October 15, 2025 • 20 mins
In the video, Graeme Scott and Josh Haselhorst delve into a real-world case involving a global resort management company that needed to replace its firewalls. They discuss the importance of asking the right questions to uncover deeper issues, such as logistics and operations challenges, rather than just focusing on the immediate need for new firewalls. The conversation reveals that understanding the customer's true pain points can lead to unexpected sales opportunities and a more streamlined process. They emphasize the significance of flexibility in sales discussions and the necessity of collaboration with engineers for success. The session wraps up with a commitment to future discussions and continued learning.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Inside the Win, We'llbreakdown real world wins,
showing you exactly how strategic partnership with our
experts empowers you to tackle your most ambitious
opportunities with confidence. Let's jump in.
All right, everybody, welcome toanother session.
My name is Graham Scott. I'm the Vice President of
Networking and Mobility with Telaris.
(00:20):
And joining me here today on thecall is the one and only Josh
Hazlehorst, affectionately knownas Haas.
Haas How you doing today, my friend?
I'm awesome, grandma. I'm awesome man.
Thanks for thanks for asking me to get on this.
Yeah, we love it, man. We appreciate it.
I know you have so many conversations throughout the
course of a week. Just a lot of great insight to
provide to our tech advisor. So we've got a great one here
(00:43):
just for the audience, let you guys know really what the point
of this is, is we're going to talk about a deal.
We're going to talk about an actual deal that came into the
engineering team and Josh is going to break it down and walk
you through his process, how he started the conversation, where
they started, what kind of things they uncovered along the
way, and then ultimately where they finished and what that
(01:03):
looked like for the TA and the end user customer in terms of
success. So without further ado, Josh,
let's jump in here right away, both feet.
This one kind of came in in a unique way, right?
Tell us a little bit about how this opportunity came in the
door and you kind of started engaging here without really
knowing a whole lot about the customer?
(01:25):
Yeah, the partner engaged me andbasically said, you know, hey
Hazelhorst, I have a call with XYZ company.
They want to talk about firewalls.
Can I get on your calendar? Perfect.
So we booked the meeting. That's all I knew.
We're blind. We're talking about firewalls.
That's all I got. Yeah.
And and that's great. And so you get on the call and
(01:45):
they start asking you questions about firewalls.
Then what happens next? Yes.
I mean they introduced me to thecustomer.
This ended up being a, a global resort management company.
And as I was talking to him, I'mthinking in my head, you know,
and looking them up and doing some research while I'm talking.
But turns out there's hundreds and hundreds of locations and
(02:07):
each location has multiple buildings in each campus.
And they were talking, we need to replace some if not all of
our firewalls. So my initial question is why?
Why? I mean, why bother?
What's the problem? Well, it turns out as they're
doing mergers and acquisitions and buying other resorts, every
(02:29):
time they buy one, it's got a different OEMA, different
manufacturer, a different firewall, a different interface,
a different portal, a different management plane.
And so this is just impossible, man.
Why we can't, unless we standardize across the
organization and standardize on one platform management and
visibility into firewall configs, firmware patches, it's
this is impossible. It's a it's a full time job for
(02:51):
a whole team. Right.
And and these guys talk a littlebit about that team.
How many folks did they have on staff to handle what sounds like
a fairly significant network? Yeah.
Funny enough, they had a pretty big staff.
We hear a lot about all these guys are lean IT, so they need
help. Now these guys had cyber
security engineers on staff, network engineers on staff,
(03:12):
DevOps guys on staff. They had a team of probably 14
to 15 engineers, logistics and operations of having staff and
talent wasn't necessarily the beginning issue.
The beginning of the issue was Ihave too many tools, too many
management portals to manage. So yeah, I've got three guys on
my firewall team, but I've got 4-5, six different firewalls
(03:34):
that I have to log into 456 different locations at 100 and
something physical campuses. This is just impossible.
It's it's, it's a full Time Teamof operators just to go hunt
down an anomaly in a firewall walk.
Yeah. So you've got a, a, a fairly
significant team, but continuingto need more resources to handle
(03:54):
what's going on, feeling limitedwith what they have.
I mean, you're right, we often hear the opposite, but that
doesn't mean those problems don't exist in some of these
bigger organizations as well as we saw here.
So obviously you guys start the conversation with firewalls.
