Ep.155- Beyond IT- The secret sauce in managed services for cloud and security with Koby Phillips
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Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success 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. We are on here kicking off some early 2025 sessions, talking about Cloud or talking about security. Specifically, today’s title track is Beyond IT, the secret sauce in managed services for Cloud and Security. On with us today to share some of that secret sauce back again, returning guests. I don’t know, man, is this three or four? Koby Phillips, VP of Cloud at Telarus.
Last time I was on, I got to host.
Yeah, it’s a good time. Of course, you were my guest, so it’s a guy hosting engagement, but thanks for having me back.
Always good to be here.
Love it.
Let’s talk about, you’ve done a great job evolving and growing the Cloud practice. Thinking about since the last visit, how do you feel some of the Cloud and Security landscape evolved here within Telarus, and just any major shifts that you’ve seen out there in customer demands?
Well, I appreciate you saying you, but it’s really going to be situation with that. Your team has been paramount in the growth that we’ve seen as far as expertise, methodology, and approach inside the deals and growing all of these things. It’s really been that that’s been the biggest result within Telarus. But if you think back to when we started this thing five years ago, we started with like, “Hey, we got to get our vocabulary.” Remember, one of the biggest reasons we did this, we had a TA call-in deal for data center, Cloud adjacent, and we didn’t handle it great. We didn’t have the right resources, the expertise, it wasn’t the person’s fault. We didn’t have anyone laying it out there for them. This is how you handle that. The deal went elsewhere and we learned from it. Organizationally, I think we’ve evolved to being able to have at every level, the right level of conversation and where to go next with the advisor within Telarus to get them the right resources and help. That’s really helped catapult to where we are right now. Then as a channel,
it’s been a force multiplier. We’ve seen a lot of great suppliers come in that extended a reach in what we can get access to from a technology landscape. We’ve also seen existing suppliers add a lot of great technology teams. As things emerge and come along, at least I’m not, which is AI. AI is becoming paramount in every major conversation. We certainly are involved in it from everything CX through security through Cloud. Our suppliers have, again, added products or productized certain technology to then give that back to the advisors to service their clients. It’s really been a force multiplier of what we’ve added and what our suppliers have added. Then that’s allowed a lot of interest to our advisors. I always say this, we’re a consumer-driven channel. We’re not selling bleeding-edge tech. The consumption of these solutions and services and the need for them continues to grow, which creates that great opportunity and why everybody continues to invest so much.
If we think about this almost from the lens for newer partners listening or maybe partners that haven’t sold into Cloud and security. Let’s talk about Telarus’ Cloud and overall security strategy. Give us a snapshot.
How do we approach Cloud and security? How do we go to market? What’s the core value that if I’m a partner listening to this that you would say, and how does Telarus differentiate whether there’s others out there?
We’ve had success by failure. The practice has grown great every year and we continue to see that. The methodology or the approach that we took in year one looks nothing like what it does now.
First, we went out and we said, “We’re going to teach everyone Cloud.” Then we defined what Cloud was to us and then we went out and we wanted everyone to walk out of their certified Cloud expert. It’s a tall task. Then we were like, “Okay, well, let’s talk about why it matters and then see if that resonates more.” We had a little bit of growth. Then we had more growth under the Y. Then the last few years, we said, “We will put that together as much as anybody wants to go deep level and we have that.” That’s why Telarus University is going to continue to be a tremendous asset for all of us. That’s there.
Our engineers will have training series that’ll be there. But what if people just want to know how to sell it? That’s where we saw the most adoption. It’s talk tracks, it’s persona training, it’s business case training, it’s how to take an opportunity and grow it and scale it and walk through it. That in nuance with the suppliers and your team and the architects and the engineers, creating a methodology and process streamlines a buyer’s journey and gives them a better overall sales experience in a very complex technology environment, has been the winning for me. I don’t want to give too much away. We don’t know who all listens to these things.
