Video Transcript
Transcript is auto-generated.
I’m excited to introduce your AVPs today. They’ve all been in the field all quarter, and they are here to give us some real insights on what’s going on, and we have quite the panel. Joining us for this conversation, we have Tim Basa, SVP of Sales Jason Stein, AVP of West Sales Phil Brekke, AVP Mountain West Sales Anton Loon, AVP Central Sales and Sean Kane, AVP East Sales, who is here with us in spirit because someone has to hold down the port while you guys spill the tea. Thank you guys all for being here. We are so excited to hear from you all today, but I’ll go ahead and just hand it over to you.
Yeah, thanks Cass. Sean’s biggest worry was that we were gonna introduce him. He wasn’t gonna be on screen and Anton, Phil and Jason would talk trash. Sean used a more aggressive word that they would talk trash about him not being here, but someone does have to hold down the fort. Also, it’s true, Schechter, I saw in the chat that we are all the same height on video.
Jason said he’s sitting on a book, which is interesting.
Thanks, Cassandra, for the intro. Thanks for all that you do. Today, we’re just going to approach this just like the slide says. We were sitting around at our last meeting and having a really candid conversation, unfiltered conversation as a leadership team, talking about best practices, what’s working now, what’s next, real insights that you guys have shared with us through Q1 and also as we closed out last year with a big finish and we’re off to a tremendous start this year.
The team and I thought we’d just pretend like we’re not on a call with a few hundred of our closest friends and chat about you behind your back but in front of you, hopefully give you some great tips, tricks, strategies, stories you can use, anecdotes. We’ll see where the conversation goes throughout the next thirty minutes or so. I think there’ll be some valuable takeaways for you to note and take action on. With that, we’ll just kick things off.
I thought, guys, we’d just kick it off with some sales talk, which is typically our top of mind talk anyway. What’s working now in the field with advisors that you’re working with one on one?
Are there Look, guys, I know we can’t give away the colonel’s secret recipe here, right? But there are some We can speak in general statements. So what are some of the things that are going on with the advisor community right now that are making a difference, maybe help them get to the big quarter they have because we all know that the sales that happen now probably started many months and even years ago for some of the big ones. We’ve closed a couple million dollar a month deals, which are really, really landmark deals, but also we see the steady state of business as well that’s going on.
So, Jason, I’ll start with you because you’re smiling. I got to get your attention away from the chat or a text message or whatever’s going on. I got to break your focus and bring it here. So I’ll start with you.
What are you seeing? What’s working now?
Well, thank goodness that Sean Cain is not on or we’d only get through one question. I’m super excited about everything that we’re seeing from a data center. Cloud data center is kind of the new gold right now in our space, especially with large language models, AI adoption.
And then, you know, with Broadcom coming in and making it mandatory to move to the VCF-nine from VCF-eight, it’s really generated a huge conversation within our space. First off, you know, where do you host it? How do you move to a large language model and adopt more artificial intelligence, which I know we’ll get to more in the future, but then where does the connectivity come in and how do you connect your clients? How do you connect your employees to it?
And then how do you protect it from a cybersecurity standpoint? So it hits all the advanced solutions. And then I love that some of the data center providers are leaning in. I saw that virtual thing that we have coming up here, and I think that that’s huge from a cloud perspective.
DRT is actually compensating their reps twenty five percent more if they attach an advisor to an active deal. So, a lot of really uniqueness in the cloud space, and we’re seeing two megawatt deals. And just so you know, one megawatt deal is the equivalent of one million dollars in MRR. So a lot of growth in that space and a lot of huge adoption.
Yeah, but I think you want to mention again, it’s DRT, right? But others are also leaning in where we’ve seen suppliers really embrace the channel over the past several years. We don’t need to rewind that far. But this unique aggressiveness towards the channel where they want, they, many suppliers want their sellers to lean into this community that’s on this call, sell shoulder to shoulder to advance opportunities, upsellcross sell.
Maybe someone’s been selling voice or cyber and they’re saying, Hey, there’s a data center opportunity here. Bring our sales team in and you don’t lose a nickel. You get momentum. You don’t need to be the expert.
So I think from a tactical standpoint, finding out who has sell for, sell with, who’s willing to lock arms, that’s creating some big wins. So that’s good insight, Jason. I’ll go to you next, Anton, and we’ll round it out, Phil.
