"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” - Aristotle
The Toronto tech community has been bursting with events and conferences lately. Having attended a few in the last couple of months and also having hosted many at Arctiq HQ, it is always an energizing experience and a perfect medium to meet up with industry friends, network with emerging tech-community players, and spark up numerous connections. During a recent AWS Summit in Toronto, stepping into conversations first and foremost as a curious human seeking connection, and even more so, as my role at Arctiq, which is Partner Sales Leader, managing some of our strategic partners, I kept coming across a similar question:
“How does Arctiq work with your partner community?” “How do we know we can trust you working with us, when we see you also work with vendors offering similar tools and solutions?
Fair question.
In my mind though the answer is simple - build trust, go in to win or lose together, rinse and repeat. Easy!
After sharing this philosophy with some coworkers it dawned on me that, what may be apparent to me as my fundamental principles of running a business relationship, may not be as explicit to our partners.
I decided to describe the foundational principles of Arctiq’s partnership philosophy in this blog as a commitment and reassurance of our ethics to our ever growing ecosystem of partners.
Where Arctiq Stands Today
Having recently gone through a strategic merger in January of 2022, Arctiq, A Benchmark Company has been streamlining their focus internally, to reshape their Partner and Alliances organization.
In parallel to fine tuning culture internally (a natural process following any merger), Arctiq continues to deliver world class services along with a peace of mind to our clients by unblocking and helping them navigate each of their enterprise technology modernization journeys at whatever stage they are at. Arctiq’s team-based project delivery approach ensures we always have the correct skill-sets engaged to solve client challenges.
Today, we lean on our expanded team of opinionated architects, real world experienced and certified delivery consultants, white glove Project Management and our reshaped team of Sales and Inside Sales Professionals. We also work in lockstep with our ecosystem partners to deliver customer solutions that, many times, span a number of partners, so we often tend to be the glue that ties all interactions together to mutually win with our partners and for our clients.
Key components of how we partner at Arctiq
For us at Arctiq we believe that the 3 fundamental principles listed below are at the core of our interactions with partners, as we build stronger alliances:
- Trust
- Consistency
- Innovation
Trust
We understand that it takes a lifetime to build trust in any relationship and seconds to destroy it. As we find partner alignment we are usually after a mutual benefit, and an uncovered opportunity, so, naturally, conversations start from an account mapping exercise. Partnering up and working in an account means continuous sales teams’ alignment, joint efforts, like meeting preparation, and knowledge sharing, as well as going in to win or lose together to drive that success for the customer. Losing sometimes happens and it is okay, because as long as we are committed to each other in our efforts, we are continuous with strengthening the trust to help cultivate mutual future success and may uncover new opportunities.
Consistency
One of the pillars of the trust building process is collaboration, and being able to transparently and respectfully communicate with each other. As an outcome, we get a valuable interaction rather than a transactional exchange of information. On an ongoing basis and to strengthen what we achieved up to today, we must be consistent in our interactions as we go on to add to the strategy of working together. Looking after and reviewing agreed goals on a regular basis which may further involve your partner teams working to review revenue targets, develop marketing plans, events.
Innovation
Staying relevant and valuable to one another is achieved through innovation. Being able to make the right investment to stay ahead of the curve, to pivot and continue to be relevant and be willing to resolve conflicts and share opinions. Investment may come in the shape of resources or money, having the flexibility to pivot to solve a customer challenge by applying technology innovation and staying ahead of the tech curve by investing in education of the whole Arctiq technical bench and the entire team.
Today’s world as we see it through the eyes of our customers
IT is rapidly changing, and more organizations are looking to automation, CI/CD, container-based applications, software delivery pipelines, cloud adoption, improving culture and process to promote operational efficiency to solve business problems. Developer and Operations teams are embracing DevOps methodologies, using new methods and new tools, and security is paramount with DevSecOps focus being ever more relevant.
With that, our strong partnerships with the technology ecosystem bolster the Arctiq experience for our clients and partners alike. Arctiq's partners rely on us to test new technology before general availability, provide feedback on new platforms, and deliver outstanding demos showcasing real world use cases. We work with our clients and partners in lock-step, with transparent collaboration, operating like an extended family. At Arctiq we believe that a rising tide raises all ships.
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