What Are You Selling? Telarus Partners Weigh in on Technology
How do you sell cybersecurity to an SMB? Is it cool to pursue UCaaS spiffs?
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Ashley Rowland is partner at the technology strategy firm Adaptiv Advisors. She also founded Recurring Raise, a vendor- and distributor-neutral education platform dedicated to telecom agents.
She recently launched the Technology Advisor Alliance, a community within Recurring Raise where agents can exchange stories and insights. That group has given Rowland insight on what partners – especially new partners – are selling. These new partners have embarked on a journey Rowland and others call “the walk through the desert,” the difficult first years where an agency labors to build its recurring commissions up to a survivable amount.
And many of those partners make the walk through the desert, Rowland said, by focusing on UCaaS.
“Because a lot of people have aging phone systems or have dabbled in VoIP already and are unhappy with it,” Rowland said. “So it there’s definitely a need, and it’s easy to flip those customers.”
Although many in the industry agree that UCaaS pricing is going down, Rowland said UCaaS vendors are offering a plethora of spiffs. That’s due to the fact that most UCaaS providers aren’t focusing on profitability right now. They’re engaged in a “land grab” for market share in order to survive consolidation. Hence, the spiffs.
“People are saying that in the first few years of your business it’s super critical to actually try to work with vendors that are giving you spiffs,” Rowland. “I think a lot of agents don’t want to ever say that they’re chasing a spiff or chasing a provider payout, but when it comes down to it, it’s our responsibility as business owners to survive.”
Many of the partners making the walk through the desert simply won’t survive on recurring commissions alone. Rowland said the average time it takes for an agent to receive their commissions is eight months from when they first sign the deal.
Another rationale behind pursuing UCaaS spiffs is how indistinguishable most UCaaS platforms are. Ryan Rowland, partner at Adaptiv Advisors with his wife Ashley, said only about 10% of UCaaS vendors differentiate themselves in terms of product and service offerings. He said customers who engage in RFPs almost always remark the different platforms are surprisingly similar.
Rowland said a UCaaS vendor’s post-sales support far outweighs the actual platform.
“The part that we really focus on is, who takes care of our customers? Who can actually install these deals without pissing off our customers? Who can actually meet install deadlines and not screw up our customer’s business, because the phones didn’t get shipped out on time, or they didn’t get this number ported when it was supposed to be ported?” he said.
Top Speed serves the SMB segment, which historically has not invested much in cybersecurity. However, Jaffe said many small businesses have accepted the fact that cybercriminals are targeting businesses of all sizes. The partner may simply need to work within the constraints of the customer’s budgets.
“You can’t spend $100 grand a month on security, because your revenue doesn’t justify that. But if you have 25 employees, you could spend $15 a month on phishing, testing and remediation, email security and password keeper/multi-factor authentication. You could do that; that’s affordable,” he said.
Many partners have found as strong niche advising their customers around contact center services. A major upside of the technology, Jaffe said, is how strongly contact center connects to business outcomes.
“The conversation with contact center doesn’t have to be a technical conversation. It’s really a business conversation,” he said. “How are you serving your customers? How do you handle communications with them? Are you happy? Are they happy with your communication with them?”
Allan Jaffe, vice president of technology at Top Speed Data Communications, said network transport totaled 76% of the firm’s revenue in 2019. The number dropped to 60% in 2021 and continues to drop. Jaffee attributed the shift to two factors. First, network prices are declining.
“It’s a race to zero with circuits,” Jaffe told Channel Futures.
On the other hand, Top Speed leaned heavily into advanced services. UCaaS grew from 19% to 26% of revenue, and cloud grew from 4% to 10%. Top Speed has also been delivering contact center and cybersecurity offerings.
Rick Bartok is managing partner at Houston-based Smart Tech MSP. The firm sells technology in both a commission-based (agent) and resale-based (VAR) model, as well as providing managed services. Smart Tech focuses on two verticals: medical and theme parks.
Bartok said the company pivoted from a break-fix model years ago. He said his team would typically spend its time waiting for technology to break so that it could charge hourly for support.
“Then we got smart and realized that we want to be with people when everything’s working. We want them to pay us when everything’s up and not pay us when everything’s down so that we’re obligated to get them up as fast as possible. So it’s a win-win partnership for us and the client,” Bartok told Channel Futures.
