This HITT centers around a training session discussing the latest Telarus Tech Trends report, which is based on research from nearly four hundred IT buyers and technology advisors. Presenters Jen Dimas, Tim Basa, and Rachelle Lara share insights on client purchasing behavior and how advisors can leverage the report as a trusted resource. They emphasize the importance of understanding market trends, particularly in AI, cybersecurity, and cloud strategy, while encouraging audience engagement and feedback. The report is presented as an interactive ebook, offering actionable recommendations and customization options for advisors. The session concludes with a focus on the evolving nature of technology and the critical role advisors play in guiding clients through complex decisions.
Transcript is auto-generated.
It’s time now for today’s high intensity tech training on the latest Telarus Tech Trends report packed with original research from nearly four hundred IT buyers and from four fifty technology advisors.
It is designed to help you understand what clients are buying, why they’re buying it, and how to position yourself as the advisor they trust. In other words, you are the solution. We will spend much of today’s call hearing from members of the sales and marketing leadership team
about this just released Telarus report, discussing with you how to use it as a sales and marketing super tool. The key findings you’ll want to know and share and how to use them to drive those client conversations.
Today, I am thrilled to welcome back to the Tuesday call. Three of Telarus most dynamic and powerful presenters, chief marketing and experience officer, Jen Dimas, senior VP of sales, Tim Basa, and VP of corporate marketing, Rachelle Lara. These three could read from a nineteen eighties phone directory, and I would show up to hear it. They are that good. Welcome to each of you. This reports a phenomenal new adviser sales and marketing resource. Great to have you all here.
Good to be here.
Great to be here. I long for the days of a phone book, Doug.
According to Zach Schechter, Zachary Schechter, I need a booster seat in my chair. He says I look small on screens.
And you said that Rachelle is giant. Rachelle is tiny.
Do I need do I need to, like okay. How’s that?
Rachelle’s five foot nothing, a hundred and nothing.
That was the thing. We could use them to boost ourselves, and in the day before we had all of this great technology, we were sitting computer monitors up on a stack of phone books. And, seriously, if you guys wanna just default to reading those, I’ll be here all hour.
I will see you soon. For the for the tremendous walk down memory lane, but I do tell people at some of our sales trainings, my first CRM was the business Yellow Pages.
There you go.
And I started
with AAA Aardvark Cleaning, and I called it Ziebart. Now the book was three inches thick. So dating myself, but, let’s talk about modern stuff, Jen.
Rachelle’s gonna kick us off.
Alright. Let’s do it.
Yeah. Hey, guys. Good morning. Thanks for joining.
So, yeah, in a minute, we’ll walk through some of the key insights of this third edition of our annual tech trends report. Super excited.
Tim’s also gonna walk you through some tips and trips of how tips and tricks. Say that ten times fast. Of how to use this in your selling conversations. You will be we’ll be walking through the tech advisor version today with all the good tips for you guys.
There’s videos. There’s all kinds of extra supplemental, materials, thought leadership, to guide in how you’re thinking about your strategies and selling. But tomorrow, mark your calendars, you’re gonna get a customer facing version of the report, takes out the tech advisor facing language, and gives you, all the good stuff that you can co brand and, use in your own selling conversations. And we’ll give you some guidance around, how to use that piece.
But first, before you guys, before we start you guys, how many, just a little raise of the hands in the chat maybe, utilized this report last year? Would love to
kind of get your your, get some feedback there as as we go.
Hopefully, you really got a lot of value out of it. We’d love to hear, you know, how much, how you used it. And, we hope this just becomes an ongoing piece of exclusive thought leadership that just another pea a valuable piece of content that we guys we provide you guys in in as part of the whole overall education program, for for that we provide out to you guys. It’s just, a really fun project.
It’s kind of our baby every year. We make it bigger and better. And, really, the whole point is to give you guys insights that you wouldn’t be able to get in just your average industry tech trends report. Right?
This is really to alert to the channel. It includes, we we partner every year, with Constellation Research and Redpoint. They’re incredible third party research partners for us. We measure, we survey out over four hundred, top executives from, from fortune, you know, fortune one thousand global, one thousand large enterprise, IT buyers as well as those, leading mid market IT buyers, plus about four hundred of your fellow technology advisers.
So we’re really getting a nice broad perspective of, buying behaviors, what’s changed since last year, what’s gonna be guiding, investments in the year to come. So really good stuff.
There’s also a bunch of actionable recommendations, downloadable, fact sheets, and, supplemental materials that you can click into in the report itself. So make sure you guys get comfortable with this thing. We’re gonna guide you through some key insights, but we’re really excited to, make sure that this is part of your your toolkit, if you will, for exclusive insights and thought leadership that make you look really good in front of your
your customers and clients as well.
So let’s, move on, if we may. I’m gonna let Jen take over in a second. We’re gonna give you a little tour of the report. I’ll orient you to some, key sections just so you guys get a sense of, okay, this is an interactive ebook.
What’s going on here? What’s in it? We can just give you a little bit of a a glimpse into the different pieces. But then Jen’s gonna really dig into some pretty cool insights that some of you may have already gotten a glimpse of at Telarus, summit last month with Ray on stage with Jen.
