In this episode, Josh Lupresto and Adam Burke discuss the intricacies of selling technology solutions, focusing on common myths, mistakes, and strategies for success in the channel. They explore the importance of understanding partner motivations, recognizing red flags in client engagements, and the significance of starting small with projects. The conversation emphasizes the need for a focus on business outcomes and adapting to changing buying cycles, particularly in the context of AI and automation. Adam shares valuable lessons learned from his experiences in the industry, highlighting the importance of effective negotiation and the role of partners in delivering complex technology solutions.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:01):
Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success selling
technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lopresto,
SVP of Sales Engineering at Solaris and this is next level
Biztech. Hey, everybody, welcome back.
We got a fun episode for you today on with us.
We have got Adam Burke, VP of Sales at Quest.
(00:23):
Brother Burke, welcome on, my man.
Hey. Josh, thanks for having me
again. This is awesome, always love
listening and catching up on episodes and when I get a chance
to join it's always always a pleasure.
Yeah, you didn't. You didn't bomb on the first
one. So we figured like, hey, why
not? Why not have you back?
So no pressure, but hey, let's give it a try, right?
Hey, you didn't bomb. Welcome back.
(00:45):
Thanks. That's awesome.
So it's a backhanded compliment for a, for a Friday.
So, so we're talking today's title, we're talking channel
myths, mistakes and $1,000,000 moves.
We talk a lot about kind of lessons learned, things that
we've gotten wrong in the past. So, you know, we've got some
secrets that we hope to help uncover here to help partners
get these things locked in and, and deals locked in.
(01:06):
So for anybody that hasn't heardAdam, we, we had another
previous episode, episode 132 that Adam and I were on.
We just talked a lot about, you know, security and negotiations
and I think you got a cool background.
So for everybody out there, go listen to that if you haven't
heard that one yet. Lots of good stuff on there.
So Adam, let's let's think abouthere.
You know, you, you've got this cool military background.
(01:27):
And as you come from that, I mean, maybe start us off with
how did that shape your approachto negotiation leadership and
how does that carry over into kind of working in the channel?
Yeah, so, so been been with Quest going on 15 years now
after finishing up a short stintin the United States Army And my
first getting involved in the channel was basically trying to
(01:50):
understand the landscape, understand the players,
understand the rules of the game, rules of engagement, if
you will. And it it took a lot of time.
So when you, when we were talking about this episode and
what we're going to talk about, kind of, you know, failures,
definitely had a lot of failuresearly on, understanding the
rules of the game, the players involved took me about four
(02:12):
years to figure out what a TSD or a master agent was coming
from our VAR background and, andthe different ways to engage
there. But from a negotiation
standpoint, when we're talking to partners and we're going
through the sales process with folks really understanding the
game. And when I say game, I mean the,
the engagement that you're in and the services that you're,
(02:35):
that you're providing and who are the other players?
What are the motivations of the partner?
What are the motivations of the client?
And then ultimately knowing, youknow, what's important to our
organization and kind of trying to trying to figure out the Venn
diagram and the overlap where itcan be a win win for everybody.
(02:56):
And, and really trying to be honest about that.
A lot of people we found when we're working on opportunities,
you know, sometimes, sometimes they don't even know the game
that they're playing necessarily.
They don't know how to negotiatea software licensing deal versus
a product resale purchase or a data center engagement, or, you
(03:18):
know, a complex, complex system integration application
development job. These are all, you know,
different maneuvers. So in the Army, we had battle
drills, right? Basic thing is you have, you
know, different battle drills and different scenarios.
So just, you know, just for my Army buddies, no, I'm not that
(03:40):
weird officer who wrote a, a handbook for my sales team on
battle drills for, you know, so don't make fun of me, but we do,
we do have certain moves and certain kind of standard
operating procedures for, hey, when this type of an opportunity
presents itself or this type of a challenge, you know, here,
here are the courses of action you can take to, to accommodate
(04:02):
that shift. And you try to standardize while
at the same time not becoming too rigid where you have 10 SKUs
and those are your 10 only SKUs.And hopefully the customer fits
within those 10. That's definitely, you know,
there's, there's risk both ways from becoming too bureaucratic
and too regimentalized, regimented versus, you know,
(04:24):
staying flexible. You got to, you got to maintain
that balance to be effective. Yeah, You know, it's kind of a,
it's a blessing and a curse, I suppose, to have all of these
skews, right. I mean, you know, we, we, we
grow up in this space in the channel of going, OK, this, this
provider has product A, this provider has product B, this
provider has product C. You know which, which one does
(04:46):
your customer need? And when the customer comes back
and says, well, I have this weird, you know, COBOL thing or
I have this weird infrastructureor data center project doesn't
really fit into that that structure per SE, right.
So we are kind of we've had a lot of lessons learned, I think
over the past few years. And I'm excited to kind of help,
help others kind of learn from of how do we, how do we avoid
(05:06):
some of these in the future? But also the end goal is how do
we help translate these things that may be seemingly binary
into a world that is not binary,But how do we operate within
confines so that we can know consistently what people could
bring you or what they can't bring you, or what's the deal or
what's just a, you know, an exercise, those kind of things.
So I think there's a lot, a lot of good to be learned there.
(05:29):
Yeah, and, and, and, and something that I've learned is
there's no necessarily there's no necessarily wrong strategy in
the channel. It's just, it's just what, what
is your organization built to support, right.
So our organization is built in a certain way that and sometimes
can be viewed as well that's a little bit different than, you
(05:51):
know, the way this provider doesit.
So for example, a lot of providers really want to do one
or two things and scale to the moon, right?
Rinse and repeat and do those one or two things really, really
well. And, and that's a fantastic
strategy, right? And and they do that one or two
things really, really well. They grow, they have a couple
(06:12):
offerings and that's, that's what they, that's what they do.
And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
So sometimes we'll get into passionate discussions with
partners about the way that things should be done.
That's the way maybe 1 supplier does it.
We, we tend to take a little bitmore of a customization system
(06:33):
integrator approach where you can't scale because it's, so
it's so diversified, right? There's so many different
aspects of the technology stack that, you know, we're OK with
the one off conversation, We're OK kind of moving outside that
box. And that's, that's one of our
strengths. But at the same time, if you're
looking to scale from, you know,you know, 1000 managed service
(06:57):
clients to 10,000 managed service clients in two years,
that's not necessarily going to,that's not necessarily going to
be the, the game plan you go with.
And again, there's nothing wrongwith that.
We use, we use partners in the channel that are single threaded
on, you know, secure storage operations or, you know, they
(07:18):
all they focus on is endpoint protection.
We'll bring those providers intoa use case and bundle them in.
But, but that's, but that's, that's kind of it's a decision
that you have to make as far as you know, what are your, what
are your strengths and weaknesses want to be?
I don't know if you remember back when you were kids, I was a
nerd. I'm guessing you were probably
definitely one of the cool kids and and and.
(07:39):
Yeah, yeah, my bowl cut, my bowlcut, my cargo pants, like really
put me at the top. But yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, yeah. But you remember, you remember
the old, the old. I just always think of the old
Marvel cards right where you look on the back of the Marvel
card for the superhero. And they have speed, agility,
durability, you know, flexibility, all those different
kind of like, you know, rankingsfor their for their, for their
(08:01):
use case there. Or if we really want to get
geeky, we could talk about Magicthe Gathering.
But let's not go there yet. Sell them and make money.
There's my investment advice. Yeah, go ahead.
There you go. Yeah.
But sometimes, you know, you build, you build your strength
space and you build your companybased on what you want to do.
And So what we've been really successful at doing with
partners is understanding the business outcome.
(08:24):
And then we built the company tohave those different battle
drills and have those different,those different resources
brought to that opportunity as aspecific engagement.
But the downside want to be 100%candid is we don't have the
ability sometimes to sell that client on why that methodology
(08:48):
is better than the person who's scaling 10,000 times.
And that's that's, that's the reality.
Yeah. No, no, no Fairpoint, right.
It's, it's, I think the game is,is about, you know, finding out
who's really a fit for what. I mean, I think that's all of
our jobs, you know, delivering up and helping these customers
at the end of the day and, and mating that certainly to the,
(09:10):
the, the, the large vendor ecosystem, the supporting OEMs,
you know, all of those differentthings.
And so that's, that's the matchmaking job, right?
And that's, that's where we hopefully come in and and help.
So let's let's talk about maybe first lesson.
So you think back about, you know, the past few years, what's
a hard lesson learned, maybe onethat you've you've learned,
(09:31):
you've seen or a partner or justmaybe kick us off with that, you
know, when it comes to what's ittake to win the business.
Yeah. So sometimes, sometimes the, the
hardest lesson to learn with a, with a partner is you, you see
them going down a path where you've, you've been down that
path before with a client. It might be responding to an
(09:53):
RFP. It might be, you know, leaning
into a pre sales engagement and ignoring potentially what we,
what we call yellow lights and red lights when we're evaluating
how to engage a classic one. We're an MSP, right?
There are MSPs that are considered the incumbents and
there are some serious red lights when you're coming in to
(10:16):
help an organization that is considering transitioning from
one MSP to another. And sometimes a really
frustrating scenario for partners is they're told one
thing by a client around their transition from one MSP to
another and the opportunity that's in, in front of them.
