How to Save 15-25% On Your Enterprise Mobility Spend

Welcome to The Did You Know Podcast by Varisource, where we interview founders, executives and experts at amazing technology companies that can help your business save a lot of time, money and grow faster. Especially bring awareness to smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business and give you a competitive advantage----https://www.varisource.com

Welcome to the did you know Podcast by Varisource, where we interview founders and executives at amazing technology companies that can help your business save time and money and grow. Especially bring awareness to smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business. 1.6s Hello, everyone. This is Victor with varisource. Welcome to another episode of the Did You Know Podcast. Today we have an amazing partner that's going to save you tons of money on your cell phone bills, which everyone hates. So very excited to have Doug McMaster, who is the VP of Partnerships with Link. Link is an all in one mobility management platform that guarantees you savings that we can all love. Welcome to the show, Doug.

Thanks, Victor. Happy to be here. 1s

Yeah. So we're going to definitely a lot of exciting questions to ask you about how we can help companies save a ton people time resource on mobility management. But if you don't mind, maybe give us a little background about yourself, how long you've been in kind of this space and how did you end up

here? Great, thanks, appreciate that. Yeah, I joined Link in 2021, but actually I've known of the company almost since it started in 2005. Met the owner at an event and we just started chatting about what he does. He had worked at a couple of retail cellular stores and realized in that process that he knew of ways to help companies save money. He knew 1.3s the billing techniques and the sales techniques that the cellular stores were using for their users, for their customers. And he figured out, you know what, let me help clients save money. So he told me this model and I thought, wow, this is a fascinating model. Who knew this even existed? I actually became a client of his based on that. I was in the energy business at the time, and I brought Link into that company. That company was a client for a really long time of Link, and then I moved from energy into manufacturing and I brought Link into that manufacturing space as well. So I've been a client of Links twice over the years. I know it works. And I was honored to be asked to start up the partnerships 1.1s efforts for the company in 2021. So here I am, loving what I'm doing, enjoying it, and helping people save a lot of money. Yeah.

No, that's awesome, man. So, again, a lot of people ask me why we named the podcast Did You Know? And I think I'm really passionate about the fact that any company who's successful or any person that's successful, a lot of times it's just because they knew of a better way or better tool or better capability available to do things cheaper, better, faster than other people. And I think a lot of companies spend a lot of money on cell phones. But just like traditional telecom services, there's not a lot of transparency in telecom in general. Whether it's wireline or wireless services. All you get is the 800 page bill you can't even understand. And then you just see costs and costs and costs, and you have no idea what you're spending a lot of times. And so but I think a lot of companies don't even know this type of service or your capability exists. Is that what you typically see as well? When you talk to clients where some prospects where they didn't even know this offering was available in the market, they thought it was just at and T Verizon, T Mobile, and you just buy it and you pay it. Is that right? Or what do you see? 1s

Yeah, we do see that a lot. Especially companies that are mid size that are at that point in their growth where managing cellular devices is getting to be too much for someone in house. Maybe they can't afford to have a full time It director that's just focusing on cellular. They've got so many other things to do. So when we show up and explain what we can do, some of them are amazed that this technology even exist or that there's a company out there that even does this. And one of our taglines is that we take a complicated industry and make it uncomplicated. So as you touched on, the carriers tend to make their billing process, customer support, those types of things not the easiest to deal with. And that's where we can come in and clean all that up for them. So they keep their carriers. Whoever our clients use today, we're agnostic. We let them keep whoever they're working with and we just merely come in there and help them save money by identifying fees and charges that they may not know they're being charged or they may no longer need. And we'll eliminate those with their permission, we'll eliminate those or adjust them to different types of plans to be able to reduce those costs for them. And again, things that maybe they thought they were doing a good job of on their own. But we have tools that enable us to do that in almost real time and reduce before they even incur an expense. We'll find it and eliminate it from their bill so that they don't work in a reactive mode. Most of our clients today are in a reactive mode. They get their bill and they see that they were charged this, that, and the other. And they say, oh my goodness, we need to make some adjustments here. Let's move people to different plans. Let's raise the data limits. Let's put people on unlimited plans, whatever it is, because they're busy. These It folks are busy doing many different tasks, not just cellular and it's just human nature. They're going to take the quickest, easiest way out to help manage their cost. Well, a lot of times those may not be the right decisions, may not be the best decisions for their organization. So that's where we can come in there. We can come in and help them by managing in real time before they get their bill. And we can follow trends and make adjustments throughout the month so that by the time the bill comes, there's no reaction. We're more proactive and keeping those costs under control. 1.5s

Yeah, 2s that's amazing feedback. And I think you already kind of talked about one of the next questions I was going to ask you, and if you can shed a little bit more light on that. Right. So for those audience, for executives and procurement people listening that may not be aware of MDM or maybe they've heard about it, but they don't fully get the benefit or Pacific, can you kind of give a high level of what is MDM and why is it important to companies, you think?

