TELARUS PARTNER SUMMIT — Telarus on Thursday unveiled Telarus University, an on-demand learning management system to help partners get training on new technologies and gain sales confidence.

“We believe in education,” Telarus chief product officer and co-founder Patrick Oborn told the San Diego crowd. “When you hire people, it shouldn’t take them six months to ramp up. It should take six days. If they take six days here, they will be proficient and speak the language.”

3 Sections

Telarus divided the platform into three sections. The first is technology certification, increasingly critical as products and services become more complex. Partners can access education around the hottest technologies in the channel.

“It’s all about the technology, to make sure you understand the basics of network and connectivity, cloud and infrastructure, security, IoT, CCaaS and UCaaS. There are six swim lanes of technology and each has a certification area,” Oborn said.

The second section is best practices. That’s where partners can learn how to use Telarus’ various tools and get connected with the company’s commissions team, for instance.

The third area on the site is supplier education, where some of Telarus’ top partners offer their own content.

NICE + CX One’s Ray Hicken and Digital Realty’s Morgan Granfield at Telarus Partner Summit, July 29, 2021.

Two of the first Telarus suppliers contributing content to the platform are Digital Realty and NICE + CX One.

Morgan Granfield, senior channel sales manager at Digital Realty, says you won’t get a sales pitch from her company’s content. It features information from Gartner analysts who help break down complex data center technology.

Ray Hicken is head of U.S. channels at NICE + CX One, the contact-center-as-a-service provider.

“It’s a very complex environment that we’re in now,” said Hicken. “There are many pieces to it, and if you don’t understand it, you’ll miss opportunities. The education is a really big piece of it. And if they get to the point where they feel comfortable, I can see partners who have never done a contact center deal go through the process of learning, get into an opportunity, see it become a reality, and immediately bring me three or four deals because they know what to look for.”

Confidence

Beyond the x’s and o’s of the training, it’s that confidence that can lead to partner success.

Telarus’ Adam Edwards

“As an adviser, you’ve got to be confident that you’re walking into a situation and that the client has confidence that you know what you’re talking about. And so to the extent that we can help partners raise that bar, educate their new employees and get people up to speed, I think we can really scale what we’ve already been doing, which is a lot of education,” Telarus CEO Adam Edwards told Channel Futures in an interview for the Coffee with Craig and James podcast.

The message?: The more you know, the more you sell. Expect the offers in Telarus University to expand over time.

“We have made a commitment in terms of the suppliers and also our engineering teams to continue to produce more and more content,” said Oborn.

Telarus said on Thursday that Partner Summit attendance is just shy of 1,000. That’s about a 15% increase over 2019, the company’s last live, pre-pandemic, in-person summit. Roughly half of the attendees are partners.