Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Jessica McDowell - Redefining Distribution for the Digital Era
Distribution isn’t what it used to be and that’s a good thing. In this episode, we sit down with Jessica McDowell, VP, North America Marketing and Digital Customer Success at TD SYNNEX, to explore how distribution is transforming into a strategic engine for partner growth.
We cover everything from her unique journey across sales, vendor management, and marketing to the technologies and tactics reshaping how partners scale in today’s market. Whether you're rethinking your go-to-market motion or looking to leverage data and, this one’s packed with insight.
In this episode, we explore:
- Why distribution is shifting from logistics to enablement, and what that means for partners
- How Jessica’s background fuels a business-first, ROI-driven approach to channel marketing
- The growing demand for marketing as a service and where partners are getting stuck
- How TD SYNNEX is using data and AI to deliver personalized, scalable partner experiences
If you're a channel leader looking to future-proof your go-to-market strategy and turn data into partner impact, this episode is a must-listen.
Connect with Jessica: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-mcdowell/
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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 Chanix and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest Jessica. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:I'm doing great, Alex. How are you?
Speaker 2:I'm excited we're talking about my favorite topic, which is distribution, and why distribution is awesome. Maybe if the uninitiated you could give us a little bit of an introduction about who you are and what you do.
Speaker 1:I would love to do that. So, Jessica McDowell, I lead North America marketing and digital customer success at TD Cinex, so I'm responsible for our strategic go-to-market partner, enablement all the marketing efforts and events in the region and also a really strong focus on digital in terms of the customer journey. What does that mean? How do we create a great digital experience? And before that, before I stepped into the marketing role, I led our security and networking business for about a decade where I was responsible for business development and vendor management, really across those two technology sectors.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Now, that is a complicated remit, looking after your sort of digital scaling strategy, and we spent a lot of time spinning up a conversation around where distribution has been where it's headed. I think often it was pick back and ship. That's what this day does. That's not your vision for where distribution is today, or even where it's headed. Talk me me through it.
Speaker 1:Couldn't agree more. Years and years, distribution was all about operations and logistics right, how soon can you get it to me? What's my price? How can you help me scale in that manner? But it's evolved and it's evolved quite significantly and I think really the ideal distributor over the next five years is going to be an enabler and an augmenter and an engine for our partners, helping our partners to scale through services, helping our partners to keep up with the technology trends from an understanding and awareness standpoint and awareness standpoint, technology is evolving at such a fast rate that not every it's difficult to keep up.
Speaker 1:It's hard to go and specialize and invest in every single one of those areas that's on the rise and I think that's really where distribution steps and helps. We help our partners scale. You know, and I think, additionally, we have a vast ecosystem that our partners can take advantage of. You know, we've got relationships with thousands and thousands of vendors and we're always looking for those strategic additions to our line card. So I think where distribution can help as technology evolves is to evaluate the technology, evaluate the partner programs and bring the partners into the fold where it makes sense for them and their company. Right. Not one size fits all. So it's meet partners where they are approached.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love it. I think, distribution I'm not sure whether it's by happenstance, by chance, by design, but I always find that I think his margins are just razor thin in distribution land. The requirement to innovate is there, right? It's not just, hey, we're going to make 20 points and life's great, but that's just not distribution land. And so that sort of mandated focus to continue to find new areas, and I think from your perspective, it's how do we augment services?
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Love it. So I remember when you gave me your background and you went vendor management, sales marketing. To be honest, that's weird. Talk me through why and how you made that transition.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, being weird is fine, I'm okay to be weird, no, but I agree it's not a very natural progression. But I got to tell you. You know, looking back on my journey I've been at the company 17 years Looking back on my journey, I'm kind of really grateful and realizing how blessed I was. I say I grew up in the organization and what I mean by that is I gained just deep institutional knowledge, industry knowledge. I learned the business from the ground up right. I started in sales, then went to vendor management, now I'm in marketing, and so what I think that allowed me to do was develop a lot of this cross-functional expertise. It allowed me to kind of create more of a holistic, strategic decision-making approach in general. I learned by doing. I understood the real challenges that were faced by our partners because I was there working through them, you know, right alongside our team.
Speaker 1:So so for me, stepping, stepping from all that sales vendor now into marketing. I came into marketing with a really fresh mindset and perspective on marketing. But from the business side right, how do we get more specific about results and what are we trying to drive? How do we get more targeted in our approach? How do we make sure that we drive a measurable result for our vendors with every dollar invested, because I was the one that had to answer to answer to that, right on the vendor management side, I was the one that was, you know, really working closely with the vendors and making sure that we were able to deliver back an ROI or we didn't invest in areas where we didn't feel like we could drive an ROI. So, all of that to say, I think that I gained knowledge that I wouldn't have been able to gain otherwise, without having, you know, been deep into, you know, the working norms and relationships in each one of those business segments.
