In this episode, Kristy Thomas, SVP of Global Channel & Alliances at Vonage, pulls back the curtain on the real power dynamics in co-sell. From navigating Salesforce integrations to uncovering hidden gold in discovery calls, Kristy shares wild stories, hard-won lessons, and the overlooked questions that could make or break your next deal.
🔥 Why is voice the secret weapon in your tech stack?
🚨 What’s really blocking co-sell success?
💡 And what’s coming next that could flip the script on CRM + voice forever?
👉 Don’t miss this one—especially if you’ve ever wondered who’s calling the shots.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success in selling
technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh, the Presto
SVP of Sales Engineering at Solaris and this is next level
biz Tech. Hey everybody, welcome back.
We are back on today with the track entitled Who's Calling the
(00:20):
Shots? Salesforce Voice and the Co Cell
Conundrum. How's that for a mouthful?
On with us today. Christy Thomas, SVP, global
channel and alliances at Vonage.Christy, welcome on.
Hi, Josh. Thank you for having me.
I'm excited to be here today. We got we got a lot of good
stuff. Let's let's kick it off here.
We've known each other a long time.
(00:41):
You've been in this space. Let's let's for those that don't
know you, tell us a little bit about you, your journey.
I mean, you've had a front row seat to this whole evolution of
cloud communication. So just walk us down your back
story and kind of what you got you into this role of Vonage.
Yeah, sure. So would love to my, my story
starts at Masonry G Communications way back in the
(01:04):
day. Now it's a Comcast organization,
but I was an individual contributor there that really
focused on unified communications and service
working with the amazing channelcommunity that's out there
today. And that was really at the, the
height top of the high curve of adoption for unified
communications in the marketplace.
(01:24):
And, and really cut my teeth there.
I, I grew up through working with a lot of the partners on
bringing unified communication or cloud communications.
And we had so many terms for it back then hosted PBXIP,
telephony, all these cloud communications, etcetera,
etcetera. And now we call it unified
(01:45):
communications as a service. And so that's where I really
started in this industry and basically was such a channel
forward organization. So I had the opportunity to sell
with a lot of the channel partners still that I work with
today in my role at Vonage. And honestly, I'm grateful for a
lot of them because they put theroof over my head being able to
(02:06):
ride shotgun with them on these opportunities and trust me with
their customers to bring forwardat the time and emerging
technology. And you know, I stayed there for
quite some time, moved up to leadership and saw that price
compression was happening in unified communications.
And this thing called contact center as a service started to
(02:27):
become front and center. And it was something that
reignited my passion for going out there and solving for
customers with business outcomesand solutions.
And so I started to learn contact center at that
particular time before I left Maester G realized it was a
whole new language. The only thing that was the same
was the as a service and and hadto learn that had to learn the
(02:51):
different stakeholders, what mattered to them and and really
enjoyed kind of that engagement again, because I learned
something new. Fast forward, I I left Maester G
and went to Vonage. At that particular time, I was a
part of the contact center strategy team at Vonage and
(03:11):
worked with Reggie Scales, who'snow our Head of Sales and Alan
Mazrick, who at the time was theCEO.
And right at that time was when we were about ready to acquire a
contact center company. And I was part of that
acquisition of a company called New Voice Media at the time and
really got to go deep around contact center and the
(03:32):
partnership with Salesforce thatthey had established over the
years and built out enterprise sales.
So I for most of that part of mycareer and then I went off to
talk desk as well. I was always more on the
enterprise sales side. So I was building the bench that
sold. I was either the one that sold
alongside of the partner or built the bench that sold
alongside of the partner. Then I, I moved from there to a
(03:55):
TSD, built the CX overlay practice for, for a TSDI did
seven months after leaving thereand was on the partner side.
So I worked for a partner for seven months and then I'm a
boomerang. It came back to Vonage but in a
different capacity. I now am overseeing all of
global channel and alliances. And really what that means is
(04:18):
our amazing channel community out there that is technology
consulting services, but also our partnerships with ECO
technology adjacent ecosystem partners like Salesforce,
Microsoft, ServiceNow, etcetera in the marketplace.
So that's been new and those newpartnerships, the Salesforce is
(04:39):
not new to me, but the others have been new.
And so it's been great to embarkon that as well.
I love it, the channel just it won't let you go.
It's like just a giant, really mostly safe gang that just you
just can't get out. It's just, it's, it's crazy.
And what I think is so, so interesting now is, and this
excites me, I'm now seeing our kids in the channel.
(05:01):
I go to events and I will get introduced to a channel
partner's daughter or son and they're like, oh, you know, he's
interning here or working here at whatever the supplier company
is or one of our our TSD friendslike at tulars.
And it's just, it's, it's weird,but it's great to see.
Yeah. And I, my daughter was with me
on a a trip. She's now 20 and she's grown up
(05:24):
through all this too. And so, you know, showing her
back and introducing to a lot ofour channel partners and them
knowing her from 7 and now 20 isit's a riot.
It's a riot. It's.
Crazy. It's crazy.
Because we all stay the same age.
I know, I know, right? They've grown up, but we're the
same age, 20. 5th birthday againI.
Watch this. Yeah, yes.
Yeah, take so, so, so all those let's let's talk about kind of,
(05:46):
you know, there's a lot of lessons to be had from the field
right before we kind of get to the Vonage and Salesforce story.
Give me a give me a good example, a lesson that you
learned either from a tough deal, a mentor, or just
something that kind of shaped how you do what you do.
OK, so I will say probably there's, there's people always
make fun of me because I go in threes.
(06:07):
There's probably 3 core quick ones that I've learned #1 is
when I, when I shifted and, and really started to lean in and
engaging more around contact centers of service and then now
and also building customer experience transformation
journeys for customers. I quickly realized that the, the
(06:32):
stakeholder depth was changing. Meaning for the longest time we
sold to an IT buyer. And now it's, it's much wider
than that. It's, it's a wider range of
stakeholders and have influence on the opportunities.
But but most importantly, the biggest learning of all of that
was start with engaging early with the CFO.
(06:56):
And I make a joke, always have kissed the ring of the CFO early
and often. But it's really important from a
from alignment perspective because people don't buy
technology because it's cool. They buy it because it's driving
some type of business impact. It's either it's adding to
positive EBITDA in some way, operational efficiencies,
revenue growth, whatever. And so making sure that you're
aligned to the CFO early and often is a really strong
(07:19):
learning for me #2 is, is really, really focusing on
active listening and being curious with active listening.
So I mean, being curious in yourconversations.
But then when you ask something,actively listen to what they're
saying and then make sure that you understand the answer or the
response that they've given you and reiterate it.
(07:40):
Because I think we often as individuals hear what we want to
hear or our brains are wired to where we want to make a point.
And we're so focused on making that point that we forget to
actively listen to what the person's telling us.
And I've learned that in my journey in my career.
(08:00):
And then the third piece of it is, is that don't do any of this
alone. And what I mean by that is, is
that there were so many, so manytalented, experienced
individuals out there for resources.
So that whether that's going to your bunch of solutions
engineering as a partner, whether it's it's me
(08:22):
collaborating with other suppliers or TSDS or what's
working, what's not or helping acustomer and making sure that we
have the right bench for there to help that customer.
Just don't be a lone wolf. Do this because the rate of
technology is happening so fast,innovation and it's so hard to
keep up. I mean, it's impossible to know
(08:43):
everything. So don't kid yourself that
you're going to. So rely on your tribe or
whatever you want to call that to help you be more successful
in what you're doing in your journey.
I love, I love those. Those are fantastic.
