in the channel

The London Olympics 2012 were dreadful.

I mean, the event was spectacular, enjoyed by billions around the world and rightly showcased London as the world capital.

The Games were the backdrop and soundscape to a period of my personal and professional life that was as challenging as it has ever been and the scale of which is a topic I am happy share in private to offer the full context of the first part of my mantra; Work Hard.

I picked up a role as Head of DMR for OKI, a huge Japanese corporation and, a little paradoxically, a miniscule channel vendor with tiny single digit market share in a low single digit technology stack at the likes of Misco, Insight and Equanet. Big Brother (literally) owned the space and I was told OKI’s presence was vanishingly small. So what to do, how to raise the profile of a small brand that is essentially known for desktop black and white and dot matrix printers? Let that sink in. Dot. Matrix.

The answer was hard work, a lot of miles, and a constant, always-on attitude to learning and making connections. I was living in Essex at the time and would spend hundreds of hours on the road traveling to The North, across The Pennines, down through The Midlands and back home all week. I received full backing from the OKI leadership team when I came back with idea after idea, often mimicked from the big vendors and scaled to budget, culminating in an unprecedented “Christmas in New York” incentive. In less than 2 years, OKI went from below specialist label printers to 2nd in wallet share across all three partners (very briefly topping Brother in one) and still to this day me being recognised by some more tenured channel folks as “OKI Matt”, or simply “OKI”.

Hard work was recognised and the bright lights of the big city came calling, and this city was Beijing, or Lenovo, whichever you prefer. Joining in early 2014 in an esoteric role to support growth in the hot topic of the time; Mid Market.

Lenovo is as exactly as you would expect; a large, complex, hyper-ambitious organisation. I came onboard with a loose remit to spread the gospel according to YY on Mid Market, given a list of partners and distributors to visit like a 19th century US horse preacher, and don’t stop until all anyone thought of when they heard “Mid Market” was “LENOVO!” So I did what I did at OKI, but on metaphorical steroids and with the behemoth name of Lenovo on my freshly-pressed polo shirt.

It worked, on the back of the team’s efforts a more established Mid Market partner team was set up and is still going today (as far as I know) enjoying significant success in being an end customer facing, partner sales engine.

Here I am, fully immersed, every day in the channel building Lenovo’s profile and at the same time making, nurturing and enjoying connections from Bathgate in Scotland to Portsmouth on the South Coast. I’m proud to say that many of my closest friends, longest allies, mentors and counsels came from this time and every M6 services, stay at the Copthorne Hotel, Salford and long forgotten nights of many tales stay with me and I am very grateful.

A change in leadership in 2016 (when isn’t there one in the channel) came at Lenovo and I was pulled from the horse preacher side show and into the glare of the main stage spotlight. Installed as Platinum Channel Manager, or similar, I forget the exact title, I found myself at the helm of an internal and well tenured external team of 18 responsible for managing the relationships with Softcat, Insight, XMA, SCC, CCS Media and 40+ others and the expected volume, revenue, profit and wallet share growth. Hundreds of millions of dollars of budget to achieve.

Over the next 3 years we transformed our part of the channel, helped enormously by a genuine gilded age of a channel team inside Lenovo, and grew every partner in every facet of the business. We also cracked the relationship and engagement barriers in building a perception of Lenovo as the leading light in the channel, ultimately winning the coveted CRN Awards Vendor of the Year 2018 at a time when HP, Cisco, Dell and Microsoft were all in the mix.

Up to my exit in 2019 we learnt so much about the impact of structure and communications in performance and that if your team is treated in the same positive and transparent manner as your partners then everyone is having the same experience, therefore there is less friction and obstacles are approached and navigated together.

Never missed a target, lost only 1 external team member to a competitor, established regular internal and external cadence with meaning, built a reputation in the channel that is still spoken of today, by some, as the highest standard of vendor behaviour. A high achieving period alongside an all-star cast of channel legends, it could not be going any better.

And then, I walked out.