78. Secrets to Helping Customers Monetize their WiFi Analytics. With Shawn Nace of Telesystem

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Did you know you can help your customers can monetize their Wi-Fi? Listen in as we have Shawn Nace, Sales Engineering Manager of Telesystem, on with us to talk about a new product they have that allows just that. It works with just about any existing hardware they have, and it puts revenue back in the customer’s pocket and in yours! You might also hear about some of their new IoT and security solutions too!

Josh Lupresto: [00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast. That is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, Telarus, and this is next level Biz Tech.

Everybody welcome back. Today we are talking about something different. We got secrets for you. More. More specifically, we’ve got the top three secrets to help you help the customers. Monetize their wifi platform and you’re probably thinking, oh my gosh, I didn’t even know I could sell wifi or, or, or venture down that road.

I’ve never done that. Don’t worry. We’re gonna cover all that. We’re gonna get into it. And today to tell us about some of these secrets here we’ve got Shawn Nace with us, and Shawn Nace is the sales engineering manager at Telesystem. Shawn, welcome on, man.

Yeah thanks

Shawn Nace: for having me.

Josh Lupresto: So Shawn, first as we kick these things off, we’d like to hear about everybody’s background.

Everybody comes from all kinds of different places. Sometimes this industry sucks us in sometimes. We didn’t know we were gonna end up here. Sometimes we wanted to be here [00:01:00] from the day one, and we just knew. So we’d love to hear just your personal background story. We know where you’re at now cause we just, we just mentioned your title, but where did it start for you?

Shawn Nace: Sure. Where did it start for me? So in college I studied business and yeah, I always. Had a fascination with technology. You know, always loved the newest gadgets and so forth. But I realized kind of late in my college career that I didn’t wanna I didn’t wanna work with numbers. I had a concentration in finance.

I realized that it probably wasn’t for me. So I ju I jumped on the opportunity to join a a C Life in Pennsylvania or outside of Philadelphia years ago, and kind of worked my way up through the ranks of support, eventually running a knock at a CLEC called line Systems. And then, Moved over to sales as I kind of just had had a, a real desire to get in front of customers and demo solutions like number one hosted PBX was new and you know, we all had to demo these cool little user interfaces.

I was the kind of the only two guy for that. So sales ended doing was just a logical regression for me. I’ve loved it. So,

Josh Lupresto: so fill us in a little bit about for anybody that doesn’t know, [00:02:00] right? I mean, today we’re gonna, we’re gonna hone in a little bit on something key that Telesystems does. But, but first of all, just tell us a little bit about who Telesystems is, what you guys are, what’s all in the portfolio, and, and kind of what the go to market motion is.

Shawn Nace: Yeah, thanks. So we’re a national voice and data provider a service provider that’s been working with, we’ve been working with Polaris now I think for I think five or six years. A lot of people, you know, know us for having a really extensive portfolio, whether it’s, you know, best in class switching solutions powered by Meta Switch or BroadSoft type two access with DDoS protection.

More recently, where we’re really getting a lot of traction is with things like cybersecurity, where our extensive managed wifi solution that includes a bit of iot little bit of iot offering on top of that. So We’re definitely not your household name, but we’re I’d say the best kept secret in telecom and we’re the words, the word’s getting out there.

Josh Lupresto: Let’s talk about that. You know I think sometimes when we think about. When the partners think about what can I talk to my customers about? What, what can I help them with? Right. [00:03:00] Obviously a lot of folks in this industry kind of started out in connectivity and then in came ucas and now we have kind of all these ancillary services from CX to cloud, to security like you mentioned, and all these other things, and I think we, you know, for a long time it felt like.

The wifi side of things was left to the VARs, the MSPs, the, the sis, the integrators, things like that. So, you know we think of common names, obviously like a Meraki and Arubas and, and all of these. But just from your perspective, just define really how you first learned about this whole broader wifi landscape.

And, you know, is it as simple as plug and play? Why or why not?

Shawn Nace: Yeah, it’s definitely not as simple as plug and play, and it really shouldn’t be. Customers like to, A lot of times when customers ask for a quote, it’s like, Hey, you could just have a quote for three access points. Or I have, you know, a 10,000 square foot building on one floor.