The the last one I think is, is interesting too, because, you
know, it's funny to, to get on calls with new partners or
partners that are maybe coming into this ecosystem for the
(09:04):
first time and, and don't know all these nuances, don't know
all the products, don't know allthe vendors, don't know kind of
the go to markets and they go, OK, I've got to do this part.
I've got to do this part, I've got to do this part.
And we're sitting here saying, Imean, you could hire all that if
you needed to, if you wanted to,but you don't, you don't have
to. OK, well, what I need to get
started. You got to knock down some doors
(09:25):
and you just got to leverage those relationships that you
already have. We'll help you with the
discovery. We'll help you with the details.
We'll help you with the notes. We'll get you, you know, we'll
get you connected, connected with folks like yourself.
And often that question I think from people coming in is like
really though, like is this an ML like?
Is that real? You know, that's true.
And it I think it's the really. And then it's also, you know,
(09:47):
often times there's a a certain personality type, the people
that come into this and start their own business, they're very
much hunter mentality and they're also used to being that
kind of type a leader and doing it all on their own and
building, building it themselves.
And you don't have to. You shouldn't.
Yeah, scale. Scale hits you.
Scale hits you quick and you. It does you.
(10:09):
Figure out how to get by. And so let us help.
Absolutely. So let's talk about, you know,
Vonage kind of where it fits in the ecosystem.
So what makes, I mean, Vonage, obviously the name that's been
around for a while, but what makes it stand out in the voice
in the communication space? And maybe just start us with
what's the Salesforce story? And then maybe we'll go a little
(10:29):
bit deeper. Sure, sure.
I'll start with Salesforce and then we can kind of go broader
across the entire communication stack and strategy that we have
around our five year plan. So our partnership with
Salesforce believe it or not is 19 years old.
So we have the longest standing partnership with Salesforce
(10:50):
today and the company that we acquired New Voice Media was
actually a Salesforce VC investment company.
So we've been doing this for a very long time with Salesforce.
And some of the like 3 differentiators around this
partnership are we, we have over1000 reviews on their app
(11:11):
exchange that are 4.9 or higher.So why that's important and why
you should care about that is, is that we've got a high level
of customer satisfaction with our technology that's integrated
into Salesforce. But when you look at that, that
really means that the lifetime value of a Vonage Plus
Salesforce customer is high because they they rate US high
and they stay with us. Our average tenure for customers
(11:33):
is five to seven years with sales force integration.
So we we really differentiate onthe integration and how deep it
is an easy and frictionless for the end user.
We also are part of what's called.
So we're in the independent software vendor ecosystem for
sales force and they have a status that's called Summit
(11:56):
status. And what that means is that
you're in the top 5% of those partners in the revenue that you
generate in that partnership. So we are long standing Summit
partner. We continue to have the benefits
of being in that partnership. And then the other thing that I
think is really important is we,we understand the Co selling
(12:18):
motion with Salesforce and why that's important for partners to
understand is we have this this Better Together strategy wherein
we really make sure that if sales force is involved in
engagement with a customer and there's also a partner involved
in the customer and bondage in the middle, that everybody truly
understands their Co selling responsibilities.
(12:39):
But also the added value that everybody brings because for,
for that trifecta and why it's important for a channel partner
is Salesforce has access to stakeholders, typically that
that Channel partner doesn't have access to.
On the other side of it for the,the, the Salesforce account
(13:00):
executive, the channel partners added value is they typically
have services that we cannot provide at bondage or they
cannot provide at Salesforce. So think Josh, project
management services, the abilityto go and do a technology
assessment to cut costs, to freeup budget for initiatives around
the CX strategy going and do a wireless assessment, maybe those
(13:22):
types of things, those value addservices that a technology
partner or a channel partner might have.
We don't have that advantage andneither does the AE at
Salesforce account Executive. So there's this great strategy
around how when we're together, we have a higher win rate.
Our win rate when we when we really team on this is in the
85% tile. And typically that 15% is a
(13:45):
status quo do nothing right, where the customer just
completely just said we're not gonna do nothing for some reason
or that we can't breakthrough. Yeah, it's just been funny, this
TST ecosystem, you know, we, we sat here and, and Vars and
resellers sat here and the SAS companies and the hyperscaler
sat here and we're all chasing somehow we, you know, high tide
(14:08):
raised all boats, we all chased similar accounts and we all sold
different products and we all stayed in whatever lanes we
needed to stay in. And so I'd love seeing these
come together right now that Salesforce is the size and, and
where they are. And it's awesome to see that you
guys have the relationship to understand how to go to market
with that because the old, the old way we would go, all right,
we got to compete against this direct trip.
(14:30):
Like let's OK, you know, let's, let's tell the customer why this
option is not the right option. We're going to, you know.
So. We're not going down that route.
I mean, maybe so just help the help the advisors understand if
I've if I've got a deal and I think this, you know, this has
got some kind of Vonage meets Salesforce chemistry.
(14:51):
What's the Ave. in that? What are you seeing the sellers
do that are successful? Is it bring it to you?
You go map and find the AE from a sales force perspective and we
lock arms like how does that howdoes that deal cycle go?
Yeah. So you, you set the foundation
of that initial engagement. That's exactly right.
They, they bring it forward to us.
We, we, we get an understanding of what the engagement is from
(15:12):
the channel side of the house. Now, the thing that we're very
sensitive about is, is that why it's so important for a channel
partner to bring forward a customer that is deeply invested
in Salesforce to us is if we don't do that, we don't do some
due diligence on their behalf, there's a chance that they're
going to be competing against Amazon Connect and they don't
(15:33):
even know it, right? And so their deal is actually at
risk because there's been no alliance that's been made on the
Salesforce side. And So what we do is, is we
typically will go through with the channel partner, what's the
opportunity? Who do you have relationships
with? What have you sold in the past?
And then we keep, we keep a, youknow, a very conservative
conversation when we engage withthe account executive at
(15:56):
Salesforce. What are you working on?
We have a partner that's potentially wanting to work with
us and we get a feel for are they open to it or not?
Also confirming that they are inan active buying cycle because
often they'll know as well. And then if there does seem to
be synergies between the two, then we start to make the match
happen and then start to engage properly with the customer.
(16:18):
Along that lines, I, I think theother thing is, is that one of
the, one of the areas where channel partners are often
hesitant to engage sales forces is that they think that it's
going to limit their wallet share of a contact centre deal.
And, and it just depends Sometimes that is the case,
(16:38):
right? Other times it's not the case.
And so we can be sensitive to that, but you still want to have
this in your pocket from a competitive landscape.
And then, you know, let the customer make an informed
decision because at the end of the day, if they've invested
heavily in their CRM for servicecloud and other clouds with
(16:59):
Salesforce, that's way more expensive on their line item of
of operating expenses than the contact center technology.
And the board is going to ask, did you look at who the
integration partners are for Salesforce?
And so you want to make sure that you've checked that box
from a due diligence perspective.
Love it. Let's let's get into a little
(17:19):
bit maybe here. Let's think architecture for
just a second. So we've got Vonage's platform,
we've got Salesforce. Can you maybe kind of you know,
we're we're we're some partners might be used to OK, full suite.
Everything's in this product set, you know, all-encompassing
UCAS, Ccas offering. Now we're talking about Vonage
plus Salesforce. So walk everybody through kind
of what's unique in that? Is it APIs?
(17:41):
Is it automation? And what does the product look
like? Yep.
