Inside the Win: VMware Cloud Migration with $54k MRR

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.

Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us again for another Inside the Win from Telarus and specifically a cloud win today. And with me, I have Mac from 11:11, and he’s gonna talk us through an opportunity that, is a little different than the usual ones that that come into 11:11. Mac, welcome, and why don’t you talk us through this win that you have recently?

Yeah. Sure. Thanks for having me, and this is one of my one of my favorites. This is kind of one of the early VMware wins that we had that really kind of, I would say, highlighted, I guess, for us, the opportunity that’s actually out there, and I’ll kinda double down on that, the actual VMware opportunity. I think a lot of folks are maybe tired of hearing about all the changes with Broadcom and VMware and how they keep evolving.

But this one really highlighted, especially to me, how unaware the broader, I would say, mid market and even enterprise are I I would say how aware they are of our model.

So in this particular case, we had a, I would say, traditional connectivity focused TA that happened to be on a webinar. So we were just talking about here’s the changes, and there’s actually more since then that I would say we we should all talk about even more. But Yeah. At the end of the day, he he listened to a couple keywords.

And in what he took away from it and and and went and did was essentially he he curates a a peer group. So he meets with a group of CIOs. They all have coffee, you know, every couple months, and simply pose the question, hey. Who has VMware in their environment, and is this, renewal thing, all that’s cracked up to be?

Anybody got a problem with it? Couple hands raised. One guy said, hey. Yeah. I’ve got a a renewal coming up in May at the time, so actually a couple months from now.

And the his response was simply, oh, man. That sounds terrible. You know, what what kind of increase are you looking at? Ended up being four hundred percent.

And the only thing he said was, have you ever considered an VMware based infrastructure as a service? So from the call, that was it. He said, didn’t even know that existed. If you wanna set up a call, happy to talk to him.

So that really set up the phone call. It took us two phone calls in forty five days to actually close the deal in this scenario. There was an impending, you know, renewal, and then he also had a hardware refresh coming in the next year, which ultimately we pulled forward.

But one one interesting thing that kind of evolved was he again, he kept trying to bring things in house that we were delivering for him. One instance would be like backup. So when as it kinda started to build in his mind, you could see, like, holy cow. I didn’t know that I could buy really a platform on a consumption basis and not have to deal with this anymore because, really, they only had about, you know, four IT guys.

The net total of the deal ended up being about fifty four grand a month. And, again, fifty k in a forty five day sales cycle was solid. But the things that the customer kept hitting on was like, oh, I didn’t realize that I could I didn’t have to go bring my own backup. And all these things, especially with replatforming, that it can become challenges of, like, looking at how my backup works and how my security tooling works.

He didn’t realize that he could buy that all in one place with one console, one level of visibility. Right? So great win for us, and and it really was the kickoff of many more exactly like that throughout the rest of q four last year, and we’re seeing it the same this year.

That’s that’s great. And and one of the key things that made this stand out to me was the fact that it was more of a traditional TA. Somebody that was really focused on the the network side of things, the connectivity side of things that they’re comfortable selling, it prompted them to step a little bit out of their comfort zone far enough to ask some questions and then hand it off to the experts that can take it and run it from there. And, one of the key things that I’m finding more and more as we we work alongside of you is just that.

Like, the people that are on your team that are doing these conversions, that are doing these migrations are the ones that really know it inside and out. And and that’s who you wanna rely on to answer these questions, not just it’s not something that a typical TA, unless they’re really involved in it, is gonna know the answers to. Were there any curveballs that came up in this whole process? Anything that got thrown at you that was like, woah.

Wait a second. Let’s let’s dig into that a little deeper.

I wouldn’t say curveballs, but, again, more surprises. Like, the the willingness again, I I’m been selling managed services and cloud solutions for on purpose as a primary role for fifteen years. Right?

Right.

A little bit before that as an ancillary product. But, you know, in the last fifteen years, the willingness to outsource at the size of company I mean, this is probably fifteen hundred employees in this particular profile.