Super awesome presentation.
So you’ll get a little refresher of that if you were there, but we’ll we’ll teach you into some new stuff as well.
Alright. So I’m gonna actually take over so I can share the report.
And Alright.
Dave, I love that comment from you, that you are you are Gartner guy. And now, yeah, this is exactly our version of third party content that we wanna bring to you that takes an absolute channel view to the market and helps. And it so it has two purposes.
Right? One is this version that Rachelle is gonna walk you through as we’re talking this morning is the interactive version that we launched in August for you to help you all learn about what’s coming up next
from a technology perspective, what the buyers are saying in the market, and, and then what advisers are experiencing en masse.
And then the second one that Rachelle is talking about is gonna be delivered to your inboxes tomorrow. That’s a version that you can absolutely customize every single piece of it. So, we’ll Tim will get to that in just a minute after we’re done going through the highlights of the content.
But we’ll talk to you about how you can use that version tomorrow in some of your marketing and selling tactics. I was happy to see, Wes, that you think it’s a lead magnet for your website. I love that. I’m here for that.
Yay. Good for you for using that. Thank you. I would love to ask a question too before we dive in.
Happy Tuesday, everyone. I’m Jen Demas, the chief marketing and experience officer at Telarus. I wanna know how many of you did come to Partner Summit and did hear that main stage content with me and Ray Wong that you see a picture of here on the screen. Just put a one into the chat if you were there so we can see how many people are already hearing that.
Hi, Zachary. I know you were there. I talked to you.
Oh, so many ones.
Yay. Okay. So here’s what I think.
This is okay.
This is gonna be a little bit of review because I am covering the highlights of the content itself.
And it’s okay that it’s a review in my opinion. You know, sometimes we need to hear these things a couple few times. And a lot of your success using this report in your marketing and selling tactic tactics is going to come from content fluency.
So let’s chop this up to, hearing it once again, I would recommend highly, you know, spending a lot of time with the interactive piece of content. And you can watch Rachelle as she kind of goes through it, like learning how to, move through the pages and all that kind of good stuff in the interactive version.
And then Tim, has has really progressed from his Yellow Pages days, and he’s got some modern tactics for, how long Just barely, Jen.
Just barely.
A little bit. So then we’ll talk about how we can use the report, as you guys move forward. And and it sounds like many of you have experienced doing that in the years past, which, you know, warms my little heart. That’s why we do this.
So we’re thrilled to, we’re thrilled to offer some suggestions and we really want to hear about your success story. So Zachary asked for some case studies of what people have done. Tim’s going to cover that. There’s lots.
And, but we also love to hear through the year how you use it. I saw a couple of questions in the chat about how do I get my advisors, more of my customers
included in this survey. That is a lovely question. We use research firms to go out to audience, but we’ll create a mechanism next year for you to suggest your end user customers to participate.
That’s a that’s a really wonderful way for us to get even a bigger base.
So thank you for that question.
Alright, Rachelle. Let’s, let’s get into the content.
We’ll dive into it.
Sure. I was just gonna say for those of you who are new to the ebook format, who haven’t dug into this last year, or haven’t used this tool before. It’s super intuitive, but, you know, just note, upper left corner, you’ve got your table of contents. You can go into specific areas if you wanna, like, quickly go somewhere and don’t wanna go through the whole thing.
There is a download PDF option at the bottom corner. Some people love to do the good old fashioned vertical scroll, PDF format, lots of options for you. So just to orient. There’s, you know, left there’s arrows to to scroll through.
Easy peasy.
But just wanted oh, there’s Adam. We’ve always have to have Adam on a report. You know?
It’s like Why would you not?
My god. There’s lots of videos as well that are expanding on the insights, and from our expert subject matter experts, and engineers.
So make sure you’re really, you know, taking advantage of of all the different content in here, that we’ve put together for you. So let’s go to, and there’s Ray Ray Wong, by the way. He is, the principal analyst of Constellation Research. He was on stage with Jen, as she mentioned. He’s got, a really nice video that just kinda summarizes key insights and gives his take on what that what this means, and based on what he’s been seeing in the industry as well.
So let’s get into it. I wanna before I do dive in, we’re gonna try as much as we can to address your questions. And if we have time at the end, we’ll definitely do that too. But I did see a couple of questions about methodology. So without going deeply into it yeah, Tim is saying it. This was mostly North America.
It was all North America actually. And so you can expect the person who asked the question about what about other places, you can expect and you’ll see that there are patterns of technology adoption that happen even amongst our North American, survey respondents. But you can expect this to apply to other geos in the way that it does from a trending other, other geos will follow in the way that they do. We’re seeing trends that are set by enterprise, for example, in North America that are being hotly followed by mid enterprise.
And then you’re gonna then you’re gonna see these technologies be adopted probably in many much of the same way,
in other geos. But this is a North America focused research. There’s a methodology section of the report too that talks about who we surveyed, where they are, what their levels were, all that good stuff so you can look into it. So this is one of the money slides that Rachelle has landed us on.
