Listen in today as Mikey B, Telarus CX Solution architect underscores all the differences of how your customers can procure Microsoft Teams, along with the value props of each. Not only will he address different customer environments and how to sell them, but we'll learn storytelling and hear how Mikey's early path to Shakespeare comes in handy!

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 at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech, everybody. Welcome back to another episode. We are kicking off this track talking about Microsoft Teams, as if you haven't heard enough about Teams. You haven't because there's new stuff and we need to talk about what's important, why it matters, and no better to do that than bring on somebody. Really smart. Mike Baillargeon, Telarus solution architect. Mikey, welcome to the show. Mike Baillargeon (00:39): Thanks, Josh. Super happy to be here. Josh Lupresto (00:41): So the title of this track, Mike, is Microsoft Teams. Is it direct routing now? Is it Operator Connect? You know, we're gonna get into that now. How do we, how do we pick that? So, so I think as we go through this, we're gonna answer that for the partners and, and kind of walk them through that. And as we kick this off, what I wanna start with is I wanna start with you personally. I want to hear your background. Anybody that doesn't know you, I, I find that that's probably a really small list of people, but anybody that doesn't know you, help us understand where did you start? How did you get here? Have you always been on this path? Did you, did you get sucked into this world, like some have? Fill us in. Mike Baillargeon (01:20): , thank Josh. So I was an English major in college. I wanted to bring Shakespeare to the masses, , that was, that was my end goal. But a funny thing happened on the way to that path, and it was called being a substitute teacher for six months. And I gotta say, if you, if you're a parent out there with kids in school, those teachers worked so hard. And in the six months I was a substitute teacher, I decided maybe I should get a minor in engineering and math , because I, I, I could handle the English. I, I love the, the, the English language and reading and poetry and all that goes with it. But the teaching part's actually the hard part. So interesting. My wife and I, we, we were married and up here in New England, and we decided we wanted to leave the cold for the sun. Mike Baillargeon (02:14): So we moved to Phoenix, and we lived in Phoenix for about 20 years where we decided, you know, that cold might be okay. So we left the, the, the sun and moved back. And what happened was when we moved out there, like a lot of us, you know, right outta college, you just, you know, pick up, pick up the newspaper back then Josh, I'm a bit of an old guy. Yeah. Pre indeed. And there's this opportunity. Do you like to talk to people? You know, do you have good customer service skills? This job is few. I'm like, great. Sounds amazing. And they were paying like eight bucks an hour. I was like, this is awesome. So what that job was, by the way, was a call center rep at a thousand person B p o. Nice. The second hardest job in the world besides teaching is being a call center rep. . Mike Baillargeon (03:04): And I learned that pretty quickly. So while I was there, I made good friends with the IT team because I saw what they did. I'm like, okay, they're, they're walking around the building. They're, they're at these high level meetings that, you know, I want, that's where I wanna be. I wanna be where a sausage it made. So I, I, I started talking about, I'm like, what do you guys do? And what, what, what is this? They're like, oh yeah, we're with a telecom admin. We have an AT&T now, Avaya,