Ep. 139 Beyond the Network: Unveiling Expert Secrets Pt. 1/3 with Graeme Scott
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Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech.
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to a new track this week. We are talking about beyond the network, unveiling expert secrets. On with us today to talk about that is Telarus VP of Advanced Networking and Mobility, returning guest Mr. Graeme Scott. Graeme, welcome on, man.
Yeah, thanks, Josh. This is actually a really big deal for me because I’ve been invited to be on a lot of podcasts, but this is the first time I’ve actually been invited back. So, huge deal for me. You know, I love it. Thank you.
Hey, if you don’t suck, we’ll have you on maybe a third time.
No pressure. Okay.
Yeah, good.
No pressure, though.
So, we had you on earlier this year. We’d just love to kind of kick this off with any new developments, any new projects, anything you’ve been working on that kind of you decided to share with the audience out there, what’s cooking in your world?
Yeah, so it’s funny, you know, the first time I was on, I had really just sort of assumed that Advanced Network mantle, and we sort of touched on that a little bit, but we really didn’t dive into it a whole lot. We spent most of our time talking about IoT, I think, for the most part. You know, that’s a very interesting topic for a lot of folks. So, over the last couple of months since that podcast, a lot of my time has been spent there in the Advanced Network world and starting to sort of dig in there and how can we prepare our tech advisors for what’s coming down the road in that space and what’s happening today, candidly. So, we continue to see a lot of opportunities around some of those IoT things that I talked about. You know, I think I spent quite a bit of time talking about video analytics, and those are, we’ve got some great opportunities that have come in from that, some big deals, really good. We had a great series a few weeks ago about IoT fleet management, and as a result of that, we’ve seen quite a bit that’s coming in. But the one thing that we’re seeing some really nice opportunities come in for that kind of crosses all of those lines is private network. So private LTE, private, you know, DAS, CELFI, those kinds of things are some just monster opportunities coming in in that space.
And they’re big deals, like just really large dollar amounts. And we’ve got a lot of partners that are leaning into that. And we’re seeing some really good opportunities come in across a number of our suppliers. So that, to me, is one of the areas where I think we’re going to continue to see some growth there and some good opportunities. Awesome.
Okay, so if we go back, we unpack, we learned a lot about Graeme on Episode 115. We learned you hail from the great north, something about the dinos in Calgary, your favorite sports team. Go dinos, yeah. Go dinos. You were going to be an investment banker. You were doing this cruise director life, the hottest bingo tables in the Pacific, something like that. And then you kind of went into this tech space, right? And it’s been a great path since then. So first of all, if anybody hasn’t gone down and seen that, go back to Episode 115. Listen to that. But anything else, I mean, share with us anything else that you’ve got that we don’t know about Graeme, kind of that leads into kind of how we got where we’re at.
Yeah, yeah. You know,
as I mentioned at the beginning, Josh, I didn’t think I’d be back on. So I kind of, you know, gave away all my secrets on the first episode and, you know, sort of told everybody all those deep, dark things. But I guess I can just go to some of the basics. You know, I’m a family man. I’ve got three kids, 1917 and 15 on our way to being empty nesters. We’ve had a couple of tastes on that. I got one in college and one on their way. So I know there’s a lot of folks out there that can relate to that. Certainly, you know, not as good clickbait headlines as this guy used to call bingo on the high seas. But that’s really what my life’s more about now is that, you know, making sure you’re taking care of your family and providing for them. And I know that’s definitely something that all of our tech advisors can relate to. You know, we’re all out here just trying to make a living and do it in a fun and entertaining way, which I think we have the blessing to do in this space. Always something interesting happening, always something cool down the pipe. And I think that’s why I love this this industry.
Love it. Love it. All right, let’s let’s go back then, you know, over these last 10, 15 years. I always love to hear people’s nuggets of additional things that you learn, hard lessons that you learn, something from a great mentor. Let’s tap that again of anything in that that you want to share with the audience.
