Employee Spotlight: Scott Nichols, CCO

“Our ultimate goal is to elevate our customers’ experience well beyond the current market level.”

Since its inception, Arelion has leveraged its true differentiator to build trust with customers and succeed in the connectivity business: world-class customer experience. Arelion’s Chief Commercial Officer Scott Nichols joined us in May 2022 to help us serve our global wholesale and enterprise customers’ connectivity needs. We spoke with Scott to learn more about his vision for Arelion’s next growth stage and the vital role of internal transformation to provide excellent customer experience in today’s connectivity market.

Q: Tell us about your background.

I’ve been in telecom sales and sales leadership since I graduated college, primarily in the enterprise networking and managed services space. Over the years, I’ve successfully built sales organizations that cater to designing solutions for large, global companies with high-end performance requirements. This is Arelion’s sweet spot! The combination of our global network assets, a long-standing leadership position in the connectivity space, and the positive energy generated by working in a global organization makes Arelion a great place to work, and a great company to work with.

Q: What does Arelion look like on the inside? What is your day-to-day experience?

Arelion is accelerating into its next phase of growth, which is embraced by all parts of the organization. Even though we have several employees who have a long tenure with the company, our team is driven by the excitement of charting our own course for success.

Being completely separated from Telia now, we’re constantly looking for ways to improve the efficiency of our day-to-day processes to achieve our goals. Our ultimate goal is to elevate our customers’ experience well beyond the current market level. To accomplish this, we are challenging ourselves to evolve past the mindset of “this is how we’ve always done it” regarding certain processes and lean into new ways of working.

Thus far in my tenure at Arelion, I feel the internal momentum we’re creating to improve ourselves will translate into value for our customers. We have lots of work left to do in our journey, but I see us moving forward every day.

Q: What are some of the key goals for Sales? How will you accomplish these goals?

As I mentioned, our global network assets, along with a long-standing reputation for delivering scalable network performance, gives Arelion the potential to win a larger share of the global connectivity market than ever before. While we’ve had great success in the past, my goal for the Global Sales organization is to achieve the “next level” of our sales potential in both the Wholesale and Enterprise market segments.

We must work differently and transform ourselves to reach that next level of success. Today, the Global Sales organization has not only changed in structure, but the conversations between the Sales Leadership Team and the Account Managers around activity metrics, target prospects by segment, and funnel KPIs are completely different since January. We’re leveraging performance and segmentation data to understand our business’s macro trends while focusing our efforts on prospects with the highest probability of success based on Arelion’s value proposition.

While embracing change is never easy, especially amid the many moving parts of expanding our brand awareness, I’m confident we’re on the right path and will see continued success in Q4.

Q: What does the 30th anniversary for Arelion’s AS1299 network mean to you?

Outside of spirited celebrations with our colleagues around the world, it means that Arelion’s network has been one of the cornerstones of the global Internet since its inception. This is an honor and a responsibility we take very seriously. From my perspective, being a part of an organization with such a rich history dating back to the very beginning of something that’s transformed the entire world is very special. The anniversary allows us to look back on Arelion’s past accomplishments while inspiring our teams to continue connecting the world in new and better ways.

Q: Anything else?

While it’s been great to be a part of Arelion for the past 16 months, I’m even more excited as I look forward to what is coming in the next 16+ months. We’re just getting started!