Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Jennifer Anaya - Mentorship, Leadership, and the Channel's Next Evolution
Trust, relationships, and connection—these are the true foundations of the channel, and few understand this better than Jennifer Anaya, Chief Marketing Officer at Ingram Micro. In this episode of Partnerships Unraveled, Jennifer shares how Ingram Micro is reshaping distribution with innovative technology, unified messaging, and a relentless focus on people.
We explore why trust is the currency of the channel, how mentorship (both giving and receiving) has shaped Jennifer’s career, and why the future of distribution is all about connection. She also unpacks Ingram Micro’s groundbreaking platforms, Xvantage and Ultra, and how they’re eliminating friction to help partners scale. Plus, Jennifer challenges the industry to shift from vendor-first marketing to outcome-driven, customer-centric messaging.
If you’re navigating the complexities of the modern channel—whether in distribution, vendor marketing, or partner enablement—this conversation is packed with insights you won’t want to miss.
Connect with Jennifer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferbaieranaya/
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Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships, and channel on a weekly basis. My name is Alex Whitford, I'm the VP of Revenue here at Channex and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, jennifer. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:I'm doing well, alex, thank you.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm very excited today. As our listeners know, I'm a huge fan of distribution and I often say that the people who work within distribution know the channel better than anyone because they have a perfect sort of view and landscape of sort of both sides of the river. Maybe, if they're uninitiated, you could give us a bit of a rundown of who you are and where you work.
Speaker 1:Yes, so I am Jennifer Anaya. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at Ingram Micro and I am based in our headquarter office in Irvine. And Ingram Micro is we reach 90% of the world's population with technology, which is pretty mind blowing and we also offer all types of services for channel partners, from financing to a giant portfolio of solutions and marketing, of course, as well as lots of technical resources to help them fill gaps as they're growing and expanding their businesses.
Speaker 2:Awesome, Jennifer. Well, I was excited to have you on. Your name has come up from a few different people, both within your organization and outside of your organization. You recently won the CRN Awards Lifetime Achievement Award, and one of the words that came back from both that speech but also from people who've spoken about you was trust. You seem to have really built trust with people who are currently in your organization or have been. Why is that so important to the sort of culture and style that you run with?
Speaker 1:Well, I think you know our business the business of the channel, the business of technology quite honestly really relies and hinges on trust, because a lot of businesses depend on our customers all of our manufacturers, software providers, cloud providers to help them in some way, shape or form, create an outcome for their business. And really I believe it's not about the technology, it's about the relationships. So for me, trust is important Because I feel, like you know, we need to. We depend on each other a lot to be able to do our jobs and to be able to show up for all the millions of businesses that we support. For me, too, it's about being transparent. I'm a straight shooter, I always have been, and I also really value relationships and getting to know people beyond just the business sort of boardroom conversations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I always think with sort of trust. It's one of those words that sounds important, right, just sort of conceptually. But the other thing that I think comes along there's a really cynical argument why you should build trust, and you've talked to us through a great framework there, right? We're in a long-term networking game and so if you burn bridges early, those bridges don't come back. I think the other thing that comes with it is it's far more enjoyable, right Is we're actually in the trenches with people that we get on with and that we know have our back. How do you sort of foster that trust within your organization, ensuring that people you know, who are around you, are trustworthy of each other? That it's sort of important to the team that you build.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just Alex.
Speaker 1:People buy from people at the end of the friction and a lot of the time that's involved in doing business in this channel and empower the people to do things that people need to do, like spend time getting to know and understand customers, helping customers through how they can be better serving their businesses and end users, and that's been a big mantra at Ingram Micro. If you ever ask all the hundreds and hundreds of people who work at or thousands of people actually who work at Ingram Micro and the hundreds of people who have worked at Ingram Micro in the channel, they'll tell you the people at Ingram Micro are the best Like it is the best thing about our company, and so if we can use technology to make all of us even better at what we can do and even smarter at how we support the channel, that's what we're all about.
Speaker 2:I love it. I know another thing that is incredibly important and has guided you well and is something that my entire team are going to start rolling their eyes about, because it's something I also bang on about constantly is the importance of mentorship. How has mentorship influenced your career and why do you still focus on it today?
Speaker 1:Well, I'm a huge believer in it, and it's not just mentors of maybe the traditional sense of what you might think of somebody older sort of guiding you along.
Speaker 1:I have mentors who are much younger than me, who have helped me to be a lot smarter about how I look at things or maybe even have a different point of view.