(10:37):
But they kind of ignore the, thered and the yellow lights that
maybe signal that clients not quite ready to, to, to move
away. And we've been through hundreds
of these, right? We've been through thousands of
engagements where we're talking to clients, understanding their
transition plans, who owns the assets, how long does it take to
actually move from a firewall provider and a Azure partner or
(11:02):
a hosted instance partner and all of that to a new
organization. And, and one of them is just
time, one of them is just the time to migrate and the cost to
migrate and the, the associated kind of risk and benefits of
that move. And sometimes partners are
really, really reluctant to ask those questions and kind of
really dig into the idea of, hey, are we, are you kind of,
(11:24):
are you kind of understanding what else is in the market right
now? And would you like some
consulting around, you know, what's the MSP landscape or are
you seriously wanting to move? And we need to do a full
redesign effort and documentation, everything like
that. And, and it's a hard lesson for
for partners to experience that after because sometimes they'll
(11:46):
kind, they'll kind of give away the consulting and give away the
engagement on the upfront and spend hours and hours and hours
only to find out, you know, a couple months in that there's no
revenue there. They're not, they're not leaving
from their incumbent. They get the Dear John letter,
you know, hey, sorry, business business reason we had to renew
(12:06):
with this organization and that can that can sting for him,
especially if you kind of had tomention at the outset kind of
called out, hey, these these aresome things you might want to be
aware of and here's some gaps inyour plan.
And again, I fail on this all the time.
Like all the time I get I get duped and ignore yellow lights
(12:30):
and red lights. But that that's probably it's a
hard lesson to learn. Well, let's, I, I, I, this is a
fairpoint, right? I, I, I think we all want to be
myself included, right? You know, when I was going door
to door, I thought that everybody told me that they
really wanted to buy my $3000 vacuum.
And it turns out that's a lot ofmoney to pay for a vacuum.
And people didn't like telling my smiling face no, because they
(12:53):
felt bad. And so I learned, I learned that
maybe I maybe I could uncover that a little differently, a
little better, right? In, in, in a parallel, I guess
what is a cause? What we want to be, what the
partners want to be is they wantto be fast.
They want to get an answer, right?
We know that customers have a sense of urgency, right?
(13:15):
So we kind of want to relay thatsense of urgency.
But what's a, when somebody comes and says like, Hey, I, I
got some MSP needs, I want to swap some things out.
What are the what are the thingsthat make you say whoa, red
light, yellow light? Is it, is it the, hey, we want
to do everything. I don't want to put words in
your mouth. Is it that like, what are the
(13:36):
what are the things to look for in a conversation like this that
we could do a better job of flushing out?
Yeah, so, so we, we tend to really focus on, you know, why
do people make changes? Often times people are going to
make a change in their life or in their technology because of
some type of a pain or some typeof an event.
So when we're trying to understand why someone's doing
(13:57):
something we're typically looking for, is there a pain
that's driving this right? Is this a, did you know, did
someone change the licensing scheme?
Did someone, you know, did they get bought and all of a sudden
their pricing doubled? You know, did, did they, did
they totally drop the ball on a remediation effort?
Was there an outage? Was there a breach?
(14:19):
So was there, was there was there a pain that was
significant enough to mandate a move, you know, or, or was
there, was there an, is there animpending event that's
happening? They're going for a certain
certification. They have to go through an
impending audit. You know, the, the managed
service provider that they used to work with just went away or
(14:40):
they lost a key person or they lost their one engineer.
Those those are typically what we call catalyst events.
So we're looking for that catalyst or that reason.
And a great way to figure that out is just ask the question.
And I know sometimes people get uncomfortable about this, but
ask the question like, well hey,what it What happens if you
don't do anything? I, I, I don't hear that.
(15:00):
I, I love that question. I, I don't think that that's
like a level of inception in theconversation, I think because I
think it throws people back because they're just not
thinking like that. Yeah.
And if they can't, if they can'tanswer that question and, and,
and sometimes partners will interpret that all of a sudden,
well, we're not interested. No, it's not, we're not
(15:21):
interested. It's just, hey, guys, I don't, I
don't think they're, they're ready yet.
They're not, they're they, they don't, there's no impending
event. There's no driver here.
Would it be great? Would it be awesome?
Like are the, is there all sortsof cool new technology that they
could, we could leverage for them?
Could we help them? Could we be thought leaders and
all that fun stuff? Yeah.
(15:42):
But it really kind of peel it back to why people make
decisions and why people do something different.
It it's there's some type of a catalyst that's driving them to
make that decision or there's animpending event or there's an
impending pain point that's, that's been that's been
identified. Everything else is a much lower
(16:03):
in our, in my opinion, most of the rest of it is a very low
probability of success. And, and to your other question,
like, Hey, another red flag or yellow flag is, Hey, we want to
do everything, scope out every aspect of our MSP and our stack
and our MSS, all, every service you have.
I mean, we've done it. We've landed the plane on some
(16:24):
massive deals, you know, with your partners.
But starting some of the starting small is a much more
attainable green light to Hey, let's start with a database
assessment or let's audit your controls around your firewall or
let's see how your your internalnetwork is segmented.
Let's do a little bit of a network audit or a health check
(16:46):
around your security. Or, you know, we can put
together a, let's put a little phase one engagement around a
data center move. If you were to do this, let's,
let's, let's flush out some budget numbers for moving you to
Azure AWS, just so you're going into it eyes wide open.
But here's the thing we, we would charge for that type of a
(17:06):
thing, right? We would, we would put together
a design and, and, and kind of go in with the lead with that,
you know that on the front end as a, as a billable engagement,
whereas sometimes this is a, this is an area that we had to
learn as far as communicating with partners.
A lot of partners will kind of give that away and they say for
(17:28):
free, but it's not really free. It's included in their service
on how they're getting paid on the back end from suppliers.
So it's not really free. There's a we're doing things for
an expectation of a return at Quest.
We typically are a little bit more upfront with that idea.
Hey, we, we want to help you. We would love to help you, and
(17:51):
here's what it would cost for usto help you.
Well, you OK, so, so you bring up a couple key points here.
I want to speak to some history that's been successful with this
strategy. I do want to come back to the
idea of BANT when it comes to qualified leads and things like
that and see what, what your perspective is on that.
But I, but I do like your start small approach because also some
(18:14):
people that are, you know, a customer that's meeting quest
for the first time has no idea who you are.
So the idea that that a CIO is going to cough up everything.
I mean, maybe that's maybe like a private equity portfolio
engagement and they're trying toslim down and you know, they
want to kick out an MSP and there is a justification to kind
of RIP out all that. I, I guess I could see that's a
(18:35):
much more, you know, realistic scenario, But if I look back at
some of the deals that we have done, you know, we may have
signed a very low, I've seen thecustomer sign a very low near
$0.00 MSA to get a agreed upon slated hourly rate for XYZ
services. All right.
And you guys are kind of a, a, you know, you could do the bill
(18:57):
of materials based on the hours need pull from your bucket of
resources. And people are like, oh, oh, OK,
I use that guy for database. Oh, I, OK, I use that person
for, you know, an Azure migration, right.
And here's 10 hours that were slated to be billed.
And we thought that's all that was going to be billed was 10
hours. And then we look at the
Commission reports and the orderreports and we see this thing
that was supposed to be a couplegrand is now 1015 grand.
(19:19):
And we call you up and say, is that is that right?
Did you guys overpay us? You go no, they just turned out
they use this for a bunch of stuff.
And then they discovered, well, yeah, they actually helped us
execute on that. I wonder if they can help us
with this thing. So it, it, it there's this never
ending thing of the deals never seem to stop where they start
(19:40):
necessarily, right. If we do good on that little
first piece. So I'm a I'm a big fan of kind
of the MVP idea of of that. So that's been cool to see.
Yeah. And that's kind of that that
land and expand, you know, virustheory if you will like just get
involved in something small, youknow, work with them mutually.
(20:00):
You know, it's a mutual benefit,right.
We we get a small contract, get a new customer.
You know, partner gets to introduce maybe a service that
they're not typically engaging in and we just kind of help out
on an ad hoc basis. We call that our technical on
call support engagements Extremely, extremely successful
(20:20):
in the middle market. And yeah, and then it just then
it just kind of grows to kind ofevolves from there.
Some of our some of our largest contracts have started out with
something as simple as a database administrator helping
with a sequel query that was taking too long.
So yeah. What's your what's your
perspective here? You know, this is a little more
(20:42):
of the old school smile and dial.
I got a call center. I'm cold calling, right?
Everything needs to be banned, right?
And the ban. I'm a big fan of the banned
methodology, though. You got budget authority, need
and timeline. And does my deal or does my
prospect have that? Does that strategy still kind of
relate? Like should we be trying to
connect those dots on every deal?
(21:04):
What's your, I guess perspectiveas you think about
opportunities? Yeah.
So I, I think that has to do with the level of energy you're
going to commit to that deal, right.
So if it, if it, if maybe they don't have budget authority or
maybe they're not the decision, maybe they're not the decider.
I do my George W Bush impersonation, but maybe they're
not the decider or have decisionmaking authority, but but they
(21:29):
do have influence or they do have a couple other things.
