Channel Outlaws

We end season 2 of Channel Outlaws with none other than the President of Intelisys, Jay Bradley. I talk to Jay about what real effective core marketing is and how Sales Partners can use it to literally hockey stick their growth, just as Intelisys did. We talk about some of his core beliefs, where they came from, and how Jay has woven them into the DNA that is Intelisys, and how Sales Partners can do the same. Speaking of DNA, we talk about how similar the DNAs of Intelisys and ScanSource were even before the acquisition. And, why this shared DNA has accelerated the integration of these two leaders. And we talk about what Jay sees in the future for the channel as ScanSource continues investing in Sales Partners and resellers and supporting them in crafting the total solution for businesses around the world. Enjoy!

Danny Passacantilli and Steve Gerhardt return! They’re the top two Channel Outlaws guests in terms of downloads, they’re two of the best salespeople in the Channel, and they’re both hilarious. So I talk to them (and they talk to each other) about their ideas around what it takes to run a successful Channel practice today, their newest hires, their shared Business Coach, and a whole lot more. It’s a fun one.

Chris Voss is a Former FBI Lead International Kidnapping Negotiator…the Author of the Wall Street Journal best-selling negotiations book “Never Split the Difference”… and the CEO of the Black Swan Group. Chris worked more than 150 kidnappings worldwide over 24 years with the FBI.  He discovered that traditional negotiations “theory” didn’t cut it when it came to life and death situations.  So he reinvented it.   Then he turned the world of negotiations on its head, both in academia and the business world, when he made the crossover to business negotiations. In this episode, we go into a number of negotiations tips and tricks that will make you a better negotiator immediately. You’ll learn why the word “no” is far more valuable than “yes” in a negotiation, the psychology behind loss aversion and power dynamics, and why tactical empathy is the most important strategy you can apply when saving a life, or saving a deal. We talk about Shark Tank, Oprah Winfrey, President Trump and a whole lot more that you can do

Today’s guest is Dee Byrnes of OnboardOxygen: Dee is an Army veteran, a Disney veteran, and a seasoned two decade veteran of helping businesses measurably scale and profit using a secret sauce…a secret sauce that both of these organizations use to excel:  Strategic Culture. We discuss the specific things any small business owner can do to create and integrate a culture in their businesses.  Secret Tip: Hanging posters with your values on them is not a secret ingredient. We discuss what Dee learned from working 20 years at Disney, how they protect their “culture ingredients” as tightly as Coca-Cola protects its secret formula, and what she teaches businesses today to help them create similar results through culture. We talk about how to attract the millennial employees you want, and repel the ones you don’t, using culture.  Secret Tip #2: You don’t need to invest in a ping-pong table. We talk about remote vs. local employees, the surprising purpose of meetings for culture, overcoming the time and money roadblo

Our guest today is Tony Palmucci, the owner of Thinking Without Restrictions. His clients call him Coach Tony. It’s Coach Tony’s mission in life to take the top performers in business to the next level, and on today’s show he tells how he does just that with some of Intelisys' Platinum Partners including Steve Gerhardt, Danny Passacantilli, Angie Tocco, and Laura Dashney. There are a lot of skeptics out there when it comes to the subject of business coaches… So Tony and I spend a lot of time talking about the practice of coaching, debunking some of the myths about coaching, and breaking down exactly what a coach can do for your bottom line, both on the balance sheet and in life in general.  But coaching up CEOs wasn’t always Tony’s vocation … He started out as many kids do, with dreams of becoming a rock sta.  But unlike most kids, Tony actually did it. He’s been an axeman for Twisted Sister’s Dee Snyder, and Kiss Frontman Gene Simmons, to name just a couple. But it was through founding and growing a music ac

On this episode, you get a twofer: IndyCar driver Stefan Wilson AND Intelisys co-founder Rick Sheldon.  We talk about this year’s Indy 500, where Stefan will be racing under the Intelisys banner, and where there’ll even be actual Sales Partner’s logos on his car as he races toward the checkered flag. We talk to Stephan about the mindset of a race car driver, the team dynamic behind every great driver, and why past gains don’t guarantee future success; on the track or in the channel.  And Rick Sheldon is here to explain how this whole thing came about, and why this year’s Indy 500 will be a banner day for both the Channel and Intelisys Sales Partners. We also talk about the many occasions in which Stefan’s dealt with adversity on his way to success, the many reasons Porsche makes the best car in the world, and the many reasons Sales Partners should be looking to racing teams for their next IOT deal. Enjoy the podcast.

