Telarus Promotes 3, Shakes Up Regional Model

Telarus is merging its six sales regions into three in an effort to support a growing partner base.

Telarus previously divided its field sales teams into California, Mountain West, Southwest, Midwest, Southeast and Northeast. But now the California and Mountain West regions have been combined to form the “West” region; Southwest and Midwest join to make the “Central” region; and the Southeast and Northeast will comprise the “East.”

Telarus’ Ruth Morford

The Utah-based master agent announced the shift on Wednesday and named three area vice presidents. Ruth Morford will oversee the East, Mike Gottwalt will oversee the Central area and Mike Bettilyon will oversee the West.

It’s an opportunity to tackle the bigger picture, CEO Adam Edwards said.

Telarus’ Mike Bettilyon

“Here at Telarus, our entire focus is on our partner community,” Edwards said. “This change will allow us as a company to go deeper with our partners, in more places. We know that we’ve got a winning recipe of sales engineering, automated research tools and value-added services that help our partners earn more money with us than they can on their own or with another master agent, but we needed to find a way to get this message to more people in less time.”

According to the company, moving from six to three regions decreases the amount of time it takes to reach partners in previously spread-out markets. That’s important as Telarus – bolstered by its purchase of its competitor CarrierSales – claims the title of largest privately held master agent. The combined company is hiring more employees and deepening its specialty practices. We wrote Monday that Telarus tapped Dominique Singer to lead its cybersecurity practice.

Telarus’ Mike Gottwalt

Richard Murray, Telarus’ chief operating officer, said the revamped field sales group will function as a “perfect conduit” for partners to access the company’s sales engineering team and specialty practices.

“It’s important to note that these changes are something that we take very seriously, as we seek to improve the partner experience while trying to minimize the impacts to existing relationships that our sales partners have built with our field sales team,” Murray said. ‘As we continue to grow, we need to stay ahead of the curve and ensure the value we provide to our partners doesn’t become diluted. We are confident that these changes will not only prevent that very thing from happening, but [they] will also help us stay ahead of the curve and expand to many more geographic areas that are looking for technology leadership in cloud services.”

Mike Bettilyon, the West area’s vice president, has worked with Telarus since 2015 after stints with Windstream and Comcast. Central Area VP Mike Gottwalt joined Telarus more than a decade ago after running his own partner business. Morford, who champions the East side, is a former member of PlanetOne Communications and Intelisys.

Rival master agent TBI announced last year that it was moving to a regional channel model.