3 Tree Tech

Every organization has decisions it stopped questioning a long time ago. Not because someone evaluated them and confirmed they still make sense. Just because they've been around long enough to feel permanent. The meeting cadence nobody revisits. A vendor relationship that runs on autopilot. Some process that exists because it existed last year, created by someone who left the company two jobs ago. None of these are necessarily wrong. That's what makes them tricky. They work well enough that there's no obvious reason to reexamine them. And "well enough" is the quietest way an organization stops getting better. It's something we think about a lot at 3 Tree Tech. Not because we've solved it, but because we know how easy it is to stop looking. #EmpowerLeaders #BusinessStrategy #ContinuousImprovement

Somewhere between parking a DeLorean at a Stealth Event and letting President Camacho run a Technology Summit, we realized something: the best professional events don't feel like professional events. The 2026 Empower Summit is sketch-comedy themed. September 23–24 in Portland. Two days you'll actually enjoy. Early bird pricing through May 26: bit.ly/3Pbs1Xy #EmpowerLeaders #EmpowerSummit #Portland

Nobody on our team is expected to know everything. That's the point. We let people thrive in the areas they're strongest, and when a conversation moves into different territory, they bring in a teammate who lives there. An infrastructure question turns into a compliance discussion? Someone on the team owns that space and jumps in with real context. That means the person you're working with can actually engage with your specific environment. They can tell you whether a solution fits the problem you described five minutes ago, or if you're about to spend six months implementing something that addresses a symptom instead of the root cause. Whether it's an initial conversation, an implementation, or a review six months in. When your partner's team pivots from confident to vague, that's the edge of their actual knowledge. Ours just bring in the next person. #EmpowerLeaders #TeamSelling #SubjectMatterExperts

There's a difference between building a partner organization from the vendor side and building one from the customer side. Most channel partners are built by people who grew up in channel sales. The instincts and assumptions about how things should work all come from that perspective. When Carraig joined 3 Tree Tech, he brought the other side with him. Years as a technology leader, sitting across the table from channel partners, remembering which practices felt helpful and which ones felt like they existed to serve the partner, not the customer. That perspective now lives inside how we operate. It's not that one perspective is better. It's that the customer perspective is almost entirely absent from how most partner organizations are designed. That absence shows up in a hundred small decisions that individually seem fine but collectively create an experience that feels like it was built for the partner, not the buyer. #EmpowerLeaders #ChannelPartners #CustomerExperience

Did you catch Jacob Friedman on the Zero Trust Forum's No Trust podcast? He sat down with Jaye Tillson and John Spiegel to talk about what's actually driving cybersecurity purchasing decisions right now, how to evaluate early-stage vendors without getting burned, and why the gap between visibility and remediation keeps getting wider. If you're heading to RSA next week, the conversation on surviving the expo floor is especially worth your time. Jacob's advice: define what success looks like before you land in San Francisco, or you'll spend the whole week reacting instead of executing. The vendor noise is louder than ever. Showing up without a plan is how you come home with a full inbox and nothing to show for it. 🎧 bit.ly/4uDYzK9 bit.ly/4bQNUEt #EmpowerLeaders #Cybersecurity @jspieg67 @JayeTillson

Structure is sneaky. It shapes behavior in ways that nobody explicitly designed for. How opportunities get routed, which vendors get prioritized, how reviews get run. None of those things are neutral. They all send signals to the team about what matters. And those signals don't always match what leadership thinks they're communicating. The tricky part is that misalignment doesn't usually show up as a big visible problem. It shows up as a pattern. Maybe recommendations keep skewing a certain direction without anyone deciding they should. Or engagement tapers off at a predictable point in the customer relationship. The drift is quiet, which is what makes it hard to catch. We're not immune to this. Being a small team doesn't automatically mean your structure is clean. It just means the drift is easier to spot if you're paying attention. We try to pay attention. #EmpowerLeaders #IncentiveAlignment #OrganizationalDesign

We tie 30% of every commission to the customer's implementation experience. The team earns the full amount only after the customer confirms things are working the way they should be. That changes every conversation leading up to it. When your paycheck depends on the implementation going well, the whole engagement naturally goes deeper. The team asks harder questions about environment, timeline, internal resources. They surface complexity in month one instead of month four. Not because someone told them to, but because they're going to be around for the answers. It also reinforces the kind of people we already have. Our team wasn't forced into caring about outcomes by a comp plan. They showed up that way. The holdback just makes sure the structure matches the people instead of working against them. Most comp plans are designed for a version of the team that the best teams aren't. Ours is designed around the people we actually built this with. #EmpowerLeaders #CompPlan #ImplementationSuccess

The 2026 Empower Summit is happening September 23–24 in Portland. This year's theme is sketch comedy. We're centering the whole event around the relationship between Data and AI from the business, IT, and security sides of an organization, and we wrapped it in a format that'll make the experience feel nothing like the last conference you attended. Our last Empower Summit was reality-TV themed and featured Flava Flav on stage, because when we pick a theme, we go all the way in. We do the themes because they work and because they're fun. Two days of keynotes, panels, workshops, networking, and a few things we haven't announced yet. #EmpowerLeaders #EmpowerSummit #DataAndAI