Can you just tell me what I need? Unfortunately, it’s just not that simple anymore. You know, wifi has really evolved over the years. Now we’re using this technology called [00:04:00] wifi six, which for those of you who don’t know, it actually supports up to well or gigs worth of throughput, 1.5 gig. Sometime in the near future with some upgrades up to 10 gig.

So that really changes the whole landscape about, hey, you need to de design a solution not just in, include not just the wifi access points and the number of users in the network expected throughput, but even things like Ling if you think about it, even ca, CAT five V can’t support greater than gig’s worth of throughput over a hundred meters, right?

You have the limitation on the port size of the switch. You know, one gig is gonna be your choke point at that point. So, you know, wifi design and deployment has to take into account a whole lot of different solutions or a whole lot of different factors including the switches, the wiring, the physical space and Telesystem does a great job with it.

We have multiple wifi tech, wireless technologies, and we also use a predictive surveying tool called eHow, which literally allows us to purposely design or optimize that RF coverage for each building. So, If you think about it, you have a an old historical building with brick brick walls, maybe 10 foot [00:05:00] ceilings, that’s gonna have a lot different coverage than say, a warehouse with you know, wire excuse me, a warehouse with 30 foot ceilings and maybe paper rolls in between there.

Right? It’s a lot, a lot more difficult to penetrate certain spaces. So we really optimized and place those physical access points on what’s best for that customer in that particular space. And yeah, I think we do a great job at Telesystem of that. So

Josh Lupresto: how does a, you know, like you mentioned, right, we know this isn’t just a quote it’s not something that we can just go, oh, you need widget A, widget B, right?

Mm-hmm. What, what does a, what does a pre-sales process like that look like? You mentioned you’ve got some, some cool stuff that you use to leverage that. Is that a remote survey? Is that a, you come on site survey. What’s that experience like?

Shawn Nace: Yeah, good question. So, you know, initially our call is, our call is always a discovery.

So we’ve worked with our partners, we work with Polaris and their spms and, and a subagent, ideally with the end user customer looking at a floor plan. So we look at that space again, the, the floor is the size of the [00:06:00] buildings, the you, the, the makeup of that space. And we ask them, you know, what they’re looking for, are they looking for a certain throughput?

Certain number of users that they’re expected to occupy that space where they don’t need coverage, maybe even. And then we’re designing that wifi solution using mostly predictive surveys. We can come on site too, but there it is just a, an added cost that, I wouldn’t say it’s cost prohibitive, but it’s very expensive to come on site and visibly walk out that space and use a a sidekick, which is.

Just an, a really cool tool, but it doesn’t always work out for the customer’s benefit. So we can do it a lot more efficiently in a more timely manner using this predictive tool. Got it. Both pre and post-sale. Cool. All right.

Josh Lupresto: So if I flashback to one of the first times that, that, you know, we had a conversation with you and our team, the, from the engineering side, there were some cool stuff that, that in my mind you guys stood out with, that you can do from an analytics perspective.

Walk me through what that product means to you, what it is, why it stands out, all that good stuff.

Shawn Nace: Yeah, [00:07:00] so our wifi engagement analytics solution, I think we’re, we’re probably one of the few in the channel offering this, but we’re certainly It’s certainly changing, changing the landscape when it comes to wifi.

We’re now able to monetize customers wifi. So think about a retail customer, a large event space like a like a stadium or a you know, a trampoline park, which we’ve been talking about a little bit later. But all these customers have wifi for not only their internal staff, but for their external customers.

So our wifi engagement analytics solution, it’s a bolt on, it’s an iot solution. It’s a software that layers on top of existing or new wireless technology like Meraki, ubiquity, ruckus, you name the technology as well as it’s business or enterprise grade. It can work on top of that. Then it provides analytics and business intelligence that’s really important to the marketing team, social media Customer experience, all these other facets of business that really aren’t so much it, but that can bring in revenue in terms of en with engaging with the customer.

And [00:08:00] it’s just really incredible that you can really monetize your wifi. What was a CapEx or an operating expense for businesses can now be a new revenue stream. If design can used correctly.

Josh Lupresto: All right, so I don’t wanna say sell me this pen, but let’s pretend for a second. I’m, I’m a customer, right? And I do have a pen.

