Inside the Win: How Telarus and Comcast Teamed Up To Double an Enterprise Account

Welcome to Inside the Win. We’ll break down real world wins, showing you exactly how strategic partnership with our experts empowers you to tackle your most ambitious opportunities with confidence. Let’s jump in.

Well, hello, everyone. Welcome again to another episode of Inside the Wind. My name is Graeme Scott. I’m the vice president of network and mobility for Telarus. And joining me today on the call, very special guest, the one and only Eric Solomon from Comcast. Eric, how are you, my friend?

Great. Thank you. Thank you for having me having us. We love working with Telarus and you.

Appreciate that, man. Thank you very much. So, Eric, we got a great story to talk about today, and this is one, about teaming and how we had a tech adviser that had done some business with Comcast over the years. They had been involved in this account, had existing Comcast business among other, suppliers.

But the Comcast team identified this account as one that they were also working on. And as a result of that, decided, hey. Rather than sort of competing with one another, let’s team up. Let’s work together to see how we can grow this account.

So talk a little bit about how that conversation started, how you guys identified the opportunity, and how we got in front of the TA to have a conversation.

Sure. It it started our our direct team identified this as a strategic potential customer. It’s a it’s a large airlines carrier, and we identified as somebody that that we need to be working with from a strategic perspective. Your TA had been working with this customer for, I think, eight years plus

Selling circuits into them, connectivity, and and built a, you know, a nice sixty thousand dollar base of business there. But we believe that we could do so much more. He’s done a great job. Until then, your project management team who was working closely with with your TA came to talk to me about it at the same time that our direct team talked about working together with the partner. So that’s how it started. I might as well just jump in.

It didn’t start smoothly. There was plenty of friction. Right. I would say that there was a bit of lack of trust and and and not wanting to work together from the TA’s perspective. He didn’t know the direct team, and all he had to go on was our word that they’re trustworthy. We had some work to do there.

Yeah. And I think, you know, it’s a great point because, typically, we tend to look at here in the channel, we tend to look at the direct team as competitors. Right? And in this case, I think it was a challenge to get past that sort of initial reservation and and skepticism that, hey. These guys are here to partner with me and collaborate on mutual success.

Yep. So this is the way that I’d look at it. Your TAs are are they’ve got great relationships, and they’ve got great expertise at their customers and the overall industry. What we have is we have the knowledge of Comcast business and all the nuance of Comcast business, what we can do, what our product set looks like, what our solutions look like, how to deliver it, and where it makes sense.

And when we can get those two things together, the TA’s expertise and our expertise, we can go far. All of our largest deals over the last three years have been teamed. We even closed a three and a half million dollar deal teamed in the last few years. Different story altogether, but what I’m saying is when we bring the two sides together, we’ve been doing great work.

Yeah. And I think that’s a big change within Comcast. And the way you guys have approached the channel, understanding that, look, the TAs have really strong relationships here. Working together, we can do better than working against each other.

Yeah. Before I was here, there was a history and and I’m not saying that I made the change. Before I was here, there was a history that we just competed. Yeah.

There was direct and there was indirect, and the two sides didn’t meet. And we learned a lot over the last few years, and we’ve made humongous and fast progress in that area. In this case, I have experience working with this specific direct team. I knew them.

I trusted them, and I was willing to put my name on them with your TA.

But we still had a lot of a lot of work to get to to to do together. We had multiple meetings. We had plenty of of friction before we got there, and I think that that’s okay. We got everything out in the open, and we got two teams working together. Not only did they work together on this account, they worked together on additional accounts after that because they like working together so much.

So if I could just keep going and talk about what this really meant. So over about eight years, we grew this account to sixty thousand.

Over the year, we did a few orders and then finally did one more for sixty thousand. We more than doubled the size of the account in a year. And that’s not because any one side did a bad job before that. It’s because this is what the power of teaming with us can do.

So go going from sixty thousand to a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty thousand, Pretty exciting pretty exciting story. We sold more advanced solutions inside of there, and we have more on the horizon as well. So, there’s more to come with this. And, again, not just more revenue, but a smooth working relationship where both sides are working harmoniously with trust and and excitement, frankly.

I know that when I’ve seen that TA at events after that, he’s he’s extremely happy with the relationship.

Yeah. And and this TA is just a great guy. Been with Telarus for a long time. One of the key components with this, Eric, and I think we can’t really gloss over this, is because the TA had already been in the account and had sold some Comcast services.

Right? They had an MSA in place. And that is a big deal when you’re talking with large enterprises. Right?

Because, you know, sometimes that MSA is really what bungles everything up. And in this case, that was in place, so they were able to just layer on incremental and additional services by utilizing what the t the groundwork that the TA had already done.

Yep. So, you know, I I I I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been at the end of an enterprise process.

We think we’re done, then we realize we’ve got three months of legal negotiations ahead of us. Yeah. It’s a long pole in the tent, and we want we wanna get this thing in process. We wanna get to revenue right away.

What’s better than having an MSA already in place, already negotiated?

This is this is the fastest way to get to revenue. Now it only makes sense when it makes sense, but if we have an MSA in place and we have a solution in place and we have a relationship in place, this is something that makes a whole lot of sense. So I I I can’t ignore the idea that having an MSA in place already is a big portion of teaming. Yes. Having a working relationship, a trusting harmonious relationship, but having an MSA in place really speeds things up and makes the sales process a lot easier.

Yeah. So, Eric, final word. What would you tell TAs out there that are you know, have done business with Comcast, know Comcast? What would you tell them about what’s changed with the teaming process? How should they be looking at Comcast differently than they did in the past?

So I say that we’ve learned the importance of working together, that we’ve learned the importance of harmony with each other. And when it makes sense, teaming has increased revenue on the TA side, on the direct side. We don’t have to do it every time. Not everything requires teaming. But where it makes sense, we have found that it that that that it’s good for for for both sides. It’s definitely a different Comcast these days than it was three, four years ago.

So I would say give us a shot. Furthermore, we have partner sales managers that oversee those relationships. They’ve got skin in the game, making sure that the the harmonious relationship works and works ongoing.

This is not just send, you know, send a partner to a to to a direct salesperson. This is overseen by the channel, and it’s important to the channel.

I wanna stress, it doesn’t have to have to happen in every deal. Sometimes we don’t need them or they don’t need us, and we can compete.

But that’s that’s what I’ve seen is the difference.

Yeah. And, like, a a great story of better together versus working opposed to one another. Right? And I think that that to me is really the big takeaway here.

Great opportunity. So, Eric, thank you so much for joining us today. I think this is a great story. Hopefully, the TAs out there in the audience can can hear this and maybe uncover some additional opportunities within the accounts that they are working on today.