Yeah. You know, I’ve been here since twenty nineteen, And we’ve come out with lots of services, solutions and tools in that time. But I got to go back to you look at our special sauce. I got to go back to our engineering team.
Last year, we had eighty five advisors that sold over one hundred and fifty thousand dollars And the overwhelming majority of them utilize our engineering team to the max. And even these advisors, they range from one man shops. Our top advisor last year, as Jason knows, was a one man shop and all the way down to one hundred plus folks. It doesn’t make a difference. The one thing that they all have in common is that they use and abuse our engineering team. Many of them have their own staff, engineering staffs, and still they bring in our team because our team has the knowledge of four hundred suppliers in the portfolio. And you get two smart people in a room together and good things happen.
So we have all kinds of stats where the closing ratio increases, size of the deal increases. Only good things happen when you use our engineers and it can’t hurt. There’s no risk.
And I go, I’ll travel the country. And my message is always give us a shot because you’ll be very surprised and happy with the results.
Yeah, look, two big takeaways there for me is we hear this all the time, which is I’m an engineer, the advisor’s an engineer. So they’re super smart and or we have engineers.
What we find is people don’t want to use the resource because you said use and abuse, right? I’m not sure Lupresto would like that terminology.
Probably not.
His team, it’s the best in the business. I’m not saying that just in platitudes. We hear that from suppliers. We hear it from the field.
And whether you’re the smartest guy in the room in your company, you have smart guys and gals in the room, we’re great thought partners. And sometimes you don’t know you need something until you try it. We’ve all had that experience in our life where a friend has a thing, probably we all bought MP3 players or the original iPods, right? Is that what they call it?
So I think it’s incumbent upon us in the spirit of sort of talking behind everyone’s back here, even though they’re on the call, we have to keep evangelizing this hidden secret because for some it’s hidden or they’re too proud to use it or they don’t know how. They don’t know how to engage, right? So we have to make sure that we’re telling them, Hey, engage with us. Reach out.
On your team, Bridget’s one phone call away. Max, one phone call away, and we can hook them up with an engineer.
Phil, one last comment. We used to say our engineers are the best, which we know they are. But now, like I said, we have the data to actually support that. So there’s no excuse not to give it a shot at this point.
That’s right. So Phil, I’ll have you close this one out and then we’ll keep the show going here. I have one tactical thing I’m gonna add at the end of this one.
Yeah, Tim. So I think what’s unique is that across our entire partner ecosystem, whether a partner’s been, an advisor’s been doing this for thirty years or they’re just getting started. They’re all looking for leads, business development type resources, right? And to Jason’s point, that is the shift that we’re seeing in the marketplace is that suppliers now understand that, right?
And they’re starting to lean in that much more. I’d say some of our most successful strategies from that dynamic is a partner that ultimately finds a supplier that’s willing to lean in, and they find direct rep or a group of direct reps within their marketplace and start leaning in with them. As we talked about, I mean, data is king, right? It’s the new gold.
So when you can lean in and share notes on specific opportunities, Hey, I’ve got this opportunity. I haven’t been able to quite get it across the line.
Who’s working on this? I love when suppliers ask that question, they come in and ask that like, who has a relationship with this customer? We share notes and ultimately it creates a cohesive relationship and a win win. It’s the one plus one equals three. So, what I say to a lot of the suppliers out there, events are great, they obviously have their place, but where we’re seeing the most ROI is when a supplier leans in and provides different business development strategies, marketing, business insights, buyer behavior, customer events, anything that’s driving immediate opportunities, that’s what our partners are looking for. That’s what we’re at.
Yeah, wanna make sure we weave in some events, Phil, events conversation later, but customer facing events, really important.
Also, I know there’s a lot of questions around this. I already saw one pop up in chat. Everyone on the call, it’s important, like get with your Telarus representative and they can help match you up with suppliers that have demand gen, that do account mapping, that have some of those tools to help you kickstart those efforts. And a couple of really tactical things.
We started this by saying, we know that the big quarter that we had to start the year, the big quarter you all had to start the year was built last year, right? Deals don’t close overnight. So some of the things that we saw this community really embrace last year, especially towards the end of the year, A lot of you rebuilt your website, so you got rid of those old school websites that were just about business phone systems or were single threaded on a specific technology or just didn’t look modern. You clean that up.