So let’s say I’m, I’m a customer, I’ve got Meraki’s or like you mentioned some, one of these other platforms and I’m thinking, well, I’ve got, I’ve got wifi, I’ve got some analytics. Like what, what is it additionally that this does? What are maybe, what are the data points that are pulled outta this platform that you use?

And, you know, what, how does that work? How does that, how does that help them?

Shawn Nace: Sure. So, you know, hopefully we’re gonna be coming outta winter, you know, sometime into your future. I know you’re dealing with a snowstorm out there in in Salt Lake. But yeah, spring training is coming up kind upon us, right?

I mean, if you’re a baseball fan, like a lot of us are, you’re probably looking forward to opening days. It’s coming up in a couple months, right? So imagine you’re going to the ballpark, right? And you have thousands, tens of thousands of bands, you know. Coming into that stadium and, you know, it’s [00:09:00] near impossible to get a good you know, cellular signal, whether you’re talking about 4G or 5G data.

So all the ballparks now offer managed wifi for those, you know, for their customers. So when you sign on to manage wifi, you know, the old days you’d have a little, you know, place card or a piece of paper, here’s your wifi password, right? But with our solution, we’re gonna create single sign on opportunities for customers.

So you can sign ’em with Facebook, you can sign ’em with. LinkedIn, you can sign with Instagram, you creating single sign on opportunities for customers so that when you sign to wifi you’re, you’re one creating it, making it easier opportunity for the customers to sign in. But two the customer in this case, the ballpark or the owner of that can then gain a lot of business intelligence about their customers don’t, is that you’ve had, you know, male and females of a certain number using a certain device and, and the language have.

Have logged into your system, you can then target that customer with coupon opportunities or marketing incentives to, you know, come back to Stadium for not only the next ballgame, but things like you know, a concert that might be coming into town. [00:10:00] And you can also customize what’s called the access journey.

So after you’ve logged into the wifi, instead of just saying, Hey, Mr. Customer, here’s your end user license agreement. Yeah, go ahead and have some fun. You can actually tailor a, a journey or experience so that after you sign in, you can show ’em like a quick little video or perhaps, you know, if it’s cold outside.

So you can have this access journey tailored not only to the operating system, whether it’s Android or, or Apple, or you know, the language of that user, but based on other factors like the weather. So imagine you’re going into opening day, you know, I’m in Philadelphia, and it can be, it can be really cold, it can be bright and sunny.

It can be rainy, right? So imagine you’re going to the ballgame out here and it’s, it’s cold outside, it’s frigid. You’ve logged onto that wifi. You can actually get an email coupon or an SMS notification to that user safe. Hey, come to the come to the peril shop, get a discount on, on a fleece or a, a rain jacket, wherever the case might be.

So there’s really marketing opportunities, both immediate and near term, that you [00:11:00] can use to engage with that customer. It can be customized in all sorts of different ways you the age of the user, the operating system, the weather outside. You know, the location in question. So think about a multi-site retailer.

You might have a different promo going on in the northeast versus the southeast region of the country or mountain west versus you know, Pacific Northwest and so on, right? So there’s all sorts of ways to really customize that journey experience for a customer, and it’s really incredible. Got it.

All right. So that

Josh Lupresto: makes sense. From a, from a profitability perspective, right. If I’m a, maybe we’ll get into a little more of this in the end when we talk about some of the questions to ask and how to go down this journey from a profitability perspective, and we talk about. You know, the title of this track is The Secrets to, to Monetize you know, wifi.

Yeah, I Is that, how can somebody figure out what the profitability on that is gonna be? Like? Is it based on the clicks? Is it based on who they bring in for ads? What is, what’s that side of it look like? Clue in there? Yeah. Really good

Shawn Nace: question. So, the roi could really vary by a customer, [00:12:00] you know, if you’re like a high-end retailer.

You might just be looking to, you know, gain gain more knowledge about the, the customers themselves, how often they’re coming through stores, repeat customers to be able to offer them a better experience. Others are really trying to bring in new revenue like that, like that ballpark or an NBA stadium, or N F L stadium or a trampoline park, right?

