Clint Mohs
Hey everyone, and welcome to In the Cloud with 2600 Hz. I'm your host, Clint Mohs and I'm back with another exciting interview. Today I'm joined by Evan Kirstel. Evan comes from a background of over 30 years experience in enterprise sales, alliances, and business development in the telecom and IT arenas. These days, Evan has made the shift to being a thought leader and social media influencer in the B2B tech space. With an audience of almost 500,000, it's safe to say that that move has been a good one. Evan is also co host of the popular TalkingHeadz podcast with Dave Michaels. Welcome, Evan. Thanks for being on the pod today.

Evan Kirstel
Thanks for having me, as always.

Clint Mohs
Well, we've got loads to talk about, including some advice on what's going to be big on social media this year. So let's just get into it. For our audience, I think it might be great just to start at the beginning. Can you tell us a little bit about your background in telecom, enterprise sales and business development?

Evan Kirstel
Yeah, so my background is 30 plus years in enterprise and telecom right out of college going into the enterprise space with a company called dialogic. So, you know, at that time, it kind of echoes the beginning of, you know, modern telco networks, you know, so most people probably don't know what 2600Hz actually means as a frequency in the old long distance networks, but I did. So you know, at that time, it was all about voice, fax, voicemail, and PBXes. And so yeah, that was kind of the beginning of my journey in into enterprise communications.

Clint Mohs
Awesome. So 30 years, there's a lot of time in the industry. So it certainly makes sense to make the jump into thought leadership. But I would really like to hear a little bit more about what led you to the sort of social media and the influencer path.

Evan Kirstel
Really, with the rise of LinkedIn and Twitter, probably about 15 years ago, I actually found it as found them both to be a great sort of research and sales tool. So I mean, it wasn't really being used that way they were being used the LinkedIn was a Rolodex for, for basically jobs or hunting and job search. And Twitter was like a social network for lightweight, casual conversations. But I found, you know, communities out there early on, on both platforms, and it was the new way of kind of networking and connecting across these emerging digital networks for selling. And from there just started, you know, to build an audience, really, I would say snowballed from there.

Clint Mohs
I really like that idea of thinking of spaces like LinkedIn, and Twitter, as like you said, you know, a research and a sales tool.

Evan Kirstel
Yeah, maybe they've turned into media companies more than even social networks. And so you know, the platforms like those and others, you really can't get your message out. I mean, the old days of picking up the phone and calling a prospect, you know, that still happens. But it's a brand new world in terms of content creators, content marketing, and, you know, analytics, and AI and marketing. And those really happen through digital channels now. But it's still fun to connect and meet new people. And those are great platforms to do that, even beyond just for selling and marketing purposes.

Clint Mohs
Oh, that's super fascinating. And we are definitely going to circle back here to some social media stuff in a bit. But I'd love to dive a little bit deeper into your perspective on the cloud comms market. With the new year well underway, what do you see as some unique challenges in the space that service providers and resellers are going to be facing this year?

Evan Kirstel
Well, yeah, well, I think we've all come to accept that the cloud is the de facto delivery mechanism for all the services we deliver, it's no longer and if it's just when and how. And, you know, it's no longer you know, Amazon's AWS is gate. I mean, we see, you know, multiple cloud platforms, we see a hyper competitive market, no pun intended with the hyper scalars. And we see so many platforms for delivery of new services. And innovation is probably, you know, the most exciting time in telecom and, you know, certainly my 30 years. I mean, there's just so much opportunity for innovation, differentiated differentiation, new services, and and more. So really, really great time to be in the industry.

Clint Mohs
I love that perspective, right? It's a moment where AWS is no longer, you know, the only group who can offer cloud hosting services. And I love thinking about it in terms of, there's all of this opportunity for differentiation for coming up with new services. But I also think, right, we have to kind of temper some of that enthusiasm with, you know, what the market looks like, right now. So how what would you say, um, you know, maybe about those same topics, but in light of all of the mergers and acquisitions that have happened over the past few years, where the big companies are getting bigger and their solutions are moving toward looking a lot similar than they did, maybe five years ago or so.

Evan Kirstel
Yeah, I think every company is sort of looking at the marketplace and copying the features of each other. You know, even we talked about social networks now, you know, copy each other, whether it's live streaming or, or hashtags, or, you know, every every, every social platform is copying each other. And then most of the cloud players, if not copying, trying to figure out what the consumers want and deliver on that. And it's really working its way into every aspect of the communications market, which you know, globally is, you know, a multi trillion dollar market. So, I mean, who would have thought that the contact center is really rapidly moving to the cloud with CCaaS? I mean, that's one of the last bastions of legacy kind of technology. We're seeing developers innovate with CPaaS platforms in ways that that are pretty new. I mean, if you did this kind of thing, years ago, you were kind of like a hacker, you know, hacking together, you know, hardware and software to boards and to try to deliver new apps. Now, there are APIs and toolkits off the shelf, like from folks like yourself and others. And, you know, residential communications, I think, you know, POTS is gradually, you know, actually disappearing, it's no longer and if it's just when,

Clint Mohs
Yeah, in terms of of POTS, I know, I believe it's this August is the FCC's kind of mandated sunsetting. So it's really interesting to see what is going to come out between now and then. Because while I think in the cloud comms industry, we obviously spend a great deal of time talking about business communications, right, like residential communications is also interesting in might be a smaller bit of the market, but something that is coming into the cloud, right?