In all reality, it’s not rocket science. It’s really taking the goodness that our TA’s bring to bear, creating great sales experience, having great relationships and rightfully so being very protective of those, getting them in an environment that’s safe to expand what they’re selling and doing so with guidance and resources and technology that helps them move the needle with their clients. It’s really been that. As we continue to go there, we’ll see an evolution. We’ll talk a little bit about it in our conversation today. There was two schools of thought on how you’re going to approach a conversation. You’re going to sell managed services and solutions or you sell a product. Either one is fine, but there’s more products that are being sold to within Cloud than ever. That’s allowing a better bridge over as you’re learning how to transition from maybe more transactional based sales or transitional sales, where a client already has their mind made up, “Hey, I have an on-prem system. I want to go to a Cloud-based system. Help me do that and help me find who to go.” This is leading into more of a consultative approach where it’s giving you a transformational feel and allowing an advisor to implement ideas and have inception points of like, “Hey, you guys might want to go here. Let me get a resource that can help give you guidance.” That’s creating a multitude of opportunities versus solving one problem. We’re creating opportunities around six, seven, eight, nine different things.
I want to go to what you mentioned. You talked about evolution. As a veteran in this space, you’ve seen so much evolution. You’ve seen evolution at Telarus, the overall channel.
You’re out there, you’re having partner conversations, you’re having vendor conversations. You’ve got this unique lens where all these things have to align. I think you’ve really done an amazing job for the partners in being so effective at aligning all of those things. But as you think back on that, what’s the biggest lesson learned that you think is the value for the partners there that helps everybody in the end drive revenue when you’re looking at all those different lenses?
Thinking that one size fits all, as far as education or with a client, like, “Hey, this company that looks and felt like yours, then you can do this too.”
I said this on a previous podcast. He asked if there’s something that I learned and I’m going to apply it here. Understanding and listening before solving. I had somebody walk me through that, “Hey, you do a really good job of jumping in and trying to solve the problem. If you know all of the nuance of what it is, you’ll be much more effective if you get all of the information.” Personally, letting other people fill in the gaps and then aligning and streamlining the process to solve the problem. As you see that, teaching that in the methodology and the approach on the sell side and engagement process, I wish we would have done that sooner. I think we would have been further ahead.
Let’s think about, we’re getting to verticalization, we’re getting to different customer needs across all these different industries. If you think about what are the common challenges? Here we are, we’ve been talking about the evolution of cloud, but what are the common challenges that you see that the end customers are facing right now when it comes to cloud or security? Is it vertical specific? Is it across the board? What’s your take?
Depends on the segmentation.
Enterprise is not going to be nearly the same issue because it’s like small in price mid-market to SMB. We’ll start with those guys, the mid-market small enterprise, because that’s where we see the most growth and have the most impact. It’s the same issue that has been their problem for the last decade. It’s skill set and resource driven. And as you get an emerging technology that is in high demand of attention, like AI,
it doesn’t make it any better. It creates more of an opportunity for us to go in with our suppliers and understand, “Hey, if you guys are all trying to do this yourself, if you consider the Coast Source Model or leveraging an MSP to come in and do parts of this, if not all of it, and doubling down on your resource allocation of like, “internal teams can do this, external teams do that, but it’s going to be in a collaborative nature,” that is really what’s haunting them. Then you get into the weeds of it. It’s that pressure of AI, right? From coming from CEOs or CFOs or sales and marketing teams, that’s creating a ton of problems. It’s compliance and regulatory that’s changing heavily around the technology, like AI. It’s cybersecurity gaps. It’s all of these things that have still been lingering out there. And it seems like every year it amplifies up. It’s like a soap opera, right? Or a drama type TV show. Season one, they have to go with a bang because it’s been leading up to it. So then they got to level up season two and it gets more and more. By season six, it’s at a ridiculous rate. And so now, like whenever you get a training and it’s not made up, you just hear how many people get breached or ran. We were on with a client earlier today and he’s like, “Yeah, we had two bridges.”