What kind of questions are you asking the customer when you're
on that call to try and really drive to the heart of what's
(04:16):
going on here? You know, where, where did you
start the conversation? What kind of questions did you
ask? And, you know, ultimately, you
know, let's talk about the information they gave you that
really helped you diagnose what the right solution was here.
Yeah, it's funny. We started talking applications,
application risk, we started talking what other cyber
(04:37):
security countermeasures do you have in the organization?
And the reason I started talkingabout that about things like
endpoint detection, response manage detection responses,
because there's a lot of next Gen. firewall platforms out
there that have those services embedded natively in into the
solution, right? There are also some firewalls
that are just basic firewalls, URL filtering, content
(04:58):
filtering, blacklist, white listport blocking, whatever.
But I kind of wanted to get to the what are the, because
remember he said, I have so manytools, we can't do our job.
I'm trying to think about, is there a way to collapse some of
these tool sets into more of an all in one platform and, and
reduce those tool sets so we canactually do our jobs daily.
(05:20):
Right. As that conversation morphed
and, and, and, and grew into theOK, I've got crowd strike for
this and I've got rapid 7 for this.
And all I'm thinking is, is moretools, more management, more
tools, more management. And then we got into the
conversation of what do you havevisibility into?
Like if there's an issue, how doyou know there's an issue at a,
(05:42):
a campus or one of your small locations or the coffee house?
He's and he said I, I, I get phone calls, like internet's
down, I get a phone call or my POS application is clocking, I
get a phone call and I have no way of having any visibility to
easily troubleshoot what's goingon in any, any location that I'm
(06:05):
that I'm getting a trouble ticket on.
So despite all the tools, right,all the things you've got, this
overwhelming amount of portals and platforms that you're
working in, you still don't havethe information you need.
Now, and in fact, so at that point their network architects
started getting on the call and we started talking about
(06:26):
Internet and and transport. What kind of connectivity do you
have? And you're running, you know,
DIA and broadband and 4G and satellite and whatever, right?
And the answer was kind of all of the above it, it depends on
the use case, depends on the, the state, the country.
If I have access, sometimes I need satellite, sometimes I need
point to point whatever, right? And the next question was, how
(06:49):
do you have visibility into transport?
How do you know if a circuit is up or down?
How do you know if a applicationis slow?
Do you have any way to proactively manage a problem or
is it always, somebody's going to call you with their hair on
fire? And it was a yeah, we don't see
anything because we buy directlyfrom the Internet carriers at
(07:11):
every single one of these locations.
So any problem that I have to escalate to the carrier, I have
to call Spectrum for that location and Cox for that
location and contacts for that one and Nitel for that one.
My God. So we started uncovering
something even more sinister than I need new firewalls.
Yeah. And I love that because you
(07:32):
know, if you had sort of stoppedthe questioning after you talked
about the firewall port, right? You knew, hey, the problem was
too many portals. We can bring in one platform and
do that. But you continue the
conversation to talk about what was going on at the network
level as well. Because I think, you know, that
is something that we really, youknow, try to get our TAS to
focus on is, hey, just ask that extra question, right?
(07:55):
Ask that one additional questionto figure out what else is going
on within there. You've got one problem.
Sure, we know they've got an issue with their portals, but
asking that extra question endedup uncovering a lot more
opportunity, right? Yeah, it did.
And people, you know what keeps you up at night and blah, blah,
blah, People don't buy anything unless it's painful enough that
(08:15):
they have to. So I wasn't asking him what
keeps you up at night and what'sthe pain or whatever, but just
having a, a flowing conversation.
We kind of uncovered that I needa new firewall.
Wasn't the most painful thing going on in there.
The most painful thing going on in there is I have no idea
what's going on at any of my locations because I have no way
(08:38):
to have a a centralized management plane where I can see
things and proactively troubleshoot.
I don't have a technology issue,I have a logistics and
operations issue. Yeah.
So obviously at this point you, you feel like you've got a
pretty good idea of what's goingon the landscape.
Were there any additional surprises that popped up during
(09:00):
the conversation? Anything else that kind of
jumped in that that you were youwere able to sort of take a look
at as well? I think one of the other things
that came up was we have this team and our team works pretty
much 8 to 5. We don't but our but our
buildings, our campuses, our resorts, our 24 hour resorts.
(09:22):
So even if I had visibility intoeverything in the world from
8:00 to 5:00, what what happens when something goes wrong at one
of these big resorts that's making $1,000,000 a day at 8:00
at night? Right.