Speaker 1:I've got mentors that are in the industry and outside of the industry Some who have just absolutely made a huge difference in my life and my career. There's also a concept of sponsors, and I think, as a woman, we have to really understand the difference between the two. So mentors are those people who you can sort of be honest with. They can be honest with you, give you that critical feedback and be okay with that conversation. Sponsors are people who put their own professional credibility on the line to support you and they need to know and it kind of goes back to trust that they're going to be able. They need to know that you're a stand up person, that they can, you know, vouch for you and it will be OK and actually vouching for you will make them look better in the end. And there have been many sponsors in my career as well, for so many women in this business to understand who they can start to cultivate in their lives, of people who are willing to be that sponsor and to vouch for them along the way.
Speaker 2:And then I think the thing that I'm constantly surprised about, especially from this podcast, is I very often get to speak to lots of people that I probably don't have much right to speak to, including you, and I find how often they, despite the fact that they seem to be the busiest people in the world, spend time still being mentors to people below them, why and in fact, they tell me that that is one of the best bits of the job, and sometimes they learn more from being a mentor than a mentee, and sometimes they learn more from being a mentor than a mentee. Talk me through your experience, now that you have climbed that ladder and you're you're sat at the top, that you're still spending the time now for other people to help sponsor and mentor them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's just, it's so fulfilling.
Speaker 1:You know, I think it's again it comes back to people and really supporting and helping people be the best that they can be.
Speaker 1:You know, I learned actually from my mom that if I can leave and help, help people to be better and learn more and create value beyond what I personally can do, then I will have succeeded. My mom was my mom. Both my parents were entrepreneurs and they had a business for many years and helped many, many people, you know, go on to doing all kinds of great things in their lives and in their careers going to college, all kinds of things and so that was a basis for me and that is a basis of my values and how I see my role as an executive at, you know, a large publicly traded company, and as I see my role in this industry and you teach what you most need to learn sometimes, sometimes, and so I think that that's probably maybe why you hear that from other people is you kind of remind yourself of things right as you're talking about them or explaining them, and that's always a great thing too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I, the framework that I sort of use with my team here is you want a strategic mentor and a tactical mentor, and the strategic mentor is someone that you know is 10, 15, 20 years ahead of you and can help point you in the general right direction and maybe talk about some of the bigger things. And then the piece that I really like is the tactical mentor, and that's someone who is just better at the thing than you, and what I've sometimes found is that those two things can actually overlap right Is that you can be a tactical mentor for the person that is your strategic mentor, because your skill sets sort of overlap in a very sort of cohesive way. And that's where we sort of get into this lovely channel ecosystem where we can just sort of all help each other out. It's a very enjoyable place to be.
Speaker 1:Well, it's also great to have mentors or be mentors to people who are really different than you. Great to have mentors or be mentors to people who are really different than you, right, cause then you see things from a different perspective. Um, and it was funny, I was talking to my daughter last night, actually, who's 20. And I think that when you're that age, you think I don't really know anything to help people. And I was basically telling her no, you've helped me. From the things you've said, I look at things differently. And she's like wow, my mom actually listened to me and suggested and I said, yeah, I mean, why not? You taught me a lot, right? So I don't think age matters in the whole mentorship equation.
Speaker 2:Awesome, that's great to hear. Maybe, then, the sort of foundation and the core principle is people and trust, but as we sort of pivot to tech and innovation, I know that Ingram has made some significant investments in tools designed to drive partner growth. Can you tell me a little bit about why that is so important and how tools like Xvantage and Ingram Micro Ultra are helping partners really achieve the goals that they need to hit?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we are really. We set out about three years ago to really redefine how distribution can work in this IT channel and how we can make B2Bs work a whole lot better. I said it sort of earlier is what can we do to help the people do what people need to do, and to take and use technology to take all of the transactional time and friction out of the way that we do business in the channel. It's not easy and it's very time consuming and it's a bit archaic even in the way that we all do business together. So what we're doing is we're really building technology that is specific to the way businesses can work together, and B2B is, you know, something that we believe in is, you know, absolutely an ecosystem of businesses supporting one another, partnering with one another.
Speaker 1:So, as for our part, ingram Micro is creating a platform that allows these connections.
