State of the Union: CX

Our January 23rd Telarus Tuesday Call welcomed Telarus co-founder Patrick Oborn for part three of our annual “State of the Union” series with Telarus VP of CX, Sam Nelson. Sam shared best practices and gave a look at what’s to come in the world of CX in 2024.

Click here to access the full recording to learn more: https://lms.telarusuniversity.com/forums/topic/31582

Doug Miller: Probably get down with us, you know. 30,

Patrick Oborn: 29.

Doug Miller: Welcome, everyone. This is the Telarus. Tuesday. Call for January 20, third, 2,024.

Doug Miller: I’m Doug Miller, Director of Order experience and the voice of Telarus.

Doug Miller: Thank you for joining us today. Here. Last Tuesday we completed the second of a multi-week powerhouse series of calls that we call the State of the Union. Examining our changing industry and marketplace, and diving into each of the Telarus advanced solutions categories. Now these presentations are hosted

Doug Miller: by Telarus Co. Founder and chief product officer, Patrick Oborn and feature. Each Category’s Associated Telarus experts last week the spotlight was on mobility and IoT solutions

Doug Miller: with featured guest, Graham, Scott. Last week we learned about the market size and trends, the standout successes achieved by Telarus advisors, the tools, resources, and Telarus, certified engineering personnel ready to assist with your opportunities and the Associated suppliers and their solutions available to you through the Telarus portfolio. So thanks Graham and Patrick for a fantastic presentation. Last week

Doug Miller: on to day’s call, Patrick returns to day, presenting the definitive guide to winning with CX. Opportunities and solutions in 2024,

Doug Miller: with Telarus, Vp. Of advanced solutions. Samantha Nelson.

Doug Miller: There has never been more opportunity than now to achieve outstanding results from your sales, marketing and business building efforts. These are the best attended Tuesday calls of the year, and Patrick and Sam will join us. Live in just minutes for the third in this year’s series.

Doug Miller: I hope you’ve had a chance to take a look at. You can go back to that slide for a second hope you’ve had a chance to take a look at the 2023 year in review. This document was put out just a little while ago on social media. You can find it on Linkedin. You can also find it on the Telarus.com website, where Adam Edwards, our CEO, has recapped all of the successes of 2023,

Doug Miller: and set up partners for success in 2,024, giving you an insider’s view as to all of the work that’s going on here at Telarus to make

Doug Miller: all of our Ta technology advisers right at the top of the line to get Garner success in 2024. So don’t miss the 2023 year in review document. It’s available now on Linkedin and@Telarus.com.

Doug Miller: And then we want to make sure that you know about a few other upcoming events.

Doug Miller: On Tuesday, February 20, ninth. It is Leap Day. That’s the extra day that only comes around once every 4 years, and this time, instead of attending some Lamo neighbourhood jousting contest with a pool queue and a garbage can lid, or finally trying out that new gym membership where the warm up exercises include sit ups deep knee bends and jello shots

Doug Miller: instead. Why not plan a quick trip to Dallas and join us for the first ever Telarus A. I summit at the Thompson Dallas Hotel. It’s part of Hyatt, the Telarus. A. I summit is a transformative all day event that will delve into the cutting edge landscape of a I and help you understand and benefit from

Doug Miller: AI’s impact on key technology domains, including cybersecurity. IOTC. X. And cloud hypersail scalar technologies. Now that we’ll have more details about that later in this call, you’ll see it from time to time on. Social media as well. But we really would like you to consider joining us in Dallas on Leap Day, February 20 ninth, for the Telarus A. I summit. I can’t think of a bigger event this spring.

Doug Miller: Now there is one other event coming right up. We’d like you to know about. It’s time for the IT. Expo in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It happens February thirteenth, through the Fifteenth and Telarus, of course, will be there. In fact, our own chief revenue officer, Dan Foster will be key noting

Doug Miller: this special event. Now, drop by the convention center, Booth 7, 17, to spend some time with us there, and remember your passes are available when you register just by using the code. Let’s see, what was that again? I can’t remember if only there was some way to oh, it’s Telarus. Just use that code and be able to get a free pass. We’ll see you in February, at the IT. Expo.

Doug Miller: And with that it is time to begin the third of 2020 four’s biggest Tuesday calls of the year. Our State of the Union, the playbook, to help Telarus advisers go beyond. In 2024. Sam Nelson joins us today. She is Vp of advanced solutions for CX. At Telarus, and is responsible for the development of the Telarus tools, processes, and resources that help Telarus technology advisers find and understand those opportunities

Doug Miller: and to determine the best solutions with expertly crafted solutions.

Doug Miller: Sam is one of the industry’s most knowledgeable resources on Cx technology and shares that knowledge and experience here on today’s call.

And Patrick Oborn is here hosting this year’s series of advanced solution calls. He is a Telarus Co. Founder. He is chief product officer, the driving force behind all Telarus product solutions.

Doug Miller: However, we also like to call him the ultra Marathon finisher in chief.

Doug Miller: And if some of you who follow Patrick on Facebook saw yesterday, Patrick took that title one step further, competing for the second year in a row in an event called the Sudden Death December Challenge. And, Patrick, I’m going to put you on the spot here. You mind taking just 30 s and letting us know how you did in the challenge and what you take from that?

Patrick Oborn: Well, it’s a 2 part. Challenge number one. It’s for it’s for serious. And you know, just recreational runners. It’s a little group on Strava, where we we go through November with no rest for a lot of people that’s really hard because they don’t ever, you know, they always have rest days and stuff. So it’s

Patrick Oborn: so. It’s a little bit, you know. Kind of. It’s kind of like boiling the frog. They kind of up in a couple of degrees of temperature, and then, if they make it through that. Then, when December starts, it’s called sudden death, December, where they actually increase the daily mileage by one kilometer.

Patrick Oborn: I don’t know. It’s not miles, but it’s we’re in case here. So you go 10 K. And then December first it goes to 11 K. December second, it goes to 12 K. And it goes on indefinite until there’s one person left. And so last year I won.

Patrick Oborn: I asked them when I when I joined the group. I’m like what’s the highest anyone’s ever done? They said. No one’s

Patrick Oborn: 2 people have made it past Christmas E ever. So I’m like, you know, I make it past Christmas, and I got to like January, you know, seventh. And there’s this other guy, and he’s still going. And finally I outlasted them and made it

Patrick Oborn: till January, 12 let. So he dropped on January tenth. I did one extra day, and then January twelfth was my day, so this year I came in saying, Okay, I can do. January twelfth. Just focus on January twelfth by January twelfth. It’s at over 50 K, so it’s like an ultra marathon like daily.

Patrick Oborn: So the the object is is to save your body. Go pretty slow. You know. Don’t blow yourself up because you have to run tomorrow, and then you have to run the day after that and the day after that. So it’s it’s really kind of an exercise in in just taking care of yourself

Patrick Oborn: getting enough sleep. I made that mistake last year, so I’m like, All right, get enough sleep, everything else. And then II got to January first this year.

Patrick Oborn: and just so happens that I got paired up in the finals with a guy named Michael Greer, who’s the the winner of design 102 years ago, like this guy is like ultra elite runner. I don’t consider myself really friend right. Consider myself with hilarious guy who runs for fun, and, you know, ends up, ends up in stupid competitions, and Sam will know what I’m talking about like. Sometimes you just find yourself in a competition. And then, like this, this extra gear just turns on. And you’re like.

