Brian Nichols  0:07  
All right, and with that, joining me here on CX without the BS, the cloud Sherpa himself, Derek Roush, Derek, welcome to the CX of the BS, the Brian Nichols show, my other podcast, no. Derek, welcome to the program. How you doing? Good man, thanks for having me, Brian, absolutely Old habits die hard. I've been doing that show since 2018 over 1000 episodes, so that point just turns into muscle memory. And just like Welcome to the Brian Nick, no CX, without the BS, but no, Derek. I'm really looking forward to today's chat. And by the way, just for folks who are playing on in the home game, Derek might sound familiar because you've probably seen some clips of my appearance over on his show, the cloud Sherpa podcast, so I'll make sure we include that link in the show notes. Go check that out. But Derek, you're on today's episode of CX without the BS, because I was over on your show, we were talking about a lot of the more mid market SMB type of customers that my company works with that you you've worked with over at your org at Vocal Point. I mean, just help me understand, you know, before we kind of dig into who you're having conversations within your customers, a little bit more of where you guys are adding some value, right? Because, obviously, there's a lot of technology that's out there. It's really hard sometimes to figure out, you know, from vendor to vendor who's offering what, in a unique way, the differentiators and the reality is, right? Vendors, or rather, customers, they go through this process what once every seven years, when they're looking at technology buys. We do this every like seven minutes. So just give us a quick intro to who you are, a little bit more about what you're hearing in terms of you're adding some value for customers.

Speaker 1  1:43  
Yeah, so again, thanks for having me, Brian. I appreciate it. But yeah, we've been doing this for about 15 years, and I started Vocal Point consulting back in 2010 so going on 16 years, I think about April is when we'll hit our 16 year. We started strictly as a consulting company. So I came from the Avaya world, the guys that were the 900 pound gorilla worldwide, especially in contact centers, although they were called Call Centers back then. But yeah, via, really struggled, you know, with their path to the cloud, and, you know, along came a little company called Cisco, and kind of really ate their lunch when a via is going No No, keep voicing data on separate lines. You know, you don't want to do it on the same line known. And, you know, Cisco just blew past them. Of course, Cisco is still having their issues right now, which is kind of why they bought the whole broad soft platform. They're still kind of struggling a little bit with their path to the cloud as well. But with that said, when we started, we were strictly consulting. I get just got tired of all the M and A and I wanted to do my own thing, and told my wife, I thought I could do something better. And we started out as a consulting firm that would help clients just map out what they had migrated over and walk them through that process, because that's kind of what I did, even as a sales guy. And we would help kind of manage those projects on the installation side as well. So I took that knowledge and parlayed it into consulting, but quickly learned how, you know, clients wanted to purchase consulting, and it's not the it's not easy to go out there and say, hey, yeah, I'm going to charge, you know, back then we were charging, I think maybe 180 bucks an hour, right? And clients are like, Ooh, I don't know. The Hours might get out of hand, you know? So they were trying to cap us. And we had one project. It was a PR firm in midtown Manhattan. Guy actually saw me on a webinar and called me up and hired me over the phone. So went in there, helped them, migrated an entire two floors of that building on a Nortel option 11, over to Cisco. Cisco ended up being the winner on that one. Again, we weren't making anything on the hardware, nothing on services, nothing straight consulting, but they were worried so much the CFO was worried about our costs getting out of hand that she's like, well, can we do it, maybe on like, a milestone basis? And I'm like, sure we could work something out. So we figured out about how many hours we would have in, you know, per milestone, and what was supposed to be a three month project turned into nine months. So I got six months that I'm not getting paid for. So needless to say, about 2013 you know, we started 2012 2013 when the cloud started developing. Developing and thought it was a fad and it wouldn't go away. You know? I was like, Man, I just don't think this is gonna stick around. But it did. You know, companies just started branding cloud this and cloud that, and it stuck, you know? And I'm like, I thought we tried this with Centrex.

Brian Nichols  5:19  
Does that not sound familiar for today with AI everything, right?

Speaker 1  5:24  
Yes, yeah, and we'll get there, right, yeah. So you know, for where we're at, we're starting to look at this whole cloud thing. And we started looking at it and going, Man, this makes a lot of sense, because you start selling, like an MPLS deal or a network deal, and you go, that commission is going to come every month in perpetuity, right? And you start building that up, and you go, wow, there's something to this recurring revenue. So needless to say, it was about 2013 to 2014 where we made the big shift, and shifted everything over to cloud first. So today, we've got relationships with over 700 different suppliers, which gives us the ability to be completely agnostic and say, Look, we work with all of the largest providers in the in the country and in the world for that matter. So look, what problem are you trying to solve? Then we'll find the right technology to solve it. But what we did was we ramped up around project management, and then we also work in the cost optimization standpoint. So we've got a software that we can drop in a customer's IP file, tell them all the contracts that they have out there, and show them where they're wasting money or you're just not making good decisions. And we can go in and either renegotiate those contracts or do a forklift upgrade and move it over to something else that works better and maybe cheaper and faster, smarter, nice. That's where we're at today.

