The SKO of Superpowers and Megazords
We Changed How Our People Get Paid
Most channel partners use their Sales Kickoff to pump up revenue targets and hand out quota sheets. Last week, we held our first SKO as a company and did something very different. We reorganized our policies, comp plans, and incentive structures to match our mission to empower leaders. We wanted to answer a question that most channel partners hope their customers never think to ask. Does your partner's compensation depend on your success, or just on closing the deal?
We spent three days making sure our answer is the right one.
Incentives Shape Behavior
People do what they're incented to do. Traditional VARs incentivize volume. Book more meetings, close more deals, collect your commission when the ink dries, move on to the next opportunity.
Activity spiffs are now banned at 3 Tree Tech. We don't want our team chasing meetings for the sake of meetings. We want them chasing outcomes that matter to our customers. We also restructured commissions so that 30% is held back until the customer confirms their implementation went smoothly. In a traditional VAR model, the sales team collects their full commission the moment a deal closes and has little reason to stay engaged through deployment. Our team stays invested because their compensation depends on it.
I spent most of my career on the customer side of the table. I've watched vendors vanish after the signature. I've been the customer left figuring it out alone when things didn't work as advertised. One of the most common breakdowns I saw was the gap between sales and implementation. The sales team makes promises to win the deal, then hands it off to an implementation team that wasn't in those conversations and has no context on what was committed. The customer ends up mediating between two groups inside the same company, trying to get what they were told they'd get. We built 3 Tree Tech to eliminate that gap entirely. Every policy we reviewed during SKO now reflects the same principle. Relationships are our product, trust is our currency, and outcomes are the result.
Superpowers and Megazords
We also spent time talking about how we've built our team differently. In a traditional channel partner, you get a seller who has surface-level knowledge across a broad set of products paired with a sales engineer who actually knows the technology. The seller does the talking, the sales engineer does the explaining. We don't operate that way.
At 3 Tree Tech, our sellers are subject matter experts. Each person on the team has deep expertise in specific areas of IT and cybersecurity. But nobody can be an expert in everything, so instead of faking it, our team is incented to bring in the right teammate when they identify a customer need that falls outside their specialty. Team selling isn't a buzzword for us. It's baked into how we pay people.
I've always believed every person has a superpower, and when you combine superpowers you get something amazing. I remember watching Power Rangers as a kid (don't judge me), and there's a reason it stuck with me. Each ranger pilots their own powers and can hold their own in a fight. But when they combine into Megazord, they can take on anything. That's what we're building at 3 Tree Tech.
Growing Together
We ran a pitch competition to push everyone outside their comfort zones. My personal highlight was watching Jen deliver her first pitch ever. She's stepping into our partner manager role this year and had never pitched before, so her first time was in front of customers, partners, and the entire company. She crushed it. Both Jen and Jacob were voted winners by a panel of partners and customers, and the caliber across the board reminded me that this team isn't afraid of discomfort. That willingness to be vulnerable with each other carries over to how we work with our customers.
We also had customers join us on day two to share what the 3 Tree approach means from their perspective. You can believe all day long that you're building something different. Hearing customers describe that difference in their own words is something no internal pep talk can replicate. Their perspective reminded everyone in the room why we do what we do, and why the policy changes we'd just made actually matter.
We celebrated wins, recognized team members for how well they've partnered with our suppliers, and made time to enjoy each other's company at a local brewery with good food, great beer... and axe throwing and a rage room.
What This Means for You
The technology industry is full of partners who talk about relationships while incentivizing transactions behind the scenes. We're trying to be something different in a sea of sameness, and we're putting our money where our mouth is in the process.
If you're a current 3 Tree Tech customer, every person on our team now has a direct financial stake in your success after the deal closes. If you're not yet working with us, go back to the question we built our entire SKO around.
Does your partner's compensation depend on your success, or just on closing the deal?
Carraig Stanwyck is the CEO of 3 Tree Tech in Portland. Proven people leader and program architect with extremely diverse background and extensive track record of immediate success and constant improvement. When the opportunity came to lead 3 Tree Tech, he knew he’d found people who shared his belief that technology partnerships should be about more than transactions.