Sure. So MDM is a term that's used a couple of different ways in our industry. One, there's software out there called mobile device management. And those are that's typically software that an It director or cellular support manager for a company would use to track devices and push apps and updates to those devices for their users. But the MDM term is also used for companies like us. We consider ourselves an MSP, a managed service provider. For everything mobile, which can be termed as another way to say MDM. We have those tools out there that can help these clients manage data in ways that they didn't even realize they could do. We have some proprietary software, plus we have a lot of expertise on the back end that enables us to go out and look at everything that is happening, every activity that's occurring on our clients cell phone accounts, again in near real time and eliminate fees and charges. One story I hear a lot is we'll talk to a client and do our initial analysis and see that they're paying insurance on an eight or nine year old cell phone. They're paying 1012, maybe $15 a month for a phone that isn't even worth $5. That was insurance that was put on that device years earlier, maybe by a previous employee. And frankly, these folks just don't have the time in their days to go and do that kind of analysis and make those changes. That's where a company like us, because that's all we do, we're not looking at all their other It infrastructure in the company, we're strictly looking at cellular. We've got the people, the manpower and the expertise to go in there and find these fees and charges that are options that don't necessarily need to be there or their It director put everybody on unlimited plans in previous years because it was simpler for billing purposes. They didn't have to worry about overage fees or anything like that if they exceeded their allowed data. The knee jerk reaction sometimes is to put everybody on unlimited plans, and that's not always the best decision, but it's easier. It makes life easier for those folks. So that's where we can come in and make recommendations and say, you know what, you may not want to be on unlimited plans. You're being throttled. If you're a high user on an unlimited plan in, you're paying a higher fee per month. That gives you a cushion, but you don't need it. You may not always need it. So that's where we can come in and be sort of a partner to our clients and give them some good recommendations every month to make sure that their dollars are being spent as wisely as possible. So.

Yeah. Especially in this economy. Again, for those companies that have corporate cell phones in a lot of industries, that's a huge spent. You're talking about millions of dollars. But it's also more than just the savings. There's so many other challenges, indirect costs right. That goes into it, which I'm excited to talk about a little bit later. But the next question that we have for you, Doug, is how and where does at and T Verizon, T Mobile, 1.1s I would say overcharge customers or maybe take advantage of customers in different areas. And whether purposely or not, 1s there's just a lot of gray areas. Whenever something is usage based. Right. There's just a lot of hidden charges and things customer may not understand. But 1.4s how are these carriers able to do that? Is it because they make it so difficult for you to understand? Is it because it's usage based, so it's so hard to decipher? What do you think it is as you work with client? 1.1s

Well, I think just like any other business, the folks that work for the carriers are there to generate revenue for their company. And when they are working with their customer who happens to become our customer, they're offering packages. And these packages can include things like I mentioned earlier, insurance on devices and cloud storage space, 1.2s other types of and charges. Again, putting people on unlimited plans. The carriers love unlimited plans because again, they tend to be more expensive and most users don't use that much data. There's typically a few key users in a company that will use a lot of data. But the carriers might recommend that they just put everybody on unlimited plans and then set it and forget it type of thing. But 1s then those companies are paying for these higher limit plans that may not be the best choice for all their employees. So again, they make it simple and easy to buy into these ideas of all these additional features and benefits that maybe that company doesn't need. And so again, that's where we come in and we can identify these fees that maybe aren't in the best interest of that client. 2.9s The carriers are doing what they're supposed to do. They're out to make money just like every other company out there. But that's where we can come in and help and almost be consultative with our clients to make recommendations for adjusting where it makes more sense, we'll do it. Rather than a shotgun approach of saying everybody does this, we'll go in and pinpoint down to the individual device level and say this device we recommend be looking at the historical trends and historical usage. This device should be on this type of plan, this device should be on that type of plan and we make adjustments based on again, once we do our analysis we always recommend and we get permission from our clients before we make any changes that they may not be aware of. 1.3s