So everybody has a different return on investment healthcare organizations. They have a, we have a very unique solution for that. They’re really trying to enhance each and experience, which is, you know this nebulous thing that takes into account you know, basically the, the post the postdoc surveys and you know, all sorts of other things maybe about their hospital stay and so forth.

So the CX is a, is a variable that customers might be hoping to improve on. But really it’s varied by customer and each solution is really tailored to that particular business. So it’s not a one size fits all. This is really solution selling at its at its finest in my opinion. So,

Josh Lupresto: So, so that helps.

Walk me through then [00:13:00] you, you mentioned something there from a medical perspective. So what about like, let’s say we’ve got those guys out there that are going, ah, patient information. P i I don’t want you to track it. I don’t trust anybody. Is this compliant with that? Do we need to worry about that?

What’s, what’s your answer for that? Yeah,

Shawn Nace: great question. So Whether you’re a healthcare organization or just a retailer, the customer o the customer owns all this information. Again, when you’re selling into wifi, there’s a quick little end user license agreement that the users of the wifi bring to the terms and conditions, right?

When the customer signs on the Facebook or whatever, they also have, the customer has the option to one, not provide that information, you know, their, their gender, their age, all that, all that sort of thing. But also the customer is the one who owns this not Telesystem, not our, it’s not, you know, housed in our data centers.

It’s integrated with the customer’s CRM or perhaps the electronic medical records system, the case of a healthcare organization. So I didn’t even mention that, you know, this, this integrates with, you know, CRMs like Salesforce or HubSpot, or in the case [00:14:00] of a health organization, epic or MyChart. So that’s really where the, where the data is housed and it’s.

It’s really up to the customer to secure that moving forward. Got

Josh Lupresto: it. Awesome. Good answer. Okay, so, so I wanna hear, I wanna get into the weeds. I want to hear about an example or a win, or, you know, a use case. Just walk me through what were you told the problem was and Hey Shawn, I need your help on this, this, this customer environment.

And then when you got in, what did it look like? What was the tech stack? And then ultimately, what’d you put in place and what did it do?

Shawn Nace: Yeah. So I think a, a great use case is a trampoline park. We’re talking about a national franchise that a lot of us have, have been to before. So Josh, you mentioned you have three kids at home depending on their age, you guys have probably been to the semi, these trampoline parks.

There’s a few bigger brands out there, you know, a rainy day or when it’s cold outside, it’s a great place to bring the kids. They get exercise, they get to have some fun jump with their friends and all that kind of stuff. But during Covid, a lot of these businesses, like, like restaurants and retailers were really [00:15:00] hurting, right?

And imagine franchises where you have, you know, these are franchises, right? So you have business owners who are purchasing various wifi technologies, whether it’s Meraki or Ubiquity, or Ruckus or Ahi, you know, so they have all these disparate technologies, but they don’t really have any solution that can be, that can be Centralized or, or consistent throughout that, you know, to have a great brand identity for their customers, right?

So one, they’re losing they’re losing revenue. Two, they have all these, you know, disparate technologies throughout the you know, throughout their, their deployments. And so what we did was we, you know, we talked to their IT staff, we talked to the ownership team, and they’re like, well, How can we engage more effectively for the customers?

How can we deploy this, you know, easily? And then, you know, how can I work with different technologies? So what they were hoping to achieve at these trampoline parks was to engage with the customer. So one you know, the parent goes there, and you’ve probably been in this boat too. Josh, you, you or your wife will go out to visit trampoline park.

You could be there for a couple hours, right? So we were gonna do some [00:16:00] work. Maybe we were just gonna get on social media. Maybe you’re gonna, you know, stream the, the NFL game that’s on over the, you know, On a Sunday afternoon, right? So you’re gonna connect to the wifi. When you connect to the wifi, again, you’re gonna be using your single sign-on credentials, you’re gonna assign the wifi, and then you can engage these customers to let ’em know, Hey, look, Mr.

Customer, here’s a coupon to go to our concession stand. That’s one revenue stream that a lot of people are missing out on. They have this concession stand to sell, you know, cys or, you know, water, pizza, whatever for the kids. And and the adults there. A lot of times it’s just sitting in a corner. It’s not really being utilized and they’re, they’re not making enough money off of that.

