Ep.150- Looking Back at a Year of Impactful Episodes
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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. It is 2025.
Believe it or not, we are on to episode 150. Crazy to think that we’ve been cranking these things out,
and that we’re getting great feedback. Lots of value from the partners, lots of great content. And today we got something special for you, a little something different queued up. So we have got our 2024 year end special recap. So in this episode, we’re going to take a comprehensive look back, we’re going to go back to these most impactful trends and innovations that shaped the year. We’re going to look back at some of the latest innovations in cloud. And I think also you’ll see how we explored some cutting edge cybersecurity measures. And of course, why not the transformative power of AI across all these different domains, right? And even, you know, customer experience. So we will revisit a little bit IoT, a little bit of mobility, advanced networking sprinkled in there. But I think the common theme that you’ll see is that, you know, you’re going to get some shared invaluable sales tips, some little tricks that’ll help you stay on top of the game. So join us as we reflect back on the highlights of 2024 and gear up for a more exciting, innovative 2025. But from me to you, thank you for all the listens every week, all the subscribers. And if you get suggestions and tips and things that you want to hear, let us know. With that, on to the episode.
So let’s, let’s jump into that then let’s, let’s go into an example. So, so walk me through a deal you got into managed security, managed connectivity, and just maybe talk to me about what was the business problem and the tech stack before and then what did it all kind of look like after?
These are fun questions, by the way, because I could give you 30 different stories. I mean, I could probably give you a couple hundred stories. But the one that we decided that I was going to talk about today was a Fortune 200 client who came to us with a absolute hodgepodge of different internet connectivity vendors, primary, secondary, tertiary,
hodgepodge of point of sale POS, hodgepodge of Wi Fi stuff in their stores,
hodgepodge of different pieces of hardware in all their stores. The project had started and stopped two separate times. They came to us with the thought of this is the third time we’re trying this, we need this to work. There’s visibility at the very top. There’s visibility with our franchisees.
We need this to work this time. And so when you think about lessons learned of kind of what I shared earlier, we knew without a doubt that we were going to be able to add value in this conversation.
When we got involved, there were about I think eight or 10 different vendors that they had kind of thought about gathering bids from. Interestingly enough, shout out to Comcast, who ended up winning the project.
But when we got involved, I said, Hey, why are these few vendors not on your list?
Comcast was one of them. And it’s interesting, because you’re sitting in a room with with 10 or 12 people that are very confident that they already know what they’re doing. A couple of them, you can feel like, you know, they’re wondering, why is tier four here? Who are these guys, right? So I’m sitting at the table, and I say, why is vendor A, B and C not on this list and no, you know, in no particular order, but Comcast again, was one of them. And they said, well, we didn’t think about them or whatever their excuse was.
Funny to fast forward a few months down the road, Comcast ends up winning the deal as the vendor to provide all those services. So again, telecom aggregation, services, aggregation, strategic sourcing,
even enterprise architecture, strategy and planning, all things that we brought to the table in that conversation,
did a phenomenal job.
If I’m, you know, if I’m a partner, I’m listening, I want to dive a little bit deeper into managed security, managed cloud, you know, data center, things like that. What would you advise the other partners out there, maybe just some of your favorite discovery questions to, to kind of open up that talk track a little more?
So you’re asking for my secret sauce here at Tier Four Advisors.
Like your least favorite ones.
I’m gonna assume that some of my frenemies are listening to this.
No, so, you know, we haven’t really talked much about security, but huge opportunity, I don’t know what the numbers are, but I think it’s fair to say hundreds of thousands, maybe even billions of people out there, kind of like we have a pilot shortage and a nurse shortage. You have an IT security and compliance shortage right now, probably worldwide.
Again, if you’re not having those conversations with your clients, someone else is right.
Just because you helped them with a DIA circuit a year or five ago, doesn’t mean that that client’s always going to knock on your door to come out and find a new MSSP. So security from a channel perspective, I would still put as blue waters. If someone wanted to use the analogy of red waters as connectivity at this point, fairly saturated. But I would be peeling the onion back, you know, I’d be asking people what their, what their challenges are, finding and retaining talent.
You know, have they had a security event in the last year or five?
And if they have, chances are they still have nightmares at night from that experience.
But just peeling the onion back, be a good question asker.
Don’t be the the partner that’s, you know, spending 10 minutes selling your product and 50 minutes buying it back. You know, ask a lot of questions and listen.
A lot of opportunity out there for sure.
Yeah, I think the thing that I’ve seen in this is that sometimes we have so much to offer, right in this community, the customers just don’t know, right. And so they might have a go to market motion that they’ve already used for all these other services. And sometimes it’s just an awareness of, Oh, I’m how many times have we heard that? I didn’t know you could do that. I didn’t know you could do that. Right. I’ve heard that, that conversation a lot because there’s, you know, hundreds of suppliers. There’s so many different OEMs within those suppliers and the list is long.