Once again this year, and to no surprise to anyone, AI is the top buying driver for our respondents with a full fifty eight percent of them citing AI as the leading buying buying driver for their buying decisions, the leading leading technology driver for their buying decisions. The difference this year versus last year is how much further along folks are in their AI journey than they were at this time last year. Now when we did this survey for the first time two years ago, AI was kind of a twinkle in everyone’s eye. Everyone was interested, and some people had said it was absolutely verboten.
They were like, never mind. We’re not even doing it. That’s not a thing that we’re allowing our folks to do. And last year, we saw a little bit of uptick in experimentation.
What was shocking to me I don’t know how you guys felt, Tim and and Rachelle, but this is like actual deep implementation. People are in their journey, both in
the enterprise and mid market space. So we’re we’re past, you know, dipping your toe in the water here and we’re into full implementation with real business value being being realized.
So as in we’ll we’ll talk a lot more about that as we move forward.
And in addition, as you would expect, cybersecurity, customer experience, cloud strategy, data readiness, all show up at the top of this buying driver list. This is exactly what we would expect from our market. And those of you who are out there in this market know this already. So here’s some
data validation for for the technology that you’re talking about and that your customers are asking for help with.
The report reveals the types of solutions that buyers are investing in within each of these swim lanes, including the AI overlap. So there’s actually charts. We’re not gonna spend time on them this morning that are about AI and CX, AI and cloud management, cybersecurity. And you can see the specific business problems that folks are looking to solve with AI in each of those swim lanes.
And in each technology area, this is really super interesting, you’ll see a pattern, which is that enterprise has moved along, further along a technology adoption curve, and mid market is now coming in hot at very fast this year. They have watched, the adoption successes and failures of the enterprise, and they are now investing in the same kinds of projects that we were seeing from enterprise for the last couple years.
There’s definitely an opportunity for you, as advisers to create specific customized strategies for your conversations that acknowledge the difference in, in, technology adoption given that data that we just talked about. And we’ll show you a little bit more of that in a second too.
One thing that we should be sure to call out here as you look at the chart is that
while twenty nine percent of buyers cited cost cutting as a factor driving business decisions, we feel like it’s really important to, to point this out. Those responses came almost entirely from our enterprise respondents.
Cost cutting is not a driver in the mid market. And we’ll talk a little bit more about the market segmentation differences in a couple minutes. But I did wanna point out that while it did show up here on the top, it was an enterprise buying driver.
Also, there’s a close correlation between the cost cutting and the reinvestment. Right, Jen? So it’s it’s not always cost cutting for cost cutting’s sake. It’s cost cutting to reinvest to deploy in some of the technology areas to advance.
Which is a motion that these advisors have worked their entire career.
That’s exactly right.
That’s why I just wanted to point that out.
So actually, thank you. Thank you for that little segue, because this next slide that will show, if we want to move there or this next little part of the report, you can see that almost half of our enterprise respondents this year expect their IT budgets to increase, while a full ninety two percent of our mid market respondents are planning for an increase in overall spend.
So that is a real like, we’re really seeing huge opportunity in that space. By the way, fifty percent seeing an increase is also a huge opportunity. That’s nothing to especially, that’s an enterprise opportunity. So those are those are a lot of dollars to invest. What’s, what we said before is true. The mid market is really ready to jump into solutions that were battle tested by the enterprise over the last couple of years. They didn’t wanna mess around with experimentation.
They’re they’re ready now to invest, to innovate and to improve their own process and efficiencies and do more with less. And in many cases, these mid market folks are taking this opportunity to make these investments so that they can leapfrog some of the, enterprises where it’s harder for them to move as fast. Both segments plan to spend the bulk of their increase in budget on on software, not headcount.
You can see that in this chart. This is good news for all of us,
that businesses expect software to drive their critical initiatives and the bottom line impact that they’re looking for. And you, as always, can help guide them to ensure that they’re choosing those right software solutions.
K.
Okay. Let’s go to the adviser opportunity.
Speaking of mid market Yes.
Here we go.
So our advisors, you, always thrive when there are moments of complexity. And we have never seen the pace of change that we’re seeing right now with technology. It is dizzying.
This is a hard job for anyone to keep up with. But it’s our responsibility to make sure that we’re there and understanding the things that are changing so quickly so that we can create confidence and, and, trust, you know, increase that trust that you’ve already established with your customers and prospects. But you so you can really kind of Sherpa them through this insane rate of change.
And very similarly to last year, almost a third of our enterprise respondents are looking to meet a new adviser to help them make sense of the dizzying pace of change, in the market. And meanwhile, ninety six percent of our mid enterprise respondents wanna meet a new adviser. And specifically, they really wanna talk to someone who has specialized expertise. This is the segment where we’re seeing the highest innovation rates in mid market, quicker deal velocity, and the most significant IT budget increases.
I saw that Marty’s on here. There’s lots of you that are that’s that can address any technology question across the stack, and that’s amazing. But I really think listening to what the specific business challenges that that folks are trying to address and showing your deep expertise in that area is something that creates a ton of confidence. When when technology is changing so fast and you can help someone say, look.