Uh oh, right. So then it became do I need an
(09:43):
after hours support world? Do I need to hire more people?
And really the answer was no. What we needed to do is we
needed to find a global systems aggregator to suck in the
telemetry of all pipes from all carriers and bring them into a
(10:05):
network operation center as a service.
Put it in a Co managed way so they've get, they get visibility
and read, write access and absolutely everything during
business hours. But after business hours, you've
got a 24/7 365 network operationcenter doing everything for you.
And what did that just do? 1 reduced all the tool sets that
(10:27):
they had to use to manage, you know, everything. 2, they never
had to deal with an underlying carrier ever again.
And three, now they got a 24/7 network operation center that
they pay a monthly subscription fee to and fixed all of the
logistics and operational holes and we still haven't gotten into
(10:50):
the firewall yet. That deal alone Graham was
$55,000 in monthly reoccurring and they signed without a
hesitation. Wow.
See how? They haven't even gotten to the
firewalls yet. We'll get to that.
Talked about the firewalls yet? Yeah.
So obviously you're talking solutions now we, we, we pitched
(11:11):
the, you know, the operation center, whatever.
Let's talk about what steps you needed to take to kind of help
the TA close this one. You know what, you've done a
pretty good job of laying out the case.
Anything special that you kind of brought to the table or any
special points that you brought in to close this?
Yeah, and it's super common for everybody to get excited, myself
(11:31):
including, oh, this is a huge project.
We're going to do everything we can do this and that and this
and that and this and that and this.
Stop, slow down. We cannot boil the ocean, even
though we want to. We want to tell these customers
we can do anything and everything for you.
But when you throw 75 options onthe plate, you know what the
(11:52):
decision is made is is none right?
It's confusing, it's overwhelming, it's just too
much. So it really was a everybody,
even the customer. Take a step, take a step, take a
breath. We need to prioritize
everything. Step one, the most painful thing
in the world is I have no visibility into up down stats of
(12:13):
is my Internet up Internet down applications or whatever.
Step 1. So it was a OK stop.
We got that covered. Let's bring in this aggregator,
show them the portal, show them the, the, the Level 3, you know,
support mechanism and the engineering pods that they get
and the, the network operation center and bingo, let's get that
done. And why was that important
(12:34):
'cause that was the most painfulpart of the situation.
So let's take that most painful part.
And now I can breathe. But hear me out on this one.
We started with a firewall conversation, right?
I didn't even know if we have budget for firewalls.
It didn't matter at that point. The money that we save them in
time, dealing with the direct circuit ISPs, the visibility,
(12:59):
the money we save them in time and cost is going to fund the
next project. So let's get them to breathe
easy. I can go home now.
I don't have to stay late. I can see everything even
remotely. Yay.
And accidentally, the byproduct was a huge cost savings, right?
They paid, you know, paying $55,000 a month, but they were
(13:22):
doing $55,000 a month and just man hours chasing their tails.
Yeah, so you know we. Have to stop them sometimes,
yeah. Yeah.
So just sort of, hey, let's let's kind of take this thing
down one piece at a time becauseyou're absolutely right.
A big project like that can be paralyzing, right?
And sometimes, hey, maybe it's painful doing things the way we
are now, but at least we kind ofknow what we're doing.
(13:45):
So bringing something like that,it has to be simple and it has
to be rolled out. So I love that, breaking that
into pieces. So let's talk about where the
deal is now, Josh. So obviously we've kind of
rolled out, you know, we startedwith phase one.
I assume we moved to some additional phases.
Anything interesting that you uncovered as you were
implementing some of these services?
(14:05):
Yeah. So as the aggregator was was
putting in in circuits and and bringing them into the knock,
remember I told you these guys had a pretty big staff.
They had a couple of their resorts that were large resorts
that had a bunch of their own servers and storage server and
storage arrays on Prem in their own wiring closets.
(14:26):
Well, the staff is remote staff,right?
That was the whole point of doing the management and
visibility planes, so I can manage these things remotely.
So the conversation internally to the customer was maybe we
should get rid of some of these on Prem servers and storage
rays. Maybe we should start sending
these to public clouds, private clouds, a hybrid of sorts or
(14:46):
whatnot. They determined that their
equipment, their servers and storage were fairly new.
They had a pretty big investmentin them.