Two, you can let the customer know, Hey, here’s a discount to come back next week, next month, here’s 50% off to come back again. Oh, and by the way, for only a little bit more, you can have a monthly membership. So for only $30 a month you can do this. And oh, hey. Membership members will also get just down their birthday parties.

If you guys haven’t been to a birthday party at one of these trampoline parks, it’s awesome. They do a great job. You have 20 kids jumping.[00:17:00] Jumping like crazy, getting all tired. So when you get ’em home to ready for bed, it’s a, it’s a great idea. And so we put this solution together for the trendline parts.

That was consistent pricing per access point. So again, the pricing for this solution is based on per access point, right? It doesn’t matter if you have Meraki or, or Ruckus or whatever. The deployment’s easy. So Telesystem goes into the works with IT staff logs in to say the Meraki dashboard licenses it per access point.

It’s only a few minutes per access point to do this. Where the real legwork comes in though, is working with the business ownership team, the marketing team, about creating that customer journey and what they’re hoping to achieve. So we worked with that ownership team and said obviously they wanna bring in revenue.

They also wanted to educate parents about their cleaning standards to think that we’re coming out of Covid. They’re worried about parents, worried about, Hey, is this place clean? And obviously talk about all these other. You know, cleaning methods that they had, even including like some misty machines that cleaned down the foam pits, right?

So parents could be, you know, assured of that you know, of their kids being safe. So we had like this, you know, better [00:18:00] engagement, new revenue opportunities and education for their customers that can be consistently adopted throughout all these franchises around the company. And they’re, they’re jumping on it left and right.

You know, when, when opportunity arises, when there’s new construction, Telesystem can also deploy our own wifi. As part of that, but that’s just one solution. And there’s so many use cases where you’re talking about large venues, like casinos that we’ve deployed at other stadiums, like you know, we’re working with that hopefully a major league baseball team here in Philadelphia, but we have other large venues in West Texas where they have rodeos and minor league hockey and arts and FA shows and so forth.

So there’s lots of opportunities there. Another one is co-branding. So imagine you know, that big arena, you know, citizens Bank Park or Toyota. Or Wells Fargo Center, your splash page could be co-branded with that other sponsor. So that can either completely or very drastically reduce the price to that to that customer.

Right? Right. And, you know, a big, big company like Wells Fargo would probably, you know, be happy to [00:19:00] have their brand out there even more. Right. So there’s opportunities there to even defray the cost. Cool.

Josh Lupresto: Good stuff. All right. Good examples. Mm-hmm. Okay. It all sounds great and awesome and easy and everybody needs it.

I want to hear the challenges. What, you know, as, as you get into this and you have these conversations, if partners are, you know, excited about wanting to, to go talk to the customers about these, of the, have you thought of these type things? What are, what are some of the challenges that you face and, and, and how do you talk through that?

Shawn Nace: Sure. The challenges sometimes are most of the time as a. As a service provider, or maybe in your case as a, as a telecom broker, we’re working with IT staff, right? So we’re selling an IT solution and a lot of times the IT guy the IT person doesn’t wanna take on another, another product that’s gonna make their job more difficult.

So getting them to understand, getting the key stakeholders to really understand who this product would benefit is, is certainly one challenge to overcome. And that, I think with this product, it’s kind of easy. We make [00:20:00] sure that, you know, it’s the easy button for it staff. Either we’re taking it on or making the load for them.

Very simple, upfront and only one time. But then it’s just navigating to the right people, the marketing, the business ownership team, social media outreach, customer experience. Patient experience. So it’s navigating to the correct stakeholders. And then two, working through that access journey efficiently.

So they have to have, you know, somewhat of a plan in place like that, you know, like the case study they gave you with the trampoline parks. So what we try to do is, you know, highlight case studies that are in the same business vertical as they, as they’re so, you know, retail, restaurants, hospitality, like hotel chains, those large venues, you know, when you have something that has already been done before and replicated.

Hopefully it’s easier to, you know, to do that for this particular business and maybe tweak it a little bit here or there. Yeah. But making sure that they know the right use case and how to quickly design that solution is important too. Cuz you don’t wanna be spending days or weeks or months even, you know, planning our rollout.