I help people make these decisions every day. That just helps folks a ton. So good news for all of us. There’s a lot of demand for your services and guidance in market.
Any, comments, Rachelle or Tim?
Yeah. I I would just say this is a really I you’re gonna you’re about to hit on it, but there’s there’s a lot of common out. There’s there’s a theme of, both enterprise and and mid market, of course, are needing that support most from advisers in AI, cybersecurity, these these highly emerging, you know, complex areas. Maybe the enterprise have have already deepened their contracts with cloud, you know, and networking, CX, etcetera. And and they’ll the next, they’re gonna be looking for support in more of those AI enabled, implementations.
But there’s just some really, I fascinating kind of trends and patterns we see, with where we’re where we can support mid and enterprise right now versus where mid market really needs that support to catch up. And they’re three times more likely to want to work with an adviser
according to the survey. So, again, just reinforcing, it’s it’s a great, like, low hanging fruit revenue opportunity to explore if you’re if you’re not going deep there already.
So that’s it.
Well and and let’s just back up from the data for a second and just talk about human psychology.
Buyers are overwhelmed by choice. At the mid market, at the enterprise, at the leadership level, at the individual contributor level, when they’re in rooms around tables or on Teams or Zoom meetings, and they’re trying to find clarity in all the choices they have. There was a note in the chat about an RFP meeting where all these people showed up to a location to bid. Well, that’s great.
Your job and how you can stand out, we’ll talk about this more later and we won’t have time to do it all on this call, but part of what Telarus will help provide you is ways for you to stand out in the crowd, but really use your superpower is creating clarity and confidence in complex buying buying decisions where all these vendors are showing up.
They’re directly selling their service. So right from the carrier, they only have we’ll use a auto analogy. They only have Ford trucks on that truck, or they only have Chevy trucks on that truck.
And guess what? You have access to all of the trucks, and you can help source, negotiate, implement, do the things that help create the best outcome for your customer. So this this report should give you confidence in the adviser space that you have the ability to navigate the most complex environments with Telarus, clarify with simplicity, create confidence and good momentum.
Oftentimes, when what you’re describing in the chat, these RFPs get stuck. They don’t move ahead because they’re confused. They’re afraid of making mistakes where you can give them the confidence to advance with some of the data here and the resources you have available. Alright. Back to you guys.
Well, this is this is exactly the motion that our all our advisors have taken for years and years just with new with new technology focus.
So, by the way, someone asked in the chat, what do we consider mid market? So the mid market for this is fifty to five hundred employees.
Yep.
Okay. So this is the other money slide. I love that first slide that talks about the, buying, the buying drivers. This is where specifically advisors want your help with really deep expertise.
So where do they want your help? Predominantly, in the fastest changing technology spaces. Right? They don’t just need help with selection and implementation,
but they also need help post sale to make sure that ROI is achieved and that their technology roadmap is advanced.
Right? So you’re going in there. You’re helping them decide what’s the first problem that they’re gonna solve. And then hopefully you’re setting the table with what’s the third, fifth, seventh problems that they’re also going to solve.
And you’re helping them through a long conversation of technology adoption on a roadmap.
In enterprise, where long contracts have been activated, they need help realizing value and potentially expanding the platform feature sets that they already have.
So focus on the renewal cycle, focus on AI enabled solutions in their existing platforms to help them realize additional value.
So hopefully you guys have a sense of how to best engage with this report now. And I really just recommend grab a cup of coffee and go sit with this thing some morning and spend some real time with it. And the places where you find, depth and great storytelling, like, the the the better you can become fluent, like Tim mentioned, the better you’re gonna be at using this data to in conversation.
So Hey, disrupt your flow, but you know how much I like that last graph.
Can we go back to it for two seconds? It’s one of my all time favorites.
Same.
Okay. Hold on. And now we’ve screwed up Rachelle’s flow.
It it’s really it’s I just think it’s really telling. We’ll see what the audience thinks.
Okay. Now you okay. Thanks, Tim. Hold on.
Did you break it?
No. She’s just having to go find it.
Look at all the great content.
Look at all look at this. Look at this.
Look at all the data.
K. One sec. It’s coming.
So close.
Well, you’re really getting to see the report now.
Hold on.
Let’s I think it’s almost there, Rachelle.
Yeah. Hold on. It’s here we go.
Here we go. So when you look at this, and I remember seeing this backstage at Partner Summit, you guys were talking on stage and you really pointed out something I thought was telling. If you look at AI, obviously the big numbers on AI, but then look at the next column, cybersecurity, cloud, data management, and governance.
They all lean directly into AI, right? We see this as we do our AI tech summits, as we talk to advisors and do deep dives on what their clients are looking for. Sometimes it starts with this data layer, moving it to the cloud, putting a security wrapper on it, and then moving forward with AI. So it’s really the whole package.
