Boxxe's new CRO: 'The reseller market is ready for some disruption'

Ex Samsung, HP and Tech Data exec Graham Long talks to CRN about expanding into the corporate space to take on the big guns of the industry

The reseller market is "ready for some disruption" according to Boxxe's new chief revenue officer, who told CRN that the York-based firm is set to expand into the corporate market to take on the likes of Computacenter, Softcat and CDW.

Graham Long was appointed as Boxxe's CRO last month after his predecessor Joel Berwitz departed the reseller last December.

Based in York and headed up by industry stalwart Phil Doye, software licencing specialist Boxxe has its roots selling to the public sector through customers such as the Ministry of Defence and Defra.

The firm turned over £238.3m in calendar 2020, up 16 per cent on the previous year.

Speaking to CRN, Long argued that the UK reseller landscape has remained largely unchanged since he joined the industry, with companies such as Computacenter, Softcat, CDW UK (previously Kelway) and SCC taking the lion's share of the market.

"I dare say, if you were to look at the CRN top 20 five years ago and look at it today, it'll pretty much be the same," he said.

"It resonated with me to come and join Phil [Doye] at Boxxe. We share similar goals in that we both think the market is ready for some disruption."

The newly appointed CRO has previously worked atas director of sales and marketing for HP, Before that, he managed HP's large format business from Barcelona where he worked alongside current HP CEO Enrique Lores.

He then moved to Samsung where he led the vendor's enterprise business.

Long estimated that around 90 per cent of Boxxe's business is in the public sector, serving high-profile customers such as the Ministry of Defence and Defra.

Boxxe's footprint in the corporate space remains "minimal", said Long, but that could soon change as part of the firm's upcoming expansion plans.

"We will look at every option available to us to expand as quickly as we can. We are proactively recruiting at the moment and we're looking to significantly increase the size of our corporate sales team," he said.

"Nothing's off the table for us. If it makes sense for us to do an acquisition or two, then we will. But we're not going to wait to do an acquisition before we start recruiting people."

Long said that it's often "very hard" for resellers to earn the trust of the "ultra-secure" organisations that Boxxe counts as customers. He said that going to corporate customers with Boxxe's credentials puts the firm in a strong position.

"Were relatively unknown in the market, so we've got to do a much better job of telling people who Boxxe are. Being the organisation that we are, I don't think it's unreasonable for us to have an opinion and I think we need to be brave enough to share that opinion.

"I think that there's an opportunity for us to be more vocal, to be more proactive and to work with those vendors that we've identified as being key to our success and to our growth and to work with them to help educate the market."

The CRO said that Boxxe could look at doing more transactional product resell to customers to complement its core services offering.

"With Boxxe, we've come at it the other way. We've come at it through selling the complex solutions and now we're saying ‘oh, by the way, we can do everything else as well'."

"For all of those customers that we're currently supplying complex services to, they also buy laptops and printers and storage devices and everything else. So if we're supplying them with the high-end, technical product, why aren't we doing everything else?

"If I allow our customers to go and engage with another reseller then I'm just giving those other companies the opportunity to sell into my customer base. And ultimately, of course, they're going to try selling more."

Long isn't the only new member to join Boxxe's leadership team this year. The reseller also appointed Phil Barrington as head of business development, Andrea Preston as chief people officer, Ruth Patterson as general counsel and company secretary and promoted Jorden Jones to chief marketing officer.

It also brought in Michael Brodigan as its new public sector sales director earlier this year.

Long said that Boxxe deliberately hired people from outside of the channel to bring in fresh perspectives into the business.

Jones previously spent almost five years at comparethemarket.com before his move to Boxxe while Barrington was ICT director of HealthTrust Europe.

Long meanwhile can bring his experiences managing channel partners for vendors such as HP and Samsung.

"When I was sat on the other side of the table at Samsung as an example, or HP, managing the marketing funds, I used to get so frustrated," he said.

"Because the resellers would come to me with the same old marketing plans that would ask me for an amount of money to go and do some activity. My comment back to them was always the same: share a plan with me that challenges me. Certainly, as Boxxe, we will be going to the partners that we're working with and we will be ambitious in the plans we suggest and the way in which we want to go to market."