It just depends on how like how much you're going to charge into
that opportunity with resources because we all have limited
resources on how much we want tospend with time and people and
things like that. So you got to kind of pick your
battles. So if it's fully qualified,
it's, you know, it's ready to rock.
(21:49):
OK, let's get an assessment. Let's get an advisor, let's get
a consultant and get in there and start, you know, ripping
things apart and taking a look at what we can do.
But if it's not, then that's OK.You know, maybe you get in there
and you have a, a capability discussion around what could
happen when they do have budget or what could happen in that
(22:10):
when they, when they do have theauthority to make the decision.
It's all relationship based. And what we're always trying to
do is, is because our, like I said, like I said before, our
strategy is based on pain and events, right?
And if you're not around when that event happens or when that
pain occurs, you're, you're vulnerable, your pipeline goes
(22:33):
away. So strategically for us, we want
to talk to and meet as many partners, as many people as
possible. So in the event they have
trouble, they think, oh, those quest guys were creative and
they could help out in a couple different areas.
This this pain point that I haveright now does not fit cleanly
(22:53):
into that one box of you know, MDR provider or that one clean
box of data center or infrastructure.
So so that qualification you're talking about fantastic for
assessing. OK, green light go everyone hit
the door, we're going in versus we're not there yet.
(23:15):
Let's throw up a drone, right? We're not going to commit.
We're not going to commit again tomorrow.
My arm is. This a battlefield reference?
Are we like saving infantry soldiers?
I get it. I respect it.
I apologize, I apologize for thethat's, that's so lame.
But anyways, you know, throw up,throw up some some, you're not
committing boots to the ground, but you're going to observe,
you're going to talk to them, you're going to see how they're
(23:36):
doing. You're going to plant the seed
for, for future opportunities and something we do we've, we
learned that the best way to to kind of to get that going is, is
through what we call capability reviews.
So we've incentivized advisors, hey, let's do a capability
review. Let's get on the phone, talk
(23:57):
with your client, understand what they're trying to do, and
walk through the capabilities they could leverage if they want
to. I like it.
I like it. Let's talk about.
Let's talk about a previous, I mean, let's layer in maybe a
previous misstep. Let's keep the let's protect the
(24:17):
innocent here. But let's think through, OK,
we've got some some lessons learned from missteps that I
know you've kind of got in the coffers.
So how do we take what some of these lessons are and recognize
that customers are buying, they're buying a little bit
differently. It's a different buying cycle.
It's an explorer, it's AI have to, I'm, I'm expected to do
(24:40):
something with AI. Some people are coming around to
what they want to do. Some things we've already sold
into and they didn't realize theROI would come so quick.
And so we're kind of meeting people at all these different
stages. And I'm not saying like
everything is about AI, but how do you take that and just
recognize it seems like the buying cycles are, are, are
changing a little bit. So what do we, what do we learn?
(25:01):
How we moving it forward? Yeah.
So a lesson, lessons learned forthat is definitely go into the
opportunities not expecting and not pretending, you know exactly
what's driving the decision. We had a classic, we had a
classic scenario the other day, long term partner advisor within
(25:25):
the Terrace partner network. They, they had a client who we
had thought was very price sensitive.
We the, we had, we had done a massive deployment for them.
They were adding additional sites and some significant
things in those sites changed. We went from 5 doors to 20 doors
(25:48):
for our access control system. We went from three cameras to 15
cameras. A wireless access points went
from A-Z like or from excuse me,from from three to to about 12
at this site. It basically this site at least
doubled and the infrastructure requirements.
We had thought and the partner had thought that the
(26:11):
organization was going to be extremely price sensitive and
really, really upset about the change request.
And so we had talked to the the people who are making the
decisions there and we came to find out after kind of, you
know, you know, worrying about the shift and worrying about the
issues. They were not worried about the
(26:33):
price. They were worried about two
things, delivery timeline and our our ability to operate as
trusted partners and advisors and give them a transparent
update as far as what the changewas.
Now we probably had five or six internal calls burned, you know,
multiple hours of our time, probably a couple of your
(26:55):
engineers time on that call kindof worrying about, Hey, how are
we going to how are we going to address this with the with the
end user? Because it was a significant,
significant change, but that wasn't the driver.
They weren't worried about funds.
They were worried about hitting their deadline for their, for
their board and about making sure it was a we were a good
partner that could, you know, communicate that, that change
(27:19):
request. So the drivers aren't always
aren't always the same and the buyers are changing too, like
how they're buying, how they're subscribing to things, how
they're evaluating partners. Short answer, you know, Josh
would be don't go into it thinking, you know, what's
(27:39):
actually driving the the consumption until you, until you
have that conversation and you try to flush that out because
you can, you can make moves and pull levers that you don't even
need to. It's not.
That's not what's actually goingto affect the outcome.
You know, I want to. I want to get on a soapbox for a
(27:59):
minute. Let's see how this goes.
You know, I used to think growing up when you would see
all these successful business people, you know, the
infomercials, the real estate guys, the whatever guys, and you
dive in and understood, you know, try to get an
understanding of how did they dowhat they do, right?
Think the, the, the, how did Bezos build Amazon or how did
this guy build that company or, or whatever, right?
(28:20):
And it was just, I worked hard. I didn't stop.
I was relentless. I outworked, you know, I gave it
all my discretionary effort. I treated people nice.
I didn't, you know, I, I, I recognized that people were
humans and, and I figured out how to help people have great
growth paths. And if I, if I focus on those
(28:40):
things and if I focus on helpingother people, that turns out
that it, that it comes back to work in the end, provided you
don't get, you know, taken advantage of.
And, and, and so I, I see this similarity in our world and in
our industry where when we get in a lot of discussions, the
common thread is we have to focus on the business outcomes.
(29:05):
And when I see that and I hear that so much, right?
And I, and I hear that and I seethat from successful people.
I see that from our folks. I see that from partners, I see
that from vendors, you know, when we're trying to flush out.
How has it worked for you? So this common theme is it's
business outcomes that that happened at the end of the day.
So if I take if I take what you're saying as to how we've
(29:26):
gotten to some of the we dissecthow we've had some of these
successful engagements both withyou and with others.
It seems to come from man. Once we finally understood what
they really wanted, we were all wildly successful and much more
successful than we even thought we would be.
We were we were in it for what we thought it would be, but it
(29:47):
became something bigger. So is the, what I'm trying to
figure out here, I guess is, is the $1,000,000 question, the
hard question of, I know you told me that you need these
things, Mr. Customer, I know youtold me that like This is why
you're doing it. But is that what?
What's the outcome that you're driving for are?
Are we just not asking enough ofthe outcome questions?
(30:11):
Yeah, it's, it's and, and the, the challenges in our industry
is a lot of the partner, a lot of the customers are waiting to
get pitched and they're and they're and they're, and they're
part of their negotiation strategy on that side of the
table is, is to kind of mask theintent of what, of what and why
(30:34):
they need what they're doing. Because they, because sometimes
they think they can get a betterprice if, if you kind of keep
the person guessing, whereas if you're and, and you know, there
are bad actors out there who tryto take advantage of situations
and there's a lot of, there's a lot of fun in the IT space.
So we're, we're dealing with an industry that's kind of brought
up a certain behavior. If you can, if you can, if you
(30:57):
can build that trust and lower those defense Shields from the
customer and they can tell you what they're really challenged
with and what their outcome they're really looking for.
Then it's amazing how much time is saved on creation of the
scope and creation of the service level agreements and,
and documenting who's responsible for what and
creating that win win scenario. You know, we, we tend to qualify
(31:24):
very, very hard there because that's what we're trying to
understand. Can we get to that conversation
with the customer? And part of that qualification
process is understanding, Hey, is this person going to tell me
what they're really trying to do?
Or are they, you know, going to kind of play, you know, some,
some Machiavellian, you know, court games and try to try to,
(31:47):
you know, execute the 48 laws ofpower to get their best purchase
on a hardware refresh, right? I don't have the energy for
that. And then there's so many
opportunities out there for partners that you can play that
game if you want to, or you can kind of step back and, and, and
wait for the pain train, which inevitably is going to come to
(32:10):
all everybody and you can step in and help him at that point.
So it is a, it is a little bit of a dance.
I think what your, what your technology advisors can really
do is ask, ask the question as as far as why are you doing this
similar, similar to like what happens if you don't do anything
(32:32):
right? What, why, why are you, why are
you looking at a sassy solution,right?
Why are you, why are you talkingabout ZTNA?
Why, why are you, why are you looking for micro segmentation?
Why are you, why are you doing data loss prevention?
And if it's the canned, like, you know, CIO monthly, you know,
(32:52):
article that was published by the vendor and they read off the
bullet points as far as what Gartner says is why they should
do something cool, OK. But if they're, if they're no,
this just happened and we saw this as an issue and we want to,
we want to, we want to protect against these things, OK, cool.
(33:12):
We're getting closer to the, we're getting closer to the, the
business outcome. And that that's, that's tough
because if that's your opportunity, if that's your guy,
if that's your person at that account, you know, sometimes you
can advisors can kind of get latched on to that that
opportunity and kind of want to want to ride it into the ground.
(33:34):
Whereas we might, we it might inour opinion, it might not be
ready for prime time yet if you can't get that outcome
conversation. Yeah.