Yeah, I think, you know, the the older you get and the more time you spend in this business, especially in a sales type environment, there’s always one piece of wisdom that I think sticks through you and sticks to you the whole way. And that is this idea of listen more, talk less, you know, and there’s so many different ways people have said it. You know, God gave you two ears and one mouth and you should use them proportionately and all these kinds of cool lines that come with that and sort of communicate that message. And it’s still something that I continue to work on. You know, we do the Ascend events and we have some breakout sessions where we ask people to do prospecting and then discovery. And almost every tech advisor is guilty of trying to jump right to the solution, right? Hey, oh, yeah, no, that sounds great. I got a great little solution for you. And just taking that extra step, asking that extra question, going that extra, you know, that extra mile to just learn a little bit more is so critical to like real success in this business. If you ask people about their business and what’s going on, they will tell you and you know, you just got to let them talk and ask questions. So this idea of listen more and talk less, it’s an oldie but a goodie, but it’s tried and true. And most of the successful people in this industry are really good at that and just listening and drawing out that information from your customers to hear what’s going on.
I love it. I love it. So today we’re talking about, you know, we’re unveiling these these expert secrets, right? We’re trying to think about the network beyond the network, everything that that encompasses. And so I want to set the stage a little bit. If we think about where this space was 10 years ago, I mean, even three years ago, you know, we had had access to a smaller clip of suppliers. But I think if you look at over these last amount of years, how our suppliers have added to their offerings, added more OEMs, there’s almost like this MSP type line card from suppliers that maybe only did this one circuitry based thing before. And so you pair that up with what the data shows and the data shows that customers want some consolidation. So dive into this maybe a little bit why that’s changed, how it’s changed, what that means for partners.
Yeah, no, I think, you know, what you’re referring to is what I call just convergence, you know, and you hear a lot of if you look at the the postings and the news clips from some of the big carriers out there, they’re talking about this a lot too, right? You know, traditionally, we would look at mobility, wireless, fiber, coax, broadband, all of these different solutions as different things. But in reality, it’s all the same, right? It’s all connectivity. And I think there’s this change happening in the industry where we’re looking at it that way, right? Hey, look, it’s all just connectivity. It’s just a different method of connecting, but it’s all the same stuff. So, you know, you look at I think of the last session, I talked a lot about how wireless and this idea that anything that can go mobile will go mobile. Well, look at what’s going on in the case with the cable companies in the second quarter of last year of this year, 54 percent of new mobile ads came from cable carriers, Comcast, Spectrum, Altis. They have jumped fully into the wireless space, even though they’re the folks we think of traditionally as network providers, right? So this idea of convergence and hey, it’s not just what you’re over there doing wireless and you’re over there doing mobility and we’re here doing fiber or we’re here doing Ethernet or whatever medium you’re using. It’s this idea that, hey, look, it’s all under the same umbrella and it’s all connectivity. And to your point earlier, that’s how customers want to buy. They do not want to be buying from 95 different folks and have 95 different bills for their services stack. They want to be able to go to one or two or maybe three providers to get all that stuff. And I think the big carriers have figured that out and they’ve done a really good job of getting all of these services onto their paper. I mean, obviously, Verizon and AT&T have been doing that from the beginning. But the cable codes in particular are doing that. Companies like Lumen are offering wireless backup and those types of solutions. So I think this idea of convergence is a real one that we’re seeing. And even further into other services like MSP type services, Comcast is starting to add technician services as part of their stack. Granted, it’s doing the same, right? Where you can actually book technicians through their platforms. So we’re seeing this convergence of all of these things coming together. And what’s driving it is just the way customers want to buy. And I think we’re starting to see that.
Yeah, you know, you bring up a good point of just this idea of expanded offerings and there’ll be an episode coming up after this where we really just pick one. We just dive in with one. And I think that’s going to be even mind blowing to people to go, oh, my gosh, I had no idea that they did all of those things. And so I’d encourage everybody to go do the same with the others that you just mentioned. There’s so many things that have changed in the last couple of years from expanding those offerings. There’s a lot there. There’s a lot of product to unpack.
