Sales & Marketing Awards 2024: Q&A with Angus Shaw, sales director at Brigantia

In this sponsor Q&A, Angus Shaw shares why the SMAs matter to Brigantia, and some of the cyber distie's key focus areas for 2024

Why do you think awards like the SMAs matter?

Many channel awards focus on technical excellence and sales. While it's great that we celebrate that success, the SMAs celebrate the people and culture behind it.

That's special because there's more to a channel business than sales figures. The channel is full of great workplaces and creative, hardworking people who love their work. We should celebrate those people.

What would winning this award mean to your company?

Winning Best Company to Work For would mean the world. Brigantia's success is based on putting brilliant, knowledgeable people in a collaborative environment. To make that work, we need working here to feel rewarding, challenging, exciting and inclusive.

We've worked hard to make Brigantia feel like that for everyone. The award would feel like an affirmation.

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

There are many contenders for this. 2023 was a record year in financial results, and Q1 of this year was also record-breaking. We've also onboarded ten more people to the team in the last year.

That said, I'm most proud of how we've achieved this. Brigantia succeeds by adding value for MSP partners. A great example is the onboarding of Sendmarc, our newest vendor, who specialises in DMARC.

DMARC is now a huge topic in the channel, not just about email deliverability but also domain security. We brought the Sendmarc to launch in anticipation of this, and it's been an enormous success.

It's built in a highly MSP-friendly way, protecting partners while enabling them to add another revenue stream and manage their customers efficiently. All our vendors are subject to a highly rigorous selection process, and it's a point of pride to see that vindicated.

What have been the biggest challenges of 2024 so far and how have you overcome them? How have your people helped with that?

We succeed as a distributor by helping MSP partners succeed. That means taking their challenges on and finding ways to help.

Broader economic uncertainty is always a challenge, but it is more complicated. Downturns often lead to increased spending on IT services, and the last couple of years have been no exception.

However, increased spending only benefits some MSPs, and some have found new business harder to come by. Our people have doubled down on helping those partners. We've produced marketing toolkits. We've helped partners run customer events.

We've advised them on ways to cross-sell complementary services to existing customers. And as we always do, we've prioritised bringing the most MSP-friendly vendors to market.

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

The channel changes with the broader business landscape. IT estates are becoming increasingly complex, even in smaller businesses, and cybersecurity postures must keep up. This can be demanding for busy MSPs, who must balance efficiency with service quality.

To meet those demands, MSPs may have to improve their use of automation in service delivery. But it's also about finding and making the most of the right partners. I'd encourage all channel businesses, wherever they sit, to reach out to partners and find ways to collaborate.

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

There are considerable opportunities to be won in the cybersecurity space where we operate. To start with, there's a growing awareness of cybersecurity among the business community. This is real progress.

The other big opportunity is the sheer scale of today's threat landscape, which keeps evolving. For instance, DMARC was an obscure topic even in the IT channel this time last year. Now, DMARC-as-a-service is a growing market with enormous potential.

We plan to capitalise on these opportunities by continuing with our current strategy. We bring the best, most MSP-friendly vendors to market. From there, our highly knowledgeable team will continue providing all they can to help vendors make the most of them, from technical advice to sales and marketing support.