Patrick Oborn: Oh, heck! No dude, I’m way like I’m not. I’m not here for like for fun. I’m not here to enjoy my like. I’m here when and when we’re gonna do just like you guys like you guys don’t get any points. For second place, you get in a deal, and once you’re in dude, you’re it’s all hands on deck for the victory. So so I was really focused on the twelfth, because I really wanted to beat my record. So the 12 came and went.

Patrick Oborn: and the thirteenth. Now we’re like 52 K. 53 K. 54 K.

Patrick Oborn: Finally we got to last weekend, and my kids had a bunch of stuff, and the other guy looked so solid every day he would run his writ his run an hour faster than me. Now I’m like man. The guy shows no sign of quitting. I think

Patrick Oborn: I think I might be done. So Saturday, a couple of days ago, I ran my last

Patrick Oborn: 61 K. 38 miles is ridiculous. How far these things were, and then, when I finished my run, my my phone blew up with Tech, saying, Hey, the other guy quit so congratulations you won again. So

Patrick Oborn: so III I’m happy. I won. But honestly like II was pushed to the breaking limit, which is kind of fun. It’s kind of a a series of self discovery to see what you can do, what you think you can do, and also just a way for you to to mentally set goals and figure out ways around problems. Because when you run that many miles for that many hours, problems are gonna develop, whether it’s a problem in your schedule.

Patrick Oborn: whether it’s a problem in a muscle whether it’s a problem, logistically speaking, I mean, there’s always problems. And so it’s

Patrick Oborn: it was a very character building experience. I’m very thankful and grateful to to be here, the last one standing. But yeah, it’s it’s by far the hardest event of the year, because the other events you show up for one, or maybe 2 days, and you’re done like you. You train. You start. There’s a finish line, and it’s over this one. The hardest part about it is you don’t know when the finish line is. If you look at the other guys, it’s like tennis. If you do your thing and he returns the serve

Patrick Oborn: balls back in your court. You gotta do another one. You gotta do another one. So so just mentioned, you plan ahead like I plan to. I was hoping to get to the beginning of February quite honestly, so that that didn’t quite happen. But

Patrick Oborn: but yeah, and every year like it. It was this year was easier than last year. And so you take what you learn, and you implement that and build a plan around it. And and and yeah, that’s kind of how it shook out, and

Patrick Oborn: again, happy to talk more about it later. Thanks, Patrick. I really appreciate you taking time to indulge us on that one. II get so much inspiration out of Patrick’s reports on these runs that he

Doug Miller: completes not only just for the fact that he does them. But what he learns in the process. If you want a great read, follow Patrick on Facebook, and I imagine he’ll be putting something out separately as well for the rest of us, but just a really inspiration. And you had to fight through a lot this year to be able to accomplish that. So thanks for taking time to share it with us and letting me call that up. You didn’t know I was going to ask for that today. So thank you.

Doug Miller: Again, we’re happy to welcome Patrick and Sam Nelson here today to talk about how our Telarus partners can win the ultra marathon of CX. In advance solution sales in 2024. Patrick Sam, it’s all yours.

Samantha Nelson: Yeah, it’s appropriate. You say ultra marathon, because c cell cycles could be really long, right? Say, unless you that’s right, they’re super long, they can. They can be complex. But if you find the right solution for the right folks to address the right objectives.

Patrick Oborn: You’ve got a winning strategy. Exactly. So. Thanks for being here today with the Sam. Gosh! You know. What if if I look at all the advanced solution practices inside our company. I would say that yours probably underwent the most transformation before we even get into the bits and bytes and opportunities. Tell us a little bit about kind of the consolidation between Uc. And CC. And just in in kind of just where where we’re kind of restructuring your your practice.

Samantha Nelson: Yeah, lots of restructuring going on which is really exciting. I think last year we really kind of tested the the new sort of structure right where it’s like, I think a lot of partners have seen it where you’ve got a customer experience on the top, and we’ve got a slide on this, so I’ll cover that but just everything under one umbrella and kind of one harmonious sort of orchestra, singing from the same sheet of music. Works a lot better when it comes to kind of offering holistic solutions

Samantha Nelson: right? And and when you look at a customer experience sale, you have to consider all of these different aspects. You can’t treat them as siloed silo projects. Right? You kinda have to combine them, because now

Samantha Nelson: you’re starting to see more decision makers across several segments. Not just operations anymore. Right? It’s primarily sales marketing operations comes next, and then the it folks come next. Right. So the sale has changed. And so as a result, we have to be able to change the way that we’re structured and helping our our partner community win out there.

Patrick Oborn: Yeah. And this probably won’t come as any surprise to our advisors. Right? Like I mean, even the last several years you had. The Uc. Was kind of growing up into CC with CC capabilities, and the contact center was was establishing. just regular Uc seats they were, and they were just. They’re going in in in a in a direction where they were gonna combine. So I think now, I think it’s safe to say it’s it’s it’s

Patrick Oborn: kind of pretty much all combined. I don’t think we have a Uc. Provider that doesn’t offer some CC capabilities or a CC. Provider that doesn’t offer some seats with with you, Casa. Crazy to see that the the the fusion, has kind of taken place. Now, with regards to those 2 areas. Sam, talk to us a little bit about first, just the global opportunity, like, where where are we at today? What does what does tomorrow look like. And what did yesterday look like? Where? Where are we headed?

Samantha Nelson: Yes, so a very, very exciting time to be playing in this space. Kind of as you could see on this graphic everything is up and to the right, as we all like to see. And what we’re we’re also seeing is this big boost in sort of contact center software market size, right where that’s going to grow? I mean, we’re looking in relation to 2030 right? So on the left, you’ve got contact Center software on the right. You’ve got

communication as a service or ucas, and you could see that they are very much aligned.

Samantha Nelson: In fact, you you’re seeing even even bigger number on the contact center side of the house. But what I want to do is remind everyone that that’s inclusive of the ancillary or kind of the bolt on products that I’ve entered the market that are sitting on top of these technology stacks.

Samantha Nelson: Right? And so we’re we’re looking at things like like AI or quality assurance quality management, things. That are plugged into acx technology stack and that’s contributing to the kind of contact center software market size. Because all of those solutions are directly addressing what the customer experience looks like. And so

Samantha Nelson: clearly we have changed and we validated this last year all year is that we have clearly changed as consumers. Right? We’re now really looking closely at what a company’s digital doorstep looks like and not to say that the in person kind of mom and pop, or the brick and mortar is irrelevant, it still absolutely is. But we have now been trained as a result, post pandemic

Samantha Nelson: to navigate. Sort of what a digital doorstep digital doorfront kinda looks like for a company. And so lots of companies are focusing on exactly that in fact, they’re trying to predict what people want before they indicate that they want something which is wild, right? But because companies have all this data. Now, they’re really looking at ways to

Samantha Nelson: to sort of monetize that and figure out, okay, how do we better not only serve our more loyal customers? But also a couple of things right? Build new customers find new customer bases all while at the same time as related to the Uc market size over here. All, while at the same time keeping employees happy and engaged. To sort of fuel. That same fire, if that makes sense.

