John Fago is senior director of channel marketing and account management, North America, at Ingram Micro Inc. He spoke with ChannelPro-SMB Publisher Michael Siggins at Ingram Micro’s recent spring VentureTech Network (VTN) Invitational Event in Florida. An excerpt from that conversation follows.
ChannelPro SMB: What are some highlights of your 15-year anniversary of VentureTech?
John Fago: We’ve eclipsed $1.25 billion in Ingram revenues with the group of 330 North American partners. When you look at that in terms of the relative magnitude for Ingram Micro, it’s meaningful. It’s really great that the community grew 8.8 percent in 2012 over 2011. … What we’re trying to figure out is the next iteration of community, and VTN specifically, and where we need to be to show that we’re leading for the next five, 10, 15 years. We’re working on the 2014 plan and the 2015 plan. We’re asking big questions, like what does engagement in the community look like? What we’re finding is that we’re getting away from it solely being about the big event and we’re getting in some very niche and specialized types of engagement. We look at experiences like our Masterminds [an exclusive community within VTN that allows executive-level members to go beyond the limits of traditional VTN chapters and network with other business leaders across the United States and Canada.]
[Also,] our member portal is now moving in a very aggressive direction; our members are able to share documents between each other, and work and best practices. That was a lot of the work that we did last year. … I really feel that we’re at a very good place. This is our time as a community to push the envelope yet again. I think that our best times are ahead of us.
ChannelPro SMB: What are the trends, and where are the opportunities for partners?
John Fago: This community is pretty progressive. You think about networking, data center – these guys are already thinking in those directional areas. Cloud is another example. They are in the space, but they’re right now working at “How do I accelerate my success in that space?” We have a lot of activity around infrastructure, a lot of activity around networking. It’s because we have some very specialized partners there. The go-forward conversation, from a recruiting standpoint, [is] selectively we’re going to look for where we can round out these skill sets in VTN. We’re going to look at specialty areas like mobility, where we have some big investments at Ingram. Security is another area that people are doing a lot of work around, but I would say we have an opportunity to add more specialized security experts in the community for people to have more to draw on. Those are a couple of examples. We’re trying to do some real tangible things to identify those opportunities.
ChannelPro SMB: What about benefits or services that Ingram is offering. Have you seen some trends where things are picking up steam in certain areas?
Fago: Yes, I would tell you that our core service is technical support licensing and these guys are drawing on those resources from us all day, every day. That continues to be a differentiator. But they are also engaging in integration services. If you think about running the business – where can they offload expense, and repeatable activity, to someone they trust, which is us. There’s a continual activity build around things like integration. There’s a continual activity build around things like marketing services. We’ve got a marketing agency team that’s out representing all of the things that we do from Ingram Micro’s marketing agency out to partners, to help them [with] branding, websites, collateral, logos. Those are a couple of examples of Ingram’s services that I think people are engaging more now.
ChannelPro SMB: When you look ahead to the next one to three years, what are some of the things that partners should be doing so they don’t miss the boat?
Fago: Yesterday I sat in on a chapter meeting with our Great Lakes team, and they’re having a conversation around Simon Sinek [an author who has spoken at the TED conference]. One speech that he has done is around the importance of why, instead of the what and the how. One of the things that I would really encourage partners to think about over the next couple of years is to take some steps toward changing the dynamics of their company and their associates, and their company and their customers. Instead of it being a relationship where they’re successful because of the what and the how they do things … they need to go deeper. That means they need to be able to get to what really drives people, and also be able to tell stories around where they can take someone and their business and help them hit their personal goals and their business goals.
The other thing is take a look at how your business is functioning. I don’t know that there has ever been a more important time to win through partnering. Partnering with us, to offload expenses, in terms of how you function. Partnering with other members where they have specializations you may not. It’s going to be really critical, because this is no longer the day where you can do everything for everybody. But you still have the need to continue to own the customer relationships. You need a little bit of help to do that. I would say customers need to focus and they need to partner and that’s going to be a differentiation point between what helps people win and lose.
Last, I would encourage people to think with a wider net. Here’s an example of something that we’re thinking through as a council. VTN is a North American organization. This is a big world, and end users are becoming more global in conversations. That presents the question of should we be thinking beyond our immediate footprint, in terms of the next five to 10 years. We have eight or nine companies that have a geographic footprint outside of North America. That may be something that picks up. I think it’s something we need to pay attention to. … We’ve got to continue to push the envelope and proactively find what the next thing is. I think that we’ve done a good job with that as a community. How do we maintain that legacy? It’s going to be thinking differently, thinking wider.