It’s the way all these things intertwine and are segmented. And then, of course, it leads to some of these long tail solutions that you guys have been selling for years. So when you think about AI, really think about you hear Kobe say this all the time and Jason and the rest of the Advanced Solutions team, think about the data readiness, the security wrapper, and AI. The AI is sort of that sizzle, but make sure that we’re adding and becoming experts and bringing the right resources to the table around the things that are gonna drive those AI decisions.
And sometimes it’s a cloud decision or it’s a data management decision. Alright. Thanks for Rachelle, thanks for going back to go forward.
Yeah. No worries. No worries. Before we move on to your, your tips and tricks, Tim, on the customizable version, tech advisers, just be aware that in section three, there’s a
whole special section for you that will not be in the customizable version that really takes a look at some of the, the findings from the tech adviser survey portion of this report, that, not only, you know, can guide, you know, and give you a sense of where your peers are with, their AI selling confidence, where they’re finding, you know, a lot of opportunity in in data readiness conversations and AI conversations, but also where some folks don’t feel so prepared to sell. And of those folks that aren’t as prepared to sell, they, you know, they may not be using it internally in their own business. So there’s some interesting correlations there.
And just a little bit of reminder that if you use AI in in your business and your marketing and your operations, you’re gonna be more confident bringing it up with your with your clients as you’re selling your traditional foundational technologies.
There’s opportunities to bring up AI across all of those technologies.
And we’re finding that those who are are really optimistic and about how those AI solutions are gonna be, impacting their revenue in a really positive way, in the next year and and beyond. So don’t forget about that section three. It’s got some really good stuff in there.
Alright. And there’s a lot of nerds at Telarus that are playing with AI every single day. So if you guys are getting your hands in there and wanting to talk, like, we are absolutely here for that. We are doing it ourselves in our own motions.
I did see someone say that AI is very broad term. Yes. It absolutely is. But as you go through the content, in the report, you’ll see that we actually dive deeply into
each of the swim lanes and we talk about AI’s application in each of those tech technology areas.
So that data that you asked for, whoever that was in the chat, it’s in there. Oh, that was Kevin. So it’s in there, Kevin. Just dig through that report and you’ll see the specific areas where people are asking and implementing.
Tim, this is the portion of the of the presentation when we get to talk about all the cool things that folks can do with the version that you are receiving tomorrow. So just to remind you, today you already have in your inbox and Matt Heron, thank you so much, Matt, posted the link to the existing
advisor facing interactive version. Tomorrow you receive this version that Tim’s about to walk you through that you can do all kinds of crazy things to, to help make it yours and to help make sure that it supports your emotions. So that’s what we’re about to start talking about.
Alright. Amazing. So the the private label version or the your logo here version, as you see on the screen, is really adaptable. We’ll walk through a couple of the areas that are customizable, but mostly it’s up to you to customize it as much or as little as you want.
Last year, we had people just simply swap out, put their logo into it. We also had advisers who cut this into other a series of reports. So someone mentioned lead magnet earlier. So you can use this as a lead magnet on your website as one big report or a series of data that they can use.
You can also include your insights into this report, but we give you the baseline report and then you can talk about ways that you can modify the report. What I want to talk about is the actual use cases. So do we wanna Rachelle, do is there anything else we add wanna add on the customization, or do you wanna get into use cases? I’d we just wanna be conscious of time.
Oh. It’s a time. It’s a PowerPoint. So Yeah.
So, Chandler, if you just wanna progress through the slides for yeah.
So, just go to go a couple more just so folks can see the level of customization. You know? You can put your own next steps in. Yep. If it’s if it’s leave behind, you know, there’s another slide where it’s a little bit more of, you know, you can do your conclusion and add your logo and all that good stuff. But very intuitive.
It’s a fully customized PowerPoint done for you so you can modify it. You can modify the voice slightly. I’d be careful not to over rotate and over tweak it. I did see some.
So we talk about best practices a lot on calls. I’ll talk about slightly a bad practice, which is to over rotate and over customize it. Again, this was created in a pretty thoughtful way. So last year, we talked a lot about the the ways others have made meaningful use of just Telarus data that we’ve put out.
Well, this year, we have even more examples of how people have used this report and taken really meaningful action. I saw a comment in the chat earlier about standing out in a crowd. So the way you have to stand out in a crowd is have a repeatable voice. So one of the things you can do with this report
is and now you have all these other tools that you’re probably using that are large language models, pick your own from Gronk to ChatGPT.
You could have this cut into different content and different social media posts. We saw that happen last year where people had social media posts, blogs that they put on their website that were based on this report, but talked to the different areas of technology. So I’ll let you guys work on the prompting for that, but I think that is a great way to cut this content into different things. Also, YouTube videos.
So people recorded YouTube videos, long form and short form based on the content here, giving practical advice to their clients. So again, I don’t want to share those links and give away secret sauce of some of our advisors, but the point is that you creating expert content and leading your prospects and customers to the water is what is really making an impact. In fact, I was just down in Tampa doing a sales and marketing training. I see some familiar faces on this call.
