---
call_id: "demo_telecom_nexus_20250115"
date: "2025-01-15T14:30:00Z"
duration_seconds: 1920
rep_name: "Mitchell Chen"
prospect_name: "Jeffrey Moore"
prospect_company: "TeleCom Nexus"
prospect_title: "Chief Revenue Officer"
deal_stage: "Discovery"
deal_value: 500000
disposition: "Follow-up Scheduled"
tags: ["enterprise", "telecom", "pipeline-visibility", "5g", "stakeholder-alignment"]
key_themes:
- "Pipeline visibility gap"
- "5G budget competition"
- "Network/IT misalignment"
---
# Customer Interview: TeleCom Nexus
## Interview Summary
Jeffrey Moore is the CRO of TeleCom Nexus, a telecom software company at $125M ARR. The conversation explored challenges around carrier procurement cycles, 5G investment competition, and organizational stakeholder dynamics.
## Transcript
**[00:00:15] Mitchell Chen:**
Jeffrey, Sophia - thanks so much for taking the time today. I've been looking forward to understanding more about TeleCom Nexus's current sales motion and where you see opportunities for improvement.
**[00:00:32] Jeffrey Moore:**
Thanks for making the trip, Mitchell. We've got Sophia Rodriguez here, our Director of Sales Ops, because frankly, a lot of what we're dealing with lives in her world.
**[00:00:45] Mitchell Chen:**
Perfect. Let me start with a broad question - what's your current biggest challenge when it comes to pipeline visibility?
**[00:01:12] Jeffrey Moore:**
Where do I even start? Look, our pipeline looks full, but in reality, we're not actually controlling anything. We've got deals sitting at various stages that are technically "active" but I couldn't tell you with confidence which ones are actually going to close this quarter.
**[00:01:45] Sophia Rodriguez:**
The data is there, technically. It's in Salesforce, it's in our call recordings, it's in email threads. But pulling it together to get a real-time health check on any given deal? That's a full-time job.
**[00:02:15] Mitchell Chen:**
When you say the pipeline looks full but you're not in control, what does that mean specifically? Are deals stalling? Slipping?
**[00:02:30] Jeffrey Moore:**
Both. Our carrier procurement cycles are crushing our forecasting accuracy. We'll have a deal that looks solid and then their procurement process drags it from a 60-day close to 240 days. It's not unusual for us to have 10-15% of our expected quarterly revenue slip into the next quarter with almost no warning.
**[00:03:15] Mitchell Chen:**
That's significant. What signals, if any, do you get that a deal might be at risk?
**[00:03:28] Jeffrey Moore:**
Honestly? We're flying blind. Sometimes a rep will pick up on something in a call - the champion starts talking about "budget competition" or mentions that their IT and network teams aren't aligned. But that insight stays in the rep's head or buried in a call transcript nobody's going to read.
**[00:04:00] Sophia Rodriguez:**
I've tried building reports to track deal velocity, but the data hygiene is a nightmare. Reps update Salesforce inconsistently, and even when they do, it's after the fact. By the time we see a pattern, the damage is done.
**[00:04:35] Mitchell Chen:**
What would change if you had real-time visibility into those signals?
**[00:04:48] Jeffrey Moore:**
Everything. If I knew that a champion was starting to hedge or that an IT stakeholder was raising security concerns, I could mobilize resources before the deal stalls. Right now, we're reactive. We find out something's wrong when the quarter-end comes and the signature isn't there.
**[00:05:20] Mitchell Chen:**
Let's talk about the 5G factor you mentioned. How is that impacting your conversations?
**[00:05:35] Jeffrey Moore:**
It's a massive headwind. Every carrier is pouring capital into 5G infrastructure. When we come in with a software platform that costs $500K to $2M a year, the conversation is basically: "Why would we spend that when we should be spending it on 5G optimization?" We're competing against capital expenditure priorities, not just other software vendors.
**[00:06:15] Sophia Rodriguez:**
And it's not even a conversation we can always anticipate. The 5G budget competition doesn't show up in normal sales qualification. A deal can look perfect on paper - right stakeholders engaged, clear pain point, budget identified - and then a CFO decides to redirect funds to network expansion.
**[00:06:45] Mitchell Chen:**
How do you handle stakeholder misalignment? You mentioned IT and network teams.
**[00:07:00] Jeffrey Moore:**
That's our second biggest issue. In telecom, you have network operations who own the actual infrastructure, IT who manages enterprise systems, and business units who use both. They don't talk to each other the way they should. We'll get championed by the CTO's office but blocked by network operations who see our solution as "one more thing to integrate."
**[00:07:45] Sophia Rodriguez:**
We've started tracking stakeholder sentiment in our deals, but it's manual. We tag contacts as supporters, detractors, or neutral. The problem is that changes over time and we don't have a good way to track the evolution.
**[00:08:10] Mitchell Chen:**
If you could have one thing to help you forecast more accurately, what would it be?
**[00:08:25] Jeffrey Moore:**
Early warning. I want to know when a deal is cooling before it's cold. Don't get me started on forecasting - we're at maybe 75-80% accuracy, which sounds okay until you realize that's millions of dollars we're miscalling every quarter. The board is not happy, and honestly, neither am I.
## Key Takeaways
1. **Pipeline Visibility Gap**: Deals stall in procurement with no visibility into status changes
2. **5G Budget Competition**: Infrastructure investment is crowding out software budgets
3. **Stakeholder Misalignment**: Network, IT, and business teams have conflicting priorities
4. **Forecasting Challenge**: 75-80% accuracy with 10-15% of deals slipping quarterly