Brian Nichols  6:51  
It's interesting, like how there are certain formulas that work and your approach at Vocal Point, it actually rhymes with what we were doing up when I was in the Philadelphia market, I worked for a company called Stratus IP, and when we built that org out, actually funny at the more or less around the same time, it started around 2010 I joined in around 2017 and I was doing their go to market and sales Dev. And you know when you're going out, the value prop that we were bringing to the marketplace was beyond the technology advisor, like bringing the right solution to the table and truly being vendor agnostic, which I love, right? Because that's the part where you don't feel like you're stuck carrying one bag. You actually get to recommend the best, like true best solution, not whatever you feel. You kind of have to push because it's your brand. But then on the other side, right the support, the project management, one of the things that we did at Stratus that was very unique in the technology advisor space, at least at that time, and it's cool to hear you guys were more or less doing the same thing down in the southeast, is doing that project management, and we were almost like project managing, the project managers. So you'd bring the vendor in, and you'd say, Hey, this is their project management team. Hey, customer, this is who we're gonna be working with, right? And then you'd make that relationship, and now you're kind of the keeper of the schedule, making sure that all the milestones are hit, that sequence of events is tracked forward, and then once you hit that go live, is handing them off to a client care team to make sure, from our standpoint, as a technology advisor, that we were able to support that customer. Because the worst thing, and it's actually funny, I remember this to this day. Mike Dlug, the CEO of Stratus IP, he used to say, the worst thing I could ever do is call a customer. Here's something that's wrong. And me had to say, I didn't know about that. He wanted to always know what was going on with those, those respective customers, which is why we would have such constant touch points with our customers. And one of the things you know just going to the overarching issues that I know we saw back in, back in the day when I was in that technology advisor role. And now for my day job, I work in the UCAS space. I'm competing with a lot of these vendors I used to sell, right? And I'm seeing the differentiators, but one of the things that I'm constantly hearing is a lot of technology advisors feeling that they're, if they're not chasing enterprise deals, that some of the more big name vendors, the logos that we were very familiar with, that they just won't give you any any time of day. What's been your experience in that, in that kind of, I guess that's kind of situation. Have you had similar experiences? Or are you, if so, like, how do you kind of juggle that? I guess so.

Speaker 1  9:34  
I guess Are you saying that a lot of those vendors just aren't working with some of those advisors because they're not chasing the enterprise, like,

Brian Nichols  9:41  
if you're not bringing me a 7580 seat, 100 seat deal, even in those kind of instances, we might not even say yes to accepting your your request for a proposal.

Speaker 1  9:52  
Yeah, look, I've we've always stayed on the agnostic consulting side. We. Will air to that side. So I've had a lot of vendors. I had one just recently that wanted to be part of our portfolio. We talked with them. They're an AI company, and they're specific to healthcare. And this guy's like, Hey, I've got a 500 seat health care deal that I need new UCAS vendor, or I need a UCAS solution for for our AI solution to bolt on to. And this is a call center 500 seats. I'll give that to you, and I'll walk you into that deal. But I want something first.

Brian Nichols  10:42  
I was waiting for the butt. I was waiting to hear that I was

Speaker 1  10:45  
gonna go. And I'm like, so, so I'm first off, I'm signing this guy up as a referral partner, right? I'm gonna give him a percentage of our deal, which is significant, you know. So I'm like, well, you're asking me for quid pro quo right on the front end. First off, I don't have, like, a bucket of health care, you know, CFOs or CISOs that are just clamoring to do business with us, right? I said, Look, if you want to put together a campaign around it, and, you know, talk with some, you know, healthcare, CIOs and CISOs and CFOs, great. We'll do that. We'll go in there shoulder to shoulder, and we'll talk with some of these large healthcare systems. I can do that for you, but for you to say that you need something right now, I'm like, come on, you know that's that's not how I do business. So needless to say, I called his bluff. Never heard from again. So really? So, so I'm going, Okay. Was that really even a real deal? Or were you just trying to get something out of me, right? You know? So that's the games that they play sometimes well.