OK. So next couple thoughts here is
we kind of wind down before we kind of do the future and and
and and things like that. I want to talk a little bit
(33:55):
about, I think you guys as far as a vendor in the Telaris
portfolio, you represent a big swath of things, right?
We're seven years into this relationship and I think we're
still shooting the texts expecting a no, man, I don't do
that. And we're getting a Yep, we're
here and here's an example engagement of what we had,
(34:16):
right? So we're still learning all the
things that you have with respective, you know, your core
product sets, you're supporting OEMs, managed services, all of
that. For anybody that's not familiar,
I mean, walk us through for a second.
You're you're in security, you're in cloud, you're in
infrastructure, you're in managed services.
I mean, you're trying to meet the demand of a customer.
So you've you've you've certainly, you know, put this
(34:38):
focus around what the customers need and what most businesses
need. But I mean, give us the give us
a little bit of highlight of some of the key product sets and
focus areas for you guys. So partners can kind of be
positioning, hey, when I have a need, but also when I'm going
out meeting with my prospects and just doing QBRS positioning
for things that might come up later.
(34:59):
Yeah. So, so we we built, we built the
company a little bit different in the standpoint of there's,
there's a labor division, right.So you need people to execute on
tasks. There's there are vendors and
OEMs and software solutions out there that, that you need.
And and then you then you need the ability to execute and
project manage and deliver, right.
(35:20):
So, so we got the, we got peoplelabor, we have technology and
then we have the process and theproject management to deliver.
And then we have very, very strong capital capabilities to
acquire assets, deliver them as a service and bundle, bundle
things together. So when partners are thinking of
us for opportunities, you know, an MDR endpoint protection
(35:44):
storage solution, manage Wi-Fi, you know, those types of
services, those all have multiple vendors that we could
select and plug in for that use case, right?
You know, you need, you need flash fast storage, you, you
drop in a pure array. You need, you know, an
alternative to VM Ware you can drop in Nutanix.
You know, you have, you know, wehave our edge cloud compute
(36:07):
services that we host. You need help tying in the AWS
or Azure or the Microsoft stack.You know, we're a tier one CSP.
So we have all these building blocks from a technology
standpoint that we help deliver.But really the secret sauce is
we we know how to how to partnerthe technology stack that all of
(36:28):
us have access to. We all have access to all these
different software vendors and hardware manufacturers and
things like that. But we know how to source it and
we also know how to how to manage it as an MSP.
So where, where we've been seeing a lot of a lot of growth
is helping organizations assess what they have and then and then
(36:50):
plug in the next thing that theymight need to, to help augment
that. So endpoint protection and
security conversations across anything in the security stack.
We can help Dr. and business replication and business
continuity, data center operations, all of that.
We built our own data centers. We built two of them and we
operate at about 16. So some of your partners are
(37:12):
always surprised to learn, wait,you guys can do the digital like
migration from from cloud A to cloud B, but you can also like
go in and pick up all the servers and move them from
California to Texas or from, youknow, from a Florida data center
to, you know, up the coast further or just digitally move
them. Yeah, we do the physical and,
and the digital because we don't, we don't see it as, oh,
(37:37):
we're, we're only ADR company orwe're only a data center company
in Northern California. So many, so many people kind of
put that limitation on themselves that oh, I'm an MSP
in this region, I can only support this region.
If we thought that. And again, that's not wrong, but
if we thought that we'd still be, you know, rolling trucks in
Sacramento and love Sacramento, great market, but you know, hey,
(38:03):
you can, we can deliver. We just, we just finished you
know a international 3030 country deployment with you guys
last. Year, No, I think it's wedges.
It's it's wedges. It's what I hope people are kind
of understanding in that is there are wedges and there are a
lot of wedges. If you need a product, lots of
(38:26):
wedges there. If we need a service, lots of
wedges there. If we need a scope of work
temporary, you know, three to six month engagement, a
migration can help with that. I think at least what we've seen
in this is these types of wedgesdon't usually stop.
They they tend to end with this unknown date or this unknown
(38:48):
more. More just seems to come.
It seems to be the gift that keeps on giving I guess is what
I'm getting at. Yeah, and and, and and fully
transparent because we talked about like failures and
challenges that flexibility can hurt on the pre sales because,
because you'll, you know, you guys will call and say hey, you
can you guys help with XYZ? Yeah, 100% good to go.
(39:12):
Here's 3 examples of a project we've done before on that.
And then we'll get involved witha with a customer and the
partner. And there's the idea that
there's a standardized methodology for that specific
use case. And it's like, well, there's
probably 8 different ways we canattack that.
So that's, that's kind of the thing that we're trying as as
(39:34):
much as we can. We do boot camps, we come to you
guys events, we do training, we do all that kind of stuff to try
to try to build up the idea of these are all building blocks
that the client, when they're discussing the outcome they're
looking for, we can work with them to, to build that next
step. That can sometimes that can
(39:55):
sometimes rub partners the wrongway.
The, you know, classic, classic feedback you'll get.
And this is something we've heard before.
Wait, you want me to pay you to scope this?
And it's like, well, that's, that's, that's one way to look
at it. Yes, you can look at it that
way, but it's also no, no, we'rewe're helping you to design an
outcome. Based on, on what you've told us
(40:16):
you're looking for right now, there's a, there's a significant
value to that. Whereas, you know, maybe a
competitor of ours would listen to the outcome and plug in like
10 SKUs and have their Salesforce instance pop out a
quote that could work. Maybe it'll work.
The sales Rep is probably going to pitch it that it's going to
(40:36):
work. But we're that's just not our,
that's just not our model. That's just not how we how we
help. Yeah, yeah, it's a long, it's a
long game approach. He who plays or she plays the
long game always wins. You will not lose in the long
game. It might take a second to get
there, but I, I, I do love that strategy.
(40:59):
So I guess as we as we kind of think about where we go from
here, as we wrap this up, you know, we're writing the next
chapter for the for the, you know, the future playbook.
We're thinking, of course, AI isa big component of that data
readiness. The Microsoft, the purviews, the
data dogs, this getting data ready, building my LMS, tweaking
(41:19):
it, keeping it private, right? Those are all, you know, future
things that that are that are here right now and going to be
here for a while. But if you're writing that next
chapter based on the disciplines, the real world
lessons going to take us home with what's just a couple must,
must do strategies right over the next couple years.
(41:41):
I think it's going to, I think, I think with AI and automation,
we've been through some automation situations in the
past. I know a lot of people think
this one's going to be different.
Probably probably is. There's some, there are some,
there are some drivers that I think are going to change some
(42:02):
of the economy like at a high level and change some of the
labor situations that we all have.
I think the from a security standpoint with partners and
advisors and people who are out there from a technology
standpoint really need to investin the idea of helping with an
outcome. And the idea of your security as
(42:25):
an advisor is in your ability toproduce results.
So, you know, whatever that, whatever that production means
for you and your and your customers, you have to be able
to produce results for your clients.
I, you know, personally, I thinkthat in the, in the services
space, in the MSP space, in the AI integration, I think the idea
(42:48):
of bringing, you know, multiple people into one deal or, or
doing a broker model is going to, is going to be challenged.
Because if that's, if that's theproduction you're looking to do,
I mean, think about it, AIAI agents are now handling complex
conversations. If, if your value is, I can
(43:10):
bring in three people and give you quotes for three people,
that's going to get automated inthe next couple years.
That's a very, very, it's a very, very vulnerable place for
an advisor to be. I would say the ability to
produce results though, and, andhelp with complex, complex
designs, complex engagements, you know, bringing together, you
(43:32):
know, multiple vendors into one outcome.
That's, that's definitely the ability to help organizations
with, with their IT stack. And that's, you know, where I
see them, where I see them going.
I've been seeing some really cool assets getting developed by
your team and by others that arehelping the advisor community
get the most out of the opportunity they have with the
(43:52):
customer when it, when it presents itself.
And then also communicate with them as far as what they can do
to help. Yeah, I, I think it just, it's a
great, it's a great problem to have, right?
It, it forces us to get a level deeper.
It forces us to get into the wise.
It forces us to understand all these things that we know that
the customers don't understand, right?
They're, they're being forced toimplement some of these
(44:13):
technologies and have no idea how complex, valuable, but how
complex some of these things are.
So I, I've always been a believer that the harder this
technology gets, well, it might be easier and it might automate
the channel thrives in complexity and the partners
truly add so much value. The harder it gets, I get more
(44:35):
excited, right? Because they, the customers need
the partners more and more and more.
So it's a great, I think it's a good time to be and I love, you
know, I'm a nerd. I might not be magically
gathering, but I am a nerd with this stuff.
And I do love to see all this new stuff come out 'cause I just
go, Oh my gosh, there's so much help that we have to give here.
So yeah. And they, they love this.
The, the more people standardizeand the more people scale, the
(44:58):
more pain is going to come from,from people who need to operate
a little bit outside of that, that standardization.
And that's a a fantastic opportunity for the advisors to
to help. I love it.
All right. Adam Burke, VP of Sales at
Quest. Thanks for coming on, man.
Good, good, good topics. Appreciate you coming back.
(45:19):
Yeah, anytime, Josh. Thanks for having me.