So, So what we we like to do andI'll start from, you know, we
have the full end of a communication stack that's
accessible with our channel partners in the Vonage
portfolio. And so when we talk about back
office workers or knowledge workers, our solution, our
(18:01):
unified communications solution is called Vonage Business
Services. And where we really
differentiate and we always haveon that solution is through
integrations. And that's because our entire
technology stack, through the acquisitions that we bought,
Josh, what we did is we took allthat code and we uncoupled it
and then we rewrote it and put it in a hyper scaler right in
(18:22):
AWS. And so why that's important to
know is 1, it gives us the elasticity and scalability of
our platform. But 2, when we did that and we
put everything into the infrastructure of AWS with micro
services and containers, we alsohad an API forward approach.
And so all of our platforms, whether it's Bonnet, unified
(18:43):
communications, BBC or the contact center, it's all
extensible through API. So the integrations is why it's
a differentiator. It's because there's no
middleware to do that. It's it's fully extensible.
So we've got the unified communication solutions for our
back office, provide users, thenwe have our contact center
suite. Historically speaking, where
(19:04):
we've always differentiated is the embedded experience with
Salesforce and the ability to really drive that rich
experience of a contact center. Not even knowing this Vonage
honestly that just lives in Salesforce.
But we just recently launched the enhancement of our contact
center solution that stand aloneand it's really the interface
(19:25):
and the extensibility of this enhancement.
So it's a full Omni channel contact center solution that is
integrated into over 13 third party platforms.
So integration beyond just salesforce, it's all these others
that are out there in the in themarketplace.
So Zoho, HubSpot, a lot of theseemerging ones.
And so that's truly the differentiation of the solution.
(19:48):
And then it is highly secure andhyper secure.
And there's a whole other track around that from our why we're
so secure because of the governance around our platform
from Ericsson, because we're owned by Ericsson company.
And then the third piece of it is that we now call Network API,
but it's our API part of our solution And why that's
(20:09):
important for customers is it allows them to embed different
types of communications into either their development stack
for applications, software that they do whatever or internal
projects. And so really that extensibility
of communications across all different types of ways in which
ultimately the customer is trying to communicate to their
(20:29):
customers externally. Yeah, I love it.
There's just I think that what Iget out of that is a lot of
modularity, right? You guys have built.
This right way? People, you got to meet people
where they are, right? I mean, it's hard enough to win
a deal. It's hard enough, it's harder to
win it when you're rigid so. Yes, I love that.
And you know, one of the things too that I've learned over the
(20:52):
past, I guess almost nine monthsthat I've been here is when we
tell that story, people also often hear that we are a
platform of as a service and youhave to, you have to eat the
whole elephant of the platform. And that's actually not the case
at all. Our solution is very much
capable of, of solving for business use cases based on
(21:14):
point solutions. And so for, for many customers
right now, you can't go in and sell the entire stack.
They're just not ready for that for many different limitations
and reasons. Sometimes they're technology
related, sometimes they're contract related.
But you can beach head into these customers with a solution
(21:35):
within the bondage portfolio andbuild credibility and trust and
then grow from there. So land and expand as we call
it, right? Love it.
Let's let's think about my favorite thing is to talk about
discovery calls questions. So you've been in a lot of
deals, right? You've seen a lot of different
scenarios. And to your point, you know,
earlier we talked about active listening.
We've all seen that where the customer just feeds you the
(21:58):
absolute answer to everything that you want.
And you were so focused on just saying the next thing that you
just like, oh, you dude, you missed it.
They just they told you how they're going to buy.
So all, all, all these discoverycalls, I, what would you say is
either the most overlooked question when we're talking
voice, we're talking CRM or the past question, I mean, I don't
(22:19):
know either way. Well, I'd say, you know, the
obvious question from a technology perspective on the
technology stack that that that people still don't ask is, is
understanding their technology stack beyond just the
communications layer of it. So going extensible into
(22:41):
understanding what they're doingfor CRM and ERP, all those
things because the the integration is often what drives
a richer ROI analysis around this and you really get the
improvement within the people inthe process of the organization.
So really understanding the fulltechnology stack is, is so
quintessential today. And there's a lot of tech
(23:03):
Franken out there through pandemic, post pandemic,
selling, buying, growing in acquisitions.
And so understanding that tech Franken is where you as a
partner bring value because you can uncouple that with a
solution that's more seamless and integrated.
So the technology stack assessment is really important,
(23:25):
not just how many seats, what features do you want.
Talk to me about the use cases and talk to me about you know
what, what are your KPIs for contact center?
Those are standard. So get that outside, just go
deeper on the technology stack. But most importantly, start at
the business level. Understand what is the company's
number one charter? Is it growth through
(23:49):
differentiated customer experience?
Is it growth through acquisition?
Is it growth through alternativechannels?
Or is there strategy to drive operational efficiencies and
operational agility, like understanding where they are on
(24:10):
the quadrant of growth and then correlating that to how is that
individual that you're talking to being measured on that
charter? We often we go, we, I see, but
we go, we go so quick into wanting to solution #1 And so we
start asking all of these technology questions, but we
(24:31):
forget like what's important to the company and what's important
to the individual that you're talking to.
Because if you can unpack that, then you can start to get to the
other parts of the, of the real solution, right, of the tech.
The tech solution is easy. It's how do you drive value to
the company and how do you drivevalue to that individual.
When you go down, when you go down this discovery call, you
(24:52):
know, this kind of process and you're asking them these, I
guess some of these questions. I guess how often do you find
that people know what's possible?
I mean when you get into. It well, it's a great question,
yeah. And and that's really
interesting because often times they don't and and and here
(25:13):
again, there's different types of customers that you're dealing
with. But let's just remind everybody
that there's still a lot of Premout there, a lot of premises
based solutions that people haven't moved off of and they
don't know what's possible because they've had this
solution in place for a decade, literally some people.
(25:35):
And so for them, they don't knowwhat they don't know.
And that's what's always really exciting is, is they might go
out there and get informed because that's most of what
people do. But today I remember this one
statistic when I was at Maester G and they told us that by the
time you talk to a buyer, they're already 30% informed
down the path of making a decision.
(25:57):
I think that that actually is declining, not increasing.
And here's why. There's so much noise out there.
It's overwhelming. It's, it's just, it's too much.
And so they don't know. I can't imagine.
I mean, I, I think we, we forgethow spoiled we get into some of
these conversations. I can't imagine, you know,
(26:17):
flipping the table to being on the other side of it and trying
to be a buyer, you know, now here we are.
Fast forward to OK, modernization happened, digital
transformation happened. Now AI is happening.
Now a gentic AI is happening. It's it's got to be so hard.
You know, SEO is SEO going to win out, right?
Who's are we back to NCO race a Gen.
(26:39):
AI you know LLM race of marketing like how to your right
like people. It's it's a thrive in
complexity. It really is.
And so that's why I think now more than ever, now more than
ever, there is the value of a technology advisor in these
discussions because they need somebody to help them, help them
(27:03):
mitigate all the noise and understand really what's the
right solution for, for what they're trying to accomplish
and, and even talk to them aboutin this.
Again, This is why you don't do this alone.
You rely on on Telaris, you relyon other suppliers to get wind
stories and understand like use cases so that you can bring
(27:23):
forward the customers say this is this is the transformation
that a light company went down like you, right?
Let's talk about that. Let's talk about what we focused
on from a technology of current state to future state.
And then what were the impacts and how did they do that?
And then they start to visualizewhat is that possible art for
them and then get them on some of them, it's a crawl, walk, run
(27:47):
strategy because they're not ready, Josh.
Most of these companies aren't ready for AI.
They don't have a knowledge base.
They don't, they're not ready, but they know that the boardroom
is telling them they've got to have it because it's going to
solve all of our world's problems.
And so you've got it again, that's the value that an advisor
brings us. So they can help them on that
journey along the way and, and take them from that current
(28:08):
state. And, and also, you know, take
them through, start small. But here's the art of what could
potentially be possible. Yeah, the IT was interesting.