So nobody wanted to even me, nobody wanted to RIP and replace
and, and OK, throw that stuff inthe garbage, your investment is
gone. That's just going to get people
in trouble, right? So basically was a lift and
shift of existing gear. Let's put it in a colocation
(15:10):
facility on the Eastern Seaboardor East Coast and another one on
the West Coast. And now I've got GR redundant
DC's. Basically we're just doing Colo
right. But we spun that up and seem
like less than 30, maybe 60 days.
And just that Colo migration wasanother 40 grand in monthly
recurring. We still haven't.
(15:31):
Talked about firewalls we. Still haven't talked about
firewalls. Yeah, I love that.
But why 'cause the firewalls weren't the most painful thing.
That was what the network architect and and the security
guy wanted to talk about. Yes, and we're gonna get there.
But that wasn't the most painfulthing.
So let's bring this baby home here, Josh.
So I, I assume at some point we did talk about the firewalls.
(15:53):
Where did we end up there with the firewall solution?
So we're still in talks. When we determined which global
aggregator was correct, we had already had conversations with
the client of potentially what next Gen. firewalls would be the
best fit for them. So we rattled off some OEM
names, right. They should just be a Fortinet
(16:14):
play, should it be a Cato play or whatever.
But in the back of my head, I'm thinking, OK, if I can lock down
probably potentially what are the three or four firewalls that
are perfect fits here? I'm going to table that, put
that under my sleeve. And the aggregator we're going
to bring to the table, I alreadyknow in the back of my head are
proficient in Merakis and Fortinets and Catos and Versus.
I already know this. So flipping that next switch,
(16:37):
which is the next project is literally just add them to your
contract. You're already working with
these guys, you already love them.
Let them deploy these things out.
And by the way, in the same management portal that you have
all your knock services and, andand circuit services with.
So not another tool, Graham. Right.
Yeah, and. So we started with firewall
(16:59):
where? What about 100 and what was the
number on this one? Where are we so far with billing
120,000 ish somewhere? Yeah.
Total MRR booked and invoicing today is about $120,000 in
monthly reoccurring obviously atwhatever Commission percentage
to the agent. So a really, really good deal,
(17:21):
but we have another 60 grand to go.
Yeah. And we still haven't sold them
any firewalls now. And you know what's cool about
it? Like because they love the
aggregator that we brought to the table so much, they don't
even the end user doesn't even engage the partner or me
anymore. We're still in talks about the
firewalls and should it be at Sassy or SD Wan or whatever,
(17:42):
right? But they just ordered directly
from the aggregator. I need another circuit order, I
need another this order, I need another that order.
And it just keeps building and building and building.
And nobody in the Telarus ecosystem or even that partner
ecosystem has to make any effortat all.
It just keeps growing and the partner just keeps making more
and more money every single month.
(18:02):
Love it. So let's wrap up here with a few
lessons learned. I think obviously the the big
one that I take away from this is, hey, regardless of where you
start with the conversation, asking a couple of questions
here and there along the way, you never know where you're
going to finish up. This one started out with
firewalls. Yeah, we might get there
eventually with some firewalls, but you sold a whack of stuff in
(18:23):
between without even talking about the firewalls.
Josh, am I on on point with thator any other lessons you took
from that? Yeah, and and and we hear it all
the time, right? Hey, sell me this.
Hey, sell me that or I want to buy this or I want to.
We have to slow down. Sometimes me, me talking, slow
down. I talk so fast it's hard for me
to slow down. But we, we need to, we need to
(18:44):
uncover what the real pain is, What is the real project and
what is really driving the customer to say I think I need
this or I think I need that. What?
Because usually that's not the real project, that's an
ancillary piece of the real project.
We've got to find the real pain and the real project, and we got
to fix that first. Yeah, love that when they come
(19:05):
to you with a product they want to buy, let's dig a little
deeper and find out why, right? Like what, what business outcome
are you trying to achieve by purchasing this product?
And I think obviously this this scenario gave us a really good
example of how that can play outto the benefit of both the
customer and and the tech advisor at the end of the day.
(19:26):
Yeah, these these type, I call them rap accounts, but these
things are not unique. They are super, super common and
partners and selling agents out there.
They don't have to know all thisstuff.
They got the hardest job in the world.
Book a meeting. Bring your hilarious engineers
to the table. We will pull out the shovel
shovels and we will dig for the real use case.
(19:48):
Yeah. Well said my friend.
