Telarus Assessment Platform Update Aims to Give Sales Engineers More Time

… dip their toes into the world of cybersecurity.

“It gave us comfort and a little bit of confidence in an area where we’re not really as proficient as we’d like to be right now,” he said.

Select years ago was selling conferencing solutions before making a pivot. Goldman says Select now plays strongly in UCaaS, CCaaS and connectivity. But in the area of cybersecurity, the firm benefits from following the road map SolutionVue provides, Goldman said.

“When you ask us to go sell other products outside of that suite of services, we really struggle,” Goldman told Channel Futures. “So having tools like that are critical for us to move into product categories that are just not in our sweet spot.”

But cybersecurity now represents a growing opportunity for the advisor. Goldman said the number of cybersecurity opportunities in the pipeline has grown 300% in the last six months. The company is seeking an overall growth of 40% year-over-year in 2023, Goldman said. And he added that Select is on track to meet that goal.

Oborn noted that the cybersecurity and cloud QSAs differ in how they frame the customer journey. Cybersecurity represented a newer area of investment for many end customers, and many of them were buying products in order to ensure eligibility for cyber insurance. Oborn said Telarus built the cybersecurity QSA to make sure technology advisors ran the client through the checklist of starting their cybersecurity posture. Cloud, on the other hand, represented a more mature market.

“Cloud was more around figuring out where people are now and helping them get to the next step,” Oborn said.

Artificial Intelligence

Oborn said Telarus plans to add AI to the suite to make more dynamic vendor recommendations based on survey data. In other words, if a supplier is getting increasingly good or bad reviews from partners, it would move in or out of the recommendations.

That touches on a challenge Channel Futures frequently hears from the technology advisor community about asking TSDs for supplier recommendations. Many partners have built close relationships with a trusted individual at a TSD (like a sales engineer or solutions architect), to whom they approach for vendor best-fits. They do that to ensure that individual’s recommendations are truly vendor-agnostic and don’t tie back to sponsorships.

AI and automation could potentially scale that trust, Goldman said.

“It will build more trust. Because if there’s AI built in and it’s built right, then the suppliers that come in [on the recommendations] should be based on the answers to the questions through SolutionVue,” said Goldman, who said his team did deals with more than 60 different Telarus suppliers in 2022.

Channel Futures has reported in the past on the “arms race” that is shaping up between TSDs to build tools for their partners to use. Avant’s BattleApp over the years has evolved into Pathfinder and recently updated to include a customer-facing version of the tool.

PlanetOne’s Jake Schuman

“We see on average that they produce roughly three times the revenue of the trusted advisors that don’t lean in and use the tool,” Avant vice president Jake Schuman told Channel Futures earlier this month.

Both Avant and Telarus have been expanding their personnel and tools with the help of investments from private equity firms Pamlico Capital and Columbia Capital, respectively.

Goldman said the increased presence of AI will take the arms race to a new level. He said he thinks AI will play more of a factor in differentiating the TSDs from one another and potentially spell trouble for the TSDs that don’t make investments.

“If I can go to ChatGPT and I can put some information there to tell me which UCaaS supplier to choose based on my requirements, then how can we utilize that in the frame of our business to use tools like SolutionVue or Pathfinder? Those tools are are essentially doing that, but AI is going to quickly advance what can be done through those tools,” he said.