We, we did an episode probably, I don't know, it's maybe 50
episodes back at this point, kind of right at the wave of
when open AI released their first model and kind of
everything went crazy. And we looked at, you know, we
(28:31):
looked back at the, the Y Combinator, the amount of
companies, AI based productization that have jumped
into Y Combinator that were already coming out with products
like right, as right as AI had started.
And so now you have, you know, 10s of billions of dollars into
private equity into the next bigproduct.
So again, to to exponentially cause pain to the customers of
(28:56):
what's the next big thing that'sgoing to be vaporware or is it
real? Because it's going to be really
hard to differentiate A1 employee AI product startup from
a very well established. It's purely from a marketing
perspective, right, Is so good and some of the demos are so
good. So diligence and advice, I can't
(29:16):
push that enough for sure. Yeah, that's actually the
diligence piece I think is you're going somewhere with
that, Josh, because I think there is value to start to bring
some type of diligence algorithmframework that you take to a
customer and say, Mr. Customer, I understand you've got an AI
strategy just like everybody else.
(29:38):
But when it comes to sourcing these technologies, this is the
framework that I work with customers to make sure that
you're making not only an informed decision one, but also
one that is mitigated from a risk perspective for your
business. Yeah, agree.
You have to, you have to yeah, just I think the more I'm always
surprised. I mean, I am and I'm not of when
(29:58):
we ask some of these questions and they're like, Oh my gosh, I
didn't even, I didn't even thinkof that, you know.
So it's, it's like cool, we're adding writing even more value,
right, Even a deeper. Layer.
Of of of that into the conversation for sure.
Yeah. All right, we got to we got to
think of a a really wild examplehere.
So as we kind of get to the the final couple thoughts, what's a
(30:19):
maybe just a wild or just interesting story in a Co sell
engagement or in a sales force engagement that you've seen that
you know that that came to fruition?
Well, what we're seeing right now is, is that, and, and I, I
just came back from Salesforce'sevent that they call World Tour.
(30:41):
And it used to be, it used to becalled Salesforce World Tour,
but now it's called Asian Force World Tour intent.
So if you were stepping away at Super Bowl and you missed the
Matthew McConaughey Asian Forestcommercials or you've, you know,
not getting the feeds on your Youtubes like I do on agent
(31:02):
force, agent forces, sales forces, agentic AI solution that
they just released at their Dreamforce at the end of last
year. And they, they launched, I think
it was, you have to quote me. It's in the thousands of
customers. Don't quote me thousands of
customers at the year that are signing up for agent Force use
(31:22):
cases. And I think you know, for us the
most interesting play of all this is, is that agent force is
actually the entry point to the their other solution that's
called data cloud. And both agent Force and Agent
Agent Force and Data Cloud are consumption based solutions.
(31:45):
They're not, they're no longer alicensed SAS based solutions.
So why I say this and why I think our channel community
should care about this is, is that they are shifting to a
consumption based business. They are going through a
transformation from SAS licensing to consumption based
and there's opportunity for channel partners there because a
(32:06):
lot of customers don't know how to buy that.
But we've been selling that in acloud environment for years and
we can help customers predict costs around that etcetera.
But the the interesting use casethat that I saw last week was
leveraging agentic AI to go through and collect information
(32:31):
from for an insurance environment where you're going
to go in and and sell additionalinsurance to a customer.
And then, but then take all the information collected and really
create this white space profile on that particular customer of
(32:51):
what are the opportunities within the portfolio solutions
that you can sell. And then and then leveraged
bondage for human in the loop when connecting those 2.
So it's a personalized experience and all of the stuff
that was collected in front was not through prompts.
It wasn't through it was naturallanguage with the agent
collecting all this information.And then, so then when you
(33:12):
actually connected the person human in the loop for the high
value rate, it, it warranted theupselling cross sell that
typically you wouldn't see. And I think that's where like
we're seeing a lot of use cases that are valuable.
The other one that's really interesting is matching for job
hunting talent profiles. So think of, you know, this,
(33:33):
these organizations that are outthere recruiting and matching
people to to open jobs. So they're a third party company
that you know, they're outsourced for that kind of
thing. Historically speaking, Josh, it
was a human that was going in and looking at the open job
rocks and then through their manual intervention saying, oh,
(33:53):
Josh is a good fit for this or Josh is not based on his resume
that you are viewing. Now all of that bias is gone
because what has happening in his agent, the agent force or
the Sygentic AI tool is just going through and looking at
different type of language or learning models and saying
actually, not only Josh is a good fit for this, but think of
(34:13):
Christy, even though her resume doesn't show this, she actually
could actually really solve for this job.
And so it's doing a lot of work and actually matching people up
better beyond just looking at A1dimensional resume.
Yeah, it's it's really interesting to watch.
And so we're in the middle of all of this and doing things
like agent actions with bondage for like fraud prevention
(34:35):
control and different scenarios.And it's fun to get involved
with Salesforce because we're that early adopter of leaning
into the exposed AP is that they're giving us and really
embracing it. And so it's, it's been fun.
And then now talking to customers about how we can solve
with it. Well, yeah.
And I mean, I, I, I think the, the spot that we're at is it's
(34:57):
all the things that you talked about I think compounded, right?
You know, listen, active listening, that's key beyond the
tech stack into the business drivers, make sure that you're
talking to the CFO like all these really, really important
absolute must haves in a deal. And now not only do you have
great examples and a great platform, I think the value, the
(35:17):
additional value comes in of my gosh, this is gonna create 85
different ways to solve the problems that the customers are
not ready to envision on their. Own right again?
Yeah. More guidance, more examples,
more use cases. I think all these things will be
great to help customers go. I didn't even think of trying to
have this call it that. Way 100% and I'll also say one
(35:38):
of the things that I am super excited about for this, the
launch of our intelligent workspace contact center
solution is, is that also, you know, we'd be like naive to
think that there's only sales force users in a, in a business
environment, right? There's there's other types of
users. And so now our contact center
solutions extensible to other different types of users that
(36:00):
are out there again and the ability to leverage integration
into those third party platformsthat that particular subset of
users are using. I this, I think it's really, you
know, people always talk about, you know, is voice dead or not?
And what I'm learning through a lot of discussions with, with
(36:23):
customers, partners and our technology alliances like sales
forces is that voice is definitely not dead.
It's more important than any because what you're doing now is
is you are taking all of those jobs to be done in a mundane
fashion and really connecting topeople for human in the loop to
have a real conversation when it's really important, when it
(36:45):
matters the most, Yeah. I.
Agree and and that's that's how companies make money is by
communicating and. It's not going to change.
It's going to get different, butit's not going to change.
It's going to get different, butit's not going to change.
I love starting to hear that human in the loop.
That was a big, you know, talk of with Salesforce and Google
Next and some of the agent to agent communication and things
like that. Love the human in the loop,
(37:07):
right? All of this automation and the
agentic stuff is great and we still can't forget the human
connection and that that human in the loop.
Absolutely. Yeah, Yeah.
That's really important. Awesome.
Great place to wrap it. Lot of good Nuggets in there.
Christy, glad we could get you on.
Thanks for thanks for coming on and doing this.
Thank you for having me, this isthe best part of my day.
(37:29):
I really enjoyed our dialogue. Love it All right, everybody
that wraps this up for today. As always, just remember these
are dropping every Wednesday wherever you're coming to us
from Spotify, Apple, be sure to go out and as long as you're
subscribed and you're liked and all that good stuff, you'll get
these as soon as they drop. So until next time, this has
been who's calling the shots Salesforce voice and the Co S
(37:50):
conundrum. Christy Thomas, SVP of global
channel and alliances at bondage.