Brian Nichols  12:06  
And that's the thing. Like, I go back to when I was in your role as a technology advisor, and I just like, it's just human nature. You want to do business with people who they kind of lean in and help you do business. And I think back to, you know, I'll give some shout outs here, my old channel manager from Vonage up in the northeast, Steven stemmy, which he no longer works for Vonage, because my old company stole him, because we loved him so much. But like, whenever he and I would go into battle, like for a deal, one of the things that, like Steven did was, I mean, this is Cx without the BS, so I can, I can swear, but like, he would give a shit, right? Like you can, and you can see it, like his approach versus some other channel managers, they would just kind of, you know, they'd be responsive here and there. Yeah, they might have some enablement resources here and there. But I was leading an SDR team too, right? Like I wanted to be able to better equip my team to go out. And he was always bringing resources to the table. He would take time to, like, kind of walk through things, so my team better understood. And I say all that, like when Steven would go above and beyond, I would go above and beyond to bring him deals, because I know, like, number one, he's leaning in and he's he's showing that he actually gives a shit. But also, like when I bring him a deal, I know he's going to treat that deal with the love it needs, right? And like, now that I'm in that kind of a role as a channel manager, right? Like, that's something for me, I've tried to be able to bring to my partners, because I just know how valuable it was as an advisor. And then I just compare and contrast with the other, you know, the other companies that are out there, and you're right. Like, it is this very like, this, this quid pro quo kind of vibe, and it just, it's icky, right? And that's something about the channel where. And let me just ask you, point blank, like, who? Like, maybe you don't have to name names necessarily, but, like, you know, just give us an idea of what good relationship looks like from a vendor standpoint, it could be any industry, right, like, or any vertical, but just kind of to help differentiate that relative to the ick that we just talked about here, where it is that quid pro quo like, what does good look like?

Speaker 1  14:13  
So first off, let me talk about a little bit about the bad. There are some of the larger, and I mean very large UCAS companies out there that are basically they will literally steal customers from you if they don't feel like you are supporting them enough and flying their flag. So if you go to the Vocal Point consulting website, Vocal Point consulting.com there are no logos on that website, and that's for a reason, because we are an advocate for the client period. So when it comes to a good relationship with a vendor, i. So, you know, look at the end of the day, vendors need to understand that we work for the client, not for them, and we're going to do the best, you know, take care of the best interests of the client. So that's why we sit down and do a deep dive. We want to know, how do you want to use this? What are we using it for. What applications are we connecting to? What services need to bolt onto this? Do you have remote workers or mobile workers and things of that nature? So we want to know everything of how to use they want to use it so that we can therefore flesh out, here's the maybe top two or three that we think are going to, you know, provide the outcome that you're looking for, as long as vendors understand our role and you know, know when to lose quickly. If you know they're not a good fit, just look, walk away. There's plenty of business out there. You know, if a client says, I need a particular, you know, feature, and it's just not in your platform, I mean, that's okay, you know, there's plenty of other business out there, but what I want vendors to realize is, you know, just that we have to put the client first? We can't put them first and then try to shove the square peg into the round hole, because that's not the way we work. But it's, it's a hard balance, and a lot of vendors, honestly would like I said we've got 700 of them. Out of those 700 how many have I sold? You know, nowhere near 700 I can tell you that. But the problem is they need to understand that we have that bucket for a reason. We need to be able to be agnostic as possible. We need to put everything that the client is looking for into a scope of work that says, you know, this meets this vendor is going to meet 90% of the requirements. This one's going to meet 95 this one's going to meet 85 you know, but they're the top three. Let's now. Let's, you know, sit down and do some demonstrations and talk through, you know, nuts and bolts, but vendors just need to understand how we work and what our role is, and they're often too quick to, number one, not listen, because the thing I hate the worst is when We send over all of our requirements and the, you know, channel manager gets on with the client and says, So, where are you located?

Speaker 2  17:49  
Oh, so, how many locations do you have? How many

Speaker 1  17:53  
users is this? I'm like, did you read everything? I sent over to you? We already gathered all that information. So, you know, repeating information, stuff like that. It just, you start just knocking yourself down one rung at a time on that ladder, until you just, you know, kick yourself out of the deal.

Brian Nichols  18:15  
Well, you know, it's funny, Derek, we talk about selling CX solutions, right customer experience. But we forget sometimes in the technology sales world that we ourselves are selling a customer experience, right, like we are. We are, in that essence, part of that, that adventure, and part of that journey. And it's like, you know, how do you want to be treated as a customer, like, like, right? And empathy. Put yourself in your customer's shoes. How would you like to go through the buying motion? But like, you're right? I see a lot of folks. They just they like, like, think about from a technology standpoint, we try to avoid the run around, right? We try to avoid customers repeating themselves when they call into a company. So we try to put systems in place and processes in place to avoid those types of instances happening. And yet, when we go through a sales process where we're selling a solution that's supposed to do that exact thing, we are putting our customer through the run around like at Stratus, we did the exact same thing we would do the discovery call that was part of our value prop. We're going to sit down ask you the right questions, make sure we have all the scoping, understand every little possible detail of how the call like, the call flow would be and how the system is gonna be set up. And then we scope out the vendor based on the fact we know what they need. We know who's gonna be a good fit. We're telling you that. And now I just need you, vendor to come in, show your solution, give the like, give them a kind of an overview that gives the warm and fuzzies right. And then just help align next steps and, and just to see, like, to your point, some vendors who just, they phone it in, man. And that's the part for me, it was really frustrating. You could tell again, my buddy Steven from from Vonage back in the day, like he would give a shit, right? And then I'd have other guys, and you can just tell they're like, all right, what? Yep. And it was more of that, like that. Taker mentality. Like, yeah, sure. Tell me. How many do you need, right? Okay, yeah, I'll do that. But, like, anyways, that's my bias. What do you see in terms of kind of ranking or differentiating different vendors when you're you're in that agnostic role, right? But you're trying to bring a good solution to the table. Obviously, you have your battle card of like, five you know, vendors that are kind of go tos, right? But beyond that, like, how are you kind of vetting out vendors to determine, hey, this is a, you know, an A tier vendor, versus this might be a D, a D tier vendor, and so on and so forth.

