Verizon's focus on collaboration and technology
Transcript is auto-generated.
Introduction to the Discussion
Hello, everyone. I’m Richard Murray, chief commercial officer at Telarus. And today, I am joined by Mark Tina, vice president of indirect channels at Verizon Business. Mark, thank you so much for joining me here today.
Richard, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure, and I really look forward to the conversation.
Anytime I get the opportunity to, talk to somebody at your level, I always like to learn from and and have a conversation about certainly, the technologies, and we’ll get into that. But I’d love to get your feedback on how you view the channel as a whole right now.
The Current State of the Channel
I think the channel is a very exciting place to be in right now because no matter whether you are a partner or a carrier or a software provider, it has become more evident than ever that we need to come together to offer holistic comprehensive solutions for our customers in order to differentiate in the market. And so what we’ve done at Verizon is really pulled all of our programs together under my leadership, and that’s various different models. We have sell to, sell with, sell through, depending on how that customer wants to be served. And that really allows us to just bring a best in class solution to the partner together.
And that’s really how we’re starting to see more and more wins out there in the marketplace. I’ll tell you, at Verizon, we are seeing more growth come through our indirect distribution here on the business side than ever before. We’re making key investments not only in our technology, but also in our systems and capabilities and and even our personnel. We’ve grown our channel, employee set significantly, in order to take advantage of the opportunity that’s out there.
So we’re very excited about the channel, and we’re bullish about growth, coming up here.
Exploring the Telarus and Verizon Partnership
Well, good. And I’m gonna wanna talk about some of those things that you mentioned. Let me, just maybe more selfishly ask you really quick about the Telarus and Verizon relationship.
What do you feel is unique about how we work together?
I’ll tell you, I love the flexibility of our partnership and how we’ve grown and evolved over the years. It’s been a long standing relationship on the wireline side. However, as you know, now we’ve got mobility in play, and so we’re able to offer these customers out there, both wireline as well as mobility, and that’s important. We’re at a point of convergence when it comes to technology, and our customers need both. They need fixed broadband, fiber connectivity as well as wireless mobility, and then, of course, all the services that layer on top of that connectivity.
And so what we’re able to do with the partnership with Telarus is, like I said, find, the right solution, the right tech, work together cohesively in order to differentiate for the customer, and create really more loyalty and stickiness as trusted advisors for those customers. So Verizon absolutely values the partnership and relationship with Telarus, which is long standing and continues to grow and evolve.
Key Market Trends in Technology
You you mentioned convergence. What other market trends, especially within the technology sector, are you seeing that, our advisors need to make sure they’re aware of and and taking advantage of?
So I did talk about connectivity, and I just wanna make sure I reiterate that continues to be the core of of what we try to provide every single customer as really the anchor of their tech stack. Right? That connectivity is critical, whether it’s broadband or wireless, and how that customer essentially connects to its people, its data, and and really everything that’s important within that business. But from there, it’s all about what are we stacking above that network layer.
And Verizon offers everything from network as a service to cybersecurity, and and many other technologies. But what I would hone in on is a few here, Richard, that we’re seeing just become more and more relevant. So first of all, artificial intelligence and all of the iterations that go with it, we’re finding ways to finally monetize and partner, out there in the channel community. I’ll give you a quick example.
Our Verizon business assistant is an AI powered tool that a business owner can purchase and use and leverage. And, ultimately, let’s say it’s a restaurant and you wanna call there and you have questions about the restaurant, hours of service, maybe what are their options or things of that nature. It’s really as simple as sending a text message that’s all set up that will allow, for an immediate response, immediate action that will answer that client’s questions and also engage a human if and when necessary. And I know the restaurant example might seem like a small one, but that can scale into any business of any size.
And, obviously, you feed the large language model, to improve the efficiency, of that assistant. I’ll tell you also on AI. Verizon’s made a lot of investments on how we use AI to run our own business.
The Role of AI in Business Solutions
AI plays a big, big role in how we, run, manage, and maintain our network. We use a lot of different AI services there, and also, things like our customer service, inbound calls, call routing, things of that nature. And so, again, we’re finding ways to not only show our customers how Verizon is using the tech, but how we can also create solution offerings to get out there and sell. The other one I’d hit, Richard, is is cybersecurity.