I'm your host, Joshua Presto, SVP of Sales Engineering.
Next Level Biztech has been a production of.
Polaris Studio 19, please visit telaris.com.
For more information.
Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success in selling
technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh, the Presto
SVP of Sales Engineering at Solaris and this is next level
biz Tech. Hey everybody, welcome back.
We are back on today with the track entitled Who's Calling the
(00:20):
Shots? Salesforce Voice and the Co Cell
Conundrum. How's that for a mouthful?
On with us today. Christy Thomas, SVP, global
channel and alliances at Vonage.Christy, welcome on.
Hi, Josh. Thank you for having me.
I'm excited to be here today. We got we got a lot of good
stuff. Let's let's kick it off here.
We've known each other a long time.
(00:41):
You've been in this space. Let's let's for those that don't
know you, tell us a little bit about you, your journey.
I mean, you've had a front row seat to this whole evolution of
cloud communication. So just walk us down your back
story and kind of what you got you into this role of Vonage.
Yeah, sure. So would love to my, my story
starts at Masonry G Communications way back in the
(01:04):
day. Now it's a Comcast organization,
but I was an individual contributor there that really
focused on unified communications and service
working with the amazing channelcommunity that's out there
today. And that was really at the, the
height top of the high curve of adoption for unified
communications in the marketplace.
(01:24):
And, and really cut my teeth there.
I, I grew up through working with a lot of the partners on
bringing unified communication or cloud communications.
And we had so many terms for it back then hosted PBXIP,
telephony, all these cloud communications, etcetera,
etcetera. And now we call it unified
(01:45):
communications as a service. And so that's where I really
started in this industry and basically was such a channel
forward organization. So I had the opportunity to sell
with a lot of the channel partners still that I work with
today in my role at Vonage. And honestly, I'm grateful for a
lot of them because they put theroof over my head being able to
(02:06):
ride shotgun with them on these opportunities and trust me with
their customers to bring forwardat the time and emerging
technology. And you know, I stayed there for
quite some time, moved up to leadership and saw that price
compression was happening in unified communications.
And this thing called contact center as a service started to
(02:27):
become front and center. And it was something that
reignited my passion for going out there and solving for
customers with business outcomesand solutions.
And so I started to learn contact center at that
particular time before I left Maester G realized it was a
whole new language. The only thing that was the same
was the as a service and and hadto learn that had to learn the
(02:51):
different stakeholders, what mattered to them and and really
enjoyed kind of that engagement again, because I learned
something new. Fast forward, I I left Maester G
and went to Vonage. At that particular time, I was a
part of the contact center strategy team at Vonage and
(03:11):
worked with Reggie Scales, who'snow our Head of Sales and Alan
Mazrick, who at the time was theCEO.
And right at that time was when we were about ready to acquire a
contact center company. And I was part of that
acquisition of a company called New Voice Media at the time and
really got to go deep around contact center and the
(03:32):
partnership with Salesforce thatthey had established over the
years and built out enterprise sales.
So I for most of that part of mycareer and then I went off to
talk desk as well. I was always more on the
enterprise sales side. So I was building the bench that
sold. I was either the one that sold
alongside of the partner or built the bench that sold
alongside of the partner. Then I, I moved from there to a
(03:55):
TSD, built the CX overlay practice for, for a TSDI did
seven months after leaving thereand was on the partner side.
So I worked for a partner for seven months and then I'm a
boomerang. It came back to Vonage but in a
different capacity. I now am overseeing all of
global channel and alliances. And really what that means is
(04:18):
our amazing channel community out there that is technology
consulting services, but also our partnerships with ECO
technology adjacent ecosystem partners like Salesforce,
Microsoft, ServiceNow, etcetera in the marketplace.
So that's been new and those newpartnerships, the Salesforce is
(04:39):
not new to me, but the others have been new.
And so it's been great to embarkon that as well.
I love it, the channel just it won't let you go.
It's like just a giant, really mostly safe gang that just you
just can't get out. It's just, it's, it's crazy.
And what I think is so, so interesting now is, and this
excites me, I'm now seeing our kids in the channel.
(05:01):
I go to events and I will get introduced to a channel
partner's daughter or son and they're like, oh, you know, he's
interning here or working here at whatever the supplier company
is or one of our our TSD friendslike at tulars.
And it's just, it's, it's weird,but it's great to see.
Yeah. And I, my daughter was with me
on a a trip. She's now 20 and she's grown up
(05:24):
through all this too. And so, you know, showing her
back and introducing to a lot ofour channel partners and them
knowing her from 7 and now 20 isit's a riot.
It's a riot. It's.
Crazy. It's crazy.
Because we all stay the same age.
I know, I know, right? They've grown up, but we're the
same age, 20. 5th birthday againI.
Watch this. Yeah, yes.
Yeah, take so, so, so all those let's let's talk about kind of,
(05:46):
you know, there's a lot of lessons to be had from the field
right before we kind of get to the Vonage and Salesforce story.
Give me a give me a good example, a lesson that you
learned either from a tough deal, a mentor, or just
something that kind of shaped how you do what you do.
OK, so I will say probably there's, there's people always
make fun of me because I go in threes.
(06:07):
There's probably 3 core quick ones that I've learned #1 is
when I, when I shifted and, and really started to lean in and
engaging more around contact centers of service and then now
and also building customer experience transformation
journeys for customers. I quickly realized that the, the
(06:32):
stakeholder depth was changing. Meaning for the longest time we
sold to an IT buyer. And now it's, it's much wider
than that. It's, it's a wider range of
stakeholders and have influence on the opportunities.
But but most importantly, the biggest learning of all of that
was start with engaging early with the CFO.
(06:56):
And I make a joke, always have kissed the ring of the CFO early
and often. But it's really important from a
from alignment perspective because people don't buy
technology because it's cool. They buy it because it's driving
some type of business impact. It's either it's adding to
positive EBITDA in some way, operational efficiencies,
revenue growth, whatever. And so making sure that you're
aligned to the CFO early and often is a really strong
(07:19):
learning for me #2 is, is really, really focusing on
active listening and being curious with active listening.
So I mean, being curious in yourconversations.
But then when you ask something,actively listen to what they're
saying and then make sure that you understand the answer or the
response that they've given you and reiterate it.
(07:40):
Because I think we often as individuals hear what we want to
hear or our brains are wired to where we want to make a point.
And we're so focused on making that point that we forget to
actively listen to what the person's telling us.
And I've learned that in my journey in my career.
(08:00):
And then the third piece of it is, is that don't do any of this
alone. And what I mean by that is, is
that there were so many, so manytalented, experienced
individuals out there for resources.
So that whether that's going to your bunch of solutions
engineering as a partner, whether it's it's me
(08:22):
collaborating with other suppliers or TSDS or what's
working, what's not or helping acustomer and making sure that we
have the right bench for there to help that customer.
Just don't be a lone wolf. Do this because the rate of
technology is happening so fast,innovation and it's so hard to
keep up. I mean, it's impossible to know
(08:43):
everything. So don't kid yourself that
you're going to. So rely on your tribe or
whatever you want to call that to help you be more successful
in what you're doing in your journey.
I love, I love those. Those are fantastic.
The the last one I think is, is interesting too, because, you
know, it's funny to, to get on calls with new partners or
partners that are maybe coming into this ecosystem for the
(09:04):
first time and, and don't know all these nuances, don't know
all the products, don't know allthe vendors, don't know kind of
the go to markets and they go, OK, I've got to do this part.
I've got to do this part, I've got to do this part.