Patrick Oborn: no makes all sense. So I see the contact center. One looks a little more nonlinear. Looks a little more kind of parabolic still. You see, looks a little bit linear. So so talk to us just real fast. Where is this growth coming from? Is there still a technology transformation

Patrick Oborn: play out? There are people still on Prem trying to go to the cloud. Are we like you said, bolting on additional features onto legacy seats and maybe increasing some Mrc that way, like, where where is this growth coming from? Yeah. Well, what’s interesting is that a a ton of customers are still using on premots lines where they just kind of linger for a long time.

Samantha Nelson: Well, here’s the thing. It’s it’s so interesting because we think, okay, well, why wouldn’t they move right? But some just can’t. Whether that’s budget constraints, or whether that’s industry, specific technology that maybe they grew in house. And they can’t make any changes because of the way that things are integrated.

Samantha Nelson: And so the the big thing there is that those folks are going to look for things to optimize what they have today. And that’s why we’re seeing this, this very steep kind of rise in Boltons or the ancillary products, right? And that’s not going to change. It’s really not going to change. And and someone in in the chat actually put technical debt. And that’s also true, right as the investment is there. They just. They can’t afford to.

Samantha Nelson: you know, to to make that change. So the opportunity is absolutely right for the picking. At the end of the day. You just have to be able to know how to approach these kind of customers with different scenarios. To really position yourself as that advisor, that that expert in the space, because once you put them in a nice cloud solution, we we undergo a bunch of integrations to talk to their Erp, their Crm, a lot of their different systems

Patrick Oborn: once that’s set up and running, and everyone’s using it. Man, that II think you probably have the practice with probably the longest life cycle as a customer like we’ve we’ve got customers that. Still, we don’t really know what the life cycle is, because they still haven’t cancelled yet. So this the number is still growing and growing in a turn is insanely small. I think I don’t know what the threshold is, where a customer has to pass the the pissed off mark like the frustration before they actually make a change. But it’s it’s insanely high.

Samantha Nelson: Yes, yes, a. And some of these projects, depending on size, complexity, they can take anywhere from one to 2 years right? But some of right. But some of the Boltons have taken anywhere from 60 to 90 days, because it is just that it’s an agnostic solution that sits on top

Patrick Oborn: right? And so it’s really important to assess. Start with the business objectives and work your way backwards to see where you can impact the Cx tech stack to meet those objectives. Last question before we move on to the next slide. What have you seen in terms of customer growth like we go every December. And we look back into your accounts. Technology advisors, we look back

Patrick Oborn: and we say, Hey, that $10,000, Mrr, that’s $15,000. Now they’ve added some more seats, and so we give you the $5,000 of uplift on the scoreboard for President’s club and everything else like what what would you say is the typical a a just organic account growth rate that that we’ve seen on on the accounts that people have placed with us

Samantha Nelson: it really depends right because and someone put in the chat land and expand. And that is 100%. The case when it comes to any Cx technology, whether that’s contact center or Uk’s right, because you stick this product in there. And it literally is, it is going to expand over time as the company naturally grows because the technology is propelling them toward that growth

Samantha Nelson: right? And so these accounts, they grow quite a bit, especially if you’ve got a company who has outlined certain initiatives. Because once you implement

Samantha Nelson: this type of Cx tech some cutting edge tech, it’s automatically going to improve things like you know, like manual processes make people way more efficient. And so then they’ve got more time and resources. To actually expand on that.

Samantha Nelson: you know, used case on those employees, on those even customer efforts right? And that naturally is going to grow the size of the accounts. They all grow at different rates. So it’s tough to put one rate specifically on one, because you’ve got your big enterprise deals. You’ve got kind of your mid size, even your Smb. But

Samantha Nelson: the reality is, I haven’t seen an account that that hasn’t grown, and in some way

Patrick Oborn: no, that’s that’s that’s perfect. Tell us a little bit. And going to the next slide a little bit about what you see as the future of this this industry.

Samantha Nelson: I wouldn’t even say future. Let’s say the present in 2,024, like what what’s happening this year, and what do we gotta be ready for? Yes, so we were talking about it earlier. Some folks were saying they were a little scared of AI! Guess what AI is not going anywhere. In fact. You’re going to start seeing it even more and more. And, Patrick as you were mentioning earlier. You see it on the news. You wake up in the morning and you see it. And in the evening, if you’re watching the news.

Samantha Nelson: Yeah, you see it. You literally cannot avoid artificial intelligence. Now, what’s important to understand is that

Samantha Nelson: a I today it has a lot of trouble saying things like I don’t know.

Patrick Oborn: and you have to keep that in mind. And that goes to the first. Adult males. Have a hard time saying that just just to be clear. Right?

Patrick Oborn: We’re asking for directions. Right?

Samantha Nelson: right? And so the first component, when we look at generative AI the the most, I would say

Samantha Nelson: popular use cases right now, and the ones where AI is most applicable comes around efficiency as well as engagement. Right now, this relates to AI really making people more efficient in the processes in terms of things that they say say scripted engagements, robotic process, automation. These are like the mundane tasks, right things like wrapping up a call, afterwards taking notes after a call. And when we look at engagement.

Samantha Nelson: we’re looking at things like chat bots right where people are literally

Samantha Nelson: interacting with a chat Bot, and that AI is generating responses and helping that customer all the way from where’s my order or to? I need a refund. And here’s a a packing slip for that. Right? So those are the 2. I would say most popular used cases when it comes to generative AI. Now it’s not going to stop there. If y’all are thinking that it’s absolutely not. It’s still going.

Samantha Nelson: Now, another area is around hyper personalization. Now, as I mentioned earlier, we all have this digital footprint.

Samantha Nelson: and whether or not you think you have one, I guess what you’re on this call you do. I hate to break it to you. So hyper personalization? When you look on your social media feeds whatever social media platform you use today, you’re gonna start noticing some ads that are targeted just to you. And so what companies are doing is they are

Samantha Nelson: targeting your profile and seeing what works for you. And then they’re applying those algorithms to other

Samantha Nelson: consumers with your potentially similar profile. Right? And so, hyper personalization is a really really big deal right now to really capture new consumers as well as keep loyal ones.

Samantha Nelson: And then I would say, Patrick, the last one, this is kind of what we call the creepy stuff. But it’s predictive analytics, right? So, knowing what you might potentially need before you even reach out, have you ever experienced that, Patrick.

Patrick Oborn: II well, I’ve got creepy on like the second the hyper personalization, one like like it knows what kind of shoe I want and knows what size I wear. It knows like yesterday, III needed some water during my run. And so it’s got these new like hydro flasks. It’s like, it’s yeah, or you’re talking, you know, to a friend about something, and then literally open up Facebook. And it’s like.

Patrick Oborn: Get out of here like it’s, it’s

Patrick Oborn: it’s pretty crazy. And and Sam, we we’ve got. Probably I wanna say, 40, 50 AI focused suppliers we’re gonna talk about in a future slide. But it’s amazing how how many of them?

Patrick Oborn: probably I would say 90% fall in the Cx, you see category like, there are some people out there that you know, like Rackspace on the cloud side, it’s like AI as a service they can help you create a Gbt, that type of stuff. But by and large.