Today's guest is Jim Warren, the founder of RDM Communications in Seattle. We’ve had a lot of graduates of the Intelisys Super9 program on this show, but none of them have articulated just how valuable deep-dive cloud training can be as well as Jim Warren does here. And he has the case study to prove it. Jim reveals one very dramatic adjustment to his business model in the last year.  It's an adjustment that has resulted in a nearly 100% close rate for his business. But Jim wasn’t always at the Vanguard…There was a time when his business had slowed, his vision plateaued, and he feared he might never get his company beyond the level of “Lifestyle Business”. He’ll tell you how he built a future by looking to the past. We also talk about Jim’s learning lessons in the Marines, partnering with VARs before it was cool, overcoming adversity, and much more. Enjoy. 

On today’s episode I talk to Denver’s own Jake Cummins, the founder of Cloudnexion. Jake runs a lean and mean operation that fishes in the big waters, and he’s got the book on how you can do it too, complete with chapter titles. From Italy to Australia, Jake’s Cloudnexion makes its hay in international circles, so we talk about what makes for an effective international practice, as well as some of the more common roadblocks one encounters with international deals. And like everyone in the Channel, Jake is trying to stake his claim in the Security space. We talk about how “security” is really just a catch-all term for a half-dozen - highly lucrative - services, and how a sales partner is best served when presenting those many options to his or her customers.  We talk about how selling Network isn’t dead, how IOT is coming into its own at a lettuce farm, where the local Denver-ites (Denverians?) go to ski and snowboard, and much more … Enjoy the podcast.

Today’s guest is Jeff Hootselle, the Chief Cloud Officer at Auditmacs. After a short stint as a lefty pitcher in the Phillies farm system, Jeff became an Ace in the Channel. And today, he’s settled in as the closer for Auditmacs, a company revered in the channel for providing the real-deal total IT solution to its customers: equipment and cloud and carrier solutions. Auditmacs is the poster child for creativity in attracting and keeping new clients. I talk to Jeff about how Auditmacs' award-winning “Ultimate CEO” David Hopper, and how he uses video to win over his prospects. We talk about how Auditmac packs a house with IT Leaders at their incredibly unique events. They don’t allow PowerPoints and they leave suppliers speechless…literally. Jeff talks about how the company took a page from the early days of Airbnb, where they map out the ideal customer experience, reverse engineer it, and provide a unique experience for their customers that can’t be replicated. We also touch on a whole bunch of other subjects,

On today’s episode, I talk with Sal Miglino, the  co-founder of The Monaco Group. Sal is a Sales Machine.  He gained his “smarts” and sales acumen on the tough streets of Brooklyn NY and later Wall Street. I talk with Sal about his transition from “aggressive” transactional sales on Wall Street, to the insight selling approach required by clients today…and how he did it all under the tutelage of his childhood friend, mentor and business partner Joe Monaco.  The Monaco Group is one of Intelisys’ fastest growing Sales Partners.  And they’ve accomplished this through providing savvy technology solutions to enterprise Fortune 500 clients and also by partnering with VARs.  So we talk about partnering with VARs.   In addition to all of that, Sal shares one of the craziest stories I’ve ever heard.  Sal overcame the unthinkable: an attempt to take his life.  He recorded the whole thing on his iphone and quickly became both a YouTube sensation and a national news story.  Sal shares how he’s taken that experience and d