And we talked about the process that you go through to buy a thing. Maybe it’s a new roof or new windows for your house. Maybe it’s a new car, if you think about the same way that you buy something that’s a complex big purchase, oftentimes technology decisions are made in a very similar way. So the more you become the obvious expert from the content you bring to the table helps separate you from the crowd.
Joe Carlasare (zero fifty three:thirty seven): All right. So let me give you some examples. Last year, I used a direct mail example. Well, I’m happy to report that someone did exactly that.
Here’s their example that they mailed to my house. So they mailed the report and they said, just like we talked about, Hey, Tim. See page two. Let’s talk.
You can also say, if you’re interested in best practices on deploying technology and you can put a post it note right inside of something like this that says, Let’s talk. The other thing that’s in every single market, we talk about this a lot, are these lists. You can see around the country. This one happens to be from Detroit because I live in Detroit, the Detroit five hundred.
So if you’re prospecting and you want a great list, well, this list talks about the business initiatives that every one of these leaders has. Most of them involve some type of seismic shift or technology shift in their business. So you can just pick the first one here is Jacob, and you could reach out to Jacob. And you can
also find out on LinkedIn very easily who’s on Jacob’s team, and you could send them all something very similar.
Or how about this? Another advisor mailed this to me and said, hey, Tim. I know you like direct mail. What do you think about this?
I bought comic books in bulk, and he has these superhero comics, and he’s sending them and getting quite the response of how you can be a superhero in your company with the right advisor to help eliminate the confusion and hassle that’s associated with making business technology decisions, and how he, as a professional technology advisor, is able to come in, help with sourcing, down selection, implementation, and making sure you hit the outcomes that you desire as a business. So a bit of accountability. So I thought that was pretty clever clever. I have a few more examples of direct mail.
A lot of people have been using that. Also, I heard and we saw in the chat using these reports or data for lead magnets or attention grabbers on your website. You guys can go and search.
So to be clear, these advisors have home addresses.
Zachary, let me tell you what’s easier and easier to get.
I get challenged on this all the time. It’s easier to get the home address of people than ever before, ever since COVID. Right? So if I was talking to Jen, I could say, Hey, Jen, just so I can keep my records up to date, could I get your best mailing address? So you don’t say home address. There’s some psychology there. You don’t say home address, best mailing address.
Oftentimes too, if you reach out to someone’s executive assistant or the business and say, I’m trying to get I have something for this person.
Yeah. An urgent an overnight to Rachelle.
I like her best mailing address, and then you send it. You can buy these in bulk in a priority express mailing.
This will likely go right past an EA. It’ll also get open first if you if you mail it. So there’s ways to get addresses that are that are pretty simple.
I would also clip specific bits of the research and drop it into a just like an outreach, an outbound email to say, Hey, I saw this stat and it made me think of you. Remember that conversation we had about x? Here’s something that suggests that this is a conversation we should continue. And then when you have the meeting with them, then you use it as either a digital or a physical leave behind from a discovery meeting to show that you have the tops. Like, we are talking about this thing, but look at all of this research that supports the conversation that we just had.
Totally. There’s a there’s a great there’s a great attention grabber, Jen, that’s the are you still interested frame.
Mhmm.
Which is, hey, Jen, are you still interested in blank, you know, data readiness for AI? I saw this stat and thought of you. If you’re interested in exploring the full report, give me your best mailing address. If you’re interested in exploring the full dataset, I just left the VIP conference where I learned
a whole new level of data.
I can send you the report, but also give you information in a fifteen minute Zoom. That’s working really, really well. You can use this data in your proposals as well. So a lot of people are using this as data to support a proposal as an appendix.
So use it in your proposals. Use it in newsletter. So you can cut the data, put it in a newsletter. I know a lot of you guys use digital newsletters.
Many of you are using tools like Beehive and ConvertKit, and you’re looking for content. This is also great fodder for those newsletters with a link that goes to your website where you can collect more information. Some of you guys are using tools like GoHighLevel as well. So if you’re using that, now you get a click and another click.
So for lead scoring purposes, now you see them moving through your funnel. So all those things and more, I think, stay tuned. We’ll give you as many best practices as we can as we advance.
Sorry, Tim, to cut you off. One more thing on the digital front. Don’t forget, you guys, that sharing on your social networks, you can literally grab a visual a a key graph that really stands out at you that you wanna elevate your thought leadership on a particular in insight. You just plop that graph and do a social post out there and, start a conversation, ask a question. Are you seeing this in your your market? Whatever.
So Yeah. Does this look like you? Right? So if you post it on LinkedIn, it can say, you know, sixty seven percent of blank do blank.
Does this does this look like you? And you can use it for your own survey. Here’s the graph. Let’s see what LinkedIn has to say.
So here’s the graph, and then you put the post underneath it and let people vote with their mouse. And then you can kind of see what your followers or the people who engage with your content are doing. All great ideas. The key is attention wins.
There’s a rule in marketing, the eyes have it. So Adam said this, I think when he closed his keynote, I’m going to mess up the quote, but he said to be bold. Now’s the time to be bold, to take some chances. A lot of times, especially many of you who’ve been in the business a long time, you you operated without doing a lot of marketing, maybe on an introduction or referral paces, and that’s still okay.