Patrick Oborn: There are so many applications for AI in the contact center, whether it’s, you know, the user experience or the agent experience or the management being able to listen to every call instead of like 10% of the calls like, because in the olden days they would physically have to listen. So I kinda look at AI as an army of helpers

Patrick Oborn: that that do a lot of things for you and don’t ask for a salary. They just they just do all this work and bring all this incredible information back to you.

Samantha Nelson: You know, business leaders, employees can really focus on what’s most important for the business that actually requires human touch to make really important decisions.

Samantha Nelson: Right? And to your point earlier around cyber security. When we look at artificial intelligence, we’re really looking at this year of AI across all of our swim lanes. So you heard Kobe Phillips talk about it. You heard graph Scott talk about it. You’ll hear Jason Stein talk about it. But AI is really applicable across all the swim lanes. And I encourage everyone to take a look at what those are, because

Samantha Nelson: just because AI is is in front of you from a customer experience standpoint because you experience it directly doesn’t mean that it’s working in the background across the other parts of the technology stack.

Patrick Oborn: Yeah. And still the same old adage applies garbage and garbage out. So there’s a lot that people need to do to really extract the benefits of the AI. A lot of work. A lot of infrastructure, a lot of modeling, a lot of. So it it just doesn’t happen on its own. So but that again, that creates a tremendous opportunity for for visors, and I guess 1 one last plug, Doug for the the leap year. AI summit like, if this is interesting to you, highly recommend everybody. Go talk to us a little bit about

Samantha Nelson: the employee customer connection that you see happening this year. Yes. So this has been around actually for some time. But it’s on this Cx trend slide for a reason. And that’s because companies are going to continue to focus on the employee experience and customer experience connection. And that connection looks like this. It’s very simple. It’s

Samantha Nelson: if you, as an employee, are happy, then your happiness will translate over to

Samantha Nelson: customer experience or customer happiness. In a transaction. So, in other words, if I’m an agent, and I am having a bad day, I may not sound so great on the phone or in an interaction on chat, or really and in in any customer communication. Right? But if I’m a happy employee, I feel engaged. I’m being productive. I feel like I’m doing a great job at what I’m doing. That’s going to translate into a much

Samantha Nelson: happier conversation that does affect the customer experience very dramatically. And so

Samantha Nelson: when we think about, you know the cutting edge stuff, don’t forget about the employee experience around things like, you know, generally workforce engagement things like gamification. We all love being rewarded and recognized for what we do. We do that here at Tilaris internally, and it fosters this wonderful culture. Despite the fact that several of us are, you know, working from remote locations. We still feel like, you know, one company working together, all rowing and

Samantha Nelson: same direction. So that’s really important is just maintaining that positive explo employ employee experience. And there are lots of tools. Now that that our advisors can go out to the field and talk about with clients so really exciting time.

Patrick Oborn: No super exciting. And I think in the past I think a lot of times is slightly changing the topic. You have things like sales and marketing. They used to be disjointed. Marketing used to set out a bunch of stuff sales wouldn’t really know about it like like they were never really rowing in the same direction. Tell us a little bit about how Cx is gonna help really bring those 2 together this year.

Samantha Nelson: Yes. So this year. We are going to see marketing and sales really as this dream team in the industry. And that’s because

Samantha Nelson: kind of late last year we were starting to see more and more marketing folks as well as salespeople involved in the Cx technology opportunity decision making process, meaning that maybe the conversation initially started with someone in operations. Well, that very quickly expanded to Hey, let me bring in my Cmo. Let me bring in my cra, because the reality is that

Samantha Nelson: all this technology affects their departments in some way. And while that’s.

Samantha Nelson: you know, great it’s even better for us, because what that means is they’re going to start contributing those budgets to the Cx technology sale. Even if maybe initially, they had those, you know, dedicated to some other some other portion of their their departments. But what’s really even more interesting

Samantha Nelson: here, Patrick, is that in marketing and sales. They’re looking for insights, right? And this type of technology is going to help them find those insights that humans. It would take them, I would say, years to delve through all the data within their company. Right? But these guys are looking for insights with all the data that they have to leverage those insights to better do things like

Samantha Nelson: put together more effective marketing campaigns, or come up with more effective sales, scripts right leading to more sales conversions, things like that. So keep in mind that this marketing and sales dream team is one that you want to target this year, especially

Patrick Oborn: no fantastic. And then number 4, because things always coming for us, for for training. Talk to us a little about customer empowerment and what you termed co-creation. That that’s kind of a newer term. It is a newer term and I want to bring this up to the forefront, because

Samantha Nelson: what we’re seeing now is we’re seeing this age of influencers. Right? And so you’re going to start seeing companies giving customers a little more leeway there? If you’re ever on, say, you watch Instagram or Facebook reels. You see Tiktoks, you start to see things like product placement where influencers then begin to put products in front of the camera. And so one concept is what we call co-creation, and I like to call this the Stanley Cup tumblr effect.

Samantha Nelson: So if you’re not familiar with the Stanley Cup Tumblr. This is what it looks like. You see them all over the place. You see people rushing into places like target to get the latest colors. So the Stanley Cup Tumblr effect is really unique in that. A few years ago.

Samantha Nelson: there was a a a social media kind of company called the Buy Guide, and they gave a Stanley cup tumblr as a gift to someone who, I guess, appeared on the bachelor. She shared it on social media. And all of a sudden there was this exposure around. What’s the Stanley Cup Tumblr? And so what Stanley Cup did was they actually created this whole line of Stanley Cup tumblers in the color of pastels.

Samantha Nelson: and they opened up the Stanley Cup, tumblr sales to a brand new market of people. And I do a whole kind of minute snippet on this segment. But the reality is in just a few years. Stanley Cup increased revenues from 70 million to 750 million.

Samantha Nelson: So just the power of what consumers can do on their own and that’s what Stanley Cup went ahead and and it capitalized on.

Patrick Oborn: Yeah, that almost sounds like one of my old favorite Youtube channels. Epic wrap battles of history where they would do it. 1 one figure, for history gets another figure from history, and then in the comments they would be like, What what’s would you like to see next? And people would put them in. And then, literally, the next video would be from a user suggestion. So they actually did involve the their users in their their creative process. And I think this is like taking things to hold like a whole new level.

Samantha Nelson: It really is really is. Yeah.

Samantha Nelson: Oh, I was, I was just gonna say with regard to your comment earlier, I wanna move on to sort of what the the structure looks like, cause I know that a couple of folks? Yeah, a couple of folks probably wanna see this, too. And and I’m sure many of you have seen it. If you’ve attended our education training events over the last year.

Samantha Nelson: But when we look at how the practice is set up, it’s really setting you up for success with regard to the sale. And nothing here has changed, if you’ve already seen it before. But the beauty of this model is that we’ve taken all 12 months of last year to validate this model. And the way that it’s structured in that you’ve got Cx as your kind of

Samantha Nelson: umbrella term, and then you’ve got the core components like you guys communications platform as a service Ccas in the middle. Then you’ve got this layer of the ancillary or the bolt on products. And what this has done is it’s opened up this concept of bi-directional selling

Samantha Nelson: for our advisors, meaning that they not only you can start from the top, but they can start from the bottom as well. So instead of going in saying, Hey, you know, how’s your whatever voice solution working for you. They can actually go in on a different angle and say, You know, how are you engaging employees in a remote work? Environment? Right? How are you leveraging artificial intelligence in your Cx technologies act today, or just generally right? What are your initiatives and what technology supports that this year?

