stuff.
Yes, it has been around for a while, but it is the future of complex selling. Alright? Get on the get on the boat. Alright.
AI advantage, leverage AI and supplier innovation. There’s a lot of new stuff coming out, folks, and it’s our job to make sure we’re staying on top of it. So, we do our best to get everything out to you, but as we know, the the, the water is really, really cloudy. Right?
And then number three, executive alignment. Just know that you need to get multi stakeholder buy in every single time. In other words, if you think that there’s only one person making the decision, I guarantee you, like, nine times out of out of ten, there isn’t. There’s way more than just one person making that decision.
And even more more importantly, you need to figure out who that economic buyer is. In other words, the economic buyer is someone who can say no even if everyone else says yes, and the person who can say yes when someone and everyone else says no. They have, like, the final final say. That is your true economic fire.
Alright? Number four, objection handling. Handle these as early as humanly possible. Okay? You can kind of tease and help we can help detect that early as well.
You’ll you’ll know just from, like, different signs. Right? If you start bringing up AI and they’re like, oh, yeah. We’ve heard about that.
Ask. Right? Like, just ask the questions. Be like, hey. Like, what are your hesitations around AI, if anything?
Right? And keep them really, really open ended. Alright? The last thing would be velocity tactics.
So the goal is to compress the timeline. Right? What you wanna do is look into your crystal ball and potentially think, okay. Right?
Like, a beautiful mind. What potentially could get in my way of closing this deal? But also, what could potentially get in the way of my champion in closing this deal? So one question I like to ask a true champion is, hey.
Like, we wanna get this done.
You and I both wanna get this done. What potential challenges are you going to face in us getting this done on your side? Right? And do what you can to help mitigate that. Alright?
Awesome. Whew. That’s what I got for you. Your call to action, engage the team, get to know your key suppliers, stay up to date on the latest trends and news.
We’ll push all that out there for you folks, but, if you haven’t yet, definitely go check out the resources out there. See, there’s always c x a dot com. There’s a neuron. Even your morning brew will throw up stuff in there.
Right? So by all means, yeah, engage our team. Let us know if you have any questions. I see that there’s a ton going on in the chat, but, Doug, it is back to you, my friend.
Thank you so much. Sam Nelson.
They say she’s not a dynamic presenter. Are you kidding me? She is the best. It’s always good to have you here.
Meagan and Mikey b, you know, AI is in both of their names. I always make that joke about Meagan, but, Mikey, he’s got that in there as well. You two had done an excellent job in fielding some of the questions and comments, and there were some powerful ones that came in there. I wanna give you both a chance to just weigh in.
Were there any that stood out to you that you wanna elaborate on a little bit more without having to type the answer out to everybody?
I saw about SMB. So full transparency, right? Sam did an amazing job talking through that, but we get a lot of requests of, hey. We know, two trucks in a truck plumbing, and they want AI to do whatever.
SMB is hard.
We have a couple of UCaaS vendors that have introduced their version of the AI receptionist or AI assistant or whatever they might call it. That’s a good place to start. Or, Sam, wouldn’t it be nice if we had an SMB friendly AI provider in the ecosystem?
What do you think about that?
Nodding. Yeah. They greet you.
Nodding. The new SMB friendly AI provider in the ecosystem that’ll be launched next month.
Yes. Yeah. So we yeah. And and, like, folks, we’re always looking. No. No. No. And I wanna put this out there too as we’re always looking for more, of these cutting edge suppliers who fit into your client portfolio.
So, like, you have to let us know. Right? Because we’re out we’re busy helping you guys with your clients, but we’re not out there, like, looking for clients like you guys are or looking to expand those. So you gotta let us know.
But, yes, like, coming down the pipe, we’ve got a lot of new exciting options around AI for SMB. Yes. Thank you for the teaser, Maggie.
Yeah. No problem. Because right now, you know, it, for SMB to go with a true AI voice agent, it’s about a minimum of twenty five hundred dollars a month. And, you know, for some smaller companies, that might seem like a big uplift. But, again, if we start with the outcome of more sales, more appointments, happier customers, and then work backwards, the money just makes sense. So engage us, engage me if you’re in the east, Meagan if you’re in the west, if you’re central, whoever you like better.
This guy Meagan, any standout to you that you wanna bring up?
Yeah. I think, I saw something about an ROI. Like, are there any ROI tools for AI?
And I think there’s tools out on the market.
There’s software that can help with this, but we do tend to lean into our our vendors to help with that piece. And I think, to keep things simple, it’s okay. So are we trying to deflect calls? Right?
Are we trying to free up our our employees and agents? They’re spending so much time. They’re not able to get to all the customer calls. We wanna free up their time.
So we can show we insert AI. We do a bunch of call deflection maybe by thirty, fifty, even seventy percent I’ve seen. And then we can equate that to, okay, how much money do we spend, how much time are we saving. And so all those numbers kinda play together to show us an ROI.