Speaker 1  20:35  
Well, for the most part, when it comes to VoIP, I mean, most of the vendors can do a lot of the same things. Yeah, there's very small nuances, and so we do try to find those nuances, right? We try to ask a lot of questions. We've got, you know, our forms that we go through, asking this question and that question and that question, so that we can get to a certain point where we can figure out, you know, hey, here's at least several vendors that that fit that criteria. But then I think the real criteria comes down to the engineering team number one, making sure that the client feels comfortable, that they understand their business and how they want to work, and that they are going to fit into that model number two, the training that goes into it and the installation, because that is what sets apart most VoIP platforms? How well are your people trained? You know? Because if you don't have good training, you're not going to have a high adoption rate. And if the adoption rate falls, people start going, oh, yeah, I know they bought that software, but I just never use it, you know. And that happens all the time, all the time. How well are your people trained, and how well are is, does the install go? So talk you through that installation. What does it look like? How quickly can we go? Or, you know, what pace Do you want to go, Mr. Customer, because, you know, when we were rolling out 200 locations for a client, you know, some clients are just hesitant to go too fast. That particular client, we had to do, you know, about three locations per week, but that's sending out a technician to, you know, do the site survey, figure out if they've got the right switch or router in place, then come back. You know, with that information that we would load into the CRM, our project managers would then send out the VoIP guys to do their install. You know, our people would document all the phone numbers. Our PMS would document all the numbers, Port all the numbers over, go back and do disconnects and first bill review, all that kind of stuff. So there's a long process to it, and getting the customer comfortable with that process and how their team is going to work within that process is a big deal. Yeah.

Brian Nichols  23:16  
Well, not only is it a big deal, right? Like this is where the marketing slides kind of hit reality, right? And this is something as just putting off, you know, putting on my day job hat, right? Like, I am very proud to carry my, my company's badge, to to, you know, to the table, because I know that when it comes time to, actually, you know, do what we're supposed to do. We're going to do it great. And when I compare that to, and I just know this from selling this back in the day, like, there are some vendors, man, they have the best slide decks, right? They have the best websites. And then you go to actually, like, you work with them from a support or from an onboarding or a training standpoint, and it's an absolute nightmare, like, like, it's pulling teeth, right? Try to get an email responded to, trying to get somebody to respond to your phone call, just, just smoke signals, carry your pigeon something, yeah,

Speaker 1  24:15  
and I tell you what, that's one of the reasons why we actually got smart on contracts. My team will dig more into contracts. We understand SLAs, but I also tell clients, don't really worry too much about the SLA. What you need to worry about is that term and termination clause breach if crap hits the fan, how do I get out of this bad relationship? You know, because that's what's going to save you. And I told you the story, I think that on the last call that we talked about, where I had a client that was trying to be charged a $299,000 ETF, that we finally negotiated it down to 40k and got the new vendor to come in and purchase that 40k back, you know. And. To do that within some rebates that they had. You know, that's the kind of crap that really just irks me. And we shouldn't have to deal with contracts that bad or that much, I should say. But we do. We have to dig into termination clauses, Evergreen clauses, and you know, your SLA is all the time. I tell clients, SLA is a shell game. So they'll say, oh, we'll give you 10x back on your downtime. But then when you really do the math on that downtime, and you talk about, say, say, your VoIP is, you know, 900 bucks a month, right? And that's $30 a day, roughly. So if you're down eight hours, 10x I got 300 bucks back, right, but I lost a whole day of business. My radiology department couldn't, you know, send images, you know? I mean, the impact is huge to a customer. So I tell them, screw the SLA. That's a shell game. Worry about term and termination, because if, if they say we've we have four nines of reliability, and all of a sudden they're down for eight hours. I'm out.