Yeah. Something I talk to a lot of our clients about is at and T Verizon, T Mobile, or any supplier for that matter. They're good people and there's relationship. You want to build strategic relationship with these suppliers, partners. But for me, we're doing business. Right. It's an investment, and it's a lot of investment you're putting into this category. You want to make sure you're getting a good deal. You want to make sure you're getting a fair price. You want to make sure you're getting the right price. It doesn't mean you have to switch. Right. But it means, hey, if you're going to stay with the supplier, you should be getting the right price, the fair price. 1.1s No. Absolutely. And that's why we love partnering with you guys. But 1.1s what kind of savings can companies typically expect when working with you guys? And then part of that also is you guys mentioned you guarantee savings, right? So as the second part question, how can you do that? How can you guarantee savings? How are you guys so confident?

Sure. So the way our model works is we are going to guarantee and this happens after we do a very. 1.1s Detailed analysis of the historical usage by our clients. We're going to guarantee what the all in number is for their devices for an extended period of time, a year or two. They're going to know exactly what they're going to pay for every smartphone, for every traditional cell phone, for every tablet, any data devices that they have, watches, it doesn't matter, anything that's cellular. We're going to go in and tell them for every one of these devices you're going to pay this amount all in inclusive of any surcharges or taxes or fees that the carriers charge that we aren't able to eliminate. So that helps our clients in the budgeting process. So they know if they're going to add 100 smartphones this year, they're going to increase their line count by 100 for smartphones. It's very simple for them to be able to go out and budget that because they know exactly what they're going to be paying each month for those devices for the next two years. And again, what we do is how can we make that guarantee? What we look at is their historical data usage and we see what they've used over extended period of time. We look for seasonality. We find out through our analysis is there a seasonal business, do they have a busy time of the year for higher data usage versus other times of the year? We're going to look at all of those factors and come back to them with a data guarantee so they're going to know exactly what they're going to pay. That gives them particular amount of data. That includes a cushion so that we know there are anomalies, there are months where somebody's going to use more than they should or more than they traditionally have. We're going to build all that in and be able to still guarantee the savings for them. Our customers love that model because it really helps, as I mentioned, helps them with the budgeting process and cost control because they know exactly what they're going to be spending over that period of time. 1.6s

Yeah. No. Again, in this economy, both of us need to make sure companies are aware of these solutions. And yeah, something people are definitely looking for. For sure. 1s Obviously, 1.1s cost savings is important, but for you guys, a lot of the value is even more than cost savings, especially for It teams right there. There's so much they're doing. They also want to be able to save time, resource, and headache as well. So can you tell us a little bit more than just savings? Can you tell us a little bit more about the customer care, the simpler billing, the lifecycle management, and kind of the different areas you help customers with, on top of kind of just cost savings?

Sure. So what we like to say is you come to us for the savings, but you stay for the support. 1.3s I also want to tell a quick little story about this. We had a client who is a client now, but at the time, we had done our analysis and presented it to them, and they were still a little bit on the fence. They weren't sure what they wanted to do. And then one day, a couple of weeks later, they called in a panic because their entire It team had been gutted and stolen by one of their competitors in the same city. So the It director calls and says, I have no help. I can't manage these. How quickly can Link come in and fix this for us? Well, because we had done our analysis. We had done all of our homework later that day. By the end of that day, we were already fielding all of their support tickets. So that's where we set ourselves apart from the rest of this industry. We have in house support teams. We don't use third parties. We have in house support teams in our three call centers throughout the United States. And that's all they do. So we actively encourage our clients to use our support. We don't charge extra for it either. That's all built into that savings model. So they're going to get that high level support whether they want us to manage all of their support tickets, some of their support tickets, it's up to them. Every one of our clients is a little bit different. We customize. We don't expect them to fit our model. We want to adapt to their model. So however they handle their support tickets today, for any device management issues, 1.2s broken devices, updating, somebody doesn't know how to update a device, whatever problems their end users have, we want to field those calls. And we can take them through a phone call, a text message, a chat, through our portal, 1.1s email, whatever method they want to use. We want to answer those calls and handle that support so that their It team doesn't need to fool with these anymore. No It person ever went to school or got training in managing cell phones, that's not what they enjoy doing. They do it because they have to, but that's where our model could come in. They can offload all of that, as much of that as they want. We want all of it if they'll give it to us because we want to make their lives easier. But that's our big value proposition, is to encourage our clients to hand off as much of that support to our teams and let us take care of it for them, and they don't have to worry about it any for it. 1.5s Yeah,