That’s right. 100%. And again, I mean, if you’re not an expert personally in certain things, at least be good enough at asking questions and saying something to the effect of that sounds great. On our next call, I’m gonna have Josh Lupresto, one of my partners on the call and we’ll dig a little bit deeper in there or something like that.
Let’s fast forward. So your role here for anybody that doesn’t know and didn’t watch any of those previous episodes, VP of security at Telerus. So what that means, you’re in charge of strategy. And there’s a lot that goes into that. So if we just look out here as we’re, we’re looking at 2024, what is your read on how the businesses will look at security in 2024? What changes? What’s different?
Yeah, there’s a lot of different opinions on where security is going to go. The most interesting thing though, is there’s still not enough good qualified security people out there. So you’re seeing this massive undertaking of outsourcing. 40% of board of directors are actually going to have a cybersecurity committee advising them. So when in the past where you didn’t get the budget to approve for certain types of cyber, you know, now it’s going to be there, you know, you’re still going to see organizations look to add a lot of layers of security, but they’re going to have to look at it differently. You need layers of security with the tech, and then you need to figure out kind of what I did with doing more with less people. So you need to really diversify your team and put more layers in with the people that you have. And sometimes you need to outsource. We’re seeing a lot of CIOs and even chief security officers ask if they can get help and bring in resources to advise them. I think we’re going to see a big uptick on data privacy and risk because there’s a lot of organizations that are in the news recently, even some big casinos that spend a ton of money on cybersecurity and that they were still compromised. So how do you limit your risk and still make sure that you have all those things in place? Identity and access management, I think is going to be a huge focus for us. Security awareness training, because two of those breaches were actually caused by someone finding credentials and then calling into support and getting people to do it.
Right. It’s still crazy. It’s going to always come back to, there’s such a great message here. The message is don’t be intimidated. And I’m trying not to jump ahead. You’ve got some great things, tips for the partners, but the overall message in this is don’t be intimidated by any customer that you talk to. It doesn’t matter. None of them are doing enough and they’ll know it, but they need help uncovering where they need some of that assistance, right? And how you can help them.
You nailed it. So I spoke to a CIO recently. He was a $9 billion company. He had 15 people on his IT staff and I had a business conversation with him. I just talked to him a little bit about what are your challenges? What are your resources really good at? What do they struggle with? And that business conversation really led into him opening up. So I think that people overthink it sometimes. We’re going to see this rise of AI and what does artificial intelligence look like? And we have early adopters, but yet we don’t know what that’s going to look like from a security standpoint. We saw cloud 10, 15 years ago, everyone wanted to put their stuff in the data center and virtualize. Nobody thought about how security was going to play a role. Now security is one of those conversations and we’re seeing cloud and security really overlap.
And I think you’re going to see that with CX of being the early adopter of AI, IOT and OT, internet of things and people moving towards everything, having an IP address. And how do you manage that? And again, still with less people because CFO is not giving you budget for headcount. So you got to do it with tech.
So let’s dive into one of these examples. Give us a scenario where you got brought in, what you were told, the problem, the issue, whatever the situation was. And then ultimately, what did that end out? What did it solve? What did it do for the customer that was different from what they started at?
Yeah, one of the examples I think really I love to talk about and I’ve mentioned it a couple of times already is physical security. So protecting the physical environment is something that has become more and more of an issue for businesses, government, and even of course personal residences as well. So securing that environment. And the fact of the matter is that we just cannot be everywhere at once and watch everything at once. Well, as it turns out, we kind of can now, right? And so we had a school system that we’ve been working with in one of the largest school systems in the country. And they had, you know, issues at their schools, they’ve got kids vaping, they’ve got, you know, they want to make sure they know when there’s weapons coming on site, they’ve got all of these problems, maintaining control of the environment of their schools. So they were struggling with, hey, we just cannot staff enough people to keep an eye on this. Like we do not have that kind of a budget. Even if we did, there’s not that many people out there to do this. There’s so many areas to cover. So now the one thing they did have is they had security cameras, right? And they had a budget for security cameras, but they did not have somebody to sit in front of them all day. They just did not have those resources. So fortunately, you know, AI is a great thing. And that sort of user interface, we have a solution that can sit over the top and bring in those camera feeds and tell you whatever you want to be told about that information. So many of them will provide the cameras if you need them. But most of them will work with the existing camera infrastructure as long as their IP cameras. So we put this in front of the school and we said, okay, well, what do you guys want to know? What do you guys want to see? Okay, well, we want to see if there is a congregation of kids in an area. Because usually if you get you know, five to 10 kids congregating in area, they’re up to no good. And I was one of those kids at one point in time. So I certainly can attest to that. So we want to know we want to be alerted if there’s a bunch of kids congregating in an area. Great, no problem. You get this AI box that sits there, watching those cameras 24 seven, seven days a week all the time. And when there’s five kids that send in there five or more kids in that area, sends an alert to a resource officer that says, hey, a bunch of kids congregating in this hallway, go check it out. Vape detection is another thing, right? Those AI boxes can bring in vape detection from a from a restroom or whatever. Obviously, you can’t put cameras in there. So there’s other things you got to do. Weapon detection, if somebody comes on to the property with a weapon, we want to know we want to be able to detect it. So the school had all these use cases, certain things they wanted to look for. And we were able to put them in front of one of our suppliers. In this case, it was Clara. And they did a really good job of working with the school and saying, Hey, what do you guys want to know? What what do you guys not care about? They had a very defined list of use cases. And we put that together. And they loved it. And we saw that we’ve got, you know, a number of other school districts that are looking at it for the exact same reason. So that I think is a really, really cool concept. And what I love about that, it’s universal, right? Every business needs it. There are no businesses that don’t that don’t have an interest in keeping track of their physical environment. So one of the IoT solutions that can apply to any any industry vertical, I think that’s great.