Brian Nichols  26:17  
Yeah, you know, yeah. Well, I remember back, going back to Stratus, right? Like, I remember one day Mike came into the office. I'm not gonna mention the vendor's name, because they're a very well known vendor, but he had had an issue where the the there was a customer we were working with, and I forget that the intricacies, but long story short, it was to your point, right? Crap at the fan, and they were not gonna take any ownership. And he came into the office, and it was very much like Michael Scott, I declare bankruptcy. He's like code black on vendor name, insert here, right? And the idea was, whenever you'd hear that, that was, you stop selling. If you're in the sales process and you had them as an option, remove them from the table if you were in an upsell motion with them pause, right? Like, if you're like, all that kind of stuff, it all just froze and, and, like, that was because that vendor just, they would not respond, right? They would not adapt. They would not listen to the feedback. And, and, you know, in talking about the ETFs, right? Like, when the crap hits the fan, where's your escape hatch? Like, I don't mean to turn this into a commercial for my day job, but like, this is where, for me, it's like, Hey, I'm actually doing a campaign right now called death to ETFs, right? Because we built, just by default, a month to month offering, and we did that because we're so confident with our support model and just our delivery that we're going to knock it out of the park and and, you know, that's one thing, like we are as a society. Derek a subscription society, right? We have our Netflix. You got your chat, GPT, you got your phone, like your cell phone service, and it's all a subscription base. And yet, we just have not, as an industry met that demand right like there's, there's obviously a buying motion. We prefer this motion. But as an industry, a lot of the vendors that I compete against, they have, not only they have resisted month to month. In many cases, they have outright said no to month to month. And they have pushed these, if not, three, five year contracts at times, which is just to me, bonkers, because, I mean, what? What relationship starts with a five year handcuff, but at the same point in time, like the customer, they're kind of between a rock and a hard place, because when they are brought options to the table by vendors or by by technology advisors, who aren't looking at that, you know what's best for the customer, but they're looking for what's best for my piggy bank, some TAs. And the reality is, Derek, and I've talked to these TAs, they're like, I don't want month to month, I want to know I'm going to get the revenue for three years, right? So, I mean, is that a differentiator? You would say, from TA to TA? And do you see that kind of in your world, where you're competing for business, where it's kind of that commission breath versus what's best for the customer?

Speaker 1  29:00  
It's It's interesting you say that. So I think the number one the vendors are scared of month to month, because they want some repeatable revenue that they can make sure that they have for a certain period of time. So they want something that is predictable, and it looks great on the balance sheet when they lock it in and they say, I'm going to have this much revenue over the next five years. But they've also trained the advisors to do the same thing, and the advisors are going, Well, I live on recurring revenue, therefore I need to lock it in for the longest period so that I can, you know, keep this customer for a long time, and then I can predict my revenue over the next, you know, three to five years. It looks great on the balance sheet. And you know, if you. You know, private equity comes in and wants to give me a multiple on my revenue, at least I can show them, you know, based on contracts, here's my Predictable Revenue. That's an issue right now in the market, and they're doing they're training the advisors by number one saying, hey, the longer we extend it out, we'll lower the monthly rate. But then the customer could be locked into something that they hate for one. But then they're also training the advisor with all the spiffs on the front end. So they're saying, oh, we'll give you 5x we'll give you 10x some of them, like 11 and 12x on the front end. Advisors look at that, and they go, whoo money. I need that. And they just jump at the brass ring. And that's the problem in the industry right now. So I do think you're going to see a shake up in the industry. I think month to month contracts are going to show you who is willing to back their support, who is willing to back their product. But also, if we can get away from, you know, the big spiffs, and just get back to, you know, what works, what is right for the client, and then build upon that and get back to a layer of trust. I think that's going to be huge. That's one of the reasons why I joined the TAA, the technology advisor Alliance. You know, we've got about 200 advisors nationwide, maybe about we might be closer to 300 now, and that is a, I like to say it's a way to bring ethics back into the industry in the old days of slamming people for long distance and stuff like that, where it was just easy money back in the, you know, 90s and such and early 2000s there's been a lot of lack of integrity within the telecom industry, and to be able to bring that back is refreshing. So the TAA is basically, I call it like a consortium of advisors nationwide that have a fiduciary responsibility to the customer and to each other. So we've got, you know, to your point, we've got a shit list, and there are some vendors that are on that shit list that we don't work with. You know, vendors that have just screwed people and advisors on that list. So there are some advisors that if they ever tried to join the TAA, they would not be allowed to. So as a board member of that group, you know, we make sure that we are operating ethically. We have a code of ethics that an advisor has to sign to even be part of that group. And then we can start, you know, trying to get some of these ethics back into telecom right now, but it's something that's really lacking. And I think what you guys are doing around month to month contracts. Solves a lot of that, but advisors just don't get it yet, yeah, but I think they will,