Awesome. All right, that wraps us up
everybody. I'm your host, Joshua Presto,
SVP of Sales Engineering at Solaris.
This has been channel myths mistakes, $1,000,000 moves.
Until next time, Next level. Biztech has been a production of
Polaris Studio 19. Please visit polaris.com For
(45:40):
more information.
Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success selling
technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lopresto,
SVP of Sales Engineering at Solaris and this is next level
Biztech. Hey, everybody, welcome back.
We got a fun episode for you today on with us.
We have got Adam Burke, VP of Sales at Quest.
(00:23):
Brother Burke, welcome on, my man.
Hey. Josh, thanks for having me
again. This is awesome, always love
listening and catching up on episodes and when I get a chance
to join it's always always a pleasure.
Yeah, you didn't. You didn't bomb on the first
one. So we figured like, hey, why
not? Why not have you back?
So no pressure, but hey, let's give it a try, right?
Hey, you didn't bomb. Welcome back.
(00:45):
Thanks. That's awesome.
So it's a backhanded compliment for a, for a Friday.
So, so we're talking today's title, we're talking channel
myths, mistakes and $1,000,000 moves.
We talk a lot about kind of lessons learned, things that
we've gotten wrong in the past. So, you know, we've got some
secrets that we hope to help uncover here to help partners
get these things locked in and, and deals locked in.
(01:06):
So for anybody that hasn't heardAdam, we, we had another
previous episode, episode 132 that Adam and I were on.
We just talked a lot about, you know, security and negotiations
and I think you got a cool background.
So for everybody out there, go listen to that if you haven't
heard that one yet. Lots of good stuff on there.
So Adam, let's let's think abouthere.
You know, you, you've got this cool military background.
(01:27):
And as you come from that, I mean, maybe start us off with
how did that shape your approachto negotiation leadership and
how does that carry over into kind of working in the channel?
Yeah, so, so been been with Quest going on 15 years now
after finishing up a short stintin the United States Army And my
first getting involved in the channel was basically trying to
(01:50):
understand the landscape, understand the players,
understand the rules of the game, rules of engagement, if
you will. And it it took a lot of time.
So when you, when we were talking about this episode and
what we're going to talk about, kind of, you know, failures,
definitely had a lot of failuresearly on, understanding the
rules of the game, the players involved took me about four
(02:12):
years to figure out what a TSD or a master agent was coming
from our VAR background and, andthe different ways to engage
there. But from a negotiation
standpoint, when we're talking to partners and we're going
through the sales process with folks really understanding the
game. And when I say game, I mean the,
the engagement that you're in and the services that you're,
(02:35):
that you're providing and who are the other players?
What are the motivations of the partner?
What are the motivations of the client?
And then ultimately knowing, youknow, what's important to our
organization and kind of trying to trying to figure out the Venn
diagram and the overlap where itcan be a win win for everybody.
(02:56):
And, and really trying to be honest about that.
A lot of people we found when we're working on opportunities,
you know, sometimes, sometimes they don't even know the game
that they're playing necessarily.
They don't know how to negotiatea software licensing deal versus
a product resale purchase or a data center engagement, or, you
(03:18):
know, a complex, complex system integration application
development job. These are all, you know,
different maneuvers. So in the Army, we had battle
drills, right? Basic thing is you have, you
know, different battle drills and different scenarios.
So just, you know, just for my Army buddies, no, I'm not that
(03:40):
weird officer who wrote a, a handbook for my sales team on
battle drills for, you know, so don't make fun of me, but we do,
we do have certain moves and certain kind of standard
operating procedures for, hey, when this type of an opportunity
presents itself or this type of a challenge, you know, here,
here are the courses of action you can take to, to accommodate
(04:02):
that shift. And you try to standardize while
at the same time not becoming too rigid where you have 10 SKUs
and those are your 10 only SKUs.And hopefully the customer fits
within those 10. That's definitely, you know,
there's, there's risk both ways from becoming too bureaucratic
and too regimentalized, regimented versus, you know,
(04:24):
staying flexible. You got to, you got to maintain
that balance to be effective. Yeah, You know, it's kind of a,
it's a blessing and a curse, I suppose, to have all of these
skews, right. I mean, you know, we, we, we
grow up in this space in the channel of going, OK, this, this
provider has product A, this provider has product B, this
provider has product C. You know which, which one does
(04:46):
your customer need? And when the customer comes back
and says, well, I have this weird, you know, COBOL thing or
I have this weird infrastructureor data center project doesn't
really fit into that that structure per SE, right.
So we are kind of we've had a lot of lessons learned, I think
over the past few years. And I'm excited to kind of help,
help others kind of learn from of how do we, how do we avoid
(05:06):
some of these in the future? But also the end goal is how do
we help translate these things that may be seemingly binary
into a world that is not binary,But how do we operate within
confines so that we can know consistently what people could
bring you or what they can't bring you, or what's the deal or
what's just a, you know, an exercise, those kind of things.
So I think there's a lot, a lot of good to be learned there.
(05:29):
Yeah, and, and, and, and something that I've learned is
there's no necessarily there's no necessarily wrong strategy in
the channel. It's just, it's just what, what
is your organization built to support, right.
So our organization is built in a certain way that and sometimes
can be viewed as well that's a little bit different than, you
(05:51):
know, the way this provider doesit.
So for example, a lot of providers really want to do one
or two things and scale to the moon, right?
Rinse and repeat and do those one or two things really, really
well. And, and that's a fantastic
strategy, right? And and they do that one or two
things really, really well. They grow, they have a couple
(06:12):
offerings and that's, that's what they, that's what they do.
And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
So sometimes we'll get into passionate discussions with
partners about the way that things should be done.
That's the way maybe 1 supplier does it.
We, we tend to take a little bitmore of a customization system
(06:33):
integrator approach where you can't scale because it's, so
it's so diversified, right? There's so many different
aspects of the technology stack that, you know, we're OK with
the one off conversation, We're OK kind of moving outside that
box. And that's, that's one of our
strengths. But at the same time, if you're
looking to scale from, you know,you know, 1000 managed service
(06:57):
clients to 10,000 managed service clients in two years,
that's not necessarily going to,that's not necessarily going to
be the, the game plan you go with.
And again, there's nothing wrongwith that.
We use, we use partners in the channel that are single threaded
on, you know, secure storage operations or, you know, they
(07:18):
all they focus on is endpoint protection.
We'll bring those providers intoa use case and bundle them in.
But, but that's, but that's, that's kind of it's a decision
that you have to make as far as you know, what are your, what
are your strengths and weaknesses want to be?
I don't know if you remember back when you were kids, I was a
nerd. I'm guessing you were probably
definitely one of the cool kids and and and.
(07:39):
Yeah, yeah, my bowl cut, my bowlcut, my cargo pants, like really
put me at the top. But yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, yeah. But you remember, you remember
the old, the old. I just always think of the old
Marvel cards right where you look on the back of the Marvel
card for the superhero. And they have speed, agility,
durability, you know, flexibility, all those different
kind of like, you know, rankingsfor their for their, for their
(08:01):
use case there. Or if we really want to get
geeky, we could talk about Magicthe Gathering.
But let's not go there yet. Sell them and make money.
There's my investment advice. Yeah, go ahead.
There you go. Yeah.
But sometimes, you know, you build, you build your strength
space and you build your companybased on what you want to do.
And So what we've been really successful at doing with
partners is understanding the business outcome.
(08:24):
And then we built the company tohave those different battle
drills and have those different,those different resources
brought to that opportunity as aspecific engagement.
But the downside want to be 100%candid is we don't have the
ability sometimes to sell that client on why that methodology
(08:48):
is better than the person who's scaling 10,000 times.
And that's that's, that's the reality.
Yeah. No, no, no Fairpoint, right.
It's, it's, I think the game is,is about, you know, finding out
who's really a fit for what. I mean, I think that's all of
our jobs, you know, delivering up and helping these customers
at the end of the day and, and mating that certainly to the,
(09:10):
the, the, the large vendor ecosystem, the supporting OEMs,
you know, all of those differentthings.
And so that's, that's the matchmaking job, right?
And that's, that's where we hopefully come in and and help.
So let's let's talk about maybe first lesson.
So you think back about, you know, the past few years, what's
a hard lesson learned, maybe onethat you've you've learned,
(09:31):
you've seen or a partner or justmaybe kick us off with that, you
know, when it comes to what's ittake to win the business.
Yeah. So sometimes, sometimes the, the
hardest lesson to learn with a, with a partner is you, you see
them going down a path where you've, you've been down that
path before with a client. It might be responding to an
(09:53):
RFP. It might be, you know, leaning
into a pre sales engagement and ignoring potentially what we,
what we call yellow lights and red lights when we're evaluating
how to engage a classic one. We're an MSP, right?
There are MSPs that are considered the incumbents and
there are some serious red lights when you're coming in to
(10:16):
help an organization that is considering transitioning from
one MSP to another. And sometimes a really
frustrating scenario for partners is they're told one
thing by a client around their transition from one MSP to
another and the opportunity that's in, in front of them.