Way to end it up. Thank you so much for joining us
folks. Hope you enjoyed this session.
Don't forget we got plenty more of these coming out.
Hope you caught our last one with Jason Stein and Trevor
Burnside. That's it for us for now.
We'll catch you on the next one.Thanks so much.
Welcome to Inside the Win, We'llbreakdown real world wins,
showing you exactly how strategic partnership with our
experts empowers you to tackle your most ambitious
opportunities with confidence. Let's jump in.
All right, everybody, welcome toanother session.
My name is Graham Scott. I'm the Vice President of
Networking and Mobility with Telaris.
(00:20):
And joining me here today on thecall is the one and only Josh
Hazlehorst, affectionately knownas Haas.
Haas How you doing today, my friend?
I'm awesome, grandma. I'm awesome man.
Thanks for thanks for asking me to get on this.
Yeah, we love it, man. We appreciate it.
I know you have so many conversations throughout the
course of a week. Just a lot of great insight to
provide to our tech advisor. So we've got a great one here
(00:43):
just for the audience, let you guys know really what the point
of this is, is we're going to talk about a deal.
We're going to talk about an actual deal that came into the
engineering team and Josh is going to break it down and walk
you through his process, how he started the conversation, where
they started, what kind of things they uncovered along the
way, and then ultimately where they finished and what that
(01:03):
looked like for the TA and the end user customer in terms of
success. So without further ado, Josh,
let's jump in here right away, both feet.
This one kind of came in in a unique way, right?
Tell us a little bit about how this opportunity came in the
door and you kind of started engaging here without really
knowing a whole lot about the customer?
(01:25):
Yeah, the partner engaged me andbasically said, you know, hey
Hazelhorst, I have a call with XYZ company.
They want to talk about firewalls.
Can I get on your calendar? Perfect.
So we booked the meeting. That's all I knew.
We're blind. We're talking about firewalls.
That's all I got. Yeah.
And and that's great. And so you get on the call and
(01:45):
they start asking you questions about firewalls.
Then what happens next? Yes.
I mean they introduced me to thecustomer.
This ended up being a, a global resort management company.
And as I was talking to him, I'mthinking in my head, you know,
and looking them up and doing some research while I'm talking.
But turns out there's hundreds and hundreds of locations and
(02:07):
each location has multiple buildings in each campus.
And they were talking, we need to replace some if not all of
our firewalls. So my initial question is why?
Why? I mean, why bother?
What's the problem? Well, it turns out as they're
doing mergers and acquisitions and buying other resorts, every
(02:29):
time they buy one, it's got a different OEMA, different
manufacturer, a different firewall, a different interface,
a different portal, a different management plane.
And so this is just impossible, man.
Why we can't, unless we standardize across the
organization and standardize on one platform management and
visibility into firewall configs, firmware patches, it's
this is impossible. It's a it's a full time job for
(02:51):
a whole team. Right.
And and these guys talk a littlebit about that team.
How many folks did they have on staff to handle what sounds like
a fairly significant network? Yeah.
Funny enough, they had a pretty big staff.
We hear a lot about all these guys are lean IT, so they need
help. Now these guys had cyber
security engineers on staff, network engineers on staff,
(03:12):
DevOps guys on staff. They had a team of probably 14
to 15 engineers, logistics and operations of having staff and
talent wasn't necessarily the beginning issue.
The beginning of the issue was Ihave too many tools, too many
management portals to manage. So yeah, I've got three guys on
my firewall team, but I've got 4-5, six different firewalls
(03:34):
that I have to log into 456 different locations at 100 and
something physical campuses. This is just impossible.
It's it's, it's a full Time Teamof operators just to go hunt
down an anomaly in a firewall walk.
Yeah. So you've got a, a, a fairly
significant team, but continuingto need more resources to handle
(03:54):
what's going on, feeling limitedwith what they have.
I mean, you're right, we often hear the opposite, but that
doesn't mean those problems don't exist in some of these
bigger organizations as well as we saw here.
So obviously you guys start the conversation with firewalls.
What kind of questions are you asking the customer when you're
on that call to try and really drive to the heart of what's
(04:16):
going on here? You know, where, where did you
start the conversation? What kind of questions did you
ask? And, you know, ultimately, you
know, let's talk about the information they gave you that
really helped you diagnose what the right solution was here.