Our guest today is Lucas Salvage of OnCall Telecom in Virginia Beach. OnCall is one of Intelisys' fastest growing Sales Partners, and Lucas's 12 years of sales leadership at the company is a big reason for that. Lucas started his career banging on phones and quickly worked his way up the food chain to where, today, he leads an ambitious sales force serving a number of Fortune 100 clients, on top of about 900 other clients. OnCall made headlines a few months back when they purchased a systems integrator in neighboring Norfolk, so I talk to Lucas about the decisions behind the purchase … how the integration with that integrator is going so far ... and how he's going about training all those new equipment-minded sales reps on cloud and carrier services, and selling these services into all those new clients. We also go very deep into recruiting, something Lucas has a ton of experience with and a lot of contrarian opinions about, which he's glad to share with us. And you won't find OnCall on the solutions engineer

On today’s episode I talk to Michael Sterl, co-founder of Cloud Optik and Carve Digital in Denver Colorado. Michael hit the channel like a freight train in 2004 when he co-founded Simple Signal, a savvy cloud company was sold to Vonage in 2015. And today, Michael is one of the channel’s foremost innovators in marketing and analytics. With his two companies (two sides of the same coin really), he helps Sales Partners zero in on how to find more revenue opportunities, and turn them into cash, through big data and big ideas. I talk to Michael about Cloud Optik, his analytics firm. Michael tells us me how he uses big data and analytics to help Sales Partners in two ways:   1) How all Sales Partners are sitting on a treasure trove of information, and how simply analyzing that information intelligently can help them get easy sales in the door. 2) How the big data engines already in place out there can provide sales partners with targeted information to begin prospecting campaigns that dramatically increase win rate

On today’s episode, I chat with Trey Lackey of Access Technologies, out of Portland Oregon. Trey is a thinking man’s technology consultant, so when his company’s rapid growth kinda stalled out after the first few years, Trey and his team went to work getting it revving again, and what they came up with was Process. Now, we are aware that all companies have what they’d call a process, but we’re talking about something more than that. We get into what exactly “process” means at Access Tech, and why it’s different, and why not all processes are created equal. And process wouldn’t matter much if nobody knew who your company was, so Trey also tells me about his marketing strategies, which he has recently dedicated more resources to. We also talk about the rise and fall of SIP, the new tax laws, where UCaaS meets CCaaS, and much more.

Matt Dixon is the co-author of The Challenger Sale, The Challenger Customer, and The Effortless Experience.  He's also the Global Head of Sales Force Effectiveness Solutions at Korn Ferry Hay Group, a prominent management consulting company. Matt's first book, The Challenger Sale, was recently ranked by marketing leader Hubspot as the #1 book today for salespeople and sales managers.   I talk to Matt about the concept of “The Challenger” ... What makes a Challenger ... And what you can do to be a better Challenger. We talk about the popular question “What keeps you up at night” and why it’s no longer the right approach to take with a customer … And what a top performing Challenger Sales Rep says to prospects instead. As the customer evolves, so too must the salesperson.  The data shows that of the 5 types of salespeople discussed in The Challenger Sale, “Relationship Builders” are no longer the best performing salespeople. They’re actually the worst. Matt’s data also shows that “insight selling”, as opposed t

On today’s episode, I talk with Dean Ara, the owner of the Channel Marketing Agency Total Product Marketing. Dean is one of the few people I trust to go to when discussing marketing for Channel Sales Partners.  He’s a brilliant strategist and challenger, but also a blue-collar "get’er done at any cost" implementor. In this episode, I talk with Dean about what Sales Partners should look for when hiring a marketing employee or marketing agency. Small business marketing is an entirely different animal than corporate marketing.  Dean "gets it" like very few do.  So we talk about where a small business should invest marketing dollars, and where they should not. We discuss the biggest pitfall that most sales partners today make...their messaging. Dean gives a 1-sentence formula for how Sales Partners can crystallize their message to stand out from the sea of sameness. We talk about marketing/sales integration, social media myths, google myths, SEO myths, beer drinking super-skills and much more.   Enjoy.