Speaker 1:So I think it's helped my approach in marketing. Alex, I do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love it. Right, I think I know plenty of marketers who wish they had more of that commercial vendor understanding, because it just is an extra set of data points to pull from. I can imagine there were also a few challenges. Right, there's new language to speak to new team dynamics. Talk me through how some of the complexities that you had to navigate to land in that.
Speaker 1:Well, I think a lot of it was just building. Lot of it was just building. Yes, I had to learn all the acronyms and you know the tools and the measurements and just a different way to approach the business, right. But in the end the outcome is the same, right, we're trying to drive margin and profit for ourselves and for our partners. I think, from a challenges standpoint, it was, you know, coming into a new team.
Speaker 1:You know I had been working in the security and networking business for the better part of a decade. We, you know that business, we grew it from $300 million to over, you know, nearly $4 million. So you know you're working closely alongside a team for years and years and years and we have low turnover on that team and so you really get to know people. So, stepping into a new team, building that trust, really understanding the inner workings of the team and the dynamics and the skill sets and the strengths, that was the challenging part. But I will say I love that part of the job, right, I love being able to come in and determine how to set people up for success, how to set the business up for success, building on strength. So you know, I guess you know, the challenge is the fun part. I don't know, is that weird? Is that weird too?
Speaker 2:no, that, that that's the dream. Hey, it's all, it's all journey, no destination. Right, that's the. Yeah, that's that, that's the goal. It's funny because I manage the sales and I manage the sales organization and I manage a marketing organization. My constant battle with managing sales people is to get them to manage leading indicators more closely. The irony is, to manage marketing people is to get them to manage and watch lagging indicators more. Right. There's just I don't know whether it's because that's the easier bit to control or whatever it is but the two teams seem to work in complete sort of different methodologies. I know you have focused on driving that marketing team to be much more outcome basedbased in terms of building strategy. Talk me through an example why that's so important. Maybe why that's not so organic or natural for marketing organizations to focus on.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, I think, in the traditional sense of marketing, many people's heads go to mindshare right, marketing is about driving mindshare. It's about being present. Mindshare, right. Marketing is about driving mindshare. It's about being present. It's about, you know, creating and elevating a perception about a brand or a product or whatever you're trying to drive. And while all that is true, I think, within well, anywhere, but certainly within distribution, I think that you have to have a multifaceted approach when it comes to anything specific that you're trying to drive. I'll give you an example.
Speaker 1:We had an opportunity recently come up with one of our vendor partners to onboard partners that were opened up to distribution. Right, they weren't necessarily purchasing through distribution before, but we needed to really build a program to get those partners onboarded through distribution. So we created a multifaceted campaign. Right, we had this wide net, but also a targeted approach. We did social media, we did advertising within our own systems. We leveraged MyShop, which is our white label storefront. We had personalized landing pages.
Speaker 1:But we also had a very targeted element of the campaign driven by data. Right, data that tells us hey, when we call these partners, we need to focus on these things based on what they may have bought from us in the past or what segment that they focused on. We also had very deliberate incentives that we put together for not only our sales reps but also the partners. So again, it's a mixture and multifaceted approach, wide and also very laser focused and as a result, we drove millions of impressions on the wide net that we cast. We had hundreds of individual personalized partner touch points and the campaign is still running and so far we're at over $80 million in sales. So successful and a great example of we knew what the target was, we knew what we had to back into and we took a multifaceted approach to get there.
Speaker 2:I love it. I think, from my perspective, I've always been a salesperson by function and marketing was this sort of thing that lived off in the corner that I didn't really understand, this sort of thing that lived off in the corner that I didn't really understand. And as I've grown my career I think almost one-to-one my understanding of marketing has improved. The bit that I see, especially in the channel, is that I think there's not enough marketing leaders who are channel leaders, who come from that marketing background, because fundamentally, the channel is an awareness game, it's a scalable game, it's a scalable game, it's a breadth game, which are all functions of not one-to-one sales but one-to-many marketing. When you hear that, how do you think about that in the context of where yourself, your organization, functions and why is marketing underutilized in the channel and by partners specifically?
Speaker 1:I think it goes. You know, you said you're a salesperson and you know, I think, going back to how people view marketing, in the traditional sense, partners are focused on sales. If I'm a partner, I'm focused on sales and traditionally sales have been driven through face-to-face interactions, events, meetings. I'm going and meeting with you in person. We're building that rapport and that's worked for years and years and it's going to continue to work.
Speaker 1:But what I think that where we're seeing the biggest shift is the way that people buy and consume.
Speaker 1:You know the way that people consume information. So, while that