Partner content: The SMAs and Westcon - meet the contenders

CRN speaks to Westcon’s marketing director about the distributor’s accomplishments in the last year and their nominations at the Awards

The 2023 Sales and Marketing Awards are coming up fast and as we prepare to find out the winners at this year's ceremony on Thursday 29 June at Leonardo Royal Hotel, Tower Bridge, CRN met some of the contenders to talk about the past year's successes and what it would mean to win an award at the SMAs.

Today we speak to Robert Watts, who's the marketing director at Westcon UKI. He joined the company in 2009 as a junior digital marketing executive, and has progress through many roles and divisions, today leading the Westcon UK field marketing team alongside the sales and commercial leads for networking and cyber security.

Watts' team is nominated this year for the Best Marketing Campaign award, with their Fire & Ice incentive campaign for partners.

Westcon is also nominated for the Best Channel Finance Support Team/Initiative award.

Why do you think awards like the SMAs matter?

We see are fortunate to work in an incredibly creative and diverse industry with the latest marketing technologies at our fingertips.

For those of us with a competitive nature, it's great to see our work judged against that of our peers.

For our leadership team, we strive to see our people recognised for their successes, especially those early in their careers.

The entire team get a boost from seeing their efforts recognised.

What would winning this award mean to your company?

Receiving the Best Distributor Campaign Award would demonstrate how we deliver first-class campaigns for our vendors that truly deliver measurable return for our partners.

It also proves our people development processes are working well, as many BDMs and Marketing Execs new to the business, all worked in harmony on this campaign to deliver these results.

What would you say is your company's proudest achievement over the past year?

As a sales organisation, our proudest achievement has to be our record-breaking UK growth because it has allowed us to increase recruitment, improve our service offering and further invest in partner data insights tools and cloud services.

On a personal level, I'm proud to see our commitment to protecting the environment with our sustainability achievements and ongoing commitments.

What have been the biggest challenges of 2023 so far and how have you overcome them? How have your people helped with that?

In the channel marketing function, one of the biggest challenges has resourcing the opportunity as we've grown.

The demand for our market intelligence data, used by sales and marketing teams alike, has grown exponentially from existing and new partners.

We have introduced processes, used automation and educated people with new analysts, BDMs and account managers all getting involved.

Data insights really are the foundation of good account management and business development.

How do you think the channel has changed over the past year and what changes do you think it still needs to make?

Speaking personally, I would like to see more eco-friendly initiatives in global IT manufacturing and infrastructure.

We now consistently see sustainability credentials being required in tenders with evidence of net-zero achievements however some responses can be misleading with offsetting.

The UK channel has made great progress locally but there's still vast potential to influence our global supply chain partners with our purchasing power and help achieve true emissions reductions globally.

What do you see as the main opportunities for the channel in the coming year? How do you plan to capitalise on those opportunities?

Efficiencies. As IT budgets become constrained and major cloud platforms broaden their offerings, partners are expected to come under pressure to demonstrate greater ROI and competitive advantage to ever more knowledgeable customers with their IT purchases.

Partners will need to focus more on consolidation and optimisation of tools which requires deeper understanding of the customer's business, even at an SMB level.