Customer service. I mean, you know, innately, right, this hits your bucket.
Coming into the CX spaces, you’ve seen CX productization grow, you’ve seen other providers come into the space, you’ve seen existing suppliers kind of bolt on other technologies. But what do you see in here? And point number two, AI with regard to customer service.
I think it’s going to be a very interesting 24 to 36 months, because Gen A I agents are becoming a thing. And so are autonomous agents as far as being able to go and execute different tasks and things like that. If you ask me personally, I mean, this is just Jason saying this, Josh, it’s not I’m not a scientist, I’m not someone that’s going to try and read the future, but it’s going to have a major effect on customer service in that the lines will be blurred, things are getting so good now that people can’t tell that they’re talking to a machine.
The voices are so good, the lack of latency is there. The ability for the machine to riff or to do things off the cuff is drastically increased. And so in text based communication, it’s really hard to tell if you’re talking to a human being or a machine right now, voice is getting there. And the thing that we need to remember is that if we have these autonomous agents that can execute and do everything on a computer that an agent can do, well, what makes it that you’re not having the AI do all of the things because AIs don’t get sick, they don’t take vacation, they don’t have bad days, they’re not cranky in the morning, you know, all of these different things, AIs are going to be very consistent. And so who knows? I mean, it’s quite possible that seat counts for CCAST platforms may go through some sort of a net reduction rather than a continued increase, like we’ve seen happening. It’s going to transform customer service in a lot, a lot of different ways, mostly in the way that companies interact with their customers through this technology, not just having it as an assistive technology.
Talk to me about, you know, I think we saw this early on manifest itself in CX, right? Cool things started to get bolted on to CX products, new CX suppliers started to come into the space, what we saw that in sentiment analysis, tonal analysis, you know, next agent recommendation, things like that.
Where else do you see that? I mean, obviously, it’s huge in the CX, but maybe help us understand for the partners listening out there.
Where else do you see that exhibit in current offerings of suppliers?
Well, I mean, it’s prominently in the CX space. I think that’s probably, as you mentioned, kind of the place where it’s the most productizable, it’s the easiest to sell, it’s the easiest to recognize. But, you know, generative AI, one of the things that’s great about generative AI is that it’s able to recognize patterns. And people have figured out that it can recognize patterns. And so using these MLDL or machine learning, deep learning instances that are built around generative AI algorithms, you can use those for a variety of other features, instead of just, you know, graphics generation or text generation. And so it’s driving innovations and things that require pattern recognition, like physical security. I mean, it would be really neat to have AI engines that could recognize someone just based on the way that they move, not necessarily having to do facial recognition, but maybe the way that they walk, the gestures that they make, and so forth. And that’s out there. And in physical security, we have firms that are in the teller’s line card that sell these systems that can do person recognition, not facial recognition, person recognition. And how do you apply that? Well, let’s look for people that are in the back storage room. And if they’re not a known employee, why are they there? Are they there to steal something? Are they there to cause damage? Are they there for some of the sort of nefarious activity? That’s a big deal.
You know, pattern recognition, at least as far as traffic is concerned and retail is a really big thing. And so yeah, that whole physical physical security or physical observation of people and patterns in presence and patterns in behavior is really a big thing. And then in cybersecurity, that is kind of morphing into an extension of that type of behavior. You know, one of the providers that we have in our line card now is basically all about biometric authentication of individuals without using a fingerprint or a password or a face print. We’re talking about, you know, biomechanical or kinetic, if you will, authentication of who individuals are based on things like the words they use when they type or how they type, you know, how fast they type certain keys, different things like their position relative to other objects that they’re integrated to via Bluetooth. I mean, it’s really interesting to see how this stuff is happening. And this pattern recognition is kind of morphing itself into doing a lot of things that we as humans do so so incredibly well, right? This is what makes us different from a lot of different animals is that we can recognize patterns and we can act on the things that we recognize much more rapidly and much more effectively.
