How Telarus Partners Are Winning in Enterprise, Cross-Selling

TELARUS PARTNER SUMMIT — Technology advisors are competing against global systems integrators for large enterprise accounts on a regular basis — and winning.

Tech advisors, historically known as agents, for years have touted their ability to move out of the midmarket and out-consult the world's largest global systems integrators (GSIs) and consultancies. Use cases coming out of this week's Telarus Partner Summit confirm the substance behind those claims. Advisors shared how they've won in enterprise accounts despite their small size relative to the GSIs. And in SMB and midmarket segments, cross-selling has helped partners widen their accounts. An emphasis on account management, technological education and the use of sales engineers have propelled these wins.

Telarus chief revenue officer Dan Foster said the technological expertise of advisors has distinguished them from GSIs when the customers need to select and procure vendor offerings.

"Your competitors are Accenture, Deloitte selling a large digital transformation project. They're very high level ... They're doing subcontracting to people that look like you and us," Foster said on a keynote panel.

Telarus' Dan Foster

John Jungbluth, whose firm World Telecom Partners (WTP) earned recognition as Telarus' top advisor earlier this week, said he's able to deliver ground-level outcomes that differentiate WTP from the GSIs.

Related:Telarus Accelerates Vendor Onboarding with Gateway Program

"They're focused on overall strategy, where I'm more focused on delivering results within the business. We enable organizations to accelerate technology buying decisions through our partnerships, research, extensive engineering, project management and ongoing support throughout the life cycle of the service," Jungbluth told Channel Futures.

Enterprise Lessons from Telarus Partners

Lorie Burkemper, managing partner at Bluewave Technology Group, shared a story of helping a multistate retailer with a digital transformation project. Burkemper said the company already possessed a solid network solution by the time Bluewave approached it. Intent on looking at other parts of the technology stack, she brought on Telarus engineering leader Josh Lupresto and the Telarus sales engineering team to help with discovery.

They weren't alone in the account approaching the account; the customer was looking to pay six figures to a GSI to define and lead its cloud migration strategy. Originally, the ask from the IT team seemed simply to be that it needed to migrate to Azure.

But upon talking to the C-suite, Burkemper and Lupresto found a deeper business need.

Related:Telarus Partner Summit: Telarus, Advisors 'Building an Industry'

"The client had 12 months to migrate their infrastructure into their own environment. After much discovery, our team concluded this could not be done within their time frame and budget. If they chose that direction, they would've had to extend their contract and face a pretty steep penalty," Burkemper said.

Ultimately, Bluewave advised the customer to move their environment into managed private cloud to meet its deadline on budget, and it oversee the migration.

"There were other parameters, outside of just IT, but the client was ultimately able to save close to $20 million by avoiding steep penalties, lowering their operating costs and eliminating applications that they no longer needed," she said.

For Jungbluth and WTP, the flexibility to create a bespoke offering makes all the difference in the enterprise. WTP and AT&T built a global rental program in response to a customer's need.

"When I consult with customers in the enterprise space, they want the ability to customize a solution and build it around their environment," Jungbluth said. "I've leveraged Telarus' engineering team to work with my customer base to help design custom solutions."

Advisors and Other Partners

Although tech advisors are displacing GSIs in certain accounts, the dynamic may resemble more of a collaboration.

“It's inevitable the more that you move upmarket, you're going to lots of different types of partners in your accounts," Vonage senior vice president of global channels and alliances Kristy Thomas said on a panel. "You've got to figure out how you can co-sell together. To think that you're going to be the only one in the Fortune 500 account is naive. You've got to figure out how you leverage each other's valued relationships that they have into those accounts to win together.”

Widening the Account

Forge Technology Advisors has built a strong cross-selling motion by tapping into the specific technology knowledge of its three partners. For example, if a client had originally purchased network or UCaaS from Forge, senior IT consultant Jacqueline Catala might use her CX/CCaaS expertise to drive a new project.

“After we get into an account and do one project, like SD-WAN or CCaaS, we do capabilities presentations to the business leaders and show them, 'We did this project successfully. We can now do this other one for you.' And we stay in those accounts for years just migrating from project to project," Catala said.

However, cybersecurity stood as a final frontier of sorts after Forge had sold all other parts of the portfolio.

The tech advisor community is increasingly looking to enter cybersecurity consulting, and for good reason. According to Telarus' upcoming Tech Trends Report, cyber attacks are the second most commonly cited issue driving IT buying decisions, trailing only AI adoption.

But making the transition is a delicate process, Catala said. Various industry vendors recommend that partners simply ask their existing customers about their security posture, but Catala that question can backfire.

“I tried it; I asked the question. Because I knew nothing about it, asking the question was not enough. It actually was a complete and utter failure. I tried it twice," Catala said.

For Catala, bringing Telarus engineers to customer meetings has helped the company bridge its knowledge gap. Using a TSD's engineering resources saves them from having to hire their own team.

"The second you ask the question and the response comes back from the client, if you don't have a highly technical, educated response that demonstrates your knowledge, you drop from being a tech advisors to a salesperson, and those opportunities are gone," she said.

In the meantime, Catala and her team are educating themselves on cybersecurity and scaling as their knowledge grows.

“We’re going to go with midmarket where there's no CISO and they need help. And once we understand the depth of knowledge that we're accustomed to having as consultants, we will go upmarket," she said.

Growing with the Customer

Historically, many partners selling in the agent model sourced technologies for a customer and moved on to the next client, collecting a residual commission stream from products that had a long shelf-life.

Now firms like Advanced Technology Consulting (ATC) are staying engaged with the customer after the sale.

"At ATC, we have a strong focus on ‘account management,’ retaining our existing client base, keeping those clients happy, and of course trying to sell additional services to those clients where possible," said Doug Neiheisel, who leads the Delta consulting team at ATC. "Part of our process is to track contract end dates for clients and alert them as contracts are coming up for expiration."

ATC has moved upmarket over the years with an eye for midmarket and small enterprise clients. But ATC continues to work with longstanding customers of a much smaller size, Neiheisel said.

One such customer with "only a handful of users" was facing the end of a contract for an 8x8 UCaaS solution ATC had delivered to them years prior.

"I questioned if I should really be spending my time alerting this small of a client of the upcoming contract end date, knowing this would lead to more time and effort to get the renewal together," Neiheisel said. "However, I stuck to the promise that we make to our clients, regardless of their size, and reached out to them."

When Neiheisel contacted the client, they told him a larger company had acquired them.

"I immediately asked if they could make an introduction to that organization. I ended up getting a meeting with the acquiring company’s chief operating officer and knocked that conversation out of the park. We started talking about all the ways that ATC can help with our expertise, process and partnerships," he said.

Ultimately, the account grew from $150 in monthly recurring revenue to more than $21,000 as ATC sourced Thrive's managed cybersecurity services, WAN and LAN infrastructure, Microsoft licensing and various other offerings.

"It just goes to show how important it is to stay in front of your existing clients, regardless of their size. You never know what will come from those conversations," he said.

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