Also, there’s been a big shift on LinkedIn.
Many folks in this community, you guys saw it last week after channel partners, everyone’s posting the dinners that they went out to or the parties they went out to.
Folks, you’re a professional technology advisor and you’re posting party pictures on a professional domain, LinkedIn. If you wanna attract clients based on your LinkedIn posts, start posting like you’re trying to attract clients. Customer testimonials, customer videos, use cases, the ways you’re creating outstanding outcomes in your customer base, and that attracts the bees to the honey. The party pictures are great for you.
You can put those on Facebook or Instagram or wherever else, but when you have a professional persona, one of the things that we’re starting to see trend is start posting like you’re trying to create demand versus posting about your social life. All right, moving on. There’s lots of suppliers in the portfolio. We talk about this all the time.
Partners come to us. They’re trying to figure out how to navigate the portfolio. Anton, you and I were just talking about this a couple hours ago even, so we’ll start it off with you. Yeah.
How do how do how do you navigate the the portfolio? What are the best advisers doing? Give us your insights.
Yeah. I look at all the reports as we all do on this call daily. And I look at the top advisors out there, and they seem to focus on six to eight suppliers.
So if you look at all their suppliers, they may have twenty five, but six to eight of them are getting about ninety percent of their sales. So what I would recommend is get to know six or eight suppliers, maybe one or two each in each of our technology practice areas. So a couple in cloud, a couple in cyber, a couple of UCCC and advanced network. Get to know their portals, get to know the channel managers, know who the executives are, get to know them inside and out. So if there’s ever an issue, it’s much easier for you to go get that resolved.
I work with some advisors that they kind of pick and choose who they want to work with, and they end up understanding the technology better than the channel manager does. So they can, they want to be able to answer every question possible about that supplier. Some of them get certified to become implementers of that technology, whether eight by eight or Zoom or whoever.
And so that’s what I’m seeing is six or eight is seems to be the sweet spot. And then as new suppliers come up, which they’re doing all the time now, right? We’ve got new AI companies that are coming in to the channel, new security companies that are coming to the channel. You got to get to know them one by one as well.
Awesome. Jason or Phil, anything to add there? I’ll just kind of leave this open and see if one of you guys want to jump in.
Yeah, if you don’t mind, I’ll jump in on this one. So, I mean, think it’s one of those that with four hundred suppliers, it can be a little bit overwhelming from an advisor standpoint, but the best news is the answer is always yes. What’s the question, right? So ultimately taking more of a, I mean, back you remind this thing ten years ago, we all had one product, telecom, call it one product to sell to a thousand customers.
Now we could sell a thousand technology products to one customer. So taking that consultative approach and taking some of the things that Tim, you teach in the sales mastery of an outcome based selling approach. Ultimately, you’re gonna find the outcomes, the problems that a customer is trying to achieve, and then you’re gonna back into the solutions. So those opportunities are gonna come up and you’re naturally gonna figure out where the opportunities are.
And then obviously don’t forego the conversations. Like Anton say, I encourage you to proactively engage with the suppliers, get educated, work with your SPDMs out there. They’re one of your best resources for understanding the marketplace.
They understand your business as well so they could apply specific examples and ideas around which suppliers are gonna move the needle with you. So take both approaches, outcome based selling, but obviously don’t forgo the conversations with the suppliers.
Yeah, just real quick on outcome based selling. Outcome based selling is a methodology, but you don’t talk to the customer that way. Sure. Just fresh in my mind from channel partners, there was a guy on stage and he must have said outcome based selling and asking customers about outcomes thirty times in twelve minutes, and it was like fingernails on a chalkboard.
Real people don’t talk that way, so outcomes is what we create, but you want to talk to your customers using their lingo. Inside lingo on the outside world doesn’t work. To understand why John Smith buys, you need to see the world through John Smith’s eyes. So use your client’s words, use your client’s goals and the conversation they have.
And in the back of your mind, you can be talking about outcomes and how you utilize the suppliers in the portfolio, whether you’re focused on six or eight or you have a pack of twenty, you can create the outcomes from there. But if you just talk to the customers in geek speak and acronyms, you’ll lose them. It’s not real. All right, Jason, I’ll let you close it out real quick.