(10:37):
But they kind of ignore the, thered and the yellow lights that
maybe signal that clients not quite ready to, to, to move
away. And we've been through hundreds
of these, right? We've been through thousands of
engagements where we're talking to clients, understanding their
transition plans, who owns the assets, how long does it take to
actually move from a firewall provider and a Azure partner or
(11:02):
a hosted instance partner and all of that to a new
organization. And, and one of them is just
time, one of them is just the time to migrate and the cost to
migrate and the, the associated kind of risk and benefits of
that move. And sometimes partners are
really, really reluctant to ask those questions and kind of
really dig into the idea of, hey, are we, are you kind of,
(11:24):
are you kind of understanding what else is in the market right
now? And would you like some
consulting around, you know, what's the MSP landscape or are
you seriously wanting to move? And we need to do a full
redesign effort and documentation, everything like
that. And, and it's a hard lesson for
for partners to experience that after because sometimes they'll
(11:46):
kind, they'll kind of give away the consulting and give away the
engagement on the upfront and spend hours and hours and hours
only to find out, you know, a couple months in that there's no
revenue there. They're not, they're not leaving
from their incumbent. They get the Dear John letter,
you know, hey, sorry, business business reason we had to renew
(12:06):
with this organization and that can that can sting for him,
especially if you kind of had tomention at the outset kind of
called out, hey, these these aresome things you might want to be
aware of and here's some gaps inyour plan.
And again, I fail on this all the time.
Like all the time I get I get duped and ignore yellow lights
(12:30):
and red lights. But that that's probably it's a
hard lesson to learn. Well, let's, I, I, I, this is a
fairpoint, right? I, I, I think we all want to be
myself included, right? You know, when I was going door
to door, I thought that everybody told me that they
really wanted to buy my $3000 vacuum.
And it turns out that's a lot ofmoney to pay for a vacuum.
And people didn't like telling my smiling face no, because they
(12:53):
felt bad. And so I learned, I learned that
maybe I maybe I could uncover that a little differently, a
little better, right? In, in, in a parallel, I guess
what is a cause? What we want to be, what the
partners want to be is they wantto be fast.
They want to get an answer, right?
We know that customers have a sense of urgency, right?
(13:15):
So we kind of want to relay thatsense of urgency.
But what's a, when somebody comes and says like, Hey, I, I
got some MSP needs, I want to swap some things out.
What are the what are the thingsthat make you say whoa, red
light, yellow light? Is it, is it the, hey, we want
to do everything. I don't want to put words in
your mouth. Is it that like, what are the
(13:36):
what are the things to look for in a conversation like this that
we could do a better job of flushing out?
Yeah, so, so we, we tend to really focus on, you know, why
do people make changes? Often times people are going to
make a change in their life or in their technology because of
some type of a pain or some typeof an event.
So when we're trying to understand why someone's doing
(13:57):
something we're typically looking for, is there a pain
that's driving this right? Is this a, did you know, did
someone change the licensing scheme?
Did someone, you know, did they get bought and all of a sudden
their pricing doubled? You know, did, did they, did
they totally drop the ball on a remediation effort?
Was there an outage? Was there a breach?
(14:19):
So was there, was there was there a pain that was
significant enough to mandate a move, you know, or, or was
there, was there an, is there animpending event that's
happening? They're going for a certain
certification. They have to go through an
impending audit. You know, the, the managed
service provider that they used to work with just went away or
(14:40):
they lost a key person or they lost their one engineer.
Those those are typically what we call catalyst events.
So we're looking for that catalyst or that reason.
And a great way to figure that out is just ask the question.
And I know sometimes people get uncomfortable about this, but
ask the question like, well hey,what it What happens if you
don't do anything? I, I, I don't hear that.
(15:00):
I, I love that question. I, I don't think that that's
like a level of inception in theconversation, I think because I
think it throws people back because they're just not
thinking like that. Yeah.
And if they can't, if they can'tanswer that question and, and,
and sometimes partners will interpret that all of a sudden,
well, we're not interested. No, it's not, we're not
(15:21):
interested. It's just, hey, guys, I don't, I
don't think they're, they're ready yet.
They're not, they're they, they don't, there's no impending
event. There's no driver here.
Would it be great? Would it be awesome?
Like are the, is there all sortsof cool new technology that they
could, we could leverage for them?
Could we help them? Could we be thought leaders and
all that fun stuff? Yeah.
(15:42):
But it really kind of peel it back to why people make
decisions and why people do something different.
It it's there's some type of a catalyst that's driving them to
make that decision or there's animpending event or there's an
impending pain point that's, that's been that's been
identified. Everything else is a much lower
(16:03):
in our, in my opinion, most of the rest of it is a very low
probability of success. And, and to your other question,
like, Hey, another red flag or yellow flag is, Hey, we want to
do everything, scope out every aspect of our MSP and our stack
and our MSS, all, every service you have.
I mean, we've done it. We've landed the plane on some
(16:24):
massive deals, you know, with your partners.
But starting some of the starting small is a much more
attainable green light to Hey, let's start with a database
assessment or let's audit your controls around your firewall or
let's see how your your internalnetwork is segmented.
Let's do a little bit of a network audit or a health check
(16:46):
around your security. Or, you know, we can put
together a, let's put a little phase one engagement around a
data center move. If you were to do this, let's,
let's, let's flush out some budget numbers for moving you to
Azure AWS, just so you're going into it eyes wide open.
But here's the thing we, we would charge for that type of a
(17:06):
thing, right? We would, we would put together
a design and, and, and kind of go in with the lead with that,
you know that on the front end as a, as a billable engagement,
whereas sometimes this is a, this is an area that we had to
learn as far as communicating with partners.
A lot of partners will kind of give that away and they say for
(17:28):
free, but it's not really free. It's included in their service
on how they're getting paid on the back end from suppliers.
So it's not really free. There's a we're doing things for
an expectation of a return at Quest.
We typically are a little bit more upfront with that idea.
Hey, we, we want to help you. We would love to help you, and
(17:51):
here's what it would cost for usto help you.
Well, you OK, so, so you bring up a couple key points here.
I want to speak to some history that's been successful with this
strategy. I do want to come back to the
idea of BANT when it comes to qualified leads and things like
that and see what, what your perspective is on that.
But I, but I do like your start small approach because also some
(18:14):
people that are, you know, a customer that's meeting quest
for the first time has no idea who you are.
So the idea that that a CIO is going to cough up everything.
I mean, maybe that's maybe like a private equity portfolio
engagement and they're trying toslim down and you know, they
want to kick out an MSP and there is a justification to kind
of RIP out all that. I, I guess I could see that's a
(18:35):
much more, you know, realistic scenario, But if I look back at
some of the deals that we have done, you know, we may have
signed a very low, I've seen thecustomer sign a very low near
$0.00 MSA to get a agreed upon slated hourly rate for XYZ
services. All right.
And you guys are kind of a, a, you know, you could do the bill
(18:57):
of materials based on the hours need pull from your bucket of
resources. And people are like, oh, oh, OK,
I use that guy for database. Oh, I, OK, I use that person
for, you know, an Azure migration, right.
And here's 10 hours that were slated to be billed.
And we thought that's all that was going to be billed was 10
hours. And then we look at the
Commission reports and the orderreports and we see this thing
that was supposed to be a couplegrand is now 1015 grand.
(19:19):
And we call you up and say, is that is that right?
Did you guys overpay us? You go no, they just turned out
they use this for a bunch of stuff.
And then they discovered, well, yeah, they actually helped us
execute on that. I wonder if they can help us
with this thing. So it, it, it there's this never
ending thing of the deals never seem to stop where they start
(19:40):
necessarily, right. If we do good on that little
first piece. So I'm a I'm a big fan of kind
of the MVP idea of of that. So that's been cool to see.
Yeah. And that's kind of that that
land and expand, you know, virustheory if you will like just get
involved in something small, youknow, work with them mutually.
(20:00):
You know, it's a mutual benefit,right.
We we get a small contract, get a new customer.
You know, partner gets to introduce maybe a service that
they're not typically engaging in and we just kind of help out
on an ad hoc basis. We call that our technical on
call support engagements Extremely, extremely successful
(20:20):
in the middle market. And yeah, and then it just then
it just kind of grows to kind ofevolves from there.
Some of our some of our largest contracts have started out with
something as simple as a database administrator helping
with a sequel query that was taking too long.
So yeah. What's your what's your
perspective here? You know, this is a little more
(20:42):
of the old school smile and dial.
I got a call center. I'm cold calling, right?
Everything needs to be banned, right?
And the ban. I'm a big fan of the banned
methodology, though. You got budget authority, need
and timeline. And does my deal or does my
prospect have that? Does that strategy still kind of
relate? Like should we be trying to
connect those dots on every deal?
(21:04):
What's your, I guess perspectiveas you think about
opportunities? Yeah.
So I, I think that has to do with the level of energy you're
going to commit to that deal, right.
So if it, if it, if maybe they don't have budget authority or
maybe they're not the decision, maybe they're not the decider.
I do my George W Bush impersonation, but maybe they're
not the decider or have decisionmaking authority, but but they
(21:29):
do have influence or they do have a couple other things.
It just depends on how like how much you're going to charge into
that opportunity with resources because we all have limited
resources on how much we want tospend with time and people and
things like that. So you got to kind of pick your
battles. So if it's fully qualified,
it's, you know, it's ready to rock.