Samantha Nelson: So we are going to keep this structure. And and it’s very, very strong, really supportive in how the technology sale works.

Patrick Oborn: Fantastic talk to us a little bit about the practice itself. The suppliers that are in the practice

Patrick Oborn: tell us the one of things that that always like is one of my favorite parts of this this interview. The state of the Union is, tell us what’s new Sam like like? Who are the new providers, and why did we add them like, that’s always the question, like, Okay, they’re great. You’ve got some new Logos. You sign some contracts good for you. Why, right? Cause it. If it’s not for the benefit of of the suppliers, and ultimately the end users.

Patrick Oborn: You know we we don’t just add people to the portfolio willingly like there has to be a clear cut reason to bring them in. Ii think if we’re looking at this light here, you can see the new ones have that little gold

Samantha Nelson: get ready for again the AI wave. The next wave

Samantha Nelson: as far as where cx tech is moving, and the that little AI box only had just a few suppliers, and we actually had to make that box bigger. We literally had to expand the box on this slide

Samantha Nelson: exactly. We had to come up with the box right? The big combo AI combo box easy for people to consume, and every single one of these folks does something completely different which is exciting. They do everything from changing accents in real time. Yeah, that’s the thing.

Samantha Nelson: right? Auto automated outbounding efforts. Right? Conversational. AI whether that’s voice or chat, or whatever lots of different capabilities here, and we wanted to make sure we kept up.

Samantha Nelson: There’s a couple in workforce management. Say one, for example, that actually takes flight patterns into account when staffing clear kiosks

Samantha Nelson: believe it or not so. A lot of different use, cases that are catering to the customer experience, not just in person, but also virtually. And so we’ve added all these folks in the last year get familiar with them. But generally they get familiar with with a lot of these folks right, because even the ones who have been there for some time. Have started to

Samantha Nelson: release some really significant AI capabilities. So just be sure to touch base with with everybody. I would say.

Patrick Oborn: Yeah, it’s interesting that the Ucast has like 0 new ones, but that doesn’t mean that AI hasn’t infected them. I was just in the Bay area a weekend ago for an audition for my son that was trying out for a marching band in Concord, California, just to south of Napa Valley.

Patrick Oborn: and the second I left the airport. All I saw was Dial Pad AI! On every billboard I saw AI from Ringcentral, like literally those you cast companies have just covered the entire bay area with their AI stuff and same thing, and see cast one new. So you cast and C cast together. One new supplier.

Patrick Oborn: and almost all the new suppliers went into into AI. Before we move. Move off this slide, talk a little bit about how these AI companies play together with somebody’s existing Ucast or existing Ccas or existing Crm like, how do those just layer over the top plug and play Api like, how how do these work together?

Samantha Nelson: They do so it’s really a plug and play. So, for example, in the space of things like quality, assurance, or quality management, where, like you mentioned it earlier.

Samantha Nelson: where the AI tool is actually ingesting all of the data on behalf of the customer or a live person, and then surfacing the most insights out of thousands of interactions. Something like that just sits on top. It literally takes those recordings or interaction metadata components. And that’s through Api, or, you know, secure fire secure file transfer protocol right? And it’s super easy. Just again it sits on top, and the beauty of all these things. Is that they could sit on top of

Samantha Nelson: not just cloud-based solutions, but also on prem solutions. So again contributing to that contact center market spike where we’re seeing a lot of these folks sit on top of really, whatever a customer has to help them optimize what they’re using.

Patrick Oborn: Yeah. And now let’s pivot into like, okay, this is all great. Where do people go to get more information? Ii think, before we even get off the slide. I think there are a lot of Logos on this slide where their leaders, their founders, their Ceos, have been. Guess on Josh. The presto’s next level bist tech

Patrick Oborn: like I don’t. He’s he just passed 100 episodes. And I wanna say, like at least 20 episodes are contact center related, and 20 episodes. There’s probably, you know, 8 of them that are AI focused with you with with J. Lo, for those of you guys who don’t know Jason, though on our staff. He’s really our in house. AI expert kind of solution architect type of level.

Patrick Oborn: And then you have other partners at Cell AI. Again, you have the leaders from these companies themselves sitting down with Josh. Very, very cool. Second thing is your thing, Sam. The minute snippet, you you briefly reference. If you guys aren’t on Linkedin, checking out her minute snippets like you’re missing out there. There are 60 s.

Patrick Oborn: Yeah, in in true crossfit format. She’s got the countdown timer on the page so you could see. You know, it’s like time sticking. Let’s go get it out, Sam. Hurry, and she always does, and she does a fantastic job. Let’s look real fast. It just the general resources here, cause we’ve got a lot of chat questions coming in it. Who’s the best for X who’s the best for y.

Patrick Oborn: There’s really 2 ways. You can do this. Number one. Engage the the Telarus sales engineering team. Sam, step us through kind of who’s on the team and what they know and how they know it.

Samantha Nelson: Yes, so we’ve got a a massive team behind. Cx, so I’ll actually start with the Cx specific folks who are your solution. Architects? And many of you are familiar with them. But if you’re not let’s make some introductions. Let’s get you connected. But we’ve got in the bottom right box there. Our solution. Architects for Cx. Megan Ty. Supporting the West Mike Bellarian on the right, supporting the East. And then we’ve got Jason Lowe in the

Samantha Nelson: the middle there who actually supports everybody nationwide because he’s specific to artificial intelligence as well as contact center. Right? And so you’ve got, you know, 3 phenomenal resources there to help you dive into opportunities with customers. That’s everything from pre call to during call to, you know, even some of those evaluation calls and then

Samantha Nelson: working our way, you know, across the rest of this this slide here, you’ve got your inside sales engineers at the ready right to respond to what you need in terms of quick questions. Quick hit questions. You’ve got your regional sales engineers who are in the field with you, addressing, you know, those high level questions, but also have expertise across several swim lanes. So what they’ll do is they will engage some of the solution. Architects depending on

Samantha Nelson: things like complexity of opportunity. You know, to make sure that we’re honing in on the right solutions. And then, of course, you’ve got leadership up here. You’ve got, you know, Mr. Bob Greenow, JW. Stanley, running the team right under Josh Lapsto. So a very robust, very well seasoned engineering team, with the most certifications in the industry. So really exciting to to be working with this team leverage your resources. Folks don’t go into

Samantha Nelson: into Cx opportunities alone. I even have folks who reach out to me saying, Hey, does this like look and feel like Cx? I’m not sure run them by us. This is what we do. We’re very passionate about it. Feel free to reach out to us whenever you need.