Yeah, I wanted to say, look, there’s a lot of unique stories out there. I love CMMC that’s got a shelf life of two hundred and eighty thousand DoD contractors that need to have CMMC, C3 is doing great at that. You have verticals that are really resonating right now, healthcare, you know, auto dealerships, a lot of them have specific things that they need to accomplish right now, especially some of the Mercedes dealerships. I like pivoting to what Anton’s saying with the advanced solutions.
You know, the meter story is fantastic. Leading in with AI, you know, allows you to get more broad on a lot of different paths. So do some studying on what Gartner’s saying, what Forbes saying. But what I love is we’re always so reactive.
We wanna pick up the phone and call our engineers when it’s something specific that we have for our client. But when’s the last time you picked up one the phone and talked to one of our architects or engineers and just say, what are you leading with? How are you winning? What are clients asking for?
And that helps shape where you’re heading with your conversations with your clients.
Totally. So I want to talk a little bit about the long game. I know there’s a lot of partners on this call that are maybe new to the space and obviously we see some familiar names in the chat so they understand that some things could take ten, twelve, eighteen months, twenty four months for of the larger multi location or very complex deals. So Phil, walk me through a little bit some of the things that you’re seeing strategically that’s helping people stay in the game, move clients along? What are some of the tactics or what’s some of the best advice you’ve seen for those folks to keep a healthy pipeline during that transition?
Yeah, mean, the unique dynamic is that a lot of our, I mean, we’re seeing that shift at the end of the day, right? We’re seeing, I’d say the majority of the advisors in our ecosystem came from telecom. So the good news is that I think by ways of the education that’s available out there, we’re starting to see that shift to expanding the product set that our partners are focusing in on and seeing traction within. Our numbers show it.
We’re actually, over the past, I wanna say three or four years, what we consider advanced solutions are outpacing traditional telecom, So the proof is in the pudding, it’s happening, but obviously you don’t wanna forego those transactional sales. So kind of like I was saying before, by taking that more consultative approach to understanding your business, your customer’s needs, those other transactional opportunities are gonna come up. We always think if you’re listening to Sam Nelson talking about AI or Sumera Riaz talking about security, those are great topics that a lot of your customers are wanting to learn more about.
That’s one of the things that a lot of customers are seeking advisors feedback on. And the unique part about those is that it opens up doors for all those other technologies. It’s both security and AI can’t touch all those other areas. So by having those conversations around those other technologies and focusing on those advanced solutions, you’re gonna get the transactional that comes along with it.
Gonna get the network, you’re gonna get the pots, you’re gonna get the voice.
It’s all pull through at that point.
Yeah, we talk about that a lot around here, which is steady sales and then bursts of greatness, right? So having the day to day conversation, be an extension of the buyer’s table in your customer account, whether it’s two people owner operated or Fortune one thousand account where you’re talking to sixteen, eighteen, twenty plus people.
You have to be engaged all the time, handle the transactional stuff, the stuff that comes up based on urgency, locations opening, closing. I was on the phone with an advisor yesterday, a lot of urgency. One of his clients is buying a big business, over one hundred locations. He’s desperately seeking a connectivity solution. Okay, that’s a today play, but then play the long term on what is all technology, map out that acquisition and play the long game on what else you’re gonna be able to get, right? I think that’s what you’re saying, you have to do both.
Yeah, and then prioritize those things, right? I mean, figure out a process to iterate on what are the priorities and phase that out. So we’re gonna focus on this project first and then let’s see what other transactional things that we can accomplish along the way as well.
I wanna piggyback down that for Anton and Jason, not that I wanna take the mic away from you, Phil.
But Anton and Jason, we’ve seen specialists in the business. Phil, you just mentioned this. A lot of folks got in from Telcom. Jason, when he was leading the cybersecurity practice, we saw a lot of people come in from cyber. So Anton, Jason, whichever wants to go first, what are you seeing now? I think I have the answer to this, but I’d like to know from your perspective, like generalist or specialist and why?
What’s working now from your lens? I guess, Jason, I’ll just start with you because you were in that specialist practice for a while and then we’ll round it out with Anton.
Yeah, everything’s changing so rapidly. You know, you watch the rise of AI and there’s so many unique changes. It’s hard to be an expert, which is why we have our engineering team. But for those of you that are trying to do it alone, it’s tough.