Brian Nichols  33:28  
and that's the thing right there. Like, if advisors only realized how much power they have, like I am, philosophically, much more of a free market type of person in the more Milton Friedman Murray Rothbard School of Economics, where it's very much looking at the fundamentals of supply and demand, right? And if only technology advisors realize that as they start to hear from customers what they want, and truly were able to pick vendors that were were meeting that demand. How the reaction from the larger vendors who have unfortunately, kind of steered us in this direction, they would, they would be forced to, by the nature of the marketplace, adapt, right? And that's a good thing, like the more that technology advisors can help steer the ship towards vendors who are doing things the right way, it will, by just the nature steer the behavior of those other vendors, because they don't want to miss out on revenue, right? And if they start to say, oh, what's happening, right? And they were to say, oh, goodness, yeah, we're losing because we're not offering month to month, or we're not offering us based support, or whatever the thing may be, like, that's something as an advisor, you have a lot of power over. So the fact that TAA exists is huge. Number one. Number two, the fact that vendors now know that there's almost like this accountability infrastructure in place, I think, is refreshing. But to your point, there's a long way to go, because. Unfortunate reality is that we are also competing with, literally, these orgs with millions and millions and millions of dollars in marketing budgets and and, like, if you're able to always steer those towards 12x spiffs or 10x spiffs. Like, as an advisor, I get it. It's that. It's that, like, it's the dopamine hit, right? Like, give me the instant gratification. It's the I won the lottery, and I can either do the lump sum up front, or I can do the, you know, the consistent payment over a certain amount of time, right? Like, everybody wants the lump sum, everybody wants that instant gratification. And when you see, do I go with this one vendor that's going to be rock solid for 10 years, or do I go with the one who's going to give me that crazy, awesome upfront spiff, yeah, you'll see the technology advisors who spiff Chase. And as a vendor like, that's just something in my world, specifically, I don't have the resources to do, because I don't have millions and millions of dollars in marketing. But as an advisor like, I've been in that role, and I don't know there's just something reassuring to know that when I'm bringing a solution to a customer, I can confidently tell them that this is the best fit for you, not because of my self interest, but because I know it's a good fit and there's going to be a mutually beneficial outcome from us agreeing to this. You're getting a good solution. I'm getting compensated with the Commission. It shouldn't be. I'm going to bring a lesser solution to the table and promote that to a customer as though it's the best solution, because behind the scenes, I'm going to get compensated more. To me, that's just icky, but it's a part of the industry. And to your point like that, that is, unfortunately, you know, kind of where we've been. But do you think things are getting better? Like, do you see things actually going in that positive direction, or are we getting some pushback? What are your thoughts?

Speaker 1  36:48  
So it's interesting. I I'd love to say it's getting better, but I really don't know. I see some of the vendors or some of the advisors that align with vendors. And those are the vendors that are the big names that you see out there that are throwing big money around. And at the end of the day, what the customer has to look at is, well, why are you selling me this vendor? You know what's in it for you, Mr. Advisor, and I'm okay with answering the customer, the customer's questions about how we get paid, because frankly, even if they that commission doesn't go to us, it would go to some inside sales rep. And the inside sales rep is the guy that's selling all features and benefits. He's the guy that's, you know, just trying to get a sale so he can keep his job for that quarter and and, you know, keep moving along. We don't have quotas in our world, so we try to be as ethical as possible when it comes to, you know, divulging to the client how we get paid, and also, you know, just making sure that they understand this is why we're bringing this vendor to the table. And if there's spiff money involved, nine times out of 10, we don't even know it. My guys don't even get the spiff emails. We delete them all. We don't sell on spiffs. Last time we got a really big spiff, I had no idea that the spiff was even there.

Brian Nichols  38:35  
Happy surprise or happy accident. I guess,

Speaker 1  38:38  
right, it is. But you know, you can't sell by that, because then that trains your brain. So yeah, I'd love to say it's getting better, man, but I just don't know. Sometimes I see some of these advisors out there. In fact, we've had over the last several years, two instances of, you know, outright fraud. One that stole a client from us that was over a million dollars that they took out of our pocket, and that's not in revenue, that's in commission. The other one, we had a customer, which really we couldn't combat it too much because the customer got bought out by another company, but the new CEO, or the president of that new company, hired a his buddies out of New York who happened to be advisors, and they started calling all of our vendors within that company and demanding that they switch the agent of record. And so now to the suppliers, you know, to their credit, they stood up and said, We can't do that, but our large. Supplier, which was about 100,000 a month, they said, Well, if you don't renegotiate the contract, then we're walking and we'll pay the ETF. So they forced my vendor to restructure a contract, so we lost out a portion of that contract that was left on that contract, right? And that was a big cloud computing provider, so we did lose, you know, hundreds of 1000s on that one as well. But yeah, so I've seen the fraud. I know it's out there, and there are still companies out there. I know one out of Texas, I won't mention their name, was indicted by the FCC, and two of their people, I believe, are going to jail. So there is fraud out there. It happens. And I would say, if you're a customer looking for an advisor, hey, go to the TAA website. You can actually do the advisor finder and find an advisor in your area. So, you know, it's a great way for advisors or customers to feel comfortable with who they're hiring. But yeah, ethics is is a tough one man and I it's funny, I look at it kind of like eschatology. Is the world getting better, or is it getting getting worse? You know, I kind of lean to the worst before, you know, you see the second coming of Christ, you