[00:21:00] Right. You wanna start monetizing that right away. So I think those are three, three challenges, but we’ve worked through enough that we I think we know how to navigate that. Yeah,

Josh Lupresto: I think I, you know, part of your, probably your biggest one here is that, you know, there might be some preconceived notions that Yeah.

But my wifi stuff I got right now gives me analytics. You know, obviously that’s true. Wifi gives you analytics. That’s, that’s certainly, but mm-hmm. Not a real easy way to monetize it and, and lock it up and SSO and, and do the things that this do. So that’s cool. Add

Shawn Nace: on. Yeah, exactly. Like Meraki’s a great solution.

We sell Meraki, right? Mm-hmm. You know, we, we love Meraki Meraki wireless access points, the firewalls, the whole nine, and you can gain a little bit of insight. So I can see you know, when an Apple user web, I can see the math addresses, the IP addresses, the, you know, the places that they’re visiting on the web and so forth, right?

So I can get, I can even see where they are if I’ve overlaid a a floor plan on top of that dashboard. But I can’t really gain that same level of activity. I can’t see the. The preponderance of data like now versus female, what they like on social media. [00:22:00] Mm-hmm. You know, how often they’ve been to this particular location, what times of day that they’re coming and so forth.

Although you might be able to see time of day and wifi dashboard too, but it’s just the preponderance of data that is so much easier and it’s say you can schedule these reports to have come to you every day, week or month. You can go into the dashboard to run, you know, hundreds of different reports that just aren’t there.

With wifi technology, and unfortunately a lot of times customers have, you know, ruckus here and Aruba there and Rocky there, and so you’d have three or four different dashboards to log into and figure all this out. This is one pan of glass that can tie everything together for you. Good. Okay.

Josh Lupresto: All right.

So I know we, we mentioned in the beginning there are other services that you guys have. Mm-hmm. We’ve talked about this one, which is more on the, the wifi, the analytics space, but I, I, I look at this in kinda the wireless and iot bucket. Any other offerings there that you guys have that, that you wanna make sure that we get a shout out for?

You know, you mentioned the wifi add-on, you mentioned the wifi itself, but, but anything else you wanna throw out there? [00:23:00]

Shawn Nace: Sure. So we’ve actually just recently rolled out an iot solution a, a true IOT solution using proprietary sensors. And you know, we’ve talked to Chris Whitaker about this and Jason Coffman, who sales engineer in the southeast.

And I think they’re very excited about this too, cuz the adoption rate of iot has been, I’ll say it’s been slower than we of life. Like, you know, when he started selling SD WAN and you guys, it just took off, right? Everybody needed it right away and it was just, So amazing to see that that growth IOT’s been a little bit slower, I’m not gonna lie.

So what we’ve done is kind of create some case studies and how it might benefit certain businesses. So if you’re talking about the restaurant supply chain that we’ve recently deployed, some, you know, temperature centers to and, and so forth, right? We have use cases for manufacturing, maybe healthcare with asset tracking and others that could really create efficiencies and effectiveness to quote Chris you know, for their business.

So it’s really just. Talking to your existing customers. And that’s, that’s the the challenge that I think we have with some of our partners too. A lot of them are kind of headset on, [00:24:00] on selling just certain technologies. They, they, everybody knows UCAS and Bandwidth and SD wan, right? There’s the, that’s the wheelhouse for a lot of them.

The bread and butter. Getting into other things can be a little bit tricky sometimes. So that’s where you engage my team, that’s where you engage Telesis and our sales engineering team, your regional channel manager. We’ll work through those use cases with you. We’ll do a a deep dive into our iot solutions or maybe even cybersecurity and talk to you about security awareness training.

That’s very easy to get into, you know, certain technologies that Telesystem has or disposal and you can really bring in new revenue and yeah.

Josh Lupresto: Good. There’s a lot of depth in that portfolio, certainly. And I think that’s helpful. Cuz I, I always have this phrase of second money is, is easier than first money.

So if you can maximize your spend in an account and, you know, as the customers are trying to consolidate or layoff or whatever, you just, you guys happen to have an answer, an answer, an answer, an answer. So definitely I wanna double down on encouraging everybody to reach out to your channel team and yourself if they haven’t yet.