And, you know, customer success, leaning on that team helps you grow your business. And while you’re sitting there waiting for, you know, some opportunity that you have, you can actually sit there and bring in our customer success team and go wider into the conversation without having to be an expert. Takes time to do. You know, a lot of clients are struggling with vendor sprawl, supplier sprawl, and they’re looking to consolidate and nobody does that better than our customer success team and people that engage with them grow by thirty percent.
And I believe out of our top twenty, eighty, ninety percent of of them all utilize that team.
Yeah. So just to add some clarity for for those of you who that’s the first time you’re hearing about customer success, also known as account management by some. It was it was renamed, But knew, Telarus knew, that many advisors were so busy hunting new logos, new business, they were caught up in the day to day and they weren’t proactively managing their base. So what Jason’s talking about is a service we offer where you can hand your base over and be co managed.
So you don’t hand it over entirely, you’re still involved, but we act on your behalf to upsell, cross sell retention, and we see those revenues go up. Then you learn along the way. So maybe you started as a specialist selling telephony and you weren’t cross selling cybersecurity or other services, and now you’re able to do that using customer success and account management. Anton, what about you?
I’m seeing a more generalist than specialist. Now there’s a few out there that will like I talked to one of channel partners that only sell cybersecurity.
And sometimes they get pigeonholed into just selling cybersecurity because that’s what they’re an expert in. And to Jason’s point, maybe they bring in some of our resources, they can pivot away and start selling other stuff. But know, you and I both started this in the business selling long distance service many, many years ago. And we were specialists in long distance.
Then as the years went by, that became network that everybody became a specialist in and everybody could sell it. And then UCaaS was next and people became experts in UCaaS and network. But they haven’t been able to become experts so far in some of the other technologies. And that’s why which the advanced solutions was Jason alluded to, and that’s where we bring in our resources, whether it’s customer success or engineering to help you close more deals besides the ones that you’re just an expert in?
Totally. I think, and I say this a lot on stage and when I travel on the country and do sales and marketing training, but think about the difference between a plumber and a general contractor, right? A general contractor helps people build the dream building or home, and they know a little bit about all the things. I saw in the chat expert generalist, Adam said that many years ago. So this general contractor approach is better than just being the plumber where the general contractor brings you in on the job. And if you’re not ready for that fully, then you can learn from the community. So you can lean into some of the services Telarus has, some of the services the suppliers have.
I did see in the chat, and we’re happy, we don’t have time today to cover it, but if you reach out to your Telarus contact about customer success, project management, those are services we offer. There is a small fee for those, but the fee is outweighed by the success you’re going to have with the work the team does. So the fee basically becomes nonexistent because it’s always successful once you engage those teams. All right, we’ll move on a little bit.
I want to talk on we’re talking about tools a little bit and services. Are there other tools? Sometimes we sit around as market leaders and leaders in the business, and the thing that we hate the most is when someone says, I didn’t know you’d do that. Right?
So this is your chance to say, Hey, we do it. So we invest heavily in services, solutions and tools. The hub has taken off like a rocket ship since it’s refreshed, but we just talked about customer success. We’ve talked about account management.
We have Telarus Capital we haven’t even talked today. We don’t have time, but that’s a game changer.
So for you guys, what are some of the hidden gems in the portfolio or Phil, like what’s the thing that keeps you up at night that you wish more people knew about?
Yeah, I would say it’s been a trend over the past couple of years that in a lot of ways, Telarus has become somewhat of a research organization, right? Because we’re in this unique seat that we see a lot of transactions that happen across the globe, right? So we see the trends, we see what’s going well and we kind of see everything kind of in transition and so forth. What that has done for us as a TSD is we’ve taken that data that is gold that I mentioned earlier convert that into consumable resources that we put in the hands of the Telarus advisors out there, right?
So whether it’s tech trends reports, our advanced solutions VPs are constantly looking and seeking out different things that are happening in the marketplace. Jason brought up VMware, there’s a couple of different guidebooks, white papers around some of the changes within VMware, the things that are happening within the pots replacement dynamic, AI, there’s lots, Sam Nelson has done a great job putting out a lot of different resources around what’s hot in AI. So there’s just a lot of really good content. And I think what a lot of advisors aren’t doing enough of is, because we get that conversation like, how do you sell into this space?