He’s like, “One through social engineering and one through, we haven’t figured out how they got in, but we cut a $100,000 check to a false company.” And so that happens all the time where you’d read about it and it’s like, “It’s nobody ever, I didn’t know anyone.” That’s made up. Then you start to hear about people that you know that it affects all the time. And so there’s more issues now for IT leaders to solve for while trying to do it with less skill set than ever and it creates way more opportunity than we’ve ever seen and helping to fill in those gaps.
So let’s think about there’s some components that we’ve talked about. There’s the LMS, there’s events, there’s all these different things. But if I’m a partner, I’m hearing about a lot of different ways that these guys can help. Walk in, help me understand. We have a lot of people that come to us and say, “Hey, who do you have that does this thing?” To me, there’s a couple of key ways here. I’m curious your take that we can really help these guys when it’s net new, take over, and walk us through that.
Yeah. If I’m an advisor and I’m getting into this space, say I have a traditional background of UCAS, and that word, and we say that all the time because when you look at the breakdown, that’s the majority where everyone starts in our channel as it sets right now. And so if I’m doing that, I’m wanting to understand a few key things. And if somebody would have told me this a while back, it would have been helpful. Understand what the teams look like and understand what their IT methodology is. So when I say IT methodology, is this organization in source where they’re doing everything internal, they don’t want any outsource help, or they co-source where they do some internal, they’ll use an MSP, they’ll use outside resources, or they completely outsource where they have somebody managing the vendors, but everything in their IT stacks really done elsewhere.
Very few are that third. There’s a lot that are number one, and with a couple of key points that you can get them to move into that co-source, and that’s where we’re making that opportunity. However,
traditionally, and this is again a lesson learned on the Telarus team part, we got stuck on like you got to sell managed services, that’s where the money is. That’s where the majority of the money is. But if somebody’s in source, they only do internal, that’s all they just want to, that’s their methodology, you can still flip them some products. You can sell them data backup, you can sell them disaster recovery. These are managed solutions in a way, but they’re more productized than a managed services type of field, where they’re doing a lot of work on behalf. These are just platforms that people are going to utilize, put their data and off they go. Data storage is another one. These are all conversations you can have. Then you take a different approach, everything’s got a strategy to it. All right, I get you a product from a solution provider, an MSP, they’re going to provide the product. Then I work along with their account teams to continue pep around with marketing material, how do I expand? That’s the beauty of Cloud. Cloud grows at a clip of about 35-40 percent year-over-year. If a client, we sell a client a dollar worth of stuff today, they’re billing about $1.35, $1.40 a year from now, and on and on and on. It’s not a bill of goods, nobody’s tricking anybody. They just continue to add more stuff, because if you get a good leader at an organization, they realize they can go faster by utilizing resources from an MSP, and that co-source in that collaborative manner, and they can get higher project completion percentage. They get a better force multiplier of why people implement the technology. They relieve tech debt, and they do all of this by just changing their IT management style slightly, if not completely. Then that’s the big conversation that a lot of people are having. So if I am a partner to go all the way back, or a technology advisor, go all the way back to what I started when I jumped on this set box, it’s really these key things. Understand the resources that they have internally. Do they want to do everything in-house, or are they open to using a co-source, co-management, IT environment, and then figuring out which direction to take it from there. Get the right resources involved, and say, “Hey, these guys are looking for this. It’s going to be a product sale, but if you could give me some guidance on the best three suppliers to do this,” or even jump on a call. We still have a tremendous amount of the opportunities that we end up booking through Telarus, work through our engineers either as a backstop or customer-facing, and that’s what we’re here for. So there’s a lot of nuance to this, but really understanding that landscape, first and foremost, and then understanding who you’re talking to. If you’re at a C-level, those are the guys that might be more open to shifting it because it’s going to add more bottom-line value, it’s going to do all those things. At a VP level, they’re going to be open to it to a degree, but kind of in the middle, if you’re thinking like a Goldilocks situation. Then IT directors are not going to want to hear you try to change taking stuff away from their internal teams. So if you’re at those levels, unless they’re already bringing you a project that’s utilizing and going to an MSP, be very cautious of how you position it, make sure you always do it as collaborative and as an approach to help grow what they’re doing, not replace anybody. Because I think we can all understand those guys are the most protective over their team because that’s the quickest line of sight to their jobs as well.