Taking all of these things and putting it on one platform, right? And one interface. Customers want visibility. They want it all at their finger, finger tips, single pane of glass. Right. We’ve heard that so many times in so many different iterations, but that’s that’s what everybody’s driving towards. And I think we’re starting to see it finally. And it’s bringing in products and services that we traditionally didn’t think of working well together.
So the next part I want to pull out just kind of some pro tips, right? Secrets, pro tips, best practices. We’re going to talk about a couple of those here. So in in Graeme’s Infinite Wisdom, what’s the first pro tip or secret that you’ve seen a partner do? Maybe this is discovery strategy. Maybe it’s mid deal. Maybe it’s closing strategy. Let’s kick this off with what’s the first one you recommend.
Yeah, you know, this is one that I learned way back and I’ve seen some partners really use this artfully in their conversations. And I’ve actually started even talking about it in my Ascend events. But it’s this idea that businesses really only care about two things, making money and saving money. So if your pitch, if what you’re talking about, your solution doesn’t somehow point to one of those two things, you’re kind of wasting time. Right. You’re missing part of the audience. Now, sometimes the customer will take the leap themselves, right, and do that. But the partners, tech advisors that really get that connection. Hey, how does this solution help you make money or save money and incorporate that into their pitch? And as you know, when they present what’s going on, those are the ones that really have those very high success rates and are in those large enterprise style accounts. Those are the ones that do it because that’s the language that businesses speak. Right. How does it make me money? How does it save me money? And so we think, you know, in terms of business problems and all of those need a tie back to those two things. Right. And I think the partners and the tech advisors that get that really are the ones that seem to be the most successful based on what I’ve seen. And it’s actually fairly, fairly incredible how some of them will bring it to that during conversations with them. And you can just tell that it’s something that they’ve been rehearsing and practicing and thought through in some level of detail to really drive to that point. Got a lot of cool stuff in our industry and there’s a lot of cool features and bells and whistles. And, you know, a lot of people love to dive into the tech and really get in there. The end of the day, businesses care about two things, making money and saving money. And if all that stuff doesn’t drive to one of those two points,
you know, it’s it’s kind of leaving them wanting.
Yeah, it’s a good point. I mean, I love that. I love that simplicity of that idea. I mean, even if you think about, OK, well, they want to improve their CSAT, so they want to get better at customer service. So they need better responses from their customers or better customer feedback. I mean, at the end of the day, if they execute on that with whatever technology solution that makes the customer more money. So your point is valid for sure. Yeah, I love that. And I think I think sometimes that’s just assumed. I don’t know that it’s always brought to light. So your idea of bring it to light, connect the dots of how this solution does that. Are we solving a problem that does that? Great point there. I love that.
Yeah, I mean, I think you’re right. It’s it’s it’s just taking that extra step in connecting the dots for the for the customer. You know, we assume that they go and kind of do that on their own. Hey, how does this make sense for my business? You know, but if we actually do that for them, I think that just makes the presentation so much more powerful. And the tech advisors that do that well are usually the ones that you see up at the stage when we’re doing those those awards every year. So I think that that that to me is a big differentiator between the folks that are successful and the folks that are.
All right. We’re going to come back to this idea of secrets. See if we can squeeze you for one more here in just a minute. But before we do that, I would love to hear just, you know, I always want to go into an example. Any any customer examples that you’ve seen in deals where, you know, any of the providers were brought in. And maybe the idea was I’m only going to use that provider for this. That’s all that I need them for. And then all of a sudden, so much more kind of gets uncovered or other services get layered in. And I just maybe how that that that seems to change perspective. Right. You know, the butterfly effect for next time. Any any any thoughts there?