Speaker 1:So it's not just about the volume of transactions. It's about the connection and the personalization of giving our customers, and even the people that work inside of their businesses, the information they need, the support they need from us being able to come to them at the right place in the right time with what they need, either from a product or a solutioning standpoint. So that's what Xvantage is, is it's really a platform for our customers to interact with us, our vendors and each other program methodology to reward all of our customers for everything they do at Ingram Micro. I think in our channel we tend to think very product specific or even vendor or brand specific, but our customers work in a multi-vendor solutioning type of manner. There's at any given time, on average of six different products that could go into one solution. So, as Ingram Micro, how can we support our customers in getting access to all the solutions they need and also giving them the benefit of being rewarded for offering all those solutions together to benefit their end customer?
Speaker 2:It's funny you're talking about the sort of six different brands that can come together for one solution. Why? I think people in distribution marketing might have the most complicated job. Because I think it's quite easy to take a sales message to market right. We can talk to a partner and say, hey, product x works with product y and it's going to deliver outcome. Zed makes sense. We can. We can speak that truth. Unifying the brands in a cohesive marketing strategy that's complicated. I think vendors struggle to build that those brands together directly, even when you know there's lots of partnership people involved and it's one of the things that's most complicated about distribution. Maybe a two-tier question One, why is that sort of unified messaging important? And two, how do you go about making it happen?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so unified messaging is really about the customer at the end of the day. So part of the thing I think we get tripped up in marketing in this industry is we focus way too much on the products and what they do and how they work. And if I were to take myself out of the industry and put you know my CMO hat in company X, I would be a buyer of technology. I buy a lot of it actually, right For Anger Micro and how we do what we have to do for marketing inside Anger Micro. I don't care what works with what and how. I care about being able to deliver a unified experience for marketing, being able to make sure all my data is connected, being able to manage all of the work that we're doing across the world. Like these are the things I care about. How it works and what works I don't care about.
Speaker 1:Right, and that is how we need to be talking really about technology is what are the outcomes that it's creating? What's the benefit to the business? As a line of business leader, what should I be thinking about as I'm making these decisions? And and, quite honestly, who can I trust as an advisor in making those decisions right? Those, that's sort of the context of how we need to be marketing in this industry and then we can turn around and talk to their it. You know professionals about the who, the what and the how and the why, right, but it's really a two-part conversation and we've traditionally made it very one-part.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I completely agree. The sort of evangelism piece that I always talk about is no one knows what's in an iPhone, and yet we all seem to buy one, right? And the number one brand in the world worked this out very quickly, which is we're not going to tell you much about the sort of inner workings, we're just going to tell you what you want to know, which is, hey, you're buying status, or you're buying a feeling, or you're buying an ecosystem, which, by the way, if it works in B2C, it definitely works in B2B, right? So talk about the outcome, talk about the problem, talk about the pain. And then, yeah, we can glue in all the different technology to make that work. But you can understand from a partner's perspective when they get told, hey, this microphone does X, y, Z, then suddenly that's what they're going to say to their end user and that's not particularly helpful to that deal.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, and there's a reason why we buy the iPhone, right, and it's a word that we don't talk often in the IT channel and it's convenience and ease, right it's. You know everybody hated giving up their BlackBerry. You know keyboard, everybody loved that right. My boss in particular, I think, was the last BlackBerry user standing. You know Paul Bay, he loved his BlackBerry.
Speaker 1:But the convenience of having basically your life on a very small device that you can bring with you wherever you go and hopefully not lose that makes all the difference and trumps whatever features or things we liked. How do we deliver convenience to the people who are serving and make it a lot easier for them to then turn around and deliver convenience and a better experience downstream to the companies and the individuals they're serving? Right, and that to us at Ingram Micro is the key B2C experience into this whole B2B chaotic world and what we can be doing to use technology to streamline that and make a deal. That could literally take days and special pricing back and forth and calls and emails and into literally minutes or even seconds. And that way Now we've got salespeople who can free up their time and go talk to more customers or talk to the ones they're serving to understand. All right, how are we going to help you support that technology downstream into the way you're integrating it?
Speaker 2:sort of collaborate together is. We're starting to hear mutterings from customers and partners and some really, I think, forward-thinking vendors, around creating vendor agnostic messaging, where it's like thought leadership that doesn't include any vendors. But then they trust that, hey, this partner sells brand X all the time and so every time an end user wants to talk about this thing, even though their logo's not on it or their messaging's not on it or their product's not on it, they trust that the partner's going to service them. That's quite a complicated thing for vendors in the channel, because it's very not how we work today. How do you sort of conceptualize that? Do you think that's a strategy that has legs? Do you think it's advisable?