Patrick Oborn: Yeah. And I think the way that they engage this team also makes a big difference. Coby always talks in his A send a trainings about the customer buying experience. The sales experience that the customer feels by your presentation. I’ve seen a very successful way of bringing in engineers by saying, Look, there’s this consulting firm that’s just staffed with engineers and solution architects named I’m willing

Patrick Oborn: to pay them to come to this meeting. If you will accept this meeting. They’re very expensive. They’re they’re high end consultants. These aren’t these? Aren’t you know Ernst and young Typho? These are solution architects. They’re not recent college graduates. They’ll have a minimum. And I don’t wanna like point out their age, but about 15 to 20 years of experience at

Patrick Oborn: these various technologies. I can get them to accept an appointment. I’m gonna cover the cost. They’re expensive. But I’m willing to do that because I’m investing in your solution and in in this relationship. And when advisors go out and do that, their customers are like.

Patrick Oborn: well, yeah, I’d be insane to not take an appointment from a very high end solution. Architect like, why, why would I say no, if you’re gonna pay for it like I don’t have budget. But if you wanna if you wanna pay, I’ll gladly do that. And then number one, you’re establishing that they’re from Solaris, so that when they look them up on Linkedin they’re not like, oh, you’ve tried to pawn them off as members of your company, and that’s not true. You’re lying to me. So it gets rid of that weirdness. The second thing is, I don’t know anybody who gets a hundred percent Commission pass through. So somewhere, somehow.

Patrick Oborn: we do share the commission, which means you do pay for this service to come in. So again, 100 valid passes all the the smell test. But again, the presentation is very different than hey? I got some people that can talk to you and help you. Then there is a very expensive resource that I wanna bring to bear if you will allow me to do that, and that that just it changes the way your customers engage with our engineers. It changes the way that your customers engage with you.

Patrick Oborn: And you know, speaking of more training and and everything else. I think one of the big pivots in the ascend events. And you’ll see here in the next slide kind of a list of of areas that that you can go and attend. But but you guys have done a really good job of pivoting the training from a little less bits and bytes

Patrick Oborn: in a lot more sales process. Right? Explain the the, the, the thinking behind that.

Samantha Nelson: Yes. Well, the reality is that when you come out to our training and education events. You. You meet with suppliers right? And the suppliers are the ones who tell you about what the technology does and what their solutions do. And so in that aspect, we’ve actually pivoted the way that we are providing training and education in that. It’s more like you said around the sales around the sales cycle.

Samantha Nelson: Different sales, strategies, things like overcoming objections is a big one this year, right? Because we want to be that agnostic voice and help you knock into these opportunities. So rather than tell you about the actual solutions, we’re gonna teach you how to sell the solutions. And that’s everything from your prospecting discovery, evaluation decision. We’re gonna walk you through all of those. And for those of you attended our ascend events last year.

Samantha Nelson: That’s really what we did. And

Samantha Nelson: going into this year, we’re looking at ascend 2.0 where we’re going to really dive in even deeper into that sales cycle of like, I mentioned things like objections. Actual use cases really empowering you all to to really command that

Samantha Nelson: opportunity. Now, one thing I wanna hit on here, Patrick, while we’re on it. Just starting at the top, is our hit series, and you may well, okay. So, Patrick, you’re probably familiar with this one but hit training right? High intensity, interval training. Right? Well, this is our version of hit, which is high intensity technology training.

Patrick Oborn: So yeah, so

Samantha Nelson: on the Tuesday calls moving forward, starting on the sixth. We’re gonna do our first one. It’ll be me kind of talking a little bit more about AI machine learning predictive analytics as it pertains to Cx on the back. Half of these hilarious Tuesday calls. We’re going to have a a component of hit series right? You’ll hear from one of us one of the advanced solutions experts. Come on, talk about a particular topic. And you’ll keep it dynamic and engaging for you. So you get a little bit

of some again, high intensity technology training every single week for you.

Patrick Oborn: Yeah. And if somebody we? There’s a there’s a question that chat about La. I see Bay area. I see, Phoenix. I see Utah but nothing in la. If somebody is in La and wants to attend one of these things. I mean, we ran out basically an entire hotel. So II remember when I got my my Ccna from Cisco like I got my butt on a plane. I flew to Washington, DC. I took a 3 day intense course, and I flew home with my certificate like.

Patrick Oborn: like, it’s okay to get on a plane and go to these things. These aren’t these aren’t things like, oh, if it’s not an hour drive. I’m not going like I highly highly highly recommend especially with the Sn 2 format. That you guys get there again. We don’t. We can’t come to every market, but we can at least get to within a 1 h flight of you. Southwest airlines. You’re looking at a hundred bucks. So again, it’s worth it to go. But but let’s finish off real fast by the one thing you probably wanna go to in person, if anything else this year.

Patrick Oborn: and that’s Partner Summit, because something tells me, Sam, I have a sneaking suspicion that there are going to be a lot of breakouts and and messaging around AI inside the contact center.

Samantha Nelson: Yes, yes, no. Join us at our partner Summit this year. August sixth, eighth, it’s it’s going to be in Nashville. It’s going to be a great time. If anyone’s been in Nashville. It is another world out there. But it’s going to be really engaging. Yeah, really fun to see each other. See everyone? We’re gonna have all the breakouts you could imagine. So yeah, please, please check it out

Patrick Oborn: fantastic. So yeah, save the day. August sixth. Through eighth, 2,004 it will be in the middle of August. It’s not

Patrick Oborn: de definitely hot in in Nashville like, like, like Dallas, Texas, last year. So so we’re gonna be. But you know what the Gaylor opulent. It’s the biggest galore that it’s it exists like in terms of square footage like you. There are several times a couple of years ago. Didn’t event there? I got lost. I was like I don’t even know what side, what wing of the of the of the building. It’s not even building. It’s like a small small city underneath one roof. So

Patrick Oborn: very, very fun. And then it’s about a 10 min bus ride from downtown Nashville, where we’ll be having lots of events. Well, basically, you know one of those things you see on the the the screen right there will rent the entire, you know. First, second, and third floors will bring in bands. It’s gonna be a lot of fun. You’re gonna learn a lot. Most importantly, it’s gonna help your business.

Patrick Oborn: But you also have a very good time.

Patrick Oborn: Well, Sam, thank you so much for joining me. Congrats on the minute snippet congrats on all your very successful appearances on next level biz tech at the trade shows all the awards you’re winning. And really, for a fantastic 2023, I mean the growth. And

Patrick Oborn: your practice area was amazing. And W. Again. Week 2024. Run N. No, no signs of stopping now. So thank you so much. And and, Doug, that concludes our interview, let’s go ahead and turn the time back over to you. So Sam and I can feel some questions with the time we got left.

Doug Miller: Terrific presentation. Thank you both. That was just fantastic, Sam. Congratulations on all your success again, you are one of the most visible personalities at Telarus, both because of your expertise and because of the

Doug Miller: Expansive nature of these needs and solutions. Right now, a number of the questions that we received today during the presentation had to do with specific suppliers.

Doug Miller: And I wanted to just touch on this briefly, because that’s that’s always a changing dynamic in terms of which suppliers are high up on the list, which ones are up and coming, and so forth. But just looking back at last year, for example, in the trajectory into this year, are there some particular suppliers that seem to have done really well in meeting some of our technology advisors needs that we tend to look at for very popular opportunities right now. And

Doug Miller: and where should so some of our advisors be looking for answers.

