How did your experience with Lexmark and Lenovo help you in your new role of working with the communities?

Well, my reference point and considerations are different perhaps versus the legacy teams that were managing our communities. Not saying that’s a bad thing, but I do have different perspectives because the reality is, I’ve been on the main stage at Varnex and TechSelect and spoken to the advisory councils 40 times. I invested literally millions of dollars into communities when I was leading both of those companies’ channels, and I understood the benefits that I got from those communities, including scale, reach, consideration factor, the ability to train and educate at a higher level. It gave me an ear. It gave me an audience. And I could hold people accountable at the distributors because I was investing a lot of money for growth. And so I knew what communities meant to me as a vendor because those were dedicated communities and it’s no different today than it was for me when I was calling on Tech Data and Synnex individually.

Partners have really bought in. They’re listening, and they’re leaning in to their distributor and they use and leverage that community platform to better their opportunities to gain leads, to further educate their sales teams. And really, I’m just modernizing and updating what was there before. There’s a set of tangible benefits and intangible benefits. And that’s why communities are so big and so meaningful to TD Synnex. They’re an audience of partners who were dedicated. And for that dedication, they get favors. They gain other things perhaps that one of our resellers might not get if they don’t consider the community. There’s just a lot of extras.