You called out something, I’m going to take a walk down memory lane and then ask you a question. You mentioned understand the team. I think that’s an absolute goldmine of understand the team. I want to push on that a little bit, drop anchor.
We did this series years ago, still out there on YouTube called Parking Lot Prep. One of the things was getting this theory of getting ready for a meeting.
And I think you harped on it. And part of that is doing the recon on the people that you’re meeting with. Maybe so and so introduce you to a new contact. What’s your take on the value of going to LinkedIn, seeing this person that I’m going to meet with and really understanding their history of where they were before? How should partners infer and what should they infer if they’re doing that level of recon on that?
I mean, LinkedIn is one thing. You grab the LinkedIn link, drop it in an AI engine, to give me background on this guy, let it scrape it for you and see what that does for you as far as breadth goes. Give me information on this organization. Tell me the key buying signals. What are they doing? Then you take in leverage of the tools that our suppliers are giving to our advisors. Six cents and other intent data tools that can give you even different, deeper layer of insight and warm up any conversation to a level of potential creepiness. But at the same time, you talk about the emergence, you did that series three plus years ago. It’s whenever that one wrapped up a little bit. But think about now. You have the ability to take AI and Sam goes over this and some of our AI summits and how to utilize this. I don’t want to steal her thunder, but that is one of the most amazing sales prep tools that I believe is still underutilized.
One of the best stories I tell is we’re on a call with a client and it’s an AI field roadmap call we don’t really know. They’re looking for a use case. Number one and number two things that most AI conversations is, A, is your data ready for this? Is your data ready in this plan where it needs to be? Number two is what is the use case? We’re on the second part of that conversation which we’re looking for a use case. I took the name of the client, put it in an AI engine and said, “Give me use cases that AI can make an impact for this client.” They went with number two that I read off of three options. They went with number two and now they’re in process of working towards that end result.
I immediately said, “This is what I did with the client.” Because the win isn’t in how you came up with the idea, the wins and the money that we’re going to make on selling it and the support of it. I would say as you’re going through understanding that landscape and taking advantage of those calls, if you’re dealing with a client that doesn’t have a big footprint and they’re not going to give you that, yeah, understanding it, try to figure out what they’re doing, but I love that stuff because if you can get some of that information, and the other one that I use a lot is if it’s a big market company and above, there’s somebody that’s wrote a use case about them doing something. I’d say I’ll pick on less one. I’m sure if somebody listening to this, that’s your account, don’t worry. It’s just because I can see a less-wab sign where I’m looking at.
But type in less-wab and say case study. It’s going to give you case studies of people that are sold. It gives you buying patterns and some of the technology they have that you might go, “Oh, that could help lead to this.” Or, “Oh, I didn’t know they did that.” There’s so much goodness in just doing 10, 15 minutes of prep.
It’s now really two to five minutes of prep, depending on how fast you can read whatever the AI team or the AI product spits out for you.
I love it. All right, so to finalize this secret sauce thought, put it all together,
walk us through a scenario. We’ve seen a lot of these scenarios. We mentioned earlier selling that new technology, taking over existing. It’s blown my mind some of these things, the size of the deals that we’ve done of, “I just need somebody to help manage this. The tech is great. I’m invested, but I can’t manage it. I don’t know how.”
Pick a deal, any deal of your choosing. Just walk us through something that brought to you that was wild, and then did we uncover more? What did it look like? How did we help?
Yeah, I would say I’m not going to give you a wild one. I’m going to give you one that’s repeatable. How about that? That might be more advantageous to the listeners, but I would say there’s this.
Can’t get through a cloud scenario, cloud conversation in 2024, 2025 without mentioning Broadcom and VMware. Just like AI, those are two really good phishing wars that are drawing a lot of attention and creating a lot of deals. One was, “Hey, they want to explore what they’re doing. They’re all in-source.
