Dive Brief:
- Technology advisory firm ARG acquired assets from fellow TA BanaTech Consulting, appointing BanaTech founder Bana Qashu as VP of marketing and strategic growth, the company said in an announcement Wednesday.
- Qashu will plug the firm’s referral partner network into ARG’s sales organization as the Virginia-based company expands its national presence, according to the announcement.
- “The customers and business relationship partners Qashu was already developing can get the full experience that she was hoping to deliver. And we get a really great executive that will help us grow our marketing and business development program,” ARG CEO Mike Shonholz told Channel Dive.
Dive Insight:
ARG is expanding its go-to-market organization seven months after a private equity investment from Bear Creek Partners.
The company doubled the size of its managing partner program in its first 60 days post-investment and added a VP of corporate development in June. ARG plans to put more enterprise sellers into the field in markets beyond the Washington, D.C. area and deepen the resources behind those sellers, Shonholz said.
“Our biggest priority now is to evangelize our global consulting practice to clients, net new clients and our referral partners and give our managing partners that platform to truly succeed in their locales,” he said.
Opportunities to cultivate referral partnerships with managed services providers, value-added resellers and other channel firms have ripened. These companies may not have the appetite to procure telecommunications, customer experience or cloud solutions — and ARG is banking on them to choose ARG for the job. Referral partners could also work outside IT, like an executive staffing firm that’s helping a company replace its CIO, Shonholz said.
Five years ago when Qashu was leading Avant’s East Coast sales region, she would have downplayed the referral route.
“[Referral partners] had their own bias or they wanted these reciprocal agreements that we really are not prepared to do because we're unbiased to our clients,” Qashu said.
At the time, many of those companies were trying to do ARG’s job. They signed up with technology services distributors to directly access the vendors their clients needed. Now the pendulum is swinging back, Shonholz said.
“They started getting more focused on their core managed services offerings and making bets on technology,” he said, “Some of them went out and experienced the TSDs and went, ‘Oh gosh, these are complex, multi-threaded sales that require something more than just a call or two.’”
The sales process is also more complex than it was before, with a proliferating number of technologies and vendors that sellers can’t be expected to grasp if it is only a secondary part of their job, Qashu said.
“It’s a lot of hand holding [and] business conversations that some of these reps at our referral partner are looking for in order to identify opportunities within their own client base,” she said.
Qashu spent eight years at Avant and one year as EVP of strategic partnerships at national TA Amplix before founding BanaTech in 2025. The new firm was recently accepted into Microsoft’s AI Assessment Cohort.
Joining ARG helped grow the TA business, a model that takes years to develop, especially in the enterprise where deals take months to close and boardrooms often turn down single-person firms, she said.
Qashu’s relationship with ARG goes over a decade to when she met with ARG founders Greg Praske and Bill Power while working for Cbeyond.
“They've really embraced me as a leadership team,” she said. “The transition has felt so natural, where I don't have that operator anxiety of, ‘Oh my god, I'm losing this baby.’ Trust me, it cost me a lot to launch, but [this] is exactly what I was looking for: having those resources to really support some of these folks that are going to continue to work with me.”
