Listen to the powerhouse team of Brandon Ivey and Christoph Uhlig from Evok Technologies. They live and breathe cloud & security sales. Being uniquely positioned to understand what a customer is going through, they talk modernization, augmenting teams, and the struggles they help customers overcome.

Transcript of episode can be found below.

Josh Lupresto (00:01):

Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech.

Josh Lupresto (00:16):

Hey everybody, welcome back. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, and this is the Next Level BizTech podcast. So today we are actually wrapping up the first series in season two, and we're talking about managed services and how we're solving this tech talent issue that we got going on with security and the broader technology landscape. So if you tuned in on the first episode, you heard Jason Stein and he talked about what Telarus is doing overall from the practice and how we go to market and what we're seeing and the trends and things like that. And then we had one of our great suppliers on where, where Thrive came on and talked about all the things from a technical perspective, their products, where they're fitting, how they go to market with those differentiators, all that good stuff. But today we get to hear from what I think is, is really critical. We get to hear from the partner's perspective. So I got some good friends of mine. We've been spending a lot of time together lately. We got Brandon Ivey and Christoph Uhlig from EVOK Technologies, gents. Brandon, welcome.

Brandon Ivey (01:12):

Thanks for having us, Josh. It's really great to be here.

Josh Lupresto (01:17):

All right, so let's kick this off. Brandon, I'm gonna come to you first here. I I, you know, part of my favorite story is how do you, how do you get started? Everybody has a different path. Some people super linear, some people do crazy windy stuff and end up in this world. I'm curious to hear how you guys get started in this.

Brandon Ivey (01:38):

Absolutely. so it's kind of interesting. I think Christoph and I both have similar backgrounds and kind of went through similar trials and tribulations, if you will, through our career path. We both started out in entry level sales jobs coming outta college, worked up the corporate ladder, led sales teams, became, you know, directors or VPs and led led to overall go to market strategies and, and new logo acquisition sales. And you know, interesting enough, neither one of us really wanted to be in management roles any longer. And we found ourselves starting at a cloud company on the same day in the same role. And what was interesting enough for, for, at least from my perspective, is that you know, we kind of hit it off from the get go. I think Christoph may have had a difference of opinion, but he was like, Hey, I want to be aligned with that guy.

Brandon Ivey (02:28):

He seems competitive. And we fed off of that. And so what we did to begin with was we started interviewing all of the top reps at the organization trying to figure out what was the secret sauce to be successful, right? And long story short, most of them didn't have a lot of positive feedback. It was, you know, if you got lucky enough to be tagged to that right account that was growing, et cetera, et cetera then you had some success. So we kind of stumbled and went through some, some different challenges the first few months at that cloud company. And and then we realized we needed a force multiplier. And I had some little exposure to what the channel ecosystem was more from a, more, from a competitive standpoint based on where I was when I was leading a sales team, There was a, a channel.

Brandon Ivey (03:18):

And, and so we introduced that. We started working with some regional players and we started integrating that into our go to market s...