Evan Kirstel
Yeah, I mean, residential communications, can mean business communications too for small businesses, and the whole remote work phenomenon. There's a lot of overlap now with with remote workers demanding, you know, whole suite of communication services that they they got maybe in the office, and, you know, trying to integrate their their business, their workflows into the enterprise, while they're working from home, you know, whether it's a contact center agent or a field service person, you know, integrating mobile telephony and messaging into their workflow. Enterprises are really having to adapt and service providers to and how they deliver and deploy and design new communications apps.

Clint Mohs
Yeah, that's certainly a great point about you know, work from home kind of blurring that distinction of what what's business communication and what's residential communications. So thinking about this kind of exciting moment, this moment of major disruption, how do you think a smaller regional reseller should respond? How should they move into the market and maybe a better way to ask this is what advice would you have for somebody looking to expand their footprint or their customer base in 2022?

Evan Kirstel
Yeah, I think it's time to shift away from just being a reseller or an agent kind of model and delivering plain vanilla to your customers to really being a trusted advisor and a consultants and going after verticals and niches and applications that you know, are kind of new and exciting and that are sticky and add value. So never has the the idea of a value add been more important. And you know, if you're just, you know, reselling what you did, you know, yesterday or last year last month, you're really going to have trouble being successful in this market. So channels have you know, still have a massive opportunity but they have to differentiate themselves with something that's novel and unique to a business you know, so if your customers is local, you know, doctor's office or pizza joint or you know, grocery store, you know, they're gonna have needs that are different. In this new normal we find ourselves in with a pandemic and workforce management with with mobile 5g service is with getting analytics and data. I mean, it's a brave new world, so time to up your game and really dig in educate yourself and partner with companies who could deliver, you know, more than the the old plain vanilla kind of telephony.

Clint Mohs
Sure. And I really liked that idea of, you know, maybe redefining what your value add is right? Like your value add in 2016 might not make sense anymore in 2022. And so how do you sort of reposition yourself as a trusted adviser? And do you need to start or build out a, you know, development team in order to start giving some of these really customizable, really nice offerings to to your customers? I think that's great advice.

Evan Kirstel
Yeah, I mean, every business is not like the next and I know someone who's supporting a bunch of Domino's franchisees owners with, with communication services and their needs, you know, as a franchise owner are very different, you know, they want to see how many just calls they have coming into the, you know, Domino's locally, they want to see missed calls, they want to have dropped calls, they want to be able to, you know, take text orders, I mean, there are all kinds of unique features and functionality that are, you know, part of a business that that are unique to the pizza business, which are very different from if you're selling to, you know, the legal profession, so that going deep into verticals, and really understanding business communications in those verticals, is, is critical value and telecoms.

Clint Mohs
Yeah, I think that's a great point, too, especially when we think about right, my family and I are still ordering carry out a handful of times a week, you know, gotta support those local businesses. So, you know, just in that very specific market totally turned on its head with the the way orders are received, the way they're trying to interact with their community where you know, your local, you know, maybe not Domino's, but your corner store, maybe can't just get by on walk in business anymore, but now needs to be able to communicate via SMS with their customers, they might need a more streamlined flow of, you know, what happens with a website order? How does it get plugged into their system? How do they go from their point of sale system to the back kitchen? So all of that, I think, is really, really great advice. And I think our partner community will definitely appreciate that. And the reminder to always, you know, pay attention to your to your vertical pay attention to the needs of your customers, because as as these bigger players continue to consolidate, what's going to set you apart is those sort of super customizable offerings. So um, last topic here, before we sign off, I'd love to hear your thoughts on social media heading into 2022. What do you think is going to be big this year? And what should our partners plan on doing in 2022, to continue growing their brand and more importantly, their customer base?

Evan Kirstel
Well, no lack of irony, voice is exciting, voice is back. You've got social networks like clubhouse that are really popular for for voice chat, drop in audio communication communities, Twitter, equally have Twitter spaces, you can join your people together and have live audio chat. And some people like myself, love audio, love podcasting, love audio consumption, and really prefer listening and engaging on these audio first platforms. So that's going to continue to be a big trend. And I think the big trend will be, you know, video where, you know, whether it's content creation, live streaming, you know, marketing through video. Increasingly, it's much, you know, it's just a better way to engage and drive awareness and eyeballs than traditional text based content and blogging, etc. So more audio, more video, more interactivity, and new platforms like clubhouse, like Reddit, even for b2b, like Quora, and onwards and upwards, so yeah, lots of cool stuff happening on the social front.

Clint Mohs
Yeah, I totally agree with you. I feel like whether it's Twitter or LinkedIn, whenever I'm scrolling through, it's almost like there has to be audio, there has to be video, there has to be something to catch my attention. Because, you know, no matter how many emojis you throw in there, just like a big solid block of text just isn't, it's not cutting it anymore these days.

Evan Kirstel
Yeah, absolutely. So lots of fun. That's gonna be an interesting year for social and look forward to catching more of your content there.

Clint Mohs
Well, that's about all we've got time for today. But again, really great chatting with you, Evan. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Evan Kirstel
Thanks so much for having me.

Clint Mohs
If you'd like to keep up with Evans thought leadership work, be sure to give him a follow on LinkedIn and Twitter and check out the TalkingHeadz podcast. I'll be sure to drop a link in the show notes for all of those for our listeners. Thanks so much for tuning in. Be sure to like this episode, and subscribe wherever you're listening. And while you're there, write us a review it only takes a second and is a huge help to all of us here at Team 2600Hz. Until next time thanks everyone!