On today’s episode, we talk to Tom McKeown of BroadReach Communications.  Tom started BroadReach relatively late in his career, but he made up for lost time in a big way, going from zero to Intelisys Platinum Partner (that’s a million in monthly billing for those of you who don’t know) in just six years. Tom McKeown is a man who Intelisys Co-founder Rick Dellar has called “Quietly Confident”. Teddy Roosevelt’s “talk softly and carry a big stick” motto could apply to Tom as well. But don’t be fooled by his calm demeanor, he’s got the hard negotiating skills and tactical chops of a field general. Today, we talk to Tom about his long, winding road to the top. How he learned his negotiating skills on the mean streets of Turkey. How his first entrepreneurial venture fell flat. How his time in the corporate world left him unfulfilled. And how all those experiences are what contributed to his massive success with BroadReach. We also talk about finding and keeping star employees, the good and bad of CCaaS, how to gea

On today’s episode, we talk to Allan Watkins of Total Telecom Management (TTM) in Atlanta, Georgia. Allan is one of our more technically-inclined Sales Partners: His extensive resume includes work on both the equipment side of the channel as well as the cloud and carrier side.  He’s the full package. We talk today about the current technology trends, how Allan is aggressively tackling the UCaaS, CCaaS, SD-WAN and security markets today, and how he addresses those subjects with prospects and customers. We discuss how a comparatively small company like TTM can use their strategic advantages to compete with the carriers in the enterprise space, and win. And we discuss how Allan leverages sales training, channel events, and education to grow. We also talk about cryptocurrency, Atlanta, closing on cocktail napkins, Tim Ferriss's 4 hour work week and much more. Hope you enjoy the podcast.  

On today’s episode, I talk with Dave Harding of Technology Resource Center of America, or TRCA. Known in some circles as SuperDave, he’s a former martial arts instructor and is one of the few in his industry to successfully pivot his company from a traditional IT and MSP model to Cloud and Carrier services.  And he is crushing it. We talk today about the tremendous learning curve that Dave overcame to finally understand the cloud and carrier model, and how he tore down his sales department and flipped it on its head to rebuild it and win big in the space. Dave is an extraordinary sales leader.  We talk about how his decades of being a martial arts instructor allowed him to coach is sales team through the transition. We talk about how he demystified what he calls the “Channel Game of Thrones” to understand how the game is really played. We talk about sales training, supplier horror stories, public speaking, and much much more. 

We’re kicking off Season 2 of the podcast with Charlie Bogart of RealCom Solutions. Charlie recently boldly went where few traditional telecom agents have gone before: He acquired a VAR. So we talk about what went into his decision … AND the pains and pleasures of such a momentous undertaking, including what it’s like to quintuple your client base overnight. We talk about how Charlie focuses almost entirely on enterprise clients, and how that’s paid off for him big time ... but the reason he does it that way is about way more than the payoff. We also discuss Charlie’s unique selling strategies, his office space strategy, how he handles failure, and his ongoing efforts to add Magic Johnson to his client list. Topic timestamps: 2:06 - About RealCom Solutions 4:30 - Acquiring Enterprise Clients 9:16 - Pitching to Magic Johnson 14:50 - Selling Strategies 20:00 - Office Space Philosophy 24:45 - Purchasing a VAR 36:50 - Lessons learned from VAR acquisition 40:55 - How ScanSource and Intelisys Affected RealCom 43:40

This is Part 2 of my chat with Intelisys’s co-founder, Rick Dellar. On last week’s show Rick took us through the history of Intelisys, and in this episode, we get more philosophical. Rick has mentored dozens of top-performing Sales Partners over the years, and we delve into his methodology behind mentoring, his observations about the types of issues he comes across most often with his mentorees, and also what he gets out of the whole process. Rick knows that Intelisys wasn’t built on the backs of himself and Rick Sheldon alone. Intelisys has hired, really, really well for more than 20 years. So, we talk about his strategies for hiring. We also talk about confidence and charm, which goes a long way in the business world and...well...Rick’s got it. But he didn’t always. We talk about psycho-therapy, raising kids without spoiling them, morning routines, and a bunch of other topics. See you in a few months when we reload for Season 2.