They want to keep it internal, but we get in there, we turn it. We turn it completely from where they’re no, no, no.” We did it through that series of like, “Hey, what’s your team look like? What happens if they’re disaster?” This is a pretty large organization with a pretty slimmed-out IT team. Sound familiar? It happens all the time. This little curveball of VMware and read platforming or having to optimize or do any of the stuff they were wanting to do was going to make them punt or push back or delay seven other projects.
When we laid out what that looks like, what’s the force multiplier on the seven other projects, what’s that mean to the company and the organization? Does that put you guys in a competitive hole? Does that mess something up with product? Does that mess anything up with finance? What does that do? As they answer those questions, co-source started to sound better and better and better.
That was the one that I was most like, that I love to point out. It’s not just a one-time occurrence. This continues to happen where companies are seeing, “All right, I’m required to do more with less, and there’s no way I’m going to get more out of my team.”
If you look at engineers as a whole personality type, and I know I’m potentially on denis with our host here,
go ahead, buddy. Look at us. What do you got?
What do they crave the most? They crave their engineers. They solve problems. They like stable environments.
They like to have a repeatable process, which is why in most organizations, IT teams have the longest tenure. Of most, IT engineers don’t jump around a lot, except for lately. They have been. Why? Because they’re in such high demand, they get a certification. They’re not getting a slight pay bump. They’re getting 20, 30, 40 percent. Come over here. Come do this. Come do that. And so that’s changed the model of that persona slightly.
And the ones that stay are the guys that aren’t upscaling, the guys that are holding organizations back a lot of times. And so introducing this idea of expertise and the ability to go faster and complete more with outsourced MSPs or MSSPs really does make a lot of sense. Oh, and by the way, especially in cybersecurity, the math problem makes so much more sense to do this through an MSP. You start to do the math problem of how much it costs to implement all the layers of technology. Josh, there’s what, 21, 22 products on a mass cybersecurity architecture of things that you need to protect. And then you’ve got the people that have to protect it, the software that you’ve got to get in there, the hardware that you have to stand up to do this on your own. You start to add it up. It’s like a million to a million, a million and a half of just hardware. It’s another six people at a buck, 20 to 200 K, depending on the levels to do 24 by seven. And then you start to add in, oh, that’s before you even get a CSO. That’s before you get somebody to start with it. You can keep him. Yeah. Oh, then you got to continually train them that cost money. Then you’ve got to do the software that caught in the licensing that costs money.
You start to do even back of the napkin map and you’re like, OK, we’re going to this is going to be much better for every one investment of one resource that I put here financially. I get the equivalent of 12 if I do it with an outsourced model.
That’s the conversation that advisors need to start to be able to bring up and walk through and then let the resources and the teams fill in the gaps on the details of it. But that’s the difference. That’s, you know, hey, you’ve got to look at this.
Well, you can go further by if we go together, then you’re going to be able to go on your own.
Love it. Love it. I appreciate the profiling. We’ll prove it. It’s pretty dead on.
I appreciate the eye contact virtually.
We do our best.
So as we think about we start kind of moving forward here, we start to wrap up some of these thoughts.
If I’m a partner, OK, I’ve listened to this, I’m foundationally, I’ve got a little bit of deeper understanding. What’s your advice then to help them continue to go to market, identify the best opportunities and then really position that angle? Any anything you want to put a bow on there?
I would say like if I’m a partner and I’m just looking to expand, I’m going to do a little account profiling. I’m going to go into my account base. I’m going to look who has the highest ability for me to have this conversation.
Mid market, small enterprise, that’s your sweet spot. I laid that out earlier. So if you have a lot of those clients, you know, you have multi location and else I’m going to steal something from Graham. Graham’s our VP of advanced network and he was talking. He’s like, yeah, if I’m if I’m talking to advisor and they’re selling multi location deals with connectivity, I’m asking why they’re if they’re positioning SD-WAN. And if they’re not positioning F-JAN, then, you know, if you’re doing that, then it’s a pretty small jump over to SASE. SASE is a good door opener to get you into the rest of the cybersecurity stack, right? Gets you into those conversations.