The willingness to outsource services is growing dramatically. Like, IT departments are getting squeezed. Everyone’s being asked to do more with less. Buzzword.

Buzzword. Buzzword. Right? But it’s real.

It it it’s showing up in opportunities to the extent that after we kind of unwound the fact that he didn’t have to go figure out his own data protection and backup solution, and that I could sell it to him based off of a storage consumption rate versus him going to have to procure a whole new solution. He said, well, what else do y’all do? We ended up deploying, you know, managed Fortinet firewall out front, which will ultimately extend to his on premise environment to and patch management. That’s kind of a pain, tedious process that he would rather not have to do internally and keep it up with.

So we added patch management to to the overall opportunity. What’s funny is the infrastructure as a service element was only about thirty five thousand. The rest of that was ancillary bolt ons through the sales process. Again, this was two phone calls.

So thirty five k in infrastructure as a service, and then twenty grand in managed firewall, you know, patch management, and some and, you know, advanced data protection, some other things that we bolted on. And the net savings, really, cost of ownership in his math, you know, was about a half a million bucks over three years. So he was looking at, if I go do this DIY, you know, accounting for some level of headcount in there too, and he’s looking at two point six million, and we’re about two point one. So if my math is right there and I remember it correctly, could be off, but it was in the twos.

But that that’s, again, light bulb for me because these deals are are popping up more and more. And and I think that you mentioned it before, the simplicity of the question of the partner. They weren’t running discovery. He was looking for data points.

That was it. Yep. So and and, really, that’s what it takes. And the other thing that I will highlight, and I know this is not a popular go to market strategy in the TA community, but he only brought us.

There there wasn’t, you know, multiple vendors that he brought to the table. He actually did come back and get advice as to who he should bring. We happen to be on the webinar, so, obviously, we’re in the the front of the line. And there was a couple other factors, one of them might being being a spiff as far as who he leaned on coming into the door.

But at the end of the day, we were able to execute in a couple phone calls and had a really good experience both for the for his first cloud deal and for, you know, the customer.

Yeah. I think it’s great. It’s a great summary of of a fantastic win for someone that really was not comfortable in this this swim lane of technology that we talk about on a regular basis. And I think it’s, it’s huge all the way around.

Not only was it answering and and resolving a a a pain point for one of his customers, but it also was, our message of land and expand that happens all the time with cloud and just opening up that conversation. So Yep. I I love these. I love having you on board for this Inside the Wind, and I appreciate you joining us this time.

Thank you.

Can I can I give you one more tip? Absolutely. Yeah. For the trade? Yeah. One thing, because there is such a mass, I would say, tidal wave of renewals coming in twenty six just because the timing of when all this went about, most people renewed in twenty twenty three.

So just to cover volume and, I would say, capitalize on the awareness side of things, we have a tool that bay basically, it makes it kind of we can help the customer determine if it’s worth talk talking about further. Like I mentioned before, not having a lot of knowledge of the space or the option, if they can just run our script or provide us an RV tools, which we can obviously, you know, share after this, we can take those numbers back. All it is is a quick script, takes two minutes, and we can give them some budgetary pricing to say, hey. I know you’re not familiar with this model.

Here’s what it might look like if we did that. Does this make sense financially, and does it make sense to to look into it a little bit further? We’ve had some success there generating opportunities just as a means of, you know, hey. You don’t know about this.

We know you’re time crunched. You got a renewal. You know, there’s an impending event. Let’s take a look and see if it’s worth talking about financially.

I think that’s great. It simplifies the sale.

It simplifies the whole process, and it gets everybody headed in the right direction right up front.

Yep.

Yeah.

That’s great. Well, thank you again, Mac. I really appreciate you joining me today for the Inside the Win, and Gotcha. Forward to seeing you on the road this month.

We’ll be there.

Alright. Thanks. We’ll see you.