Carraig Stanwyck and Deidre Diamond are taking the stage together at RSAC 2026. Their session combines lessons from HUMINT interrogation and enterprise sales to teach practical influence skills for security leaders. If that pairing sounds unexpected, that's kind of the point. The psychology behind both disciplines overlaps more than most people realize, and it translates directly to persuading stakeholders, building trust, and getting action in high-pressure situations. "The Power of Influence for Cyber Leaders: From Interrogation to Boardroom" Wednesday, March 25 | 8:30 - 9:20 AM PDT Seating is reserved, so grab yours now: bit.ly/4sfwmHp #EmpowerLeaders #RSAC2026 #CyberLeadership

We don't pay our team bonuses for booking meetings or hitting activity targets. No spiffs for volume. No rewards for motion. We learned early that incentivizing activity creates activity. Not necessarily the kind you want. The policy exists to make sure the structure points in the same direction as the team, and to make sure it stays that way as we grow. We spend more time now figuring out what metrics actually tell the story of customer success. That's harder than counting meetings. It's messier to report on. And it's an ongoing conversation, not a solved problem. But when your structure matches your people, you spend a lot less energy managing around misalignment. And a lot more energy on the stuff that actually matters. #EmpowerLeaders #SalesIncentives #CustomerSuccess

Your phones are working. Your agents are dialing. And your customers' screens are flashing "Spam Likely." You just don't know it yet. That's the reality for a growing number of businesses. The same systems protecting consumers from robocalls are flagging legitimate calls from real companies, and most organizations don't realize it's happening until answer rates have already tanked. Our VP of Tech Strategy, Joseph Meyer, dug into what's actually going on behind the scenes and put together a white paper covering the causes, the fixes, and the enterprise-level tools worth knowing about. A few things that might surprise you: - Something as simple as a brief pause before your agent speaks can trigger spam flags - A number you just acquired could already have a damaged reputation from its previous owner - Your own customers marking a call as "spam" once or twice can snowball fast It's a solvable problem, but only if you're paying attention to it. 📖 Full white paper here: bit.ly/4rGsn7f #Telecommunications #VoiceSecurity #STIRSHAKEN #CallReputation #3TreeTech

Our team has been sharing their takeaways from our first-ever SKO, and it's been incredible to see what resonated with each person. But there's a bigger story underneath all of it. When we started 3 Tree Tech, we believed the channel partner model needed to change. Not just in how technology gets sold, but in how partners show up for their customers after the deal is done. Most of the industry still treats post-sale as someone else's problem. We've always tried to do it differently, but at SKO, we made it structural. Every policy, every incentive, every comp plan now reflects one idea: our team only wins when our customers do. Our CEO, Carraig Stanwyck, wrote about what that process looked like from the inside, why we made the changes we did, and what it means for the customers and partners who trust us with their business. If you're curious about what it looks like when a channel partner rebuilds itself around outcomes instead of transactions, give it a read. bit.ly/4tHIdzy #leadership #teamculture #sko #empowerleaders

What a week! Our first 3 Tree Tech SKO gave us the space to get aligned and spend real time together as a team. That matters as we step into what’s next. Our mission to Empower Leaders starts with how we show up for each other. Thank you to our partners, clients, and friends who continue to trust us and build alongside us, making what we do possible.

Happy New Year! 2025 challenged us, sharpened us, and pushed us to raise the bar. We’re fired up about what’s ahead and ready to do the work that actually matters. To our team, partners, clients, friends, and families, thank you for the trust and the chance to keep building something we believe in. 2026 is coming in hot!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! We hope the season brings good times with good people and a chance to recharge, however you spend it. To our team, partners, clients, friends, and families, thanks for being part of our world!

Carraig and Eric braved the atmospheric river last week and met up with @Akamai at Climate Pledge Arena for a @SeattleKraken game. Fast hockey and a loud crowd capped off the night, even with the Kraken falling to the Colorado Avalanche. Big thanks to Akamai for hosting and to everyone who joined us. Always good spending time together in person. #SeattleKraken #Akamai #Hockey #Partnerships #EmpowerLeaders #NHL

Stacy Sherman just released the 200th episode of @doingcxright, and it’s a big one. For years, 3 Tree Tech has partnered with Stacy because we believe in the same things: leadership shows up in the small moments, trust is built through action, and customer experience is a byproduct of how teams are actually treated. This milestone episode pulls leadership lessons from the voices that shaped the first 199 conversations and brings them straight back to what matters day to day. We’re proud to see Eric Skeens included in the 200th episode highlight. That inclusion reflects years of shared thinking around removing friction, empowering people to act, and building cultures that can perform when it counts. Two hundred episodes takes discipline, curiosity, and a willingness to challenge how things are done. Stacy’s done exactly that. Watch the episode: na2.hubs.ly/H02L0040