Brian Nichols  41:32  
know, I know I well. And, you know, going back to when we started the show, I accidentally did the intro to the Brian Nichols show, which, for my show, had been a, you know, very much like a current events kind of looking at the world of politics. And I'll tell you what, like you talk about, what there's they call in the world of politics, there's the white pill and the black pill, right? Like, the white pill, like, things are getting better and the black pill, things are getting worse. And when you start to read some of the news headlines, you know, just day after day, week after a week like, man, it burns you out, and it really makes you feel like you're taking the black pill. But now I'm always reminded of one of my college professors. He said, When it bleeds it leads right, which that speaks to why you always see bad news. He used to have a running joke. He'd say, only the six o'clock news is where you turn on the TV, the man on TV says, Good evening, and then spends the next 30 minutes telling you why it's not and like, right? And it's true, because that's the thing that unfortunately, as humans like you, go back to our caveman brain, we wanted to know the bad things, because that's what kept us safe. When you know what's wrong out there, you know to avoid those things. And unfortunately, that does manifest in, you know, you go from an era where, you know, I'm sure my childhood, Derek, I'm not trying to age you. You're a little bit older than I am, but my childhood where I was free reign, right? I'm sure your childhood, you were even more free reign. I look at where my gen, where my kids generation, is, you know, they're, they're hover parents everywhere, right? And just to see that progression of, yeah, you understand? Because when it was in the 90s and 2000s it was always, you know, Stranger danger, and it was the catch a criminal and stuff like that on TV. And that's where the mentality, you see it manifest in behavior. And you're just not trying to go back to the world of politics, but this, you know, going back to one of those guys I mentioned, Murray Rothbard, he talks about human behavior being basically modeled by economic interests. Right? Like you, you are making these economic decisions in your brain, these little calculations every single day. You're looking at opportunity costs. You're looking at, you know, what am I willing to spend based on the value I'm going to be getting for something that's arbitrary, but it's all based arbitrary, but it's all based on your kind of position in life. Long story short, all the little things we do are kind of based on our self interest, but also right? And it's the long term game, and this is where I'm going full circle, I promise, when you look at a lot of these vendors, it has been this short term game, and then a lot of it has been growth by acquisition, right? But in terms of how they actually earn business, it is a lot of just burning cash, giving away these 10x 12x spiffs. You're just spending gazillions of dollars at channel partners or you know, name your your big it expos coming up here next week, as we're recording here today. Like, you'll see all those booths there. Those costs a lot of money, right? So I know for a fact that there's vendors out there who they are very much. Like, let's just go. Let's just get the win after win so we can continue to put promote. You know, the next hurdle that we have to go over, but they're not really thinking long term health of the customer, right? And it makes it so, like, you know, unfortunately, those big voices do get the more attention because they have more more cash to burn. But I think you're right. Like, the more we do continue to have orgs like TA. Okay, orgs, like you guys at Vocal Point, and I'll just, you know, quick to the side, I think my day job at level 365, from a UCAS standpoint, like vendors who start to do things the right way, it will change behavior, right? Like the fact that there is more power, both in vendors who are competing, as well as technology advisors who are selling to help kind of model the behavior and help change by pulling different levers right, like bring opportunities to different vendors who are doing things the right way, versus rewarding those vendors who have traditionally just did the chasing the spiffs and spending the money on marketing dollars like reward those who do well and for technology advisors, that might mean you take air quote a short term hit, but what you're doing for the long term is not only giving a better experience to your customer, which is going to be just a better, happier customer, just by and large, but you're helping change the industry, right? We're helping change that status quo. So I'll get off my soapbox, man. I know we're getting hard pressed for time here. So I like to do two things. First of all, the last question I'm going to ask you is the question I ask every guest, and that is, you know, what is the biggest piece of BS that we've seen here in the industry? So I'll let you think about that. But first I'm going to talk about someone who's doing the opposite of that, and someone who's doing a good job in our industry. And that's someone named Michael Curtin. Michael's out there. He I'm actually repping his channel champions gear today. He goes out. He builds great relationships with his advisors. He is one of the most just like go getter guys I've ever met in my life. And whenever he's out talking to partners, all I hear is good things. I talked to PDMS partner development managers from different TSDS constantly. And whenever Michael's brought up, it's like, oh yeah, the guy who literally works tirelessly and is like, on a plane every other day. So shout out to Michael. No BS on his end, he's doing things amazingly in the right way. But Derek, I gave you some time to think. Hit us with the last part of the show, the biggest piece of BS you're seeing in the industry right now, Derek, and in specifically in that CX space, the floor