Yeah, it's funny. We started talking applications,
application risk, we started talking what other cyber
(04:37):
security countermeasures do you have in the organization?
And the reason I started talkingabout that about things like
endpoint detection, response manage detection responses,
because there's a lot of next Gen. firewall platforms out
there that have those services embedded natively in into the
solution, right? There are also some firewalls
that are just basic firewalls, URL filtering, content
(04:58):
filtering, blacklist, white listport blocking, whatever.
But I kind of wanted to get to the what are the, because
remember he said, I have so manytools, we can't do our job.
I'm trying to think about, is there a way to collapse some of
these tool sets into more of an all in one platform and, and
reduce those tool sets so we canactually do our jobs daily.
(05:20):
Right. As that conversation morphed
and, and, and, and grew into theOK, I've got crowd strike for
this and I've got rapid 7 for this.
And all I'm thinking is, is moretools, more management, more
tools, more management. And then we got into the
conversation of what do you havevisibility into?
Like if there's an issue, how doyou know there's an issue at a,
(05:42):
a campus or one of your small locations or the coffee house?
He's and he said I, I, I get phone calls, like internet's
down, I get a phone call or my POS application is clocking, I
get a phone call and I have no way of having any visibility to
easily troubleshoot what's goingon in any, any location that I'm
(06:05):
that I'm getting a trouble ticket on.
So despite all the tools, right,all the things you've got, this
overwhelming amount of portals and platforms that you're
working in, you still don't havethe information you need.
Now, and in fact, so at that point their network architects
started getting on the call and we started talking about
(06:26):
Internet and and transport. What kind of connectivity do you
have? And you're running, you know,
DIA and broadband and 4G and satellite and whatever, right?
And the answer was kind of all of the above it, it depends on
the use case, depends on the, the state, the country.
If I have access, sometimes I need satellite, sometimes I need
point to point whatever, right? And the next question was, how
(06:49):
do you have visibility into transport?
How do you know if a circuit is up or down?
How do you know if a applicationis slow?
Do you have any way to proactively manage a problem or
is it always, somebody's going to call you with their hair on
fire? And it was a yeah, we don't see
anything because we buy directlyfrom the Internet carriers at
(07:11):
every single one of these locations.
So any problem that I have to escalate to the carrier, I have
to call Spectrum for that location and Cox for that
location and contacts for that one and Nitel for that one.
My God. So we started uncovering
something even more sinister than I need new firewalls.
Yeah. And I love that because you
(07:32):
know, if you had sort of stoppedthe questioning after you talked
about the firewall port, right? You knew, hey, the problem was
too many portals. We can bring in one platform and
do that. But you continue the
conversation to talk about what was going on at the network
level as well. Because I think, you know, that
is something that we really, youknow, try to get our TAS to
focus on is, hey, just ask that extra question, right?
(07:55):
Ask that one additional questionto figure out what else is going
on within there. You've got one problem.
Sure, we know they've got an issue with their portals, but
asking that extra question endedup uncovering a lot more
opportunity, right? Yeah, it did.
And people, you know what keeps you up at night and blah, blah,
blah, People don't buy anything unless it's painful enough that
(08:15):
they have to. So I wasn't asking him what
keeps you up at night and what'sthe pain or whatever, but just
having a, a flowing conversation.
We kind of uncovered that I needa new firewall.
Wasn't the most painful thing going on in there.
The most painful thing going on in there is I have no idea
what's going on at any of my locations because I have no way
(08:38):
to have a a centralized management plane where I can see
things and proactively troubleshoot.
I don't have a technology issue,I have a logistics and
operations issue. Yeah.
So obviously at this point you, you feel like you've got a
pretty good idea of what's goingon the landscape.
Were there any additional surprises that popped up during
(09:00):
the conversation? Anything else that kind of
jumped in that that you were youwere able to sort of take a look
at as well? I think one of the other things
that came up was we have this team and our team works pretty
much 8 to 5. We don't but our but our
buildings, our campuses, our resorts, our 24 hour resorts.
(09:22):
So even if I had visibility intoeverything in the world from
8:00 to 5:00, what what happens when something goes wrong at one
of these big resorts that's making $1,000,000 a day at 8:00
at night? Right.
Uh oh, right. So then it became do I need an
(09:43):
after hours support world? Do I need to hire more people?
And really the answer was no. What we needed to do is we
needed to find a global systems aggregator to suck in the
telemetry of all pipes from all carriers and bring them into a
(10:05):
network operation center as a service.