Samantha Nelson: yeah, that’s a great question. And I did see a bunch pop up around who are the top AI solutions or suppliers out there. I mean, that’s a tough one, because you can’t rank them because they all do completely different things

Samantha Nelson: and so you have to look at the business objectives of the company come to us with those objectives, and we’ll work our way backwards to outfit the appropriate AI solutions for that opportunity. So you know, people ask me all the time who are your top? Who are your top and my Co. My answer is always well sorry, but it depends right. And what I would encourage everyone to do as well is when you look at the traditional kind of Uc providers. A lot of those folks

Samantha Nelson: have come up with really, really amazing contact center offerings. Right? So look at those folks as well, because a lot of that has come to surface even within just the last few months. Really, phenomenal things happening in this industry? And then also backwards. Right? You’ve got contact center folks who now have. You see capabilities. And you see offerings. So you know, talk to your regional folks. Talk to your

Samantha Nelson: you know your your Spd, your local Telarus folks to make sure that you are up to speed with what these different solutions are offering now. And what’s really resonating in the market. So

Samantha Nelson: tough to say, I know I danced around this one Doug but coming up with a leaderboard is really impossible, because they all do totally different things.

Doug Miller: One thing that we’re seeing over and over again is that many opportunities that come our advisors way are not necessarily brand new opportunities where you’re starting from scratch, but it’s an opportunity to add on to, or perhaps rebuild something that is already in process, and customers are looking to our advisors for answers on that earlier on in the call, you introduced the concept of technical debt

Doug Miller: which is so applicable in terms of the opportunities that come our way. Many customers find themselves dealing with technical debt for something that was set up a while ago, and they’re looking to make changes, augmentations or replacements. How can we help our partners in meeting those opportunities?

Samantha Nelson: Yes,

Samantha Nelson: first and foremost, we ask about initiatives? Right? Because if we know that people are stuck with solutions, and we have to figure out what their plan is around using those solutions in the New year. And once we understand how they are, then we can figure out, okay, how do we augment that or optimize it to better fit those initiatives? Patrick, I saw you come off mute. I mean, you know 2 cents there, whether you’ve seen that here in Cx or across other swimlines.

Patrick Oborn: Yeah, absolutely.

Patrick Oborn: when when I was building the Qsa. And and there’s this, you know. No, there’s there’s other resources you have. If you wanna see who can do something. You have the contact center and the Uc matrix. They’re just in your back office in the tools area. The second thing you have is the Qsa, the quick solution assessment.

Patrick Oborn: And when we built the quick solution assessment for contact center, specifically, we really gauge the questions for 2 things. Number one, we’re looking for areas where you need technology that you don’t have an existing solution. That’s that’s a Greenfield opportunity. That’s great. We diagnose it. We talk about it.

Patrick Oborn: The other thing is when we talk about existing infrastructure. The things that we want to really dive down into existing infrastructure is capabilities. Is it doing what you needed to do? And also the performance of the company itself?

Patrick Oborn: Do they answer the phone, or they easy to do business with? Do they have what you need? Do they treat you like an important customer, or they just discard you. So the customer, the customer csat, or customer satisfaction. There could be people on. I don’t know. I don’t want to throw any names out there, because this is a bad example, but they could be on, you know, supplier a. But supplier a gets their bill wrong, supplier a has outages supplier a is incompatible with some of their crms

Patrick Oborn: that that creates a rock in your shoe effect that eventually will get big enough where they’re willing to do the lift and shift. And so it’s looking for that. Those pain points. So it’s looking for technical capabilities or not. Technology transformation. And looking for those rocks in the shoe that that it just, it may be time for a lift and shift.

Doug Miller: I also want to go back to Scott Elfin’s question that he asked earlier on in the in the Q. And a window many times. You’re going to walk into a customer and find that they’re very happy with the setup that they have. They feel like they’re where they need to be. But what can a technology advisor do in terms of proposing some ancillary products, services or solutions or helping the customer understand things that may be coming down the road that they haven’t seen yet.

Doug Miller: and get out in front of those opportunities.

Samantha Nelson: Yes, I get this one all the time where they say I have a happy customer. They don’t want anything. What do I do? Exactly, Patrick? No, you’re good.

Samantha Nelson: You’re good. It’s good. We’re on the same wavelength. I love that. So yeah, no, they don’t know what they don’t know. And that’s actually a big component of what we teach in the ascent trainings is this concept, this concept of needing to educate the customer? At

Samantha Nelson: all points of the technology sale right? Because it can even start with. Hey, look, I was just on this call with a couple of AI experts, and I learned about some really interesting stuff that I think would be really applicable for you, and would help you kind of improve operations here. Do you want to hear about it?

Samantha Nelson: Who wouldn’t want to hear about it. If it’s going to make a business better. Right? And so it’s really about how you tailor your approach with regards to education positioning that with customers to get interest to at least just open up the can of worms, to take a closer look if that makes sense

Patrick Oborn: no, absolutely. And then the other thing, too, is almost. There’s. There’s really 2 things there’s there’s existing providers that that that bring new product to market, a lot of the customers. They don’t. They don’t like. Take a second look at their existing provider, and say, Hey, what else do you got for me like there might be free ways to turn on AI. They might, or it might be like $5 a seat. Well, maybe you take

Patrick Oborn: 30 of the 100 seats and you turn on the AI for for like. So there’s a lot of times where they have access to the product with their existing indigenous incumbent provider that they don’t know about. The second thing is like, like you mentioned Sam.

Patrick Oborn: All these providers are over the top. So so you know, yellow AI, or observe AI! They don’t get a crap. Excuse my language. Who your who your Cpass provider is? They don’t care. From 5, 9 9 like does not matter. They’ll plug in, they’ll they’ll they’ll create magic with the data that’s in there.

Patrick Oborn: and and and and make the experience and the the whole thing that much better irre again, irrespective of what provider you’re on. So there’s again the the amount of knowledge that is required there is insane and and like you, said Sam just going in and saying, Hey, I know a few things.

Patrick Oborn: I have met some people. I’ve seen some new technologies. I think they’ll help you especially those words, and I think they can help you. Would you like to hear about them? I there’s there’s, I think there’s an art to what we do guys right? I mean, it’s it’s knowing your tech side. But it’s also presenting in a way it doesn’t make a customer feel stupid doesn’t put them on a defensive.

Patrick Oborn: and makes them feel like you’re there to to to be on their their side of the table. You’re there to help them, not there to to kind of show off all the cool stuff you got and how smart you are.

Doug Miller: Mike Lattimore asked a great question in the QA. And I want to expand it just a little bit. He’s asking whether or not Telarus technology advisors, business grew at the same rate as the market. In other words, our technology advisers working in the Channel.

Doug Miller: Taking advantage of this growth in the overall market. And why is it, I guess, is the bigger question that technology advisers who work in the indirect sales channel are uniquely positioned to address these needs, perhaps more so than in other ways of purchasing these solutions

Samantha Nelson: cool. That’s a loaded question, Doug. I was wondering when you were gonna put. I was. I was wondering when you’re gonna put a period or a comma somewhere in there. It didn’t happen so. Then I’ll definitely let Patrick have his take on this one because he could speak to the overall business as well. But when we look at Cx technology, happy to report sales are like through the roof, which is exciting. We’ve literally doubled almost like tripled what we’ve done, as far as the number of

Samantha Nelson: you know, advisors actually participating in the space as well as like opportunities that are closing in the space which is really, really exciting. So it does prove, that this is a huge area of opportunity. But maybe, Patrick, you can shed a little more light on just overall, you know, swim lanes as it relates, or as it relates to Cx.