Why don’t I get more opportunities in security or AI? It’s like, well, leverage the content. And it’s like your, the low hanging fruit is your customers that you already have today. And I’m baffled by how many actually don’t do like a newsletter or an email drip campaign to those existing customers.
Leverage those resources that are out there from a content standpoint, you can put your logo on ninety five percent of it, or you can take bits and pieces of it and iterate it into a email campaign and send that out on a regular basis to your customers to open up some of those unique opportunities.
Totally, I gotta be careful not to get on my soapbox, but it makes me crazy when people ask about this stuff and we tell them about it all the time. So we’re telling you again right now, we have lots of content that you can private label, and there’s even more that’s a bit we can direct you to suppliers who have great content.
And the other thing is, folks, persistence beats resistance. So, Bill, you mentioned newsletters or so. We talked about social posts at the beginning. We’ll have people say, Well, I tried that. And I’ll say, Well, when did try it? And they’ll say, I tried it for a couple weeks and it didn’t work. Couple weeks?
That’s not enough time. I think Anton tried to date his wife for four years before she said yes. Don’t know. Got be charming and persistent. It’s the same way with customers.
So Anton, Jason, just sort of piggyback on that, and then I’ll transition to another question, but.
I love the Matrix Pro. The Splatter Matrix Pro is fantastic. We have Telarus Labs.
There’s, you know, as Phil was mentioning data, I was thinking analytics. Your clients want better analytics. You want better analytics. Our advanced solutions done a really good job of putting thought leadership available for you. The tech trends reports, everything that we have within the hub gives you all the tools that you need to go wider into advanced solutions with your clients. And it’s super simple. There’s all kinds of playbooks out there that people don’t even utilize.
And please go into the hub and spend some time clicking around. You’ll be really impressed with all the data that we have.
Yeah, if you need a guided tour, you want a behind the scenes tour, reach out to your SPDM and they’ll take you, they’ll do a demo, they’ll show you where the materials are, they can show you at Telarus University.
It’s always amazing to me, the people who use Telarus University, when we bump into them at an event and they’re like, I really studied, I really learned these things and I didn’t know you were six foot ten.
Because they see me on a tiny screen. All right, Anton, what’s the, I wish I would have known that, I didn’t know you did that for you.
Yeah, well, Jason stole a little bit of my thunder with the hub, but I’ll point out a couple of things about That’s just way Jason rolls.
I know.
Really what our advisors are doing are living in the hub as if it’s their CRM, right? They should be in there all day long every day, except when they’re out selling. And if you open up the first page of the hub on the left side, it shows a bookings report. And this is important because it shows you all the orders that you booked for the month. And believe it or not, our advisors get so busy that they forget to submit their orders and months will go by and they don’t submit the order, which means of course that they don’t get paid commission on those orders. It happens every month. So if you just go to the hub and look at that orders report on a daily basis, then you will make sure that you’re getting paid in all the orders that that you’ve submitted.
So the other thing I wanna mention is that quoting, you can get your quotes out of the hub, you can request pricing, register deals.
Quotes are coming back in less than two hours. Deal regs are being done within an hour. Our commissions team is doing a phenomenal job. They’ve they’ve recovered over fifty million dollars in the last year. So we’re doing a lot.
It’s almost like an offensive lineman, right? When you’re you’re doing your job, you don’t really hear about them. And that’s kind of what’s happening with our support team at the moment. So it’s a huge advantage for us.
All right. We only got a couple of minutes left. I see CAS popped up on the top of the screen for me. So we’re going to rush through two quick things that were hot on our mind when we were meeting pre Vegas, but I think it’s important to talk about publicly. So, the first is the rise of the aggregator. So, I want you guys to give your hot take on how aggregators used to be sort of a secret society and where they play now. I’ll have you guys talk about that.
Maybe we’ll go Anton and Jason on that one. And then I want to touch on the best use of advisor time for events that aren’t Telarus. So, it customer facing? Is it VIP?
Should they go get training? You guys could touch on that and then we’ll wrap with a final thought. So, let’s just touch on aggregators real quick. Anton, I’ll start with you.