Put it in a Co managed way so they've get, they get visibility
and read, write access and absolutely everything during
business hours. But after business hours, you've
got a 24/7 365 network operationcenter doing everything for you.
And what did that just do? 1 reduced all the tool sets that
(10:27):
they had to use to manage, you know, everything. 2, they never
had to deal with an underlying carrier ever again.
And three, now they got a 24/7 network operation center that
they pay a monthly subscription fee to and fixed all of the
logistics and operational holes and we still haven't gotten into
(10:50):
the firewall yet. That deal alone Graham was
$55,000 in monthly reoccurring and they signed without a
hesitation. Wow.
See how? They haven't even gotten to the
firewalls yet. We'll get to that.
Talked about the firewalls yet? Yeah.
So obviously you're talking solutions now we, we, we pitched
(11:11):
the, you know, the operation center, whatever.
Let's talk about what steps you needed to take to kind of help
the TA close this one. You know what, you've done a
pretty good job of laying out the case.
Anything special that you kind of brought to the table or any
special points that you brought in to close this?
Yeah, and it's super common for everybody to get excited, myself
(11:31):
including, oh, this is a huge project.
We're going to do everything we can do this and that and this
and that and this and that and this.
Stop, slow down. We cannot boil the ocean, even
though we want to. We want to tell these customers
we can do anything and everything for you.
But when you throw 75 options onthe plate, you know what the
(11:52):
decision is made is is none right?
It's confusing, it's overwhelming, it's just too
much. So it really was a everybody,
even the customer. Take a step, take a step, take a
breath. We need to prioritize
everything. Step one, the most painful thing
in the world is I have no visibility into up down stats of
(12:13):
is my Internet up Internet down applications or whatever.
Step 1. So it was a OK stop.
We got that covered. Let's bring in this aggregator,
show them the portal, show them the, the, the Level 3, you know,
support mechanism and the engineering pods that they get
and the, the network operation center and bingo, let's get that
done. And why was that important
(12:34):
'cause that was the most painfulpart of the situation.
So let's take that most painful part.
And now I can breathe. But hear me out on this one.
We started with a firewall conversation, right?
I didn't even know if we have budget for firewalls.
It didn't matter at that point. The money that we save them in
time, dealing with the direct circuit ISPs, the visibility,
(12:59):
the money we save them in time and cost is going to fund the
next project. So let's get them to breathe
easy. I can go home now.
I don't have to stay late. I can see everything even
remotely. Yay.
And accidentally, the byproduct was a huge cost savings, right?
They paid, you know, paying $55,000 a month, but they were
(13:22):
doing $55,000 a month and just man hours chasing their tails.
Yeah, so you know we. Have to stop them sometimes,
yeah. Yeah.
So just sort of, hey, let's let's kind of take this thing
down one piece at a time becauseyou're absolutely right.
A big project like that can be paralyzing, right?
And sometimes, hey, maybe it's painful doing things the way we
are now, but at least we kind ofknow what we're doing.
(13:45):
So bringing something like that,it has to be simple and it has
to be rolled out. So I love that, breaking that
into pieces. So let's talk about where the
deal is now, Josh. So obviously we've kind of
rolled out, you know, we startedwith phase one.
I assume we moved to some additional phases.
Anything interesting that you uncovered as you were
implementing some of these services?
(14:05):
Yeah. So as the aggregator was was
putting in in circuits and and bringing them into the knock,
remember I told you these guys had a pretty big staff.
They had a couple of their resorts that were large resorts
that had a bunch of their own servers and storage server and
storage arrays on Prem in their own wiring closets.
(14:26):
Well, the staff is remote staff,right?
That was the whole point of doing the management and
visibility planes, so I can manage these things remotely.
So the conversation internally to the customer was maybe we
should get rid of some of these on Prem servers and storage
rays. Maybe we should start sending
these to public clouds, private clouds, a hybrid of sorts or
(14:46):
whatnot. They determined that their
equipment, their servers and storage were fairly new.
They had a pretty big investmentin them.
So nobody wanted to even me, nobody wanted to RIP and replace
and, and OK, throw that stuff inthe garbage, your investment is
gone. That's just going to get people
in trouble, right? So basically was a lift and
shift of existing gear. Let's put it in a colocation
(15:10):
facility on the Eastern Seaboardor East Coast and another one on
the West Coast. And now I've got GR redundant
DC's. Basically we're just doing Colo
right. But we spun that up and seem
like less than 30, maybe 60 days.