Yeah, no, I think I’m going to go back to the point that I brought up earlier about this idea of convergence. Right. It’s kind of the same thing. So we did a hit series on this a couple of, you know, probably close to the beginning of the year with our good friends at Comcast. And this was actually one of the largest deals ever sold in the channel. And it started out with a retail multi location retail deal where you had we’re looking at basically just connectivity. You know, that’s all that they were doing, just connecting things. And so as they started digging in, you know, the the partner started adding, you know, asking questions and doing things. Well, you know, we have issues with our with our, you know, stores when they go down and the store manager having to do that. Well, what if we built in some technician truck rolls into the into the structure? You know, yeah, great. Can we do that? Sure. So now you’ve got a partner that’s getting paid on technician truck rolls, answering a demand of the of the customer. What if we start layering in services like firewalls and, you know, sassy platforms and all of these different things? So, you know, you look at that and go, OK, we’re going to move you up the stack and all of these different things. Again, customers want to buy from a single provider with a single platform. So through all the discussion, you ended up finally with a deal that started at X, right? And the numbers were still pretty good. I think most tech advisors would have been happy just taking that network deal and riding off into the sunset. But this partner, by asking a few additional questions, all right, well, when when there’s connectivity at the store, you know, what happens if there’s an outage? You know, do you guys have a redundant connection? Now we could use one of the great let’s drop in a wireless backup or let’s do fiber and coax. And now let’s well, how you guys, you know, having those two fail over one of them are great. OK, let’s do this one. Now let’s drop in Estee, when and then let’s bundle it with sassy and then let’s add this. And then, oh, by the way, what if they’re finally none of that stuff works and we need to roll a truck? Well, gosh, you know, we don’t want our managers doing that. Let’s go ahead and layer that in as well. So now all of a sudden you’ve got your deal that’s gone from here to here, all with the same carrier, you know, and most of the carriers now, whether you talk about Comcast, who that example was, Granite, Looman, all of these guys are happy to explore that they want as much of the customer as they can have. And one of the reasons those companies are as big as they are is because they deal with a lot of large enterprise that have all of those needs. So in most cases, they’re set up to do it and to do it well. And I think our partners just need to ask those extra questions and see if they can go down, you know, go down that road.
And sometimes I know that, you know, our tech advisors want to bring in other carriers and other solutions along with those. And that’s fine, too. But you really have to be aware, again, of how customers want to buy.
And they want to buy as much as they can through a single vendor. That is clear. I think the numbers are like 86 percent want to buy through a single vendor. So, you know, I think you’re going to have to see more and more and more of that. And there’s some really key suppliers in the portfolio that are doing that well. Awesome.
All right. Let’s let’s pull back the secrets thing here, man. There’s got to be something else in there. There’s got to be a second one. Final best kept secret pro tip. I read it in a book and I’ve applied it. I saw a partner applying it. Whatever it is. Anything you want to final thought there you want to share as we wrap up the secret idea?
Yeah, you know, it’s I’m actually going to with this last secret, I’m actually going to pull in the nuggets from my previous two secrets and bring it all together. So I was on a call with a tech advisor. This was several, several months ago. And, you know, most tech advisors, when there’s a conversation around connectivity and all that kind of stuff, they talk about the medium. Maybe it’s fiber coax, all that stuff. What’s good? You know, what what medium we’re going to put in there. Hey, we’ve got a fiber circuit. We want to upgrade it. We’ve got this. We want to upgrade it. They kind of stay at that level of just the medium. But what this tech advisor did is he said, well, tell me about all the things that are connecting to the network. Right. Not just the medium, like bypass the medium. What’s the medium there to service? OK, so you’ve got a fiber connection there. But what’s it there for? What what devices are connecting to it? And this happened to be a hospital.
And so within that hospital, if you know, there’s all kinds of things that are connecting in a hospital environment now. Right. So you’ve got, you know, doctors, obviously, you’ve got nurses, all the things that should be obvious. But now you’ve got, of course, patients coming in. Right. And they want to connect. So we need to somehow meet their needs, whether we provide them with Wi-Fi or whatever. You’ve got visitors coming in. They have the same needs. Well, then also you’ve also got equipment. You’ve got beds. You’ve got machines. You’ve got all of these different things that are connecting. And it’s no longer good enough to just say, all right, well, we’re going to bring in a fiber pipe and we’re going to put up a Wi-Fi hotspot. We’re good. Right. No. So this partner really did a good job by sort of asking that question. OK, well, what what what what are all the things that are connecting within that environment? And what it did is it converted that fiber opportunity. And, you know, we’re looking at a couple of fibers and multi-site into a private network opportunity. Right. Which essentially jumped the cost on that significantly. And I think just really, really well done by the partner, just asking those questions like getting right to the basics of, hey, like, what are we using this connection for? What what are all the things that need to be connected here? And are we meeting the needs of each one of those things? And I think that that is a conversation that a lot of people are going to be having as we move forward, because the reality is there are more and more things connecting to the network now. Some of them have different protocols, some of them have different needs. And all of that needs to be addressed when we build these networks out.