You know, it’s it’s not new. However, I think it’s more relevant than ever before. It’s enough to literally cripple a small medium business altogether, unfortunately, or even put and create major pain in any enterprise.
So we publish our our data breach investigation report with a lot of different third party resources, and then we have a full array of cybersecurity products that we work with partners like Telarus to get out there and help our customers to to mitigate, detect, and certainly respond where necessary, to any sort of, you know, breach or bad actor incident that’s out there. So we’re starting to really see that become more and more important as well.
Well, you know, on the AI topic, nothing is is more talked about, but so often it’s buzzword driven. Right? It’s AI. But to talk about the fact that you guys are actually offering usable AI services and you’re using it within your infrastructure. I think that’s what where it’s a little bit unique. And it candidly, it’s kinda refreshing to hear that Verizon is really leading the charge in in using AI as well.
Enhancements in Systems and Processes
Let’s talk about some of the other areas that you guys have continued to evolve and invest and and get better at. You guys worked really hard on improving your systems and processes that then lead to better overall advisor and ultimately customer experience. Can you touch on, you know, some of those areas of improvement?
Absolutely. So one area we’re always focused on is enabling API integration for our partners. It makes it a lot easier, obviously, for the different systems to communicate and and and really be then delivered to our customers together. So API integration is a place where we’ve invested.
I’ll talk about one particular offering that’s just become available in the last six months. It’s called Digital Agent. And Digital Agent really allows our partners to sell different Verizon products and services fully enabled in in exactly what it sounds, digital fashion. So you’re we’re now able to sell Fios.
We’re able to sell different routers, fixed wireless access, and several other products with more more coming in even including our phone lineup to make it that much easier for our agent and other partner channels in order to sell and transact with customers in a very simple and real time fashion. So digital agent, has been a pretty major investment of ours. And look. I’ll also say I know you said systems and processes, but at the end of the day, systems and processes are only as good as the humans that are using it.
So we’ve also made investments, in our employee base that support and drive in the channel. We’ve led, I should say, added, more senior leadership than we’ve ever had in the channel. We’ve expanded upon the different work groups, the different technical resources that we have available to the channel, our operational folks that are dedicated to the channel. These resources, I would say, were once shared, across the organization, where now we’ve got channel direct resources as well.
So these investments are starting to pay off.
Well and anybody that knows me knows that I’m not given to hyperbole.
I will tell you that when I saw Digital Agent, I was immediately impressed. I think it’s one of the the best and simplest, portals for quoting and ordering. It’s very thoughtful, very, very well done. I’m really excited for you guys as you continue to incorporate new products within it, because I think it’s a game changer for how you do business with Verizon. So so if if our advisors are already are already on it, they should know about it and look forward to it This is a great product offering. Look, I think that our conversation would be wanting if we didn’t talk a little bit more about connectivity. It’s the core of what we do.
The Importance of Connectivity
It drives all of these other conversations.
But I understand that for some connectivity is connectivity. Maybe they dismiss it. I’d love to hear from you. You’re in a, you know, you’re you’re over Fios for Verizon.
So I’d love to hear from you how you view connectivity and and what is different about your offering.
Yeah. So I do lead our our Fios business, which is super exciting, and it’s hard to believe Fios is now twenty years old. And so twenty years ago, Verizon started to lay that fiber footprint down, and it has expanded drastically.
And I will tell you the the service level, the reliability, the speed, the throughput really is second to none in our franchise. But what’s even more exciting is we’re continuing to invest, in additional, footprint. Right? And so I think a lot of people are aware, we moved to acquire Frontier last year, and we’re still working through a series of approvals that we’re making our way through, still waiting on final approval.
Expansion Plans for Fios and Broadband
But we do expect later this year, to be able to fully integrate, Frontier, not only from a network perspective, but, again, from a systems and infrastructure perspective. And we’re very, very familiar, with their properties and their holdings and really what the competitive advantages are. That move alone is gonna take our Fios footprint from eighteen million fiber passings all the way to thirty, million plus in the next three years or so. So we’re excited for that type of expansion.
And then we’re also continuing to consider other strategic, acquisitions and build out of our own. So we will continue to expand fiber. And then the other side of our broadband connectivity is fixed wireless access. And so for those familiar, our five g c band and also millimeter wave networks that we, again, purchase spectrum in and a lot of other investments in infrastructure are allowing us to offer and provide full broadband capabilities right over our wireless network.