And just that Colo migration wasanother 40 grand in monthly
recurring. We still haven't.
(15:31):
Talked about firewalls we. Still haven't talked about
firewalls. Yeah, I love that.
But why 'cause the firewalls weren't the most painful thing.
That was what the network architect and and the security
guy wanted to talk about. Yes, and we're gonna get there.
But that wasn't the most painfulthing.
So let's bring this baby home here, Josh.
So I, I assume at some point we did talk about the firewalls.
(15:53):
Where did we end up there with the firewall solution?
So we're still in talks. When we determined which global
aggregator was correct, we had already had conversations with
the client of potentially what next Gen. firewalls would be the
best fit for them. So we rattled off some OEM
names, right. They should just be a Fortinet
(16:14):
play, should it be a Cato play or whatever.
But in the back of my head, I'm thinking, OK, if I can lock down
probably potentially what are the three or four firewalls that
are perfect fits here? I'm going to table that, put
that under my sleeve. And the aggregator we're going
to bring to the table, I alreadyknow in the back of my head are
proficient in Merakis and Fortinets and Catos and Versus.
I already know this. So flipping that next switch,
(16:37):
which is the next project is literally just add them to your
contract. You're already working with
these guys, you already love them.
Let them deploy these things out.
And by the way, in the same management portal that you have
all your knock services and, andand circuit services with.
So not another tool, Graham. Right.
Yeah, and. So we started with firewall
(16:59):
where? What about 100 and what was the
number on this one? Where are we so far with billing
120,000 ish somewhere? Yeah.
Total MRR booked and invoicing today is about $120,000 in
monthly reoccurring obviously atwhatever Commission percentage
to the agent. So a really, really good deal,
(17:21):
but we have another 60 grand to go.
Yeah. And we still haven't sold them
any firewalls now. And you know what's cool about
it? Like because they love the
aggregator that we brought to the table so much, they don't
even the end user doesn't even engage the partner or me
anymore. We're still in talks about the
firewalls and should it be at Sassy or SD Wan or whatever,
(17:42):
right? But they just ordered directly
from the aggregator. I need another circuit order, I
need another this order, I need another that order.
And it just keeps building and building and building.
And nobody in the Telarus ecosystem or even that partner
ecosystem has to make any effortat all.
It just keeps growing and the partner just keeps making more
and more money every single month.
(18:02):
Love it. So let's wrap up here with a few
lessons learned. I think obviously the the big
one that I take away from this is, hey, regardless of where you
start with the conversation, asking a couple of questions
here and there along the way, you never know where you're
going to finish up. This one started out with
firewalls. Yeah, we might get there
eventually with some firewalls, but you sold a whack of stuff in
(18:23):
between without even talking about the firewalls.
Josh, am I on on point with thator any other lessons you took
from that? Yeah, and and and we hear it all
the time, right? Hey, sell me this.
Hey, sell me that or I want to buy this or I want to.
We have to slow down. Sometimes me, me talking, slow
down. I talk so fast it's hard for me
to slow down. But we, we need to, we need to
(18:44):
uncover what the real pain is, What is the real project and
what is really driving the customer to say I think I need
this or I think I need that. What?
Because usually that's not the real project, that's an
ancillary piece of the real project.
We've got to find the real pain and the real project, and we got
to fix that first. Yeah, love that when they come
(19:05):
to you with a product they want to buy, let's dig a little
deeper and find out why, right? Like what, what business outcome
are you trying to achieve by purchasing this product?
And I think obviously this this scenario gave us a really good
example of how that can play outto the benefit of both the
customer and and the tech advisor at the end of the day.
(19:26):
Yeah, these these type, I call them rap accounts, but these
things are not unique. They are super, super common and
partners and selling agents out there.
They don't have to know all thisstuff.
They got the hardest job in the world.
Book a meeting. Bring your hilarious engineers
to the table. We will pull out the shovel
shovels and we will dig for the real use case.
(19:48):
Yeah. Well said my friend.
Way to end it up. Thank you so much for joining us
folks. Hope you enjoyed this session.
Don't forget we got plenty more of these coming out.
Hope you caught our last one with Jason Stein and Trevor
Burnside. That's it for us for now.
We'll catch you on the next one.Thanks so much.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com