TD SYNNEX's Bespoke Support

Jared Cary

Senior Director, IBM & Red Hat TD Synnex UK&I

This Monday I hosted the first sales stand-up call of the final month of our fiscal year. As we look to close out on another record performance, a couple of questions were front of mind:

• How can we continue to innovate?
• What’s going to drive our next wave of growth?

There’s also the small matter of IBM’s Business Partner Christmas Lunch, where we plan to celebrate our success together, but that’s for another post…

A business-led approach to innovation

At the heart of what we do as a team, and across the wider TD SYNNEX business, is the desire to make the process of doing business easier for everyone involved. Whether that’s via technological, commercial or financial means, we’re always looking at how we can leverage our significant resources to break down barriers that hinder growth.

Credit for creating growth

As anyone who runs a sales organisation will know, there’s nothing quite like ‘net new’ growth. Everybody wants it, but sometimes it’s not the biggest players that are best placed for first-mover advantage in emerging markets – you need a niche and nimble partner.

In the area of Generative AI in particular, and with the shift to SaaS models, credit providers can feel nervous of smaller partners with nascent skills but not a lot of money. The shame of it is that without funding, these talented partners can’t do the first deal that will get them on the credit ladder and the potential is lost.

So, the question we asked ourselves at TD SYNNEX was: “Do we want to see exciting new partners wither on the vine due to a lack of appetite from traditional credit providers and insurers?”. The answer, of course, was: “No!”.

Stepping outside the silos

The beauty of TD SYNNEX is that we get to step outside of silos and employ lateral thinking where we bring in our best people from across the business. A great example of this is our approach to credit.

As an organisation that is committed to creating 100 new Gold IBM watsonx partners, it would be naïve to think that every business we engage with will have a gold-plated credit rating.

And, when we looked at what’s possible when you’re #71 on the Fortune 500 list, it soon became obvious that we can help to unlock that partner potential.

Deal with it

There are lots of different deal scenarios we encounter and our approach is to asses each deal on its own merits.

It could be a brand new organisation has uncovered a deal but doesn’t have the financial history to access the terms they need. It might be the nature of a SaaS deal would max out a partner’s credit line and put them on ‘stop’. It could be a multi-year deal requires loading up front to take advantage of favourable terms, but the partner can’t quite stretch to it.

We know that these deals are often large and complex, so why would we offer a simple ‘no’ as our answer? Instead, we have the support of the entire Senior Leadership Team including Regional Finance Director Steve Philp and Managing Director Simon Bennett , to look at these deals in the round.

As a result, our solutions are tailored on the basis of expertise, acumen and years of experience from across the team. This might include offering a 2nd credit line to take pressure off the partner’s standard credit account. It might be that we take a collective view of a group of start-ups in the same way an insurer would do. It could be that we look to insurers that don’t typically operate in the IT market.

Real business value

And partners love this approach. What I hear is how much they value the ability to access real people to discuss their commercial issues and aspirations.

From talking about incentive programme intricacies with Internal Sales, to sitting with our Regional Finance Director to look at funding deals that materially impact a partner’s fiscal position, they see that our emphasis on innovation drives real business value.

Credit where credit’s due

Given what we’ve achieved in the past year, I was especially proud to accompany Simon Bennett, Managing Director, TD SYNNEX Advanced Solutions, to collect the prestigious IBM 2024 EMEA Recognition Award for Best Business Innovation. You can read more about that here.

The real credit, however, must go to the wider team who make these things happen and, of course, to our partner community who trust us to work with them to achieve their goals for innovation and growth. If you’re reading this and you’re not a TD SYNNEX partner yet, we’d love to have a real business conversation with you.