Note: this blog was guest authored by Shannon van den Bosch, Manager of Vendor Business at Tech Data
Tech Data is one of the world’s largest IT distributors and solution aggregators. Leading technology companies engage us for supply chain, logistics, warehousing and technical services. We also help resellers design and deliver competitive IT solutions that meet the unique requirements of their customers by providing servers, workstations, hyper-converged infrastructure, and other offerings from our partners such as Dell Technologies.
Competition in the IT reseller business is fierce. Resellers bid against each other for jobs — often against the partner vendors whose hardware, software and services they use to create solutions. To help resellers thrive amid these dynamic challenges, we educate them about emerging technologies and help them identify and maximize sales opportunities. Our employees have found that it’s often easier to meet these requirements by partnering with Dell Technologies due to the comprehensive portfolio which simplifies solution designs. Furthermore, the complimentary marketing and education services available from the partner portal minimize costs, save time and increase agility — for our teams and for our partner customers.
Generating demand with fewer resources
For example, many resellers have an abundance of technical expertise but need help with marketing. Instead of having our teams invest significant time in guidance, we direct partners who leverage Dell Technologies offerings to the partner demand generation center. Accessible from the Dell Technologies partner portal, the partner demand generation center provides tools for simplifying the management of campaign calendars, product rebates and client relationships. Up-to-date market insights and solution trends also help teams quickly establish sales priorities as well as prospective customers to maximize efficiency.
Being able to give our reseller customers access to the partner demand generation center improves our competitiveness and value, with almost no effort by our teams. And our partner customers gain expert marketing insights and management tools without having to add people or software.
Saving time with on-demand information
The other tool our engineers, specialty teams and sales representatives use all the time on the Dell Technologies partner portal is the knowledge center. It’s where they go whenever they need to learn, put together training and stand up a demo involving Dell Technologies products. That’s because they can quickly get answers to questions like, “What’s the Dell portfolio of solutions that enable AI, security, cloud and digital transformation?” And unlike results from a web search, they know they can trust all of the information.
Minimizing costs with ready-to-go content
Successful marketing campaigns require a lot of communication and strategy. To save time and cost, our resellers and our internal teams take advantage of ready-to-go resources available through the digital marketing tool on the partner portal. It provides marketing campaigns, playbooks, email messages and web pages that individuals can publish as is or customize as they wish. By taking advantage of the digital marketing tool and not having to start all our efforts from scratch, we’ve improved our marketing efficiency by 25%.
Boosting agility drives growth
Agility has always been important for success. However, it became critical when COVID-19 hit. The playbooks and other resources on the Dell Technologies partner portal helped us rapidly shift our marketing strategies and generate new business by hosting effective virtual events. We’re also developing offerings to help our partners drive growth. For example, in this quarter, we’re hosting a comprehensive social-selling boot camp to help them build up core competencies within their sales organizations by leveraging all the content that Dell provides.
The partner portal is really a one-stop shop for all of us to add value to our customers — and grow our Dell Technologies business.
Shannon van den Bosch is Manager of Vendor Business at Tech Data, responsible for overseeing the creation and execution of go-to-market strategy, customer outreach, enablement support, and operational efficiency. With more than 9 years of business and marketing experience in the IT Channel, Shannon leads with a customer-centric, outcome-driven methodology. Shannon is a graduate of Miami University (Ohio), where she majored in political science and marketing.