no, I love that story. Again, cost savings is important, but a lot of times there's so many other areas of management that's saving resource and headaches so customers can focus on their business, right? So obviously we work with and obviously the audience offer our podcast. You have SMB, you have mid market end, you have Enterprise. And obviously as you get into the enterprise, they have more resource versus mid market. SMB have less resources. But can you kind of explain what customer size is best fit for your service? And how do you support whether it's SMB and mid market differently than maybe an Enterprise? Because, again, Enterprise may already have some resources. So how do you complement kind of customer of different sizes? Doug

sure. So the smallest that we work with typically has about 200 devices. That could be any combination of cellular devices, from phones to tablets, data devices, it doesn't matter. And they can actually have multiple carriers. As long as we 1.1s combine all of those, we can work with anybody with 200 or more. And typically that company, the 200 device company, again, they don't have the resources to manage this as good as it should be. So that's where we can come in and do things that they never even thought were possible in reducing their costs and supporting the devices much quicker than they are able to do today. A lot of those folks, they maybe don't even have an It person. They might have an office manager who is doing many different tasks. And cellular, it just happens to be one of them and they just don't have the time. I can't blame them. There's just not enough time in the day to do everything that should be done. So that's where we can help those folks and that person can then hand off all that support to us and they no longer need to deal with it and they can move on to other things. When it comes to the enterprise, we have a lot of clients that have help desk. They might have a help desk team just for cellular, or they have a help desk team that's a combination of It and cellular, whichever it may be. Again, that's where we can adapt whatever model they would like us to do. So we have some clients that they'll keep managing, ordering new devices and provisioning new devices and sending them out to their employees. They want to keep that in house versus the troubleshooting problems when there's a problem with the device, where they'll hand that piece off to us or some even much larger organizations, they might want to handle the. 1s Level one simple request in house. But level two, level three again, that designation is different for every company but they may say for level two, level three that are much more difficult, much more technical. We want to hand that piece off to Link. Again, we have the expertise to handle the simple requests as well as all those very highly technical requests. We want to handle that whatever way that the client wants and we want them again to relieve their internal It teams of this burden. But also we don't want them to have to call and wait on hold to talk to the carriers. Let us be your replace the carrier so that you don't need to talk with them. If you choose to, you still can. But again, who has the time of the day to do that? Let us be that conduit to the carrier so that they don't need to wait on hold or make submit email requests to the carriers that may not get answered the same day or the next day. They might have to wait a few days depending on the call volume that the carriers are dealing with. Let us be that 1.1s resource instead of talking with the carriers.

Yeah, I don't know. I'm trying to think but I don't think I ever have spoken with a customer who loves dealing with the carriers. It's definitely a category that it's more pain than entertainment. 1.4s First of all, amazing insights. 1.2s I think as Verisource, we look for and always try to partner with companies that are cheaper, better, faster, easier to help, really customers transform their business across 100 plus different categories. And you guys do a tremendous job on the mobility side. So no, I really appreciate you being on the show. I got one last question that we always ask our guests, which is you've seen a lot, done a lot. Doug, if you have to give people one personal and or business advice, whatever it is that you believe in or you're really passionate about, what do you think that would be? 2.2s

That's pretty cool. I'm glad you asked that. There's a saying that I've said for many years, and I learned it from somebody. I can't say that I created it on my own, but when I heard it, maybe 25 years ago, it stuck with me. And that is, if you always do what you've always done, you'll always be where you've always been. So that's why I encourage myself and those around me to always be looking for change, for doing something better, finding a new way to do something, reaching for goals that maybe you think are too hard to attain, but that you can. If you work hard and persevere, you'd be surprised how much you can change. And for companies that don't change, a lot of them get stagnant and they end up disappearing. So I love working with organizations that are dynamic and always embracing change and new ideas and constantly innovating. That's why I love working for Link.

Yeah, I love it. That was a great way to wrap things up. So, again, really appreciate your time and excited to partner with you guys.

Thank you. Same here. We're looking forward to it. 1.1s

That was an amazing episode of the digital podcast with Varisource. Hope you enjoyed it and got some great insights from it. Make sure you follow us on social media for the next episode. And if you want to get the best deals from the guest today, make sure to send us a message at sales@varisource.com.

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