But let’s let’s shift this just a little bit here, a little little sprinkle of of A.I. Right. Because we know this is coming down this this path of some of the things that we talked about. Any any thought there that you want to drop in? I mean, you’ve got a lot of great education sessions coming up to talk about how to consider these, how to talk about these, how to uncover these advanced networking opportunities. But but when you’re talking with with prospects and customers about this, anything you want partners to to kind of gleam on, move towards, stay away from, focus less on more on, you know, that kind of thing as regards to the A.I. angle on this.
Yeah.
You know, this is no by no means my idea. But I think when we talk about A.I., I mean, it’s it’s everywhere, right? It’s it’s all over the place. Everybody’s talking about A.I. I saw great meme the other day and it was the old, you know, sell me this pen exercise. And the guy’s answer was it has A.I. Right. So it’s like that’s that’s kind of the answer now for everything. Well, it’s got A.I. So we got to buy it. I think there’s certainly a lot of applications within my technology swim lanes that are A.I. enabled and using A.I. And, you know, it IOT in particular, right. I talked a lot about video analytics. But the reality is just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Right. And I think a lot of businesses really kind of get, you know, somebody from on high said, hey, we need A.I. All right. Great. So they go out and they run and try and find it. And I know a lot of our tech advisors are happy to take those calls. But if we really want to look at how it truly impacts the business, again, we need to drive back to those two things, making money and saving money. And where A.I. is going to be truly effective is where you have some kind of bottleneck within the business where there’s a resource constraint and A.I. can address that. And I think, you know, those are the kind of things we really want to look for when we’re having those conversations with our partners. This, you know, this bottleneck, like where are we going to maximize the impact of what we’re doing? Where are we going to maximize the value? And this actually goes back to, you know, the Japanese car industry. Right. Why were they so much more efficient and effective than the U.S. manufacturers? They were spending less cranking out better cars. It’s all about where they were using those resources and where they were plugging things into the into the overall ecosystem. And I think we really need to think about A.I. the same way. Just because we can add A.I. here doesn’t mean it’s really going to have the impact we want. And you see some of these stories of businesses that are applying this and just seeing huge benefit, massive returns on their dollar. Look for that bottleneck. Look for that constraint of resources within your customers and then say, hey, is there something we can apply there? From the A.I. space that can ease that ease that, you know, that bottleneck. And that’s where you’re going to really create value for your customers.
Awesome. Final couple of thoughts here. So you’ve got again, I would encourage anybody, you know, one, if they if they haven’t been on Telerius University, there’s a lot of great content on there. But you’ve got some great events throughout the year. You know, my question is, hey, obviously, I want people to go to those and kind of get to know you and get to know the practice more. But advice for those looking to go deeper is it go to the events or, you know, where would you want them to kind of stay in tune with some of the technology areas that we’ve talked about today?