And we're sitting here saying, Imean, you could hire all that if
you needed to, if you wanted to,but you don't, you don't have
to. OK, well, what I need to get
started. You got to knock down some doors
(09:25):
and you just got to leverage those relationships that you
already have. We'll help you with the
discovery. We'll help you with the details.
We'll help you with the notes. We'll get you, you know, we'll
get you connected, connected with folks like yourself.
And often that question I think from people coming in is like
really though, like is this an ML like?
Is that real? You know, that's true.
And it I think it's the really. And then it's also, you know,
(09:47):
often times there's a a certain personality type, the people
that come into this and start their own business, they're very
much hunter mentality and they're also used to being that
kind of type a leader and doing it all on their own and
building, building it themselves.
And you don't have to. You shouldn't.
Yeah, scale. Scale hits you.
Scale hits you quick and you. It does you.
(10:09):
Figure out how to get by. And so let us help.
Absolutely. So let's talk about, you know,
Vonage kind of where it fits in the ecosystem.
So what makes, I mean, Vonage, obviously the name that's been
around for a while, but what makes it stand out in the voice
in the communication space? And maybe just start us with
what's the Salesforce story? And then maybe we'll go a little
(10:29):
bit deeper. Sure, sure.
I'll start with Salesforce and then we can kind of go broader
across the entire communication stack and strategy that we have
around our five year plan. So our partnership with
Salesforce believe it or not is 19 years old.
So we have the longest standing partnership with Salesforce
(10:50):
today and the company that we acquired New Voice Media was
actually a Salesforce VC investment company.
So we've been doing this for a very long time with Salesforce.
And some of the like 3 differentiators around this
partnership are we, we have over1000 reviews on their app
(11:11):
exchange that are 4.9 or higher.So why that's important and why
you should care about that is, is that we've got a high level
of customer satisfaction with our technology that's integrated
into Salesforce. But when you look at that, that
really means that the lifetime value of a Vonage Plus
Salesforce customer is high because they they rate US high
and they stay with us. Our average tenure for customers
(11:33):
is five to seven years with sales force integration.
So we we really differentiate onthe integration and how deep it
is an easy and frictionless for the end user.
We also are part of what's called.
So we're in the independent software vendor ecosystem for
sales force and they have a status that's called Summit
(11:56):
status. And what that means is that
you're in the top 5% of those partners in the revenue that you
generate in that partnership. So we are long standing Summit
partner. We continue to have the benefits
of being in that partnership. And then the other thing that I
think is really important is we,we understand the Co selling
(12:18):
motion with Salesforce and why that's important for partners to
understand is we have this this Better Together strategy wherein
we really make sure that if sales force is involved in
engagement with a customer and there's also a partner involved
in the customer and bondage in the middle, that everybody truly
understands their Co selling responsibilities.
(12:39):
But also the added value that everybody brings because for,
for that trifecta and why it's important for a channel partner
is Salesforce has access to stakeholders, typically that
that Channel partner doesn't have access to.
On the other side of it for the,the, the Salesforce account
(13:00):
executive, the channel partners added value is they typically
have services that we cannot provide at bondage or they
cannot provide at Salesforce. So think Josh, project
management services, the abilityto go and do a technology
assessment to cut costs, to freeup budget for initiatives around
the CX strategy going and do a wireless assessment, maybe those
(13:22):
types of things, those value addservices that a technology
partner or a channel partner might have.
We don't have that advantage andneither does the AE at
Salesforce account Executive. So there's this great strategy
around how when we're together, we have a higher win rate.
Our win rate when we when we really team on this is in the
85% tile. And typically that 15% is a
(13:45):
status quo do nothing right, where the customer just
completely just said we're not gonna do nothing for some reason
or that we can't breakthrough. Yeah, it's just been funny, this
TST ecosystem, you know, we, we sat here and, and Vars and
resellers sat here and the SAS companies and the hyperscaler
sat here and we're all chasing somehow we, you know, high tide
(14:08):
raised all boats, we all chased similar accounts and we all sold
different products and we all stayed in whatever lanes we
needed to stay in. And so I'd love seeing these
come together right now that Salesforce is the size and, and
where they are. And it's awesome to see that you
guys have the relationship to understand how to go to market
with that because the old, the old way we would go, all right,
we got to compete against this direct trip.
(14:30):
Like let's OK, you know, let's, let's tell the customer why this
option is not the right option. We're going to, you know.
So. We're not going down that route.
I mean, maybe so just help the help the advisors understand if
I've if I've got a deal and I think this, you know, this has
got some kind of Vonage meets Salesforce chemistry.
(14:51):
What's the Ave. in that? What are you seeing the sellers
do that are successful? Is it bring it to you?
You go map and find the AE from a sales force perspective and we
lock arms like how does that howdoes that deal cycle go?
Yeah. So you, you set the foundation
of that initial engagement. That's exactly right.
They, they bring it forward to us.
We, we, we get an understanding of what the engagement is from
(15:12):
the channel side of the house. Now, the thing that we're very
sensitive about is, is that why it's so important for a channel
partner to bring forward a customer that is deeply invested
in Salesforce to us is if we don't do that, we don't do some
due diligence on their behalf, there's a chance that they're
going to be competing against Amazon Connect and they don't
(15:33):
even know it, right? And so their deal is actually at
risk because there's been no alliance that's been made on the
Salesforce side. And So what we do is, is we
typically will go through with the channel partner, what's the
opportunity? Who do you have relationships
with? What have you sold in the past?
And then we keep, we keep a, youknow, a very conservative
conversation when we engage withthe account executive at
(15:56):
Salesforce. What are you working on?
We have a partner that's potentially wanting to work with
us and we get a feel for are they open to it or not?
Also confirming that they are inan active buying cycle because
often they'll know as well. And then if there does seem to
be synergies between the two, then we start to make the match
happen and then start to engage properly with the customer.
(16:18):
Along that lines, I, I think theother thing is, is that one of
the, one of the areas where channel partners are often
hesitant to engage sales forces is that they think that it's
going to limit their wallet share of a contact centre deal.
And, and it just depends Sometimes that is the case,
(16:38):
right? Other times it's not the case.
And so we can be sensitive to that, but you still want to have
this in your pocket from a competitive landscape.
And then, you know, let the customer make an informed
decision because at the end of the day, if they've invested
heavily in their CRM for servicecloud and other clouds with
(16:59):
Salesforce, that's way more expensive on their line item of
of operating expenses than the contact center technology.
And the board is going to ask, did you look at who the
integration partners are for Salesforce?
And so you want to make sure that you've checked that box
from a due diligence perspective.
Love it. Let's let's get into a little
(17:19):
bit maybe here. Let's think architecture for
just a second. So we've got Vonage's platform,
we've got Salesforce. Can you maybe kind of you know,
we're we're we're some partners might be used to OK, full suite.
Everything's in this product set, you know, all-encompassing
UCAS, Ccas offering. Now we're talking about Vonage
plus Salesforce. So walk everybody through kind
of what's unique in that? Is it APIs?
(17:41):
Is it automation? And what does the product look
like? Yep.
So, So what we we like to do andI'll start from, you know, we
have the full end of a communication stack that's
accessible with our channel partners in the Vonage
portfolio. And so when we talk about back
office workers or knowledge workers, our solution, our
(18:01):
unified communications solution is called Vonage Business
Services. And where we really
differentiate and we always haveon that solution is through
integrations. And that's because our entire
technology stack, through the acquisitions that we bought,
Josh, what we did is we took allthat code and we uncoupled it
and then we rewrote it and put it in a hyper scaler right in
(18:22):
AWS. And so why that's important to
know is 1, it gives us the elasticity and scalability of
our platform. But 2, when we did that and we
put everything into the infrastructure of AWS with micro
services and containers, we alsohad an API forward approach.