Patrick Oborn: yeah, II think you know, in general, I think the technology transformation is still happening. I think technical debt. I think I think technology transformations, especially for this are insanely difficult to to pull off. I mean, there’s a level of product management, a level of expertise, a level of experience that’s needed, that II don’t think any customer will will walk away from, I think. When you start to have

Patrick Oborn: it, it almost feels like when you look at that slide of vendors. It feels like a pharmacy. It feels like there’s lots of drugs. And sometimes when you combine 2 drugs together, it’s bad. Sometimes when you combine 2 drugs together, it’s good but but who knows that but the pharmacists? So so the level of expertise to the solution architects. And because those guys have seen so many hundreds and hundreds

Patrick Oborn: of of deals. They’ve seen hundreds of of migrate like they know what’s what’s gonna work and plus, we’re creating tools to actually democratize that information and make it more transparent to you guys.

Patrick Oborn: But but whenever an Adam always says this, wherever complexity lives, that is our opportunity, so I think more and more again, according to our tech tens report more and more people are listening to advisors. Our advisors are asking where questions are going deeper than their accounts, and we’re starting to sell into more swim lanes. And so when you add those 3 things together, you see a greater than linear growth.

Patrick Oborn: We were. I don’t even know if I wanna put the number out there at all, probably shoot me. But I think the growth in industry was between 11 and 13, and we were north of 20. So that that goes to show you that that those 3 things are compounding to help us, you know. Beat the actual. You know someone someone can say, Hey, the rising tide floats out right. But if the tide rises 6 feet, but we rose 10 feet, we’ve done some additional things

Patrick Oborn: that that that make us special. And I think that that 2024 is the year of the technology advisor. I think more and more people are gonna come to you guys for advice. More and more people are gonna

Patrick Oborn: be

Patrick Oborn: skeptical, or maybe maybe ask questions about their existing solutions. I think a lot of the early adopters that went to cloud are gonna start asking questions like, Is this the right cloud provider for us?

Patrick Oborn: Should we be switching. I see all this stuff on Cnbc for AI. Should we be using AI? What? How can it help our business like? They don’t know the answers to these questions. These are, this is like, when the Internet first sprang on. And people didn’t even know what website was and member, I don’t know, if you remember Sam and Doug. But I’m old enough to remember when people businesses would ask me, why do I need a website? And I would have to convince them the value of a website, and why they should have it, and why? So? Your customers can find you. So they know you do say no where you’re opens. They know where you’re located, like all these

Patrick Oborn: inf like, the people didn’t get it. And so that’s where we are today. With AI. They know it’s there. But it’s like a website. It’s like, Why do I need AI like, II don’t know, and that this is really like like, Sam said, always be educating

Patrick Oborn: like this is your opportunity to educate. We’re we’re not sales people anymore. We’re not here to convince somebody they need something we’re here to teach them about the products, teach them about the benefits, the long, especially the long term benefits of these products, and then help them put a plan together to get into that technology. That’s our job. That’s it. And and yeah, there’s parts of that process involved. So I, signing contracts with Mr. Right, and that’s great for us.

Patrick Oborn: But the Mr. Is a pull through. For from from the education process. So if we focus on education process, Mr. Will take care of itself, I believe. And you guys are all be doing really well this year.

Doug Miller: Perfect segue into one more question that came from Zachary Schechter, one of our longest term listeners. We really appreciate him being here every week, I think.

Doug Miller: He talked a little bit about some of the resources that we have. We, we mentioned next level biz, tech podcast for my money, absolutely the best technology podcast in the industry, minute snippet that Sam puts out on Linkedin and another venues very regularly phenomenal content. In a very brief period of time we talked about our engineering resources, their certifications, everything that Telarus does for our technology advisors.

Doug Miller: What is it that we have available that our advisors can make available to their customers to help them in that education process to introduce new concepts, new ideas, new questions to them in terms of evaluating their needs.

Samantha Nelson: Yes, quite a few things. So I would say, first off Toleras University. Start there. We’ve actually got a C extract coming out. So for those of you who hung out on the call, you’re first to hear. That is coming out within the next few weeks. Very exciting. You could take those resources. I’ll figure out which suppliers you want to go out with

Samantha Nelson: and they’ve actually got a ton of customer facing things that you can take advantage of things like email templates one. Pagers. Pdfs, you name it? But it definitely starts with with you. Right? Starts with you. You know, just getting a refresher on what’s going on learning about what’s new. So you can go to your clients

Samantha Nelson: and and position these appropriately

Doug Miller: excellent.

Doug Miller: so many resources available. And I just wish there were more time available for today’s call. But, Patrick, let me throw it to you first, and then Sam to you, just for last words, and tell partners what they should go away with today, and where to go for additional resources.

Patrick Oborn: Awesome! Well, fantastic. Doug, thank you for being here, Sam. Thanks for for being our guest, and thanks for I mean, more importantly, the job you do every single day behind the scenes. One of the hardest working people here. It’s hilarious to see, you guys know if you don’t have

Patrick Oborn: much time or or don’t know Sam, that will make make a point to attend in a send. Make a point to attend. Partner. Summit. She will be there. Again. The the whole entire team. These are these are important people to know. These are people who are truly the the the keys to unlocking massive opportunities for for your future in this business?

Patrick Oborn: For me, personally. Just wanna thank each and every one of you technology advisors for for your time, for your many, many years of maybe maybe not so many years of faithful partnership with us. We we really appreciate you, we work, we get out of bed every single day.

Patrick Oborn: looking for ways to make you more money, and we really appreciate that last, but not least, on a programming note next week. We don’t have a call all in our entire sales engineering solution like our entire. Anyone who touches revenue is gonna be in Arizona for a conference so that we can ch sharpen our sort a little bit and and be better resources for you guys.

Patrick Oborn: So so the thirtieth there’s no call. Next week. The sixth of of February will be our next call will be talking about advanced networking, and Bob Greenow will be my guest. So very excited. Talk about advanced networking. Sdn sassy. All the fun things that are happening in that area. And then, lastly, again, Sam, thank you so much

Patrick Oborn: for everything today. And Doug, as always very much appreciated all, all of your work for those of you guys. I know Doug actually has a day job. So I appreciate you pitching in here each and every week. Doug.

Doug Miller: Always my pleasure. Thanks, Patrick Oberbourne and Sam Nelson for the outstanding presentation to day, as Patrick mentioned. No Tuesday call next week, however.

Doug Miller: Telarusuniversity.com is where you go to capture all of our Tuesday calls. If you’ve missed any of the State of the Union calls so far, go back, take a look at those in Telarus university.com, or any of our archive Tuesday calls so much information there for you. There’s no need never to have a Tuesday call on Tuesday. We appreciate you taking advantage of that next week. Bob, 2 weeks from today. Bob Greenow, as you mentioned with Patrick Oberbourne, will be here to talk about advanced

Doug Miller: networking. I’m Doug Miller. We will see you in 2 weeks here. Thank you so much for being here. Have a great selling week. Everyone.