So good stuff. [00:25:00] Okay. Final couple thoughts here. So, I’m excited. I’m a partner. I want to go talk about this. I wanna go sell it. Maybe I haven’t sold anything with Telesystems before. Maybe I want to go down some of this wifi iot analytics kind of space. I’m a big questions guy. I love giving people questions to just open the conversation, see where the interest is.

What’s your approach there with maybe partners that haven’t ventured down this track? Is it questions? Is it a business conversation? What do you advise them on? Yeah, no,

Shawn Nace: that’s a, that’s a, a great question, Josh. So, you know, what, what are questions that can open the door? When it comes to wifi engagement analytics, it’s, you know, Hey, Mr.

Customer, have you ever thought about monetizing your wifi? Or do you know how you can monetize your wifi? That’s just the way I start that conversation all the time, cuz everybody’s like, what do you mean by that? I have no idea what you’re talking about. I spend, you know, $200 a month on this Meraki solution and, you know, it’s great, but what do you mean to be monetizing it?

So [00:26:00] that’s, that’s the easiest way to start that conversation. I, I think first and foremost And then of course, like, you know, when a customer is, Hey Mr. Customer, what are you? You know, what is your wifi tech technology are, are you looking for any technology refresh? You, things along those lines, cuz you know, as wifi has evolved, you know, a lot of customers have just outgrown it.

Whether they’re, they’re not getting enough throughput, you know, they’ve maxed out the number of users that are supported on a particular access point or technology. Right. So, you know, how old is your wifi technology? Things along those lines. The same way you might go into a solution trying to sell UCaaS.

What type of phone system do you have? What type of wifi technology do you have? If you have, you know, an old liny, you know, an old lysis router hanging off a hanging off your cable modem for a, a retail shop, that might not be the best fit for you now, So, yeah, I think it depends on that, that partner, if you’re an msp you probably can talk about that a little bit easier.

If you’re a traditional kind of telco reseller and bandwidth kind of shop you know, just reach out to us [00:27:00] and we can, we can help you navigate back.

Josh Lupresto: All right. Final thoughts here. So, you know, we’re, we’re talking about a rapidly evolving industry when we talk about wireless and iot and that.

Mm-hmm. Any, if you look out 12 months, 18 months, whatever it might be, any thoughts there that you, you want the partners to be aware of that you’re seeing trends wise, things that are changing? Do we double down on everything that you just mentioned so far and start that talk track or anything else as you look

Shawn Nace: into your crystal ball?

Yeah, no, just that, you know, wifi six is, is really a game changer in, in a lot of ways, and I think I’ve talked about it earlier on, that, you know, just with the, you know, the number of devices that can support the, the greater throughput that’s never existed before. It’s now creating, there’s, it’s now kind of opening up other opportunities for us as service providers to, to help out our customers.

So again, if you, if you recall from earlier I said that WI five six can support the 1.5 gig. Most customers only have one gig switches, so they deploy this really great, fancy new hardware, and then they’re like, wow, I’m only getting, you know, [00:28:00] 900 mega, or whatever the case might be. Well, then you have to take a look at, you know, go into the hood a little bit, look at what else is in their infrastructure.

So it’s just another opportunity for that customer that MSP that partner to sell them, you know, new switches, you know, maybe upgrade the wiring and so forth. So it. It’s a holistic view of technology that can just open up more doors for you. I’d say, you know, it’s wifi six. That’s really evolved quite a bit and it’s gonna continue to evolve as far as that throughput’s concerned.

That’s what’s really exciting for me. And there’s talk of a new spectrum coming out, six gigahertz that I haven’t learned all that it much about yet, but you know, again a lot more to

Josh Lupresto: come. Sweet. Good stuff. All right. Go talk to the customers and I, I, I guarantee if you ask them are you monetizing your wifi?

Not a lot of them are gonna say yes. So would love to see how those conversations go. Good stuff. All right, Shawn, appreciate you coming on, man. That wraps us up for today. Thanks Josh. All right. Have a great day. Okay, everybody, that’s it. Wraps us up. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering Telarus [00:29:00] Shawn Nace, SE Manager at Telesystems.

Until next time, with the Next Level BizTech.