Tech Data Canada announced its 2008 marketing initiatives in the hopes that the new programs will help the company grow its current reseller community.
With the recent announcement of the next week’s marketing activities, Rick Reid, president of Tech Data Canada, says the 2008 marketing program has been designed to reflect the sales that the company has seen over the past year.
“We want to grow our resellers to match some of our larger resellers,” Reid said “We’re going to go after specific sales segments with events and initiatives that we think will help us support our current momentum to successfully grow our business.”
Greg Myers, vice-president of marketing at Tech Data Canada, says for the company’s TechSelect partners, the program has a number of different initiatives built into it.
“The program will have regional chapter meetings,” Myers said. “We’re also going to do this on the West [coast], in Quebec City, Ontario and the Maritimes region.” Myers said the company will also have Web training complete with Web resources for partners to utilize using the TechSelect partner portal.
In addition to this, Myers further explains Tech Data Canada has also implemented what it calls its Business Builder Tour. This, he says, is similar to that of a two-day conference and will be held in different cities, including Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver. For Ottawa and Quebec City, the conferences are scheduled to last for a full day. These tours have been designed in such a way that partners will be able to actively engage with Tech Data to raise any issues or concerns they may have around how the company supports its products or anything else around that matter.
“We’ll be holding this tour in partnership with our vendors,” Myers said. “We’ll be launching this program in April 2008 and it will run all the way through to October 2008,” Myers added.
Along with its Tech Data Canada business partners, Myers reinforces the fact that system builders both still and will always remain to be a critical market segment for the company moving forward.
“We’ll offer to them training, Web resources and other customized elements,” Myers said.
In particular, it’s the SMB space that Tech Data Canada hopes to target with these new marketing initiatives.
“With the growth of this market in Canada, the SMB business space represents a significant chunk of Canada’s overall market,” Myers said. “We’re pleased that we now have a sales and marketing strategy that’s probably better aligned now than it has ever been in the past.”
In short, Myers says with the new marketing initiatives planned for 2008, the message that Tech Data has for its partners is a simple one.
“We want customers and our partners to recognize that with these new announcements, there’s more of a welcoming tone resonating with them and us,” Myers adds.