Be bolder with that. Be bolder with the asks.
My best customers come from customers like you, Jen. Would you be open to making introductions? I’d love to have the same results with your network that I’ve had with you personally.
Those are great ways to expand your expertise, expand your market, and then use this report and the other services, solutions, and tools available at Telarus to help really drive home your expert authority with your audience and attract new people to you.
And just to pull the thread on the thing that Rachelle said earlier about you guys developing fluency with AI as you I would start with how you have door opening conversations about it because remember that we’re always here to do sell with, conversations too. So, you know, you’ve got the advanced solutions team, you’ve got the solution architects, solution engineers, and everyone here that would be very happy. If you are able to kick open a door and have a conversation, then you need someone who has deeper experience and expertise. We are here, as always to help you in those efforts.
Hey. I’ll tell you. I have one more just quick example. I brainstormed with an adviser, and he mailed peanuts to prospects. It said you’d have to be nuts not to read this report.
Hopefully, Harry, you’re mailing to no one who has a nut allergy. Yeah.
Yeah. Look. It’s a it’s a weird world. Maybe they don’t open it. It’s it’s, it’s sealed in plastic. So I I did not I opened it just to read the content. It was pretty good.
Alright.
Alright. I think we’re ready to open it up to q and a if we have a few more minutes.
There have been tons of questions that have been going by. I’ve been trying to grab them, but, maybe they didn’t get, addressed.
Great presentation, all of you. We did have some great questions that came in from our advisors. Some of them you’ve already addressed in the, chat. And so for any that, had specifically asked, we encourage you to go back there and take a look.
But a couple of the things that you brought out that really seem to get their interest was the difference of course between mid market and enterprise. This is almost like two reports and that you’ve really broken out these two markets. What works and what doesn’t in each of them. And one of the fascinating takeaways that I had written down here was that cost cutting is not a driver in the mid market, but it still seems to be in the enterprise market, but with the idea of reinvesting it.
Let’s talk a little bit about more about that because it affects everything else that we’re discussing.
Yeah. Sure. So I I think generally speaking, what we see is at the let’s bifurcate a little bit too versus easier to sell into. So enterprise, you start thinking about multi location.
The decision makers are dispersed over broad geography. Sometimes it’s hard to get them in a room together, whether it’s a virtual room or a live room where mid market, especially the lower end of mid market, sometimes those are owner operated companies.
So you’re interacting with It’s hard to find the decision maker. Now you’re surrounded by influencers. So when we see people and you guys, advisors on this call, can talk about cost cutting as a way to reinvest and redeploy with measurable ROI, provable ROI, Doug, that seems to be driving real momentum. So when I can say, Hey Doug, here’s what here’s what we’ve learned, case study, stories, things that that where the audience says, oh, that sounds like me.
So if I’m talking to multi unit retail or healthcare, the story should relate to that audience really well. And this is, Oh, that sounds like me. Well, we are able to do this over here, savings, cost cutting. And if you want to just harvest those savings to achieve a revenue savings
goal, that’s great.
But if you redeploy, watch what happens when you redeploy. The end of the story, the good news part of the story is on redeployment, the ROI is measurable and really, really good. So I think for advisors, you got to decide where you’re comfortable, right? Don’t worry as much about the mid market enterprise narrative.
If you play an SMB and you think, Oh, well, I don’t sell to the mid market. These stats are still very, very relevant to you. If mid market to you Like a lot of people get caught up in the, Well, where’s your mid market line? If your mid market line is five hundred employees, that’s okay.
If your mid market line is two fifty employees, that’s okay. The point is business owners, business operators are really looking at these things and they’re always going to be looking to cost cut or cost optimize because there’s only three things that business owners are focused on. Right? How to maximize their time, how to maximize their money, and how to maximize their human resources.
That’s it. You can tie every goal to every business back to those three things. So if you show them how to maximize the money they spend or maximize for savings and redeployment, you’re gonna win if you tie it into those other two things as well.
Terrific answer. AI makes up a lot of what we’re talking about in the report, both for the trends that are occurring and for the individual solutions that are being proposed.
Couple of good questions about AI. Bill asked, how is it that we can be successful in proposing AI solutions? And in fact, just discussing it, when we’re up against very large AI developers and providers, are there things that advisors can do to make themselves more visible and more effective?
Yeah. I think you have to market yourself as the obvious expert or the neutral expert. A lot of times we talk to advisors, we talk about this very publicly too. Instead of being a specialist in AI, you have to be more like a general contractor.
What a general contractor is, if you’re building a house, there’s over three hundred people on this call, close to four hundred. If you were building a house, folks, who would you call? The plumber or the general contractor? The plumber or an architect?
The answer is usually an architect or a general contractor.
So the way you stand out is you’re the source to find the best plumber. You’re the source to find to create clarity in a crowded place of AI service providers. You could help source the right AI service provider, whether it’s fully integrated or over the top, you can be the one that creates clarity and confidence for the business to advance. If not, they might just get stuck.