(21:49):
OK, let's get an assessment. Let's get an advisor, let's get
a consultant and get in there and start, you know, ripping
things apart and taking a look at what we can do.
But if it's not, then that's OK.You know, maybe you get in there
and you have a, a capability discussion around what could
happen when they do have budget or what could happen in that
(22:10):
when they, when they do have theauthority to make the decision.
It's all relationship based. And what we're always trying to
do is, is because our, like I said, like I said before, our
strategy is based on pain and events, right?
And if you're not around when that event happens or when that
pain occurs, you're, you're vulnerable, your pipeline goes
(22:33):
away. So strategically for us, we want
to talk to and meet as many partners, as many people as
possible. So in the event they have
trouble, they think, oh, those quest guys were creative and
they could help out in a couple different areas.
This this pain point that I haveright now does not fit cleanly
(22:53):
into that one box of you know, MDR provider or that one clean
box of data center or infrastructure.
So so that qualification you're talking about fantastic for
assessing. OK, green light go everyone hit
the door, we're going in versus we're not there yet.
(23:15):
Let's throw up a drone, right? We're not going to commit.
We're not going to commit again tomorrow.
My arm is. This a battlefield reference?
Are we like saving infantry soldiers?
I get it. I respect it.
I apologize, I apologize for thethat's, that's so lame.
But anyways, you know, throw up,throw up some some, you're not
committing boots to the ground, but you're going to observe,
you're going to talk to them, you're going to see how they're
(23:36):
doing. You're going to plant the seed
for, for future opportunities and something we do we've, we
learned that the best way to to kind of to get that going is, is
through what we call capability reviews.
So we've incentivized advisors, hey, let's do a capability
review. Let's get on the phone, talk
(23:57):
with your client, understand what they're trying to do, and
walk through the capabilities they could leverage if they want
to. I like it.
I like it. Let's talk about.
Let's talk about a previous, I mean, let's layer in maybe a
previous misstep. Let's keep the let's protect the
(24:17):
innocent here. But let's think through, OK,
we've got some some lessons learned from missteps that I
know you've kind of got in the coffers.
So how do we take what some of these lessons are and recognize
that customers are buying, they're buying a little bit
differently. It's a different buying cycle.
It's an explorer, it's AI have to, I'm, I'm expected to do
(24:40):
something with AI. Some people are coming around to
what they want to do. Some things we've already sold
into and they didn't realize theROI would come so quick.
And so we're kind of meeting people at all these different
stages. And I'm not saying like
everything is about AI, but how do you take that and just
recognize it seems like the buying cycles are, are, are
changing a little bit. So what do we, what do we learn?
(25:01):
How we moving it forward? Yeah.
So a lesson, lessons learned forthat is definitely go into the
opportunities not expecting and not pretending, you know exactly
what's driving the decision. We had a classic, we had a
classic scenario the other day, long term partner advisor within
(25:25):
the Terrace partner network. They, they had a client who we
had thought was very price sensitive.
We the, we had, we had done a massive deployment for them.
They were adding additional sites and some significant
things in those sites changed. We went from 5 doors to 20 doors
(25:48):
for our access control system. We went from three cameras to 15
cameras. A wireless access points went
from A-Z like or from excuse me,from from three to to about 12
at this site. It basically this site at least
doubled and the infrastructure requirements.
We had thought and the partner had thought that the
(26:11):
organization was going to be extremely price sensitive and
really, really upset about the change request.
And so we had talked to the the people who are making the
decisions there and we came to find out after kind of, you
know, you know, worrying about the shift and worrying about the
issues. They were not worried about the
(26:33):
price. They were worried about two
things, delivery timeline and our our ability to operate as
trusted partners and advisors and give them a transparent
update as far as what the changewas.
Now we probably had five or six internal calls burned, you know,
multiple hours of our time, probably a couple of your
(26:55):
engineers time on that call kindof worrying about, Hey, how are
we going to how are we going to address this with the with the
end user? Because it was a significant,
significant change, but that wasn't the driver.
They weren't worried about funds.
They were worried about hitting their deadline for their, for
their board and about making sure it was a we were a good
partner that could, you know, communicate that, that change
(27:19):
request. So the drivers aren't always
aren't always the same and the buyers are changing too, like
how they're buying, how they're subscribing to things, how
they're evaluating partners. Short answer, you know, Josh
would be don't go into it thinking, you know, what's
(27:39):
actually driving the the consumption until you, until you
have that conversation and you try to flush that out because
you can, you can make moves and pull levers that you don't even
need to. It's not.
That's not what's actually goingto affect the outcome.
You know, I want to. I want to get on a soapbox for a
(27:59):
minute. Let's see how this goes.
You know, I used to think growing up when you would see
all these successful business people, you know, the
infomercials, the real estate guys, the whatever guys, and you
dive in and understood, you know, try to get an
understanding of how did they dowhat they do, right?
Think the, the, the, how did Bezos build Amazon or how did
this guy build that company or, or whatever, right?
(28:20):
And it was just, I worked hard. I didn't stop.
I was relentless. I outworked, you know, I gave it
all my discretionary effort. I treated people nice.
I didn't, you know, I, I, I recognized that people were
humans and, and I figured out how to help people have great
growth paths. And if I, if I focus on those
(28:40):
things and if I focus on helpingother people, that turns out
that it, that it comes back to work in the end, provided you
don't get, you know, taken advantage of.
And, and, and so I, I see this similarity in our world and in
our industry where when we get in a lot of discussions, the
common thread is we have to focus on the business outcomes.
(29:05):
And when I see that and I hear that so much, right?
And I, and I hear that and I seethat from successful people.
I see that from our folks. I see that from partners, I see
that from vendors, you know, when we're trying to flush out.
How has it worked for you? So this common theme is it's
business outcomes that that happened at the end of the day.
So if I take if I take what you're saying as to how we've
(29:26):
gotten to some of the we dissecthow we've had some of these
successful engagements both withyou and with others.
It seems to come from man. Once we finally understood what
they really wanted, we were all wildly successful and much more
successful than we even thought we would be.
We were we were in it for what we thought it would be, but it
(29:47):
became something bigger. So is the, what I'm trying to
figure out here, I guess is, is the $1,000,000 question, the
hard question of, I know you told me that you need these
things, Mr. Customer, I know youtold me that like This is why
you're doing it. But is that what?
What's the outcome that you're driving for are?
Are we just not asking enough ofthe outcome questions?
(30:11):
Yeah, it's, it's and, and the, the challenges in our industry
is a lot of the partner, a lot of the customers are waiting to
get pitched and they're and they're and they're, and they're
part of their negotiation strategy on that side of the
table is, is to kind of mask theintent of what, of what and why
(30:34):
they need what they're doing. Because they, because sometimes
they think they can get a betterprice if, if you kind of keep
the person guessing, whereas if you're and, and you know, there
are bad actors out there who tryto take advantage of situations
and there's a lot of, there's a lot of fun in the IT space.
So we're, we're dealing with an industry that's kind of brought
up a certain behavior. If you can, if you can, if you
(30:57):
can build that trust and lower those defense Shields from the
customer and they can tell you what they're really challenged
with and what their outcome they're really looking for.
Then it's amazing how much time is saved on creation of the
scope and creation of the service level agreements and,
and documenting who's responsible for what and
creating that win win scenario. You know, we, we tend to qualify
(31:24):
very, very hard there because that's what we're trying to
understand. Can we get to that conversation
with the customer? And part of that qualification
process is understanding, Hey, is this person going to tell me
what they're really trying to do?
Or are they, you know, going to kind of play, you know, some,
some Machiavellian, you know, court games and try to try to,
(31:47):
you know, execute the 48 laws ofpower to get their best purchase
on a hardware refresh, right? I don't have the energy for
that. And then there's so many
opportunities out there for partners that you can play that
game if you want to, or you can kind of step back and, and, and
wait for the pain train, which inevitably is going to come to
(32:10):
all everybody and you can step in and help him at that point.
So it is a, it is a little bit of a dance.
I think what your, what your technology advisors can really
do is ask, ask the question as as far as why are you doing this
similar, similar to like what happens if you don't do anything
(32:32):
right? What, why, why are you, why are
you looking at a sassy solution,right?
Why are you, why are you talkingabout ZTNA?
Why, why are you, why are you looking for micro segmentation?
Why are you, why are you doing data loss prevention?
And if it's the canned, like, you know, CIO monthly, you know,
(32:52):
article that was published by the vendor and they read off the
bullet points as far as what Gartner says is why they should
do something cool, OK. But if they're, if they're no,
this just happened and we saw this as an issue and we want to,
we want to, we want to protect against these things, OK, cool.
(33:12):
We're getting closer to the, we're getting closer to the, the
business outcome. And that that's, that's tough
because if that's your opportunity, if that's your guy,
if that's your person at that account, you know, sometimes you
can advisors can kind of get latched on to that that
opportunity and kind of want to want to ride it into the ground.
(33:34):
Whereas we might, we it might inour opinion, it might not be
ready for prime time yet if you can't get that outcome
conversation. Yeah.
OK. So next couple thoughts here is
we kind of wind down before we kind of do the future and and
and and things like that. I want to talk a little bit
(33:55):
about, I think you guys as far as a vendor in the Telaris
portfolio, you represent a big swath of things, right?