And that five g wireless network already covers over two hundred and eighty million pops in the US and over sixty million homes as well. People are using it as their primary home Internet, and that’s again over our wireless network.
One of the things I would say that’s a differentiator, and we talked a little bit about Convergence earlier, is how well the two can play together. Right? Even with a fiber connection as the primary, every customer should absolutely have a fixed wireless access backup connection in the event that there’s maybe a fiber cut or an outage or any kinda issue like that. And there’s just many other ways the connectivity services complement each other.
But then just to really hit the differentiation, when you look at the full Verizon technology stack and everything that we offer on top of that connectivity, the customer really has everything they need covered. A lot of businesses are moving their, data out into the cloud. Well, guess what? That needs connectivity, and that data needs to traverse a a a fast, reliable network with guaranteed throughputs, and so we’re there every every step of the way.
I did talk about security earlier, which is inherent in both our Fios network as well as our mobile network as well. So really excited again about the investments we’ve made and that we will continue to make, to expand upon that broadband footprint.
And and just to, look, our advisers are all very competitive folks just to trigger maybe, hopefully, some some FOMO for them. One of the things I walked away from at our last advisory council that, you guys are seeing great success with your direct teams and traditional distribution with fixed wireless.
And look, we sell more fiber than anybody in the country.
Started to see pockets of advisors start to do that. And those that aren’t, I would just say, are missing out because it’s a great opportunity, to provide great solutions.
I completely agree. And just to throw a factual teaser out, and it’s factual, just a few years ago, fixed wireless access was not even a thing, as a primary offering. And in a couple of short years, we now have over one million connections on our fixed wireless access network in a very short amount of time, and that’s on the business side only. On the consumer side, it’s obviously a much larger number as I talked about the the home connections and things of that nature.
So we are selling, the technology, you know, very effectively and efficiently. We are a market share leader, and we do have obviously plenty of spectrum left to continue to grow, and expand. So we encourage all of our our technology advisers to get on board and, not only make some more money, but also create stickier solutions for our customers that we’re selling together.
Excellent.
Advice for Technology Advisors
I I I better wrap this up here, but I I did just wanna ask. I I’ve got, I feel like such a great opportunity. You’ve led teams, you’ve led direct sales.
You’ve done a lot of different things in your career. I’d love for you to provide just a little bit of advice as you see it to our advisors around how they can most effectively pitch and and win with Verizon?
I would literally tell you it’s as simple as this. People buy from people at the end of the day, and I would encourage any trusted technology adviser to become a trusted adviser for the end customer. And that starts with being genuine, with being authentic. Sometimes you have to admit when your technology is not going to do what the customer wants.
It’s about removing obstacles and roadblocks for that customer to earn that trust and credibility with them. And once you’re there, it just becomes an awesome relationship, where everybody wins. Right? We win when as I’m talking about Verizon here, when our partners win, and then together collectively when the customer wins.
And so when you have those trusted relationships that are built on credibility, you’ve now earned the right to ask customers questions about their business, uncovering true pain points, not just pushing products, slinging widgets, but figuring out what is this business really struggling with, and what is the best solution to move them forward or to create different revenue streams for them. But I think I’ll go back to where I started to the answer to this question. You you have to gain the trust of your customer, and it’s very easy to think you have that trust. But it does take time and and, obviously, a strong track record in order to really have that and hold it.
And I will tell you to, never break a promise and to keep it real. And remember, again, people buy from people. And so I would say that’s my biggest point of advice. Whether you’re a direct or indirect seller, it’s critical to success.
Excellent. I love it. I I’ve I’ve, been found myself saying more and more that trust is earned, not given. And so you walk through the door as a technology advisor, you earn the right to be a trusted advisor, and that comes over time.
And I think that’s what our advisors do a great job at. And, Mark, great advice. I really, really appreciate it. Appreciate you joining me here today and, love the conversation.
I enjoyed it as well, Richard. It’s always great to see you. I appreciate you having me on, and I very much appreciate our partnership overall with Telarus. So thank you so much.
Excellent. Thank you. That’s all we have here today, guys. Thank you for joining us.