Speaker 1  47:03  
is yours. AI will solve all your problems. Tell us more. So, you know, I've seen it in the CX space a lot, and look, AI is awesome. In the CX space, there's a lot of great things coming out. I know you guys are even doing some AI stuff. But within AI, yes, you can have a chat bot answer the front end of that call. You can have a chat bot waiting there, or an agent AI, agent that's maybe feeding the agent information. So doing like what we call agent assist. And I think one of the great benefits of AI is the fact that it can listen to those calls, transcribe those calls, and be real time, scoring those calls, so that at the end, when you have the quality assurance team that typically consists of, you know, seven, eight people sitting there listening to calls, they're going to get through 30% whereas the AI is going to do 100% of them and do it way faster. So that's the plus side. The downside. Gosh, this Thursday, I've got, I've got to get on a late night call with the Philippines, because I've got a client that thinks he's going to get rid of all of his call center staff with AI and will he maybe, you know, but to what degree is that going to hurt his business? And that's what I think clients need to realize is there's still something to be said for that human touch. There's still something to be said for customer service and really understanding what the meaning of the word service is. You know, bots just don't have the empathy, and this particular client wants to, you know, not have anybody answer the phone, and have it all web based and chat and, you know, email and such. And yes, we can have bots handle that stuff, and we can put together the workflows to do all that. But how efficient will it be maybe a little bit better than the human but what's the, you know, end game outcome? What does that look like from your NPS scoring? You know, is your CSAT going up or is it going down? Because at the end of the day, I would argue that your customer service scores are probably going to drop. So, yeah, that's the big lie. And right now, I think there's a lot of great use cases for AI, but I think clients need to step back and go, Okay, let's talk about what problem we're solving for then let's. Look at our data. Do we have it all in a certain area where we can structure it and we can write workflows to that one area? You know? Yeah, they've got to do all the homework on the front end if they want the outcome on the back end. And a lot of clients just aren't doing that. They think it's just a magic pill, and it's not,

Brian Nichols  50:22  
yeah, I had a buddy of mine. He talked about his grandpa, who he used to talk about, P, F, M, which ear muffs kids. But it's pure effing magic, right? Effing is a different word, only you didn't say fudge, but like that. That is when you look at AI, it is not PFM, right? It is data in, data out right? Like if you put in garbage, it's going to give you garbage. So you need to make sure not only are you putting in the right things, but also you're not trying to use it for things it's just not able to do. I've talked about this in the show. I call it h i right? Human intelligence, that that warm and fuzzy. There's just something inherent to a real human being, hearing your concerns to your point, that empathy, knowing that that person, they can actually understand, right? Like, if you think of the most frustrated you've been on a phone call with someone, you're trying to get them to understand your issue, and you're like, do you understand me? Right? You want representative, but like, you want to feel heard, and there's just something about AI. It will never make you feel heard. It will just process you. And there's just something about that as a human being, something's missing, right? There's a fly in the ointment. Call it what you will. But like AI, can never do that, whatever that is, you can try to mimic it, you can try to replicate it, but you will never actually copy that. But that's, I guess, my final thoughts. And I like that call out there for the BS, but Derek, I know we are hard pressed for time here, which means it's time for us to go ahead and unfortunately, say goodbye. So with that, where can folks go ahead LEARN MORE ABOUT YOU Vocal Point consulting and more. If they want to get, of course, some of their technology up to snuff as well, they want to give you a shout there. What would they do to reach out?

Speaker 1  52:11  
Yeah, well, of course, our website, Vocal Point consulting.com, that's V, as in victor. And then, of course, we've got our cloud Sherpa podcast. That's our logo there for the cloud Sherpa podcast, you can go there and we just talk about, you know, a lot of the vendors that we work with. We talk about things like VMware and the debacle there with, you know, Broadcom and such. But we, we've got that podcast. I've also got another podcast that's more on, you know, my faith based journey, where we talk about, you know, it's called the narrow road, where we talk about the intersection of faith, technology and business. And that's just about walking the walk and being integral in this world. And then lastly, if somebody wants to follow me on LinkedIn, you can look me up, Derek Roush, and I'm pretty easy and accessible to find on LinkedIn, and, you know, happy to communicate with people, and all my contact information is there on LinkedIn.

Brian Nichols  53:15  
Good stuff, no. And by the way, cloud Sherpa podcast, I heard it's really good. You had a really good guess. I heard from level 365 I don't know. Folks Go, go check that episode out. In particular, maybe I'll include that link in the show notes, but I know Derek. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for joining us on CX without, yeah, CX, without the BS. I was like, what show Am I on? It's not the Brian Nichols show today. CX, without the BS. With that being said, thanks. We'll talk to you again

Unknown Speaker  53:40  
soon. Awesome. Thanks, Brian. You.

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