I mean, anything to dive deeper on that just a second before we start talking a little bit about kind of AI and CX. Anything as you kind of talk to these customers and you do some of these engagements that helps you guys stand out from the competition?
I would say where Lucidity is our strength is really the dedication to making sure we’re grabbing those customer requirements. We dive deep, we stay sticky.
And it’s really it becomes a collaborative decision making process with the customer very much included from the very beginning until the end of the design and then making sure that we can continue to partner with them in other areas of our business.
Love it.
Let’s talk about lessons learned here. One of my favorite things I never thought this was definitely not an interest of mine in high school or in college, but history. And so I’d like to learn current leaders, learn from previous leaders, learn from Julius Caesar. I mean, it goes back and back and back. So if you just look back, let’s look back five years, 10 years, 15 years, some of those key lessons that you’ve kind of brought with you into this role now.
Absolutely. So I would say anytime I think about gathering requirements for a customer, I always know basic phone usage, ACD routing, reports, recording, those all come into play. I think a very, very important lesson I learned, I showed up on site, I delivered agent training, I reported back to my boss at the end of the day, and I said, Hey, everything went great. I’ll be back on site tomorrow to deliver supervisor training, showed up the next day, and you take supervisors who’ve been on a solution, even just for a year. They know the reports they run every day, they know exactly how to conduct their business, the performance management and how to manage their team.
We trained them on the reports, we started training them, they had attended the agent training the previous day, so they felt really comfortable. But today we’re training them on how to do their job every day as a supervisor. And report data can be similar. But sometimes when you start talking about naming convention, and I was pulling this report yesterday, and now I’m pulling a different report in a different solution, and the data elements don’t match up, and I can’t customize my data, I’m exporting it into pivot tables, it’s just not working for me. So I saw great stress. And it was a challenge. So from that day forward, I always when it comes to gathering requirements, during the discovery phase, I will ask for the reports that those supervisors are running today, currently, and then I send those to the providers or the solution suppliers that they’re considering, so that we can do a match so that when that supervisor walks into that office, the day they transition, they already know the reports they’re going to run and they’re set up for success. So that was a very huge lesson, and challenging for sure. But it stayed with me.
Yeah, and they feel like they they were, she listened, oh my gosh, they understand us, they got our requirements, because I think customers are sometimes so used to, I’m going to have to repeat this a lot of times to the vendors, but when they see the solution actually gets built, right, that’s a smooth process because of your efforts, which they, you know, keeps them coming back, right?
Well, and we really start, in my opinion, your transformation starts or your onboarding really starts the day you decide to consider a new solution for your, your customer base, your internal customer base, your teams, you need to get them excited. At that point, they really should be involved in the entire process versus coming in, oh, hey, guys, we changed their new solution today.
So let’s talk about for, you know, for partners listening to this, we get a lot of feedback from partners of, hey, you know, I’m selling in CCAS, but I haven’t ventured into cloud or vice versa. So let’s talk about for these partners that are, maybe haven’t ventured into cloud yet, practical advice, anything you’d help them to start that meaningful conversation and develop some of those opportunities?
Yes, that’s the whole reason I exist right now.
It’s kind of a tricky conversation. I mean, there’s the, I mentioned it before, it kind of depends on their willingness not only to try it, but at what level, right? So we can go a lot of different ways. You can try the, you know, opportunistic route where it’s just the more transactional, Widgety products like your M365 backups, it’s pretty, you know, simply priced. I would say that there’s probably universal need for it, but it is a super competitive space. So I would say, you know, qualify it and win or lose it very, very quickly, because it’s not worth spending a ton of time on, but it could potentially be adorable, right?
I really think the more you can understand and going back to the AI conversation, right? Same, same idea, better understanding what your customers’
IT projects are throughout the year, you’re going to hear a lot of buzzwords around immutability, cyber resilience.
You don’t even necessarily have to know what those means, but something to listen for as you’re doing like a business review with your clients or kind of walking through, you know, what their priorities are for the year. Because the more you understand that, the more opportunities you’re going to have. And even if you’re, I mean, let your customers educate you on what’s important to them as the best way to kind of learn how to shoot the gap and then engage resources, right? It’s not always easy to do. You guys obviously have a lot of engineering resources in house that can help with those conversations. But I would even say, you know, you don’t necessarily have to walk into a business review trying to sell something more than just trying to understand what’s important and what they’re prioritizing, and then figuring out how to kind of back in or pull those conversations through. That makes sense.