Yeah, aggregators are kind of become a secret weapon for Telarus. They’re rising up the ranks for the supplier rankings on a monthly basis.
They used to have not the best reputation ten years ago, right? They had the reputation for not getting installs done in time, lots of fees, just lots of negativity surrounding the aggregators. But in recent years, they do a lot more than just aggregate circuits. They do SD WAN, SASE, voice and so on.
So we probably have fifteen or twenty in the portfolio that are doing a phenomenal job. They also have, most of them also have a really good channel manager staff that blanketed the whole country. So, and the and the ones that are doing well are the ones that have the channel managers in spots where we are and are involved with our events and are with our partners on a daily basis. So, you know, if you have a an account that just has a couple locations, two or three locations, it doesn’t have to be, one hundred locations.
Take a look at the aggregation. They’re all really good. Get with your SPDM and figure out which one is right for you.
A hundred percent. I don’t know that Phil or Jason can add any more to that. So I’m gonna go to Phil. Events, Phil. What’s the best use of time for advisors that you’re seeing in your market or even from what we’ve shared in our closed door meetings?
I’ll bring up two different dynamics. So you obviously have what I think all of us are aware of, advisor facing events, the events that we do, the events that suppliers do. I think the old kind of agenda for different events was mainly just us looking at a screen and getting a presentation for the day. If you’ve been to any Telarus events, whether it’s Sales Mastery or Beyond the Solution events, you notice that they’re much more interactive.
I go back to an old sales book that I read back in the day, you can’t learn how to ride a bicycle in a seminar. So putting that engagement to, turning that learning into practice, you retain it that much more. So it’s the interactive approach that I think is really sticking with partners. They’re finding a lot more value in it.
The other side is I’m seeing more, I think we all are seeing a lot more partners interested in doing customer facing events. And I will tell you right now that our suppliers love it.
Any of our suppliers are more than happy to lean in from a customer facing event, customers and prospects obviously. You can do these live or virtual. And the best part is we could also bring any of our advanced solutions VPs to the table to act as a subject matter expert, engineers, architects. So come up with a trendy topic, everybody wants to hear AI security, figure out what that topic is and then get people to the table. You could do a smaller kind of round table at a steakhouse, that’s been very successful through the webinar where it’s a broader reach.
Look at doing events with customers and prospects, it’s driving a lot of demand right now.
Yeah, those events, the end user events where our advisors, members of this community are becoming the clarity in the noise. It’s so confusing for an end user to make a confident decision right now that they need you all on this call. Everybody on this call, they need you to be clear, concise, give them confidence, and reduce friction in the buying process.
Those customer facing events are great. Jason, I’ll kind of give you the last word on events and then we’re going to put a bow on this.
Yeah, I would agree. We’ve done about thirty to forty customer facing events all across the country and actually in Australia and Canada, and they’re incredible. We walk out of there with a lot of opportunities. We can get super creative.
We have the suppliers that’ll come in. We have the thought leadership ready. The AI workshops that Sam’s doing, incredible. You have resources.
All you have to do is fill the room, pick a venue and we’ll help do the rest. You have so many different ways that you can lean on Telarus, so don’t try to do it alone.
Yeah, I love what you just said. Actually, I’m to paraphrase what you said and close with it, which is you have so many resources. You’re not alone. Lean in.
Lean in. Ask for things. There’s a million things, maybe not a million, but there’s a half a dozen more things we didn’t even cover on this call that we talk about all the time. How partners like you are using Telarus Capital to expand confidently, whether it’s make new hires, create marketing campaigns, invest personally.
How people are leaning into our team just for strategy sessions before they go on an appointment. Forget about bringing an engineer on an appointment. Just having a strategy session with the guys on this call, or notably absent Sean Cain, who dissed us. But look, we stand ready.
I say this all the time. This team knows it. We sound like a broken record. We get together, but we talk about it all the time.
We have one goal as a team at Telarus, that’s to help everybody on this call and all of our technology advisors around the globe achieve their most ambitious goals. Don’t hesitate to ask a question, to ask how we can help, to ask if we have a resource or we have an unlock or a hack or whatever you want to call it. Don’t be shy. Reach out to us.
We stand ready to help you guys. We appreciate you and thank you. We’re looking forward to a great back half of the year or back three quarters of the year. And with that, Cass, I’ll turn it back over to you.