Next Level BizTech

How does a premium golf club outfitter recover 20,000 missed calls a year — and turn that pain point into a better customer experience across voice AND chat?In this CX & AI edition of Inside the Win, Sam Nelson, VP of CX and AI at Telarus, sits down with Justin Shively of PolyAI to break down a real, closed customer win — and the practical lessons every Telarus technology advisor can bring into their own conversations.🏌️ The Customer: A well-known premium golf club outfitter with ~160 global locations, handling 200,000+ calls per year.⚠️ The Challenge: Roughly 10% of calls (~20,000/year) went completely unanswered — no voicemail, no BPO overflow, just lost revenue and a degraded customer experience for a brand that competes on exactly that.✅ The Solution: PolyAI deployed agentic dialogue to answer every call, eliminate reliance on the BPO, free up full-time employees for higher-skill work, and — once discovery uncovered a hidden need — unify the experience across both voice and chat.📈 The Results:$135K ARR win (Phase 1 — North America only) Deal doubled in size after discovery revealed chat + global opportunities 6-month sales cycle, anchored by a metrics-driven proof of value A clear path to expand into global sites and new channels 💡 Key Takeaways for Tech Advisors:Look at the opportunity in totality — ask about future state and vision. The voice-only deal grew into omnichannel and global once they asked the right questions. Get the customer's actual data — real benchmarks, workflows, and integrations drive a credible ROI (and are a perfect place to bring in Telarus). Define success up front — a mutually agreed proof of value with specific, accountable KPIs is what de-risks AI and gets deals closed. As a pure-play AI solution, PolyAI works irrespective of the customer's existing platform — no rip-and-replace, no vendor lock-in — making it easy to solve for high call volume, missed appointments, and customer experience gaps.Bring Telarus into these conversations early. We'll help you explore the opportunity, shape the next steps, and bring the right supplier teams together.👉 Subscribe for more real customer stories and practical, field-ready ideas from Inside the Win.Chapters: 00:00 Intro — Inside the Win: CX & AI Edition 00:30 What PolyAI Does (Agentic Dialogue for Enterprise) 01:30 Meet the Customer: Premium Golf Club Outfitter 02:30 The Challenge: 20,000 Missed Calls & Lost Revenue 05:00 The Solution: Replacing the BPO & Unifying Voice + Chat 07:30 Expanding the Deal Through Discovery 08:30 The Sales Cycle & Proof of Value 10:00 Key Takeaways for Technology Advisors 13:30 Final Thoughts & How to Partner with Telarus

AI agents are already operating inside your customers' businesses — accessing real data, making real decisions, and answering to no one. Two-thirds of office workers admit to using AI tools that weren't approved, and nearly half of all enterprise AI activity runs through personal accounts that completely bypass company controls. This year, shadow AI is showing up in 43% of data breaches — more than double the year before — at an average cost of $5 million each.In this episode, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, breaks down the shadow AI problem and why it's a fundamentally different challenge than the shadow IT issues we've been managing for 20 years. Unlike passive chatbots, today's AI agents take action — logging into systems, reading email, pulling records, and running workflows with little to no human oversight. And when they're unsanctioned, no one is watching the blast radius.But here's the opportunity: your customers can't see this problem, and that makes you indispensable. Josh walks through the exact discovery questions to ask, how visibility alone builds instant trust, and how the Telarus solution map — spanning governance, zero trust, identity, and monitoring — turns one invisible risk into a full security engagement.If you want to be the advisor your customers call before they adopt anything new, this episode is your playbook.

Can a single network deal become the doorway to much more? In this episode of Inside the Win, host Graeme Scott (VP of Network & Mobility at Telarus) welcomes back Mac McClenathan of 11:11 Systems to break down a real-world Network as a Service (NaaS) win—and the cross-sell opportunity it unlocked.Mac shares how 11:11 has quietly become competitive in the network space over the last 18 months, especially on the managed edge side. This deal came together the way many great channel deals do: through trust, relationships, and a partner who recognized the right opportunity.In this episode, you'll learn:🏥 The Deal – A healthcare organization rightsizing from 11 sites to 7, battling aging firewall infrastructure, failed failovers, and configuration loss with their previous aggregator/MSP (running VeloCloud under the hood).🔧 The Solution – A full network redesign built on managed Fortinet firewalls with built-in security, consolidating SD-WAN and firewall into a single appliance, refreshed switches, simplified failover, and single-vendor aggregation for one point of contact.📈 The Cross-Sell Proof – How following the wire led to attaching a backup tool and uncovering a future infrastructure opportunity (~$5K/month) on top of the ~$8K/month network deal. Mac reveals his internal 6-month cross-sell tracker currently sitting at an impressive 44% attach rate.This is land-and-expand in full display. If you're an advisor looking at network refreshes, renewals, or responding to a client incident, this episode shows exactly how strategic partnership with 11:11 can turn one opportunity into many.Engage Mac and his team at 11:11 for your next network deal.🎧 Subscribe to Inside the Win for more real-world wins and expert breakdowns.

Quiq founder and CEO Mike Myer joins Josh Lupresto to explain why voice is the real battleground for AI in customer experience. Learn how multimodal AI agents combine voice, text, and mobile handoffs to resolve issues end-to-end, why voice is "super hard" to make conversational (interruptions, pauses, latency), and how AI can assist human agents with back-end data entry and system integration. Real-world use cases include a health insurer handling spiky enrollment volume, a garage door troubleshooting QR handoff, and a resort AC rebooking demo. Discover the ideal AI customer profile, the "process guide" approach for business users, and where AI-powered CX is headed by 2027.

In this Cybersecurity Edition of Inside the Win, VP of Cybersecurity Sumera Riaz sits down with senior engineer Josh Haselhorst to break down how a simple circuit renewal at seven locations grew into a $17K MRR deal—complete with dual disparate circuits, a Fortinet NextGen SD-WAN refresh, outsourced firewall management, and a clear runway to XDR/SIEM/SOAR.You'll learn:• How to partner with an existing MSP instead of competing with them• Why "everything is connected to everything" opens cross-sell opportunities• How to move a client from MPLS to SD-WAN without a costly rip-and-replace• How platform consolidation (fewer devices, fewer portals) lowers spend and lifts the burden off thin IT teams• How to position security as certainty—not just another productWatch to see how solving the network problem the right way set up a SOC and XDR conversation for the future.