You get into like a follow the data type of idea. Hey, we’ve sold you network. We’re transporting this. What infrastructure is it landing on? How are you storing it? How are you protecting it? Data is so valuable for everyone. That’s what’s creating all this AI buzz, right? You got to have data in the right places and utilize and cleansed and all this stuff to be able to take advantage of it. Work backwards from what data model, like follow the data. What’s creating all of your data? A lot of times that’s contact center software and like stuff that they’re creating, getting to analyze, create better customer experience. All of that is landing somewhere and creating something. And that’s where you can go have infrastructure conversations. You can have cyber conversations. You can have like data storage conversations. So those two things as I’m looking through it, like really start to figure out, take five, ten accounts.
And you can bring that in and bounce that around with people at Telarus. Hey, these are the guys I’m thinking about.
Utilize the idea of just doing a little research on them. Figure out if there’s like suppliers that are going down the same target path as you. And level up with your resources, use their marketing, use their engines as far as intent data and things like that. And take advantage of everything around you without letting yourself get overwhelmed by it. Like in focus on what you’re going to do, you’re going to create a better sales experience and you’re going to create a streamlined buyer’s journey. If you want to get deeper into the tech, by all means, we’ll support you and help you with that. But if you want to keep it as a sales experience methodology and what you’re going to do and align it and get the right resources involved at the right time and oversee it, you’ll have a lot of success with that as well.
All right. Final thoughts here. Think about the future.
We’re just in the midst of so many amazing innovations. But as you think about cloud and security or heck, anything personal, just most exciting innovations that you think are going to come out and then how do we pay attention? How do we capitalize on it?
I mean, if you would have told me, I don’t know, 12 months ago, that I’d be able to just like ask somebody to create a PowerPoint for me and they would do a pretty good job of it. I’d be pretty excited. I think we’re going to see a lot more innovation in time management type things, right? Like you use Copilot now and you can just say, send this email. One of my pet peeves was always, hey, give me your calendar. What’s open for you the next few days? I have to stop. I have to go look. I got to remember. I either write it down and put it back in the email or calendar came along. That was great until it wasn’t for me. And so kind of a more personal thing. But what I love about Copilot, I can just respond to the email and say, hey, in Mountain Standard time, find four openings over the next three days and it’ll put it in the email. For me, the time savers and things like we talked about the cells, I wouldn’t say that they’re going to be these big wow innovations. These big wow innovations are already happening. It’s going to be the subtle improvements on everything. You know what I was most excited about lately? And this might be like a couple of dates old. So I want to overly date it. They put a back button on the calculator on my iPhone. The only times I would get down through like continually adding something up that I messed up and have to start all over and read it. Now I can just hit the back button and stay on task. The other thing, too, that I loved in text messages the other day was I was doing a how much is this times this times this and I hit equal and it did the math for me. I didn’t have to go out, go to my calculator because there’s no way I was going to do that off the top of my head. So level level subtle innovations. And if you think about cloud as a whole, that’s been the beauty of cloud and the development of we did a podcast. We talked about reinvent and all the cool, exciting stuff that’s coming out of that.
We’re everybody’s doing the same thing. They’re trying to make it easier to utilize hard technology that’s very complex. And that’s what I get excited about is how do we continually make it easier for to get access to you and how do we make it easier to present and sell to our clients and easier for them to consume and implement and to make their organizations better. And I think we’re going to continually see that for the foreseeable future. I mean, that is what innovation, the technology is. And we’re continuing to see it at rapid rates. Love it.
Love it. Right at the epicenter of it. All right, man, that wraps us up for today. As always, good to have you on lots of good. Today, it’s not nuggets. It’s secret sauce. So thanks for coming on and sharing. Great. Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
All right, everybody, that wraps us up for this week. Remember, as always, wherever you’re coming in, listening from Spotify, Apple Music, follow, subscribe, and you get these notifications every Wednesday. So you can get this and go to market with these things first. That wraps us up. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. Koby Phillips, VP of Cloud. This has been Beyond IT, Secret Sauce in Managed Services with Cloud and Security.
Next Level BizTech has been a production of Telarus Studio 19. Please visit Telarus.com for more information.