While telecom partners offer a wealth of complex products and services, how do you differentiate the partners that will accelerate growth and drive results for your business? Reflecting on our team’s tenured industry expertise and our own experiences working with various telecom agents and carriers, we’ve gathered some of the key differentiators that separate a good telecom partner from one that will deliver measurable results in helping you achieve a competitive edge:

1. Intelligence

Great telecom partners use data-driven decision making, network assessments, and market intelligence to make recommendations that use actual data from the customer’s environment. When evaluating a potential partner, dig deep into their process and asses how they will develop a strategy that is unique to you. A great telecom agent will take the time to understand your business drivers, will document and asses the current state of your network, and will ensure that your service provider commitments are mapped into a comprehensive networking strategy. It’s important to ensure that their strategy will align with your current processes and your team’s goals. For example, the MacroNet team leverages a consistent DocumentedDesign process to ensure that the service provider’s sales, engineering, and product teams have full ownership of the final solution. This achieves one of the common goals of their customers, to enable their teams to have full ownership at the project’s completion.

2. Relationships

While a good telecom partner may have a vast partner portfolio, a great partner possesses a balance of quality and quantity of partner relationships. Assess your potential partner’s portfolio and do your research to understand how they have historically managed their industry relationships. A great telecom partner is consistently looking ahead, building relationships with new suppliers, contractors, and sub agents that will enable them to bring the best in network solutions to their customers. A great telecom partner will leverage their partner relationships to help you gain a competitive advantage, improve profitability, and will ensure that you receive the best account support possible.

3. Trust

Without trust and transparency, a partnership won’t exist. A great telecom partner makes transparency a key priority and will serve as your trusted technical resource. In a relatively tight community, especially in regional areas, many customers are seeking a better means to manage their carrier relationships and do not necessarily want a traditional consultant relationship. A great telecom partner will provide you with a layer of support on top of the carriers that you rely on for the long-term and will transparently steer you in the right direction. A great telecom partner will transparently align your business requirements with a realistic network plan that enables you to achieve your business goals.

4. Insight

More agents are appearing in the marketplace at a rapid pace. A promising sign of a great telecom agent is one that has a more tenured and technical team with diverse networking backgrounds and industry insight. It’s important for a partner to have more than just the sales expertise. A great telecom partner will have a sales engineering and/or executive management background, which will help them craft a networking solution strategically aligns with your long-term goals. Great telecom partners are ones that can advise their clients on industry best practices tell them something they don’t already know. Your goals should be the first priority and your partner should leverage their market intelligence to give you a different perspective and insight to help achieve what you would like to accomplish.

Whether an organization’s goals are to realize cost savings or invest in a new technology, a great telecom partner should serve as a resource for providing you with the subject matter expertise and experience to deliver your desired results. Regardless of your goals, an ideal telecom partner should act as an extension of your internal team and enable you to drive results that give your organization a competitive edge.

Achieve a Competitive Edge 

At MacroNet, we work to understand your business and how technology services from our portfolio of suppliers can help you gain a competitive advantage and improve profitability. Contact our team today to discuss how we can help you increase business value and drive results for your business.