Speaker 1:100% and it's really kind of comes back to a typical marketing strategy of goodwill, connecting with what the customer is needing and looking for. It's funny we, in a couple of weeks, we are hosting the second annual event for our Trust X Alliance partner community event for our TrustX Alliance partner community. It's a leadership summit and we bring together the top leaders across the companies that are members of TrustX, literally from different parts of the world, and it's a leadership summit where it's a retreat. We have it at a really great place this year it's going to be in Dana Point, california, right view of the ocean and we bring in keynote speakers who talk about leadership. They talk about change management. We're going to have a specialist on innovation. We're going to have somebody talking about friction killers and how do you kill friction inside of your company. He's actually a very prominent Stanford professor and hilarious, huggy Rao is his name and it's two days of people learning together and about things. And did I mention anything about technology in any of that? No, and we have our vendor partners joining us, as well as our micro executives, as well as our customers and our top executives at our customers.
Speaker 1:So it's just a mind meld of really top people learning from one another, and what we heard last year when we did this event there was a lot of skepticism going in like, okay, well, wait a second, how are we going to show ROI?
Speaker 1:Because you know we're not really going to talk about business. It's like, yeah, but the outcome of that were customers saying this was the most incredible two days that I have spent in my business ever, right, and I worked on my business, not in my business, which was really important. And I worked on my business, not in my business, which was really important. We had vendors saying I had the most insane conversations and I got to know these partners at a totally different level. That was the best experience I've ever had. And I had an Ingram Micro executive say like, wow, you know, the collaboration and the level of conversation coming out of that that then we could go take action on later was incredible. So that's a real life kind of you know way that we're experiencing and really leading, I think, that effort in the channel because, let's face it, we don't all have to talk about business to do business it comes back to relationships, right, and building that trust together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I. The more and more that I'm in the channel, and maybe the more and more I get older, I'm starting to see that you know, there's a real cynical reason why we do a lot of stuff, right, hey, it's going to make us money and that pays the bills and that's really important. But finding the balance between the softer, warmer stuff, what you realize, what I think young, hungry Alex would have said is that's a waste of time. I'm focused on dollars. This is what's going to make us win, and the more I realize I drift, more this way the money goes up. Actually, right, as you spend time building relationships and really understanding people's perspectives and maybe not taking the short-term, very measurable ROI for a longer-term, more expansive view, I imagine there was lots of people in your business that were like Jennifer, how the hell are we going to measure ROI on this in three, six months' time? And yet 12 months' time we're talking about, hey, we're still seeing the ripples of that investment.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Awesome, maybe pivoting into a future vision. Distribution was, I think, certainly a long time ago. It was about logistics and a bit of finance. We are not in that world anymore, but I also think the role of distribution is going to continue to innovate and change as AI plays a role, as M&A plays a role, as technology brands unify. Talk to me about where you think distribution's headed and where that value will change.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really think the value is in connection and because it takes six different technologies to make a solution on average right. It's really about connecting the expertise. We've got lots of people in the industry that have very specific expertise. It's tough to be able to manage a solution end to end, you know fully. And we also have so many managed service providers who are the tech executives on behalf of the companies they're serving and supporting, and they have to be experts at everything. But they can't be right.
Speaker 1:So it really kind of comes down to partnerships. It comes down to being able to be connected to the right people to get things done and it also comes down to making sure we're together creating an outcome for the businesses we're serving and also for a better experience and using technology, Because we're. Let's face it, every company pretty much in the world has become a technology company, all so interconnected and using so much technology to meet, to do business, to serve customers and such. So really, distribution is around managing those connections and around making sure that those partners, those customers that we're all serving, get the support they need as a business partner.
Speaker 2:Awesome. I'm excited for where the channel's headed. I think we see this sort of ripple effects of how the channel grows, I think touching more and more parts of the world and more and more industries, and that's something that makes me extremely excited. On this podcast, we're also a fan of connections. We always ask our current guests to recommend who our next guest should be. Jennifer, who did you have in mind?
Speaker 1:I would love to nominate Mary Hagerson from Aruba. I think that you know she is an unsung hero inside of Aruba. I think she's wicked, smart and she'd be a great person to have on the podcast.
Speaker 2:Awesome, mary, we're coming through. Thank you, jennifer, for sharing your insights today. It's been awesome.
Speaker 1:All right, thank you so much.