Yeah, I mean, if you’ve got an opportunity to go to one of our send events, I mean, we’re really ramping up the ascend events, at least as it relates to my practice through the end of the year here. I think I’ve got about eight or nine that we’ve got. We just had one last week. We’ve got one next week. So we’ve got a lot coming up and they’re coming soon to a market near you. We’ve also got the A.I. and Tech Summit coming up, which I think are going to be very well attended and very popular. And we’ll be talking about some of these things there. If you haven’t checked out the hit, check the hit. Those things are good. We do one every week and it’s always a really good nugget. There’s a lot of tech advisors that get a ton of value and we always generate opportunities. You know, I referenced IOT fleet management at the beginning of the session. A lot of those leads came out of people who tuned into that hit. We’re like, you know, I’ve got a customer that has some cars on the road. Let me ask them. And sure enough, there’s an opportunity there. So, yeah, there’s a ton of those things to plug in. The one last piece of advice, though, I will give, and I think this sort of transcends all the swim lanes,
is try and get out of the I.T. department of your customer, right? You know, so many of our our partners, our tech advisors are, I think, single threaded within their customers where they’ve got, you know, by and large, the majority of their relationships are tied to a single I.T. manager or I.T. personnel.
Try to get outside of that that department, whether it be, you know, to logistics, finance, marketing, as we continue to evolve with these technologies. And I mentioned A.I. and bottlenecks in the business. I.T. is often the person they come to when there’s already a problem in place or there’s already a solution that’s been chosen. And they just need their help to implement it. So a lot of times, but when it gets on the I.T.’s desk, it’s already been decided and it’s already moved. And so many of these solutions touch on these other areas of the business. Really need to understand what’s going on within the business as a whole and try and get out of that sort of single threaded mentality.
You know, almost all the time when you hear a partner say, yeah, my customer just signed this big deal to do X, Y, Z. And I missed out on it because the marketing guy was the one who did it, not the I.T. manager. And you hear that a lot. So that’s the one piece of advice that I would give to tech advisors out there is do what you can. And I mean, especially in the I.T. space, C.X. is another one. A lot of that stuff’s made by marketing, right?
I think that’s it. That’s a great takeaway for, you know, all of our techs and minds.
All right. Final thoughts. The future. So the next couple of years, what are just some of the innovations you’re most looking forward to? And then on the flip side of that, does it, should it change the focus at all?
So in the network space, I think you’re going to continue to see the evolution of this as a service mentality, right? We’ve seen it in other industries. So this shouldn’t surprise us. But network as a service, you know, everything moving from CapEx to OpEx.
You know, again, we talked about the the main big carriers bringing on things like, you know, SASE and SD-WAN and all that. They’re doing all that on a monthly basis. Customers do not want to go out, spend a lot of money on equipment anymore. They just don’t want to do that. Things are evolving so quickly that they want to be able to get all that stuff on a subscription based model as they can. And it’s even trickling down to their connections. You know, network as a service is a big thing we’re starting to see come up. So you’re going to see that happen a lot. And then again, I’m going to go back to my previous point. So many of these innovations that are coming are touching on other areas of the business. Make sure that you know who those people are and those key decision. Know what’s going on within your customers and understand how they make money. Right. Because if you understand how they make money, then you can understand how they save money and you understand the things that are going to sort of drive their decisions.
So that, to me, are some of the big things that are going on. We’re going to continue to see, you know, as a service, we’re going to continue to see things driven to the cloud, especially in the SD-WAN space. It’s already there, you know, and we’re seeing a lot of that.
And, you know, I’m curious to see really how AI is going to impact that network space. We’ve seen some glimmers, but not nothing that’s kind of jumped up and grabbed this, grabbed our attention yet.
So we’ll see. Yeah, I think that a lot of that remains to be seen. And we’re doing our best to try and stay on top of that for people so that we can let them know.
Awesome. Love it, man.
Graeme, that wraps us up, buddy. Appreciate you coming back on. Thanks so much, man. Always, man.
Hopefully I get back for a third. That would be unprecedented for me.
We’ll submit the request to the board and we will get back to you on that. We’ll see. No, good stuff. Hey, everybody, as always, don’t forget, wherever you’re coming in, listening to us from Apple Music, Spotify, Go Follow, these things drop every Wednesday so you can get that info before anybody else does. That wraps us up for this week. Graeme Scott, VP of Advanced Networking and Mobility at Telarus. This has been Beyond the Network, unveiling expert secrets. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering.
Next Level BizTech has been a production of Telarus Studio 19. Please visit Telarus.com for more information.