We're seven years into this relationship and I think we're
still shooting the texts expecting a no, man, I don't do
that. And we're getting a Yep, we're
here and here's an example engagement of what we had,
(34:16):
right? So we're still learning all the
things that you have with respective, you know, your core
product sets, you're supporting OEMs, managed services, all of
that. For anybody that's not familiar,
I mean, walk us through for a second.
You're you're in security, you're in cloud, you're in
infrastructure, you're in managed services.
I mean, you're trying to meet the demand of a customer.
So you've you've you've certainly, you know, put this
(34:38):
focus around what the customers need and what most businesses
need. But I mean, give us the give us
a little bit of highlight of some of the key product sets and
focus areas for you guys. So partners can kind of be
positioning, hey, when I have a need, but also when I'm going
out meeting with my prospects and just doing QBRS positioning
for things that might come up later.
(34:59):
Yeah. So, so we we built, we built the
company a little bit different in the standpoint of there's,
there's a labor division, right.So you need people to execute on
tasks. There's there are vendors and
OEMs and software solutions out there that, that you need.
And and then you then you need the ability to execute and
project manage and deliver, right.
(35:20):
So, so we got the, we got peoplelabor, we have technology and
then we have the process and theproject management to deliver.
And then we have very, very strong capital capabilities to
acquire assets, deliver them as a service and bundle, bundle
things together. So when partners are thinking of
us for opportunities, you know, an MDR endpoint protection
(35:44):
storage solution, manage Wi-Fi, you know, those types of
services, those all have multiple vendors that we could
select and plug in for that use case, right?
You know, you need, you need flash fast storage, you, you
drop in a pure array. You need, you know, an
alternative to VM Ware you can drop in Nutanix.
You know, you have, you know, wehave our edge cloud compute
(36:07):
services that we host. You need help tying in the AWS
or Azure or the Microsoft stack.You know, we're a tier one CSP.
So we have all these building blocks from a technology
standpoint that we help deliver.But really the secret sauce is
we we know how to how to partnerthe technology stack that all of
(36:28):
us have access to. We all have access to all these
different software vendors and hardware manufacturers and
things like that. But we know how to source it and
we also know how to how to manage it as an MSP.
So where, where we've been seeing a lot of a lot of growth
is helping organizations assess what they have and then and then
(36:50):
plug in the next thing that theymight need to, to help augment
that. So endpoint protection and
security conversations across anything in the security stack.
We can help Dr. and business replication and business
continuity, data center operations, all of that.
We built our own data centers. We built two of them and we
operate at about 16. So some of your partners are
(37:12):
always surprised to learn, wait,you guys can do the digital like
migration from from cloud A to cloud B, but you can also like
go in and pick up all the servers and move them from
California to Texas or from, youknow, from a Florida data center
to, you know, up the coast further or just digitally move
them. Yeah, we do the physical and,
and the digital because we don't, we don't see it as, oh,
(37:37):
we're, we're only ADR company orwe're only a data center company
in Northern California. So many, so many people kind of
put that limitation on themselves that oh, I'm an MSP
in this region, I can only support this region.
If we thought that. And again, that's not wrong, but
if we thought that we'd still be, you know, rolling trucks in
Sacramento and love Sacramento, great market, but you know, hey,
(38:03):
you can, we can deliver. We just, we just finished you
know a international 3030 country deployment with you guys
last. Year, No, I think it's wedges.
It's it's wedges. It's what I hope people are kind
of understanding in that is there are wedges and there are a
lot of wedges. If you need a product, lots of
(38:26):
wedges there. If we need a service, lots of
wedges there. If we need a scope of work
temporary, you know, three to six month engagement, a
migration can help with that. I think at least what we've seen
in this is these types of wedgesdon't usually stop.
They they tend to end with this unknown date or this unknown
(38:48):
more. More just seems to come.
It seems to be the gift that keeps on giving I guess is what
I'm getting at. Yeah, and and, and and fully
transparent because we talked about like failures and
challenges that flexibility can hurt on the pre sales because,
because you'll, you know, you guys will call and say hey, you
can you guys help with XYZ? Yeah, 100% good to go.
(39:12):
Here's 3 examples of a project we've done before on that.
And then we'll get involved witha with a customer and the
partner. And there's the idea that
there's a standardized methodology for that specific
use case. And it's like, well, there's
probably 8 different ways we canattack that.
So that's, that's kind of the thing that we're trying as as
(39:34):
much as we can. We do boot camps, we come to you
guys events, we do training, we do all that kind of stuff to try
to try to build up the idea of these are all building blocks
that the client, when they're discussing the outcome they're
looking for, we can work with them to, to build that next
step. That can sometimes that can
(39:55):
sometimes rub partners the wrongway.
The, you know, classic, classic feedback you'll get.
And this is something we've heard before.
Wait, you want me to pay you to scope this?
And it's like, well, that's, that's, that's one way to look
at it. Yes, you can look at it that
way, but it's also no, no, we'rewe're helping you to design an
outcome. Based on, on what you've told us
(40:16):
you're looking for right now, there's a, there's a significant
value to that. Whereas, you know, maybe a
competitor of ours would listen to the outcome and plug in like
10 SKUs and have their Salesforce instance pop out a
quote that could work. Maybe it'll work.
The sales Rep is probably going to pitch it that it's going to
(40:36):
work. But we're that's just not our,
that's just not our model. That's just not how we how we
help. Yeah, yeah, it's a long, it's a
long game approach. He who plays or she plays the
long game always wins. You will not lose in the long
game. It might take a second to get
there, but I, I, I do love that strategy.
(40:59):
So I guess as we as we kind of think about where we go from
here, as we wrap this up, you know, we're writing the next
chapter for the for the, you know, the future playbook.
We're thinking, of course, AI isa big component of that data
readiness. The Microsoft, the purviews, the
data dogs, this getting data ready, building my LMS, tweaking
(41:19):
it, keeping it private, right? Those are all, you know, future
things that that are that are here right now and going to be
here for a while. But if you're writing that next
chapter based on the disciplines, the real world
lessons going to take us home with what's just a couple must,
must do strategies right over the next couple years.
(41:41):
I think it's going to, I think, I think with AI and automation,
we've been through some automation situations in the
past. I know a lot of people think
this one's going to be different.
Probably probably is. There's some, there are some,
there are some drivers that I think are going to change some
(42:02):
of the economy like at a high level and change some of the
labor situations that we all have.
I think the from a security standpoint with partners and
advisors and people who are out there from a technology
standpoint really need to investin the idea of helping with an
outcome. And the idea of your security as
(42:25):
an advisor is in your ability toproduce results.
So, you know, whatever that, whatever that production means
for you and your and your customers, you have to be able
to produce results for your clients.
I, you know, personally, I thinkthat in the, in the services
space, in the MSP space, in the AI integration, I think the idea
(42:48):
of bringing, you know, multiple people into one deal or, or
doing a broker model is going to, is going to be challenged.
Because if that's, if that's theproduction you're looking to do,
I mean, think about it, AIAI agents are now handling complex
conversations. If, if your value is, I can
(43:10):
bring in three people and give you quotes for three people,
that's going to get automated inthe next couple years.
That's a very, very, it's a very, very vulnerable place for
an advisor to be. I would say the ability to
produce results though, and, andhelp with complex, complex
designs, complex engagements, you know, bringing together, you
(43:32):
know, multiple vendors into one outcome.
That's, that's definitely the ability to help organizations
with, with their IT stack. And that's, you know, where I
see them, where I see them going.
I've been seeing some really cool assets getting developed by
your team and by others that arehelping the advisor community
get the most out of the opportunity they have with the
(43:52):
customer when it, when it presents itself.
And then also communicate with them as far as what they can do
to help. Yeah, I, I think it just, it's a
great, it's a great problem to have, right?
It, it forces us to get a level deeper.
It forces us to get into the wise.
It forces us to understand all these things that we know that
the customers don't understand, right?
They're, they're being forced toimplement some of these
(44:13):
technologies and have no idea how complex, valuable, but how
complex some of these things are.
So I, I've always been a believer that the harder this
technology gets, well, it might be easier and it might automate
the channel thrives in complexity and the partners
truly add so much value. The harder it gets, I get more
(44:35):
excited, right? Because they, the customers need
the partners more and more and more.
So it's a great, I think it's a good time to be and I love, you
know, I'm a nerd. I might not be magically
gathering, but I am a nerd with this stuff.
And I do love to see all this new stuff come out 'cause I just
go, Oh my gosh, there's so much help that we have to give here.
So yeah. And they, they love this.
The, the more people standardizeand the more people scale, the
(44:58):
more pain is going to come from,from people who need to operate
a little bit outside of that, that standardization.
And that's a a fantastic opportunity for the advisors to
to help. I love it.
All right. Adam Burke, VP of Sales at
Quest. Thanks for coming on, man.
Good, good, good topics. Appreciate you coming back.
(45:19):
Yeah, anytime, Josh. Thanks for having me.
Awesome. All right, that wraps us up
everybody. I'm your host, Joshua Presto,
SVP of Sales Engineering at Solaris.
This has been channel myths mistakes, $1,000,000 moves.
Until next time, Next level. Biztech has been a production of
Polaris Studio 19. Please visit polaris.com For
(45:40):
more information.
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