Q&A: New Telarus Channel Manager Vows To Bring On More Partners, Evangelize SD-WAN And UCaaS

Go West

Master agent Telarus is aggressively expanding its team of channel managers in an effort to bring more in-market resources to its channel community. In the Northwest, Telarus has tapped Koby Phillips as senior partner development manager.

Phillips is no stranger to the telecom space – or to the channel, for that matter. He most recently handled channel sales for Broomfield, Colo.-based carrier Level 3. Phillips also served as an indirect sales manager at Integra and before that was an account executive for TW Telecom. These days, Philips will be focused on helping Telarus channel partners get up to speed with new technologies, and expanding their UCaaS and SD-WAN practices.

Philips sat down with CRN to share his growth goals for partners, the importance of bringing on more VAR and MSP partners, and the services that the channel should place its bets on in 2017. Here's what Philips had to say.

What is your new role and responsibilities with Telarus?

In my new role, I will be handling the same territory I was with TW Telecom -- Washington, Oregon and Idaho. I'll be their first in-market resource in these areas, so I'll be a channel manager tending to needs of partners and making sure we have a good, visible connection. I'll also be able to meet in person with partners a lot more.

My goal is to make Telarus the fastest-growing and most stable partner in the Northwest. I want to make sure that partners that we do bring on are really a great fit for what we are doing, and really continue that momentum that the team that brought me in has already put in place.

What are the first priorities that you'd like to accomplish in your new role?

In the Northwest, Telarus does have a big group of legacy partners. I want to make sure to reach out to them, let them know that I'm there for them now and make sure they have everything they need and answer any questions. Especially because we have an expanded portfolio that Telarus brings to the table versus some other options in this space, and I want to make sure they know about all the tools. They may have signed up with us years ago and haven't realized that we have account and project management options for some of their orders, so I first want to make sure that everyone is in the know with what we can do.

Do you plan on recruiting new partners, including VAR partners who are looking to add recurring revenue and telecom services to their businesses?

Absolutely. That will be a big part of my first few moves, as well as actively reaching out to some contacts I already have in the area and looking for new contacts that I might not be aware of to help educate them and bring them on as well.

VARs and MSPs are fantastic relationships to go after. They already have trust within their customer base, so it makes complete sense to target those [partners] and help align them with the network needs for their customers. I think they'll like our various supplier options, and we can have them as involved in as much and as little as they'd like depending on whether they want to add this to their core business or just keep it as a one-off. We do have a lot of existing sub-agent partners in the market, and we'll also be really respectful of those relationships as well.

Does Telarus have any specific programs that VAR partners can take advantage of?

We have a whole VAR program and we have tools that give them ability, under certain carriers, to vet solutions, make their own paperwork, and then get it signed. Or we have the ability to be an outsourced sales rep for [VARs] and they can bring us in, help do an intro, and then we can take it from there. We can help sell the deal and take customer meetings and [handle] project management, all the way through to account management to go help them sell and upsell as necessary.

And that doesn’t cover our VX Suite that certain VARs, I think, would really appreciate those products with pre-circuit monitoring, etc., so they can really get the diagnostics on the networks they are going to be using.

Can you tell me a little bit about the tools that Telarus has for partners, and how you'll be able to use these resources to help your partners?

[Our tools] are going to be major in what I like to call ;pivot conversations.' There are traditional networks -- like MPLS -- that are slowly fading out and new technology like SD-WAN is becoming more and more predominant. We can use our tools to go over these options with our partners and help them if they are more traditional and haven't quite made the pivot, or don’t know how to make a pivot. We can help them have those conversations with their customers.

More importantly, we can really help our partners dissect and diagnose what works and what doesn’t work in a pre-sales manner, as well as post-sales monitoring. A lot of masters have account management tools and quoting support, but I think the difference that really attracted me to make the move to come here is how the company is built. Telarus built [the company] backwards -- tools first, then adding the support, and now they are adding in market sales resources like myself.

Having experience in both direct and indirect sales, what do you like the best about working with the channel as opposed to working with customers directly?

I've always been attracted to the channel side, more from a customer point of view -- to be able to have a resource on your side and not just have to fit into one box of what they can sell and be limited by one company's portfolio. Working in the channel at a carrier is fantastic, but designing the solution always excited me more than just what we could offer.

Partners can truly go out and use multiple carrier solutions to build an overall solution for [a customer's] needs. It's a much better value than just a direct sales force. Not everyone does everything great, and partners can help pick out the right solutions for the right opportunities.

What is the next big opportunity for partners?

SD-WAN is the hot buzzword, and definitely being aware of the options is important because there are multiple vendors that are doing it in different ways, so being up to date and educated on that is important. What still hasn’t gone away is the mystery of the cloud, and customers still want to know how to better utilize cloud. There's other companies coming into play that can help [partners and customers] utilize AWS and [Microsoft] Azure connections, so making sure those are on the radar is huge, too. And then of course, partners should also be looking at UCaaS.

What is your message to existing, or prospective Telarus partners?

I'd like them to know what separates us from other master agent options. We provide tools that give our partners the ability to have different types of conversations with customers. We have an amazing back-end service option. Whether that be account or project management, our overall goal is to make it as easy as possible to do business, and more importantly, we want to give partners time back in their day to go grow their business. If we have a partner that is great at sales but they feel like they need to be on every provisioning or account call for customers going though project management, we want to be able to help offload that burden and allow them to go see more customers.

Our core focus is 100 percent-focused on helping partners initiate bottom-line growth.