Telarus Tools Expand Around Contact Center Sales, Quote Visibility

TELARUS PARTNER SUMMIT – Telarus expanded its SolutionVue tool to help technology advisors with contact center sales and enhanced its back office to help partners fully view the status of their quotes.

The Utah-based technology solutions brokerage unveiled updates to its technology platform on Tuesday at its annual partner summit. In addition to adding a contact center-focused module for its guided sales platform, Telarus announced a quote monitoring tool with new capabilities for commission reporting.

Telarus each year at its conference shares an update to its technology and software. The rollout of those tools continues to ramp up as Telarus grows both its product development and sales engineering teams and expands its partner base.

Telarus’ Patrick Oborn

Telarus partners, suppliers and employees have descended on Dallas for a week of networking and education. The TSB in its opening keynote shared its vision for its technology advisor partners to grow into a household name with CIOs and CXOs. Part of that vision includes automating more backend processes that consume time for both partners and Telarus employees. It also requires helping partners fill gaps in their technological knowledge with pre-sales tools like Telarus’ SolutionVue and Avant‘s Pathfinder.

Chief product officer Patrick Oborn said Telarus’ toolset is expanding with the challenge of data in mind. Oborn said the biggest challenge partners face is around seeing and grasping “the data of the industry.”

“It’s knowing who’s buying what, when they’re buying, how long they’re buying, what they’re buying it for, if the customers are happy, if other people in the community are happy and, last but not least, your own financial data,” Oborn told an audience of technology advisors.

Assisting Contact Center Sales

Telarus unveiled its SolutionVue sales tool in 2022. Partners can use SolutionVue’s quick sales assessment (QSA) modules to run client discovery, inputting answers into a form that generates a white-labeled report and identifies relevant vendors. SolutionVue started with a QSA module for cybersecurity. Telarus earlier this year added a module for cloud infrastructure and managed services.

Now it has moved into contact center, a lucrative yet complex technology that intimidates many partners.

“Contact Center is an area where a lot of us still have struggle. A lot of people in the room have not sold a single contact center our deal yet. And that’s not for lack of trying,” Oborn said. “…But our goal right now is to make you the technology advisor that your customers look to for everything. And that starts with a tool that has your brand on it, that you can very easily lead a customer through a series of questions.”

Lucidia IT’s Audra Lindell

Audra Lindell works as a customer experience solution consultant Lucidia IT, which has partnered with Telarus since 2018. She said the new self-service discovery capabilities will aid her contact center practice.

Telarus’ Samantha Nelson

“We will be able to identify client needs from multiple department influencers simultaneously, and quickly determine the right suppliers vetted by Telarus,” Lindell said. “The ability to match client requirements to a vendor short-list without the typical manual diligence, which can take days or even much longer, is a game changer for us and the industry. We will be able to operate faster and more efficiently, giving us the confidence to take on more business.”

Oborn told Channel Futures in an interview earlier this year that SolutionVue will help sales engineers dedicate more of their time to helping partners with qualified opportunities.

The module covers workforce engagement, business process outsourcing and other components associated with contact center.

Telarus vice president of contact center Samantha Nelson said the contact center space is seeing a rapid evolution as technologies like artificial intelligence enhance their capabilities……

“We are so excited to offer this new contact center discovery module for SolutionVue to our technology advisors. It provides them with the latest vendor and best practice recommendations needed to align with their customers’ immediate requirements and rising standards,” Nelson said. “We also see SolutionVue as a huge win for our contact center providers because it’s specifically designed to pull them into opportunities that are best suited for their solutions, improving their success potential.”

QuoteVue

The new QuoteVue lets partners track their quotes faster and in a less manual way, according to senior vice president of technology Michael Brown.

Brown said Telarus’ backend process for retrieving pricing occurs in Salesforce. And in historically, that backend was a “hole” of sorts when it came to partners’ visibility.

Telarus’ Michael Brown

“This has been your data, but you not have the ability to see that. So really what we’re introducing today… is all about providing you with access to that information,” Brown said.

QuoteVue lets partners see the list of opportunities Telarus is working on, the status of the quote, and the specific person partners can contact about the quote.

“If you feel like something is stalled out that needs attention or if you’ve forgotten to provide a key piece of information, we’re going to provide you the contact information for the resource within Telarus that is working on it,” he said.

Report Builder

The Telarus Report Builder adds more flexibility to the company’s existing commission reporting structure. That includes tweaking the export model to their preferred medium and changing the dates to better view historical trends.

Brown said the update solves a pain point of partners wanting to customize their commission reports.

“I’ve had partners come to me and say ‘Hey, can you tweak that export format for me? If you can do this little thing then it’s going to save me 25 minutes of processing.’ And while I could have made them happy, I probably would have made 200 people unhappy. Because those export formats were not customizable any changes that I made impacted everybody.