The firm has found great success in voice sales. Moreover, contact center has been a significant piece of Smart Tech’s business in the last two years.
“The phones get us in the door and then we expand from there,” Bartok said.
But more specifically, Bartok said contact center fortified with artificial intelligence has proven a competitive differentiator for the partner. Customers, especially those in the two verticals Smart Tech serves, need to capture the real-time of their customers during calls. Real-time sentiment allows the supervisor to jump in a customer interaction with an agent that is going south.
One such provider doing a good job on the AI side is Dialpad, Bartok said. But he said he turns to Telarus to make vendor-agnostic sourcing decisions on contact center.
“It’s never a cookie cutter approach to voice so whatever the client needs and the right price point,” he said.
He also said Smart Tech works to standardized many of the technologies it sells. That means getting into a habit of selling technologies they’ve grown accustomed to managing and that have proven to work well. For example, it makes more sense to stick with Dell and HP as computer vendors than deviating to a different provider. He compared this approach to Southwest’s strategy of only operating Boeing 737 airplanes.
“We’d rather you’d work with Dell because we know if something breaks, there’s an enterprise level of standard that those machines don’t change very often. So we’re able to standardize an office, and that’s key,” Bartok.
Don Douglas serves as president of CEO of Liquid Networx, a San Antonio, Texas-based firm. He said Liquid went through an extremely busy time helping customers adopt hybrid working trends. Fortunately, Liquid went through the process of enabling remote work years before the pandemic.
“It was great for Liquid having already done that we could share some of the stuff that we had done to to be able to work this way,” Douglas told Channel Futures. “But also it created a tremendous amount of challenges for our customers too. How are they going to handle this securely? What tools were they going to provide for their employees? How would they support their own customers?”
Douglas said Liquid, which had historically done a great deal of business around network, saw increasing opportunities around cybersecurity. In addition, the firm won Fortinet’s 2021 SD-WAN Partner of the Year award.
Learn more about Don Douglas in a 2015 Channel Futures profile article.
Companies like Adaptiv and Top Speed focus on SMB customers, which require a different mindset from the larger enterprise customers that many agents are chasing.
A unique component of SMBs, Ryan Rowland said, is how they value speed.
“SMB can be very lucrative, but you have to be a well oiled machine,” he said. “You’ve got to find them quick, close them quick, get them installed quick, get paid quick and not spend a ton of time with process.”
He said Adaptiv partnered with TCG (which now belongs to Telarus) in part because of its ability and enthusiasm to land SMB deals. Some TSBs might tell a partner they want bigger deals. But TCG, Rowland said, bought into Adaptiv’s business model and had the nimbleness to execute.
“We send what we need, and they turn it around and give us paperwork fast. They just allow us to kind of burn through those accounts really quickly and gain a lot momentum,” he said.
Companies like Adaptiv and Top Speed focus on SMB customers, which require a different mindset from the larger enterprise customers that many agents are chasing.
A unique component of SMBs, Ryan Rowland said, is how they value speed.
“SMB can be very lucrative, but you have to be a well oiled machine,” he said. “You’ve got to find them quick, close them quick, get them installed quick, get paid quick and not spend a ton of time with process.”
He said Adaptiv partnered with TCG (which now belongs to Telarus) in part because of its ability and enthusiasm to land SMB deals. Some TSBs might tell a partner they want bigger deals. But TCG, Rowland said, bought into Adaptiv’s business model and had the nimbleness to execute.
“We send what we need, and they turn it around and give us paperwork fast. They just allow us to kind of burn through those accounts really quickly and gain a lot momentum,” he said.
Telarus agent partners are selling unified communications, contact center, cybersecurity and other emerging technology offerings as network prices bottom out.
Telarus executives shared data about partner growth during their Tuesday morning keynote at the Telarus Partner Summit. Total new sales bookings increased 34% last year. Moreover, the diversity of customer deals increased. In other words, agents are selling more types of technologies within a given client engagement. Whereas 90% partner sales five years ago came from network, 60% of sales currently come from advanced solutions.
Channel Futures sat down with several agents and MSPs to learn about the technologies their customers are demanding. Although many of them still sell network and view it as a foot-in-the-door for customers, they’ve leaned into advanced solutions. Many of them see UCaaS as their bread and butter. A growing group is positioning itself as a contact center expert. Still others are leaning heavily into cybersecurity.
Go through the 11 images above to see the technologies partners are selling.
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