Yes, there’s big players in the space. There’s always big, big players in the space, whether it was back in the days of just network or in mobility. But our advisors, many advisors,
familiar names on this call know it. They’re probably nodding their head.
They beat big providers head to head more now than ever before.
They beat out consulting firms more now than ever before. This agnostic neutral expert that can come in and navigate quality decision making, really be a thought leader among thought leaders. Those are the folks who are winning. And they’re winning at every level. SMB, mid market, enterprise, however you define it, they’re winning at every level.
I wanna make one more comment too, that’s a little bit more broad since we were talking about agnostic technology approaches. This is a a little bit of an agnostic content comment that I wanna make for everyone. I wanna make sure that I remind you, I’d be remiss if I didn’t. We spend so much time creating assets, for you all to use, like the Telarus Tech Trends Report, in your marketing and selling motions.
But there’s a lot more available to in your marketing resources, page. So please, if you don’t know where that is, have that conversation with your ex PDM, with your sales rep. Make sure that you’re talking with those folks and that you understand where these assets are. We provide assets all day every day about each of our, different technology areas, about different approaches to market.
We create medium and long form content that you can customize, that you can put into your marketing and selling motions beyond just this report. We want you to use this one, we very much, but also know that there are lots of other things. There are iframes available for you to place into your website. There are value sheets that you can use either digitally or in person.
There’s a whole bunch of stuff in that marketing resources center. So if you don’t know where that is, make sure you have a conversation with your favorite person at Telarus, and they will show you where that is.
And, Rachelle, we should have you weigh in on this as well. We’ve discussed during this presentation so many ways in which advisors can use the existing report as well as the customer facing report, which comes out tomorrow. Breaking it up, co branding it, putting it on their website, using it all at once, using it in small snippets. From your perspective as the, the marketing, officer, what do you think is one of the effective ways right out of the chute to get a jump on this and hit hard and then follow-up again over and over, that advisors should be thinking about and planning now?
Tim Tim gave a great, handful of examples, but the easiest thing would be if you were reading through the report on your own to edify and educate yourself and you saw a piece of content in that report that appear that reminds you of someone of your prospects or a conversation you had with them, clip the info, pop it into an email, and and use the tactics that Tim mentioned, which was like, hey. Are you still interested in this? I read this. It made me think of you.
How about if we meet next Wednesday and have a conversation about this? Like, use it as a meeting maker. Use it as an excuse for another reason to engage and make sure that you’re just in there always listening to the business problems and driving through, those. It’s just another opportunity for conversation.
Yeah. And I I would just
say I know we’re reaching time, but just as targeted and personalized as you can make the message, the better. You know? Make it you you wanna make sure they know that they’re you’re not just blanketing and sending out your thing. It just you know, you’ve gotta, like, be strategic about it. And, you know, what is that insight tailored to that pain point for that particular client that you have in that space?
And, you know, the eyeballs the eyeballs will come.
So, Rachelle, let’s just double down on that super tactical. But when you when an email looks generic, people think it’s generic. Everyone on the call can agree. So try to use their name.
Even if you’re using a Mailmers tool, use their name, use their business name, use words like you and your in the email. It feels more one to one, even if it’s one to many. If it feels like it’s bulk and you’re talking to a big audience, the reader knows it right away. So try to make it a little bit personal.
This will be like fingernails on a chalkboard to many of you.
A typo is even okay sometimes because it looks like That hurts my heart.
I know it does, Jen. I know it does.
But it looks like you wrote it out real quick. Like if I wrote a message to Doug and it was too polished and I said, Hey, Doug. Was thinking about when I saw this data, whatever, if it’s too polished, then Doug feels like, oh, that’s a form email. But if it’s just a text message that says, hey, Doug, I was thinking about you and Acme company when I saw this stat.
Are you still interested in securing your data and getting it ready for an the AI project we talked about six months ago. Even if you never talked about an AI project, here’s the unique thing about Doug and decision makers. They have lots of conversations, and they can’t remember them all. So Doug might think that, Oh, I did mention the AI project, and they’ll respond.
In fact, many of you will see this live at AI Summit in Florida. Yep. We do an email and text message challenge where if people trust us with some of the stuff we put on the screen, you get responses back right away when you use some of these techniques. So, join us there.
And look at how Tyler used AI to summarize our call and post it in the chat for everyone to see. Thank you so much.
That’s fantastic.
That’s awesome.
VP of corporate marketing, Rachelle Lara has been here today.
Senior VP of sales, Tim Bassa, and of course, our chief marketing and experience officer, Jen Dimas. This is a phenomenal report. If you have additional questions, they’ll be here in the chat
for a little bit longer as we finish up. And I have to, throw this out as well.
Once you find the solution and the opportunity that you’re after, take advantage of Telarus phenomenal engineering resources. We can help you customize the solution to match the information that you presented and take full advantage of this. Great opportunities here. Thank you to all of you.
Jen, anything final you wanted to bring up here just as we close it out?
No. But I’m just always so happy to be with you folks. Thank you so much for your time and attention today. It was great to be with you.
Yeah. Thank you all. We look forward to having you again very soon.