Martine Dodwell-Bennett has been confirmed as the new group sales and business development director at Steljes, following the one-time contractor’s successful tenure as head of product management.

“I was given the job for a year as head of sales and deployed to go and discover the role and understand what we do for our channel, so I have been quietly working with the channel for a year,” she said.

Her focus will be how to work better with the channel to grow both resellers’ and the distributor’s businesses.

Dodwell-Bennett joined Steljes as a contractor in mid-2005 and became permanent head of product management in 2007.

Graham Wylie, group product marketing director at Steljes, said Dodwell-Bennett had met her targets weeks early and impressed the education-focused distributor with her lively ideas.

“She came up with a very interesting way of encouraging the team towards higher targets. You know sales; they’re often into public humiliation. If they had 110 per cent, the board would dress up as Harry Potter characters for them,” he said.

“Now we just need something to keep that success going.”

Wylie said the 2009-2010 financial year for Steljes held various challenges – not least retaining revenue in an increasingly competitive public sector market with shrinking margins.

“Our partners will see increased pressures,” Wylie said. “We are trying to package everything together more to help them.”

Traditional models of marketing, such as simply providing market development funds to larger partners, were no longer working as well as previously, so Steljes was looking at ways of assisting partners with specific strengths.

“Partners who can say, ‘I am going after this product or this opportunity’, are the ones we will target,” Wylie said.