And so all of our platforms, whether it's Bonnet, unified
(18:43):
communications, BBC or the contact center, it's all
extensible through API. So the integrations is why it's
a differentiator. It's because there's no
middleware to do that. It's it's fully extensible.
So we've got the unified communication solutions for our
back office, provide users, thenwe have our contact center
suite. Historically speaking, where
(19:04):
we've always differentiated is the embedded experience with
Salesforce and the ability to really drive that rich
experience of a contact center. Not even knowing this Vonage
honestly that just lives in Salesforce.
But we just recently launched the enhancement of our contact
center solution that stand aloneand it's really the interface
(19:25):
and the extensibility of this enhancement.
So it's a full Omni channel contact center solution that is
integrated into over 13 third party platforms.
So integration beyond just salesforce, it's all these others
that are out there in the in themarketplace.
So Zoho, HubSpot, a lot of theseemerging ones.
And so that's truly the differentiation of the solution.
(19:48):
And then it is highly secure andhyper secure.
And there's a whole other track around that from our why we're
so secure because of the governance around our platform
from Ericsson, because we're owned by Ericsson company.
And then the third piece of it is that we now call Network API,
but it's our API part of our solution And why that's
(20:09):
important for customers is it allows them to embed different
types of communications into either their development stack
for applications, software that they do whatever or internal
projects. And so really that extensibility
of communications across all different types of ways in which
ultimately the customer is trying to communicate to their
(20:29):
customers externally. Yeah, I love it.
There's just I think that what Iget out of that is a lot of
modularity, right? You guys have built.
This right way? People, you got to meet people
where they are, right? I mean, it's hard enough to win
a deal. It's hard enough, it's harder to
win it when you're rigid so. Yes, I love that.
And you know, one of the things too that I've learned over the
(20:52):
past, I guess almost nine monthsthat I've been here is when we
tell that story, people also often hear that we are a
platform of as a service and youhave to, you have to eat the
whole elephant of the platform. And that's actually not the case
at all. Our solution is very much
capable of, of solving for business use cases based on
(21:14):
point solutions. And so for, for many customers
right now, you can't go in and sell the entire stack.
They're just not ready for that for many different limitations
and reasons. Sometimes they're technology
related, sometimes they're contract related.
But you can beach head into these customers with a solution
(21:35):
within the bondage portfolio andbuild credibility and trust and
then grow from there. So land and expand as we call
it, right? Love it.
Let's let's think about my favorite thing is to talk about
discovery calls questions. So you've been in a lot of
deals, right? You've seen a lot of different
scenarios. And to your point, you know,
earlier we talked about active listening.
We've all seen that where the customer just feeds you the
(21:58):
absolute answer to everything that you want.
And you were so focused on just saying the next thing that you
just like, oh, you dude, you missed it.
They just they told you how they're going to buy.
So all, all, all these discoverycalls, I, what would you say is
either the most overlooked question when we're talking
voice, we're talking CRM or the past question, I mean, I don't
(22:19):
know either way. Well, I'd say, you know, the
obvious question from a technology perspective on the
technology stack that that that people still don't ask is, is
understanding their technology stack beyond just the
communications layer of it. So going extensible into
(22:41):
understanding what they're doingfor CRM and ERP, all those
things because the the integration is often what drives
a richer ROI analysis around this and you really get the
improvement within the people inthe process of the organization.
So really understanding the fulltechnology stack is, is so
quintessential today. And there's a lot of tech
(23:03):
Franken out there through pandemic, post pandemic,
selling, buying, growing in acquisitions.
And so understanding that tech Franken is where you as a
partner bring value because you can uncouple that with a
solution that's more seamless and integrated.
So the technology stack assessment is really important,
(23:25):
not just how many seats, what features do you want.
Talk to me about the use cases and talk to me about you know
what, what are your KPIs for contact center?
Those are standard. So get that outside, just go
deeper on the technology stack. But most importantly, start at
the business level. Understand what is the company's
number one charter? Is it growth through
(23:49):
differentiated customer experience?
Is it growth through acquisition?
Is it growth through alternativechannels?
Or is there strategy to drive operational efficiencies and
operational agility, like understanding where they are on
(24:10):
the quadrant of growth and then correlating that to how is that
individual that you're talking to being measured on that
charter? We often we go, we, I see, but
we go, we go so quick into wanting to solution #1 And so we
start asking all of these technology questions, but we
(24:31):
forget like what's important to the company and what's important
to the individual that you're talking to.
Because if you can unpack that, then you can start to get to the
other parts of the, of the real solution, right, of the tech.
The tech solution is easy. It's how do you drive value to
the company and how do you drivevalue to that individual.
When you go down, when you go down this discovery call, you
(24:52):
know, this kind of process and you're asking them these, I
guess some of these questions. I guess how often do you find
that people know what's possible?
I mean when you get into. It well, it's a great question,
yeah. And and that's really
interesting because often times they don't and and and here
(25:13):
again, there's different types of customers that you're dealing
with. But let's just remind everybody
that there's still a lot of Premout there, a lot of premises
based solutions that people haven't moved off of and they
don't know what's possible because they've had this
solution in place for a decade, literally some people.
(25:35):
And so for them, they don't knowwhat they don't know.
And that's what's always really exciting is, is they might go
out there and get informed because that's most of what
people do. But today I remember this one
statistic when I was at Maester G and they told us that by the
time you talk to a buyer, they're already 30% informed
down the path of making a decision.
(25:57):
I think that that actually is declining, not increasing.
And here's why. There's so much noise out there.
It's overwhelming. It's, it's just, it's too much.
And so they don't know. I can't imagine.
I mean, I, I think we, we forgethow spoiled we get into some of
these conversations. I can't imagine, you know,
(26:17):
flipping the table to being on the other side of it and trying
to be a buyer, you know, now here we are.
Fast forward to OK, modernization happened, digital
transformation happened. Now AI is happening.
Now a gentic AI is happening. It's it's got to be so hard.
You know, SEO is SEO going to win out, right?
Who's are we back to NCO race a Gen.
(26:39):
AI you know LLM race of marketing like how to your right
like people. It's it's a thrive in
complexity. It really is.
And so that's why I think now more than ever, now more than
ever, there is the value of a technology advisor in these
discussions because they need somebody to help them, help them
(27:03):
mitigate all the noise and understand really what's the
right solution for, for what they're trying to accomplish
and, and even talk to them aboutin this.
Again, This is why you don't do this alone.
You rely on on Telaris, you relyon other suppliers to get wind
stories and understand like use cases so that you can bring
(27:23):
forward the customers say this is this is the transformation
that a light company went down like you, right?
Let's talk about that. Let's talk about what we focused
on from a technology of current state to future state.
And then what were the impacts and how did they do that?
And then they start to visualizewhat is that possible art for
them and then get them on some of them, it's a crawl, walk, run
(27:47):
strategy because they're not ready, Josh.
Most of these companies aren't ready for AI.
They don't have a knowledge base.
They don't, they're not ready, but they know that the boardroom
is telling them they've got to have it because it's going to
solve all of our world's problems.
And so you've got it again, that's the value that an advisor
brings us. So they can help them on that
journey along the way and, and take them from that current
(28:08):
state. And, and also, you know, take
them through, start small. But here's the art of what could
potentially be possible. Yeah, the IT was interesting.
We, we did an episode probably, I don't know, it's maybe 50
episodes back at this point, kind of right at the wave of
when open AI released their first model and kind of
everything went crazy. And we looked at, you know, we
(28:31):
looked back at the, the Y Combinator, the amount of
companies, AI based productization that have jumped
into Y Combinator that were already coming out with products
like right, as right as AI had started.