But I would say let’s let’s lean into our vendors to help with that and get a better idea. Now it what it’s hard because from the get go, you our customers don’t really know what types of interactions, the volumes that they’re going to experience between voice or chat or whatnot. So it can be a little bit tricky, but I would say there are ways to show ROI, and let’s just let’s just have our vendors help us figure that out for our customers.
Here’s a problem with with AI and customer experience. If all of all you are doing is focusing how much it costs, you’re losing the value of customer experience. You’re losing the value of a higher CSAT, higher NPS. There’s gonna be a cost to that.
You can’t get around it. Right? But that cost of having a terrible customer service department and a terrible customer experience means lost revenue, lost clients, you know, less budget for IT spend, etcetera. So, yeah, money is important.
Listen, believe me, with three daughters, I totally get money is important. However, on the flip side of that is you gotta start with that customer experience.
If you if we can retain, you know, twenty percent of your your call your calling base, what is that worth to you from that perspective? So don’t focus on the invoice, focus on the outcome. I think that’s Sam one zero one right there.
There’s something I just saw. So Victor just put something here, and this has been top of mind for me is so he Victor’s asking, are there specific solutions for urgent care, smaller medical?
I’m seeing a lot of requests these days for, hey, vertical specific AI. I need AI for law firms. I need AI for the and for us, it’s like, well, we don’t really deal with vertical specific vendors because we think the technology speaks for itself, and so we’re trying to figure out what technology fits where. For the most part, it can fit anywhere.
If if you’ve got customers in the, legal industry that says, nope. We only want vendors who have experience with law firms. We don’t wanna talk to anyone else. We can help with that.
We can figure that out. But it’s hard for us to say, hey. We’ve got one specific vertical. We only want something catered to that vertical market.
It like, we can help, but, you know, it might not be that these vendors who are specific to that vertical. So, Victor, to your point, yes, we do have options. And it goes back to what Mikey was saying was the SMB market. Okay?
So we’ve got smaller medical offices. They may not wanna pay five thousand a month, a hundred thousand a year, you know, for some sort of an AI virtual assistant on the front end, and we can help with that. We can figure out what makes the most sense technology wise and budget wise.
Verticals are all about right?
What do you call the CRM that a bank uses? Put it in chat real quick. And then the other thing is, what do you call a CRM that health care uses? Put it in chat real quick.
See if you’re right. You win a great gift card from a Richard Schumann who dropped from the call. Therefore, you know, Oscar Wilde said you should only speak ill of the dead or those who aren’t in the chat room. So, Richard, you got all these people with some gift cards.
Yeah. EMR, EHS, EHR, banking core. Right? So when you talk to these clients, speak their language, not your language, and then come to us.
We know who has the integrations, and, we can certainly walk you through all that.
Great tips. And and Sam, I just wanted to end on this. One of the great perspective changes that I had during this call today was and we talk a lot about how do we position AI solutions and how do we introduce these to our clients.
But we should be using AI in developing what it is that we’re presenting to them. Finding those use cases, finding the sorts of questions that we should be asking, using AI actively to find what we need to bring that to our clients, our champions, the decisions makers. Comment on that if you would and then the one other question that I wanted to bring up here, are there any other hidden motivators that we haven’t explicitly brought out here during the call that advisors should remember in speaking to CROs or others who are making these decisions. Any hidden ones?
Yeah. Well, I’ll leave the second question up to to Meagan and Mikey b. But for the first one, so we actually have an AI essentials course in Solaris University, of me doing the thing, and and chatting more about, like, how you can actually use AI, you know, on a daily basis to really help you not just find more clients, but also upsell, cross sell existing ones as well as your prospects. So by all means, check it out. Again, AI Essentials in Telarus University. But, Meagan, might you be, any other hidden motivators there?
I think when I’m speaking with customers, what I hear is it’s kinda funny. They’re like, well, our executives have called our competitors’ lines, and they have this AI thing that sounds human. We want that. You know?
So it’s kinda funny. It’s like they know what what their competitors are doing, whether it’s banking, health care, or whatnot, and they know they have to get on this bandwagon. Everyone’s talking about AI. They have no idea what it means.
They know they need it. So I think that’s another hidden gem is, and that’s just how we just always start the conversation. Right, Mikey? We’re always like, well, have you guys started talking about AI?
Are you focused on that? What what are the conversations you’re having internally, if at all? You know, just kinda get get the dialogue going that way. But, yeah, that’s that’s what I see.
Yeah. Love that. And, last part for me, if your customer doesn’t have an AI strategy, then AI is just a two letter word.
Right? If they don’t have a strategy if they come to you, hey. I need AI. I don’t really know anything about it or what I need. I just need it. And then you registered five different AI vendors. That’s gonna fail a hundred percent guaranteed.
Come to Telarus, come to the hub. We have AI checklist. We have AI readiness documents. We have AI conversation starters.
It’s all about AI, AI, AI, EIO.
And I always lead with AI. It’s easy to spell. Great presentation to all of you. Sam, last word to you?
No. That’s it, folks. Engage your resources early and often. That’s all I was gonna say.