Over the past three years, we’ve worked with leading technology distributor, TD SYNNEX, to support their reseller partner network to create and execute their go-to-market strategies. As a trusted advisor, TD SYNNEX works with global IT names such as Microsoft, AWS, Cisco and IBM, while supporting its reseller network with the expertise and content to take well-known vendor solutions to market.  

Through our partnership, we’re always looking for ways to add value to the great work that the TD SYNNEX teams are already doing – whether that be breaking down the jargon to make a solution easier to understand or experimenting with marketing message and positioning. The focus of our most recent collaboration aimed at breaking down the complexities of Microsoft Azure.  

The expansive Microsoft platform offers over 200 applications which help solve a range of IT infrastructure and cloud challenges for the businesses, yet differing levels of experience and competency among TD SYNNEX’s partner network meant the solution was trickier for less experienced partners to take to market. Spotting an opportunity to rethink how TD SYNNEX support their partners, we hypothesised that if we could increase the baseline knowledge and confidence across the partner network, we could make taking Azure solutions to market a much easier feat.  

 Diving into the discovery 

Particularly in the IT space, one of the most effective ways to market a solution is telling the consumer how it can help them to make their lives easier or overcome a certain challenge. Kicking off this project, we took a back-to-basics approach, mapping out a lot of the common challenges customers have and then began to link these back to one or more of the solutions across the Azure portfolio. 

Diagnostic delivery   

Delivering effective training and support to a growing community of Microsoft partners can be a challenge within itself. In a bid to work more strategically, we began to build out a simple diagnostic tool which partners could use to troubleshoot common IT challenges advise customers on the appropriate Azure solution. The tool is currently in BETA testing with a select group of partners, with plans to roll-out as a customer-facing self-assessment tool in the near future. 

Supporting partners at scale 

In addition to creating a BETA diagnostic tool, we collectively identified a need to support partners with collateral and sales enablement. 

With our discovery framework in place, we were able to begin mapping out full-funnel content that related to each of the challenges and solutions identified. 

For the past month, we’ve been testing the effectiveness of the content created with targeted audiences to understand how it performs with a few, which we can then optimise and widen its availability to the TD SYNNEX Azure community. 

Nathan Selby, Client Portfolio Director at Active Profile, said: 

“It’s been great to bring this project to life in such a short space of time; we have adopted a strategic approach to taking complex solutions to market in a way that will really benefit the TD SYNNEX community – and like no other distributor already does. 

We’re only just scratching the surface with what we can do here and I’m excited to continue to work closely with the TD SYNNEX team as we roll this out further.” 

David Keiller, Microsoft Azure Business Manager at TD SYNNEX, said: 

 “We pride ourselves on the value-added work we do to support partners; we’re never content with only supporting our Azure partners transactionally. Instead, we want to get under the skin of the challenges they face so that we can help them to better support existing customers and grow new business revenues. This flagship project with Active Profile is just one of the great initiatives we’ve delivered over the past few years.”

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