And so now you have, you know, 10s of billions of dollars into
private equity into the next bigproduct.
So again, to to exponentially cause pain to the customers of
(28:56):
what's the next big thing that'sgoing to be vaporware or is it
real? Because it's going to be really
hard to differentiate A1 employee AI product startup from
a very well established. It's purely from a marketing
perspective, right, Is so good and some of the demos are so
good. So diligence and advice, I can't
(29:16):
push that enough for sure. Yeah, that's actually the
diligence piece I think is you're going somewhere with
that, Josh, because I think there is value to start to bring
some type of diligence algorithmframework that you take to a
customer and say, Mr. Customer, I understand you've got an AI
strategy just like everybody else.
(29:38):
But when it comes to sourcing these technologies, this is the
framework that I work with customers to make sure that
you're making not only an informed decision one, but also
one that is mitigated from a risk perspective for your
business. Yeah, agree.
You have to, you have to yeah, just I think the more I'm always
surprised. I mean, I am and I'm not of when
(29:58):
we ask some of these questions and they're like, Oh my gosh, I
didn't even, I didn't even thinkof that, you know.
So it's, it's like cool, we're adding writing even more value,
right, Even a deeper. Layer.
Of of of that into the conversation for sure.
Yeah. All right, we got to we got to
think of a a really wild examplehere.
So as we kind of get to the the final couple thoughts, what's a
(30:19):
maybe just a wild or just interesting story in a Co sell
engagement or in a sales force engagement that you've seen that
you know that that came to fruition?
Well, what we're seeing right now is, is that, and, and I, I
just came back from Salesforce'sevent that they call World Tour.
(30:41):
And it used to be, it used to becalled Salesforce World Tour,
but now it's called Asian Force World Tour intent.
So if you were stepping away at Super Bowl and you missed the
Matthew McConaughey Asian Forestcommercials or you've, you know,
not getting the feeds on your Youtubes like I do on agent
(31:02):
force, agent forces, sales forces, agentic AI solution that
they just released at their Dreamforce at the end of last
year. And they, they launched, I think
it was, you have to quote me. It's in the thousands of
customers. Don't quote me thousands of
customers at the year that are signing up for agent Force use
(31:22):
cases. And I think you know, for us the
most interesting play of all this is, is that agent force is
actually the entry point to the their other solution that's
called data cloud. And both agent Force and Agent
Agent Force and Data Cloud are consumption based solutions.
(31:45):
They're not, they're no longer alicensed SAS based solutions.
So why I say this and why I think our channel community
should care about this is, is that they are shifting to a
consumption based business. They are going through a
transformation from SAS licensing to consumption based
and there's opportunity for channel partners there because a
(32:06):
lot of customers don't know how to buy that.
But we've been selling that in acloud environment for years and
we can help customers predict costs around that etcetera.
But the the interesting use casethat that I saw last week was
leveraging agentic AI to go through and collect information
(32:31):
from for an insurance environment where you're going
to go in and and sell additionalinsurance to a customer.
And then, but then take all the information collected and really
create this white space profile on that particular customer of
(32:51):
what are the opportunities within the portfolio solutions
that you can sell. And then and then leveraged
bondage for human in the loop when connecting those 2.
So it's a personalized experience and all of the stuff
that was collected in front was not through prompts.
It wasn't through it was naturallanguage with the agent
collecting all this information.And then, so then when you
(33:12):
actually connected the person human in the loop for the high
value rate, it, it warranted theupselling cross sell that
typically you wouldn't see. And I think that's where like
we're seeing a lot of use cases that are valuable.
The other one that's really interesting is matching for job
hunting talent profiles. So think of, you know, this,
(33:33):
these organizations that are outthere recruiting and matching
people to to open jobs. So they're a third party company
that you know, they're outsourced for that kind of
thing. Historically speaking, Josh, it
was a human that was going in and looking at the open job
rocks and then through their manual intervention saying, oh,
(33:53):
Josh is a good fit for this or Josh is not based on his resume
that you are viewing. Now all of that bias is gone
because what has happening in his agent, the agent force or
the Sygentic AI tool is just going through and looking at
different type of language or learning models and saying
actually, not only Josh is a good fit for this, but think of
(34:13):
Christy, even though her resume doesn't show this, she actually
could actually really solve for this job.
And so it's doing a lot of work and actually matching people up
better beyond just looking at A1dimensional resume.
Yeah, it's it's really interesting to watch.
And so we're in the middle of all of this and doing things
like agent actions with bondage for like fraud prevention
(34:35):
control and different scenarios.And it's fun to get involved
with Salesforce because we're that early adopter of leaning
into the exposed AP is that they're giving us and really
embracing it. And so it's, it's been fun.
And then now talking to customers about how we can solve
with it. Well, yeah.
And I mean, I, I, I think the, the spot that we're at is it's
(34:57):
all the things that you talked about I think compounded, right?
You know, listen, active listening, that's key beyond the
tech stack into the business drivers, make sure that you're
talking to the CFO like all these really, really important
absolute must haves in a deal. And now not only do you have
great examples and a great platform, I think the value, the
(35:17):
additional value comes in of my gosh, this is gonna create 85
different ways to solve the problems that the customers are
not ready to envision on their. Own right again?
Yeah. More guidance, more examples,
more use cases. I think all these things will be
great to help customers go. I didn't even think of trying to
have this call it that. Way 100% and I'll also say one
(35:38):
of the things that I am super excited about for this, the
launch of our intelligent workspace contact center
solution is, is that also, you know, we'd be like naive to
think that there's only sales force users in a, in a business
environment, right? There's there's other types of
users. And so now our contact center
solutions extensible to other different types of users that
(36:00):
are out there again and the ability to leverage integration
into those third party platformsthat that particular subset of
users are using. I this, I think it's really, you
know, people always talk about, you know, is voice dead or not?
And what I'm learning through a lot of discussions with, with
(36:23):
customers, partners and our technology alliances like sales
forces is that voice is definitely not dead.
It's more important than any because what you're doing now is
is you are taking all of those jobs to be done in a mundane
fashion and really connecting topeople for human in the loop to
have a real conversation when it's really important, when it
(36:45):
matters the most, Yeah. I.
Agree and and that's that's how companies make money is by
communicating and. It's not going to change.
It's going to get different, butit's not going to change.
It's going to get different, butit's not going to change.
I love starting to hear that human in the loop.
That was a big, you know, talk of with Salesforce and Google
Next and some of the agent to agent communication and things
like that. Love the human in the loop,
(37:07):
right? All of this automation and the
agentic stuff is great and we still can't forget the human
connection and that that human in the loop.
Absolutely. Yeah, Yeah.
That's really important. Awesome.
Great place to wrap it. Lot of good Nuggets in there.
Christy, glad we could get you on.
Thanks for thanks for coming on and doing this.
Thank you for having me, this isthe best part of my day.
(37:29):
I really enjoyed our dialogue. Love it All right, everybody
that wraps this up for today. As always, just remember these
are dropping every Wednesday wherever you're coming to us
from Spotify, Apple, be sure to go out and as long as you're
subscribed and you're liked and all that good stuff, you'll get
these as soon as they drop. So until next time, this has
been who's calling the shots Salesforce voice and the Co S
(37:50):
conundrum. Christy Thomas, SVP of global
channel and alliances at bondage.
I'm your host, Joshua Presto, SVP of Sales Engineering.
Next Level Biztech has been a production of.
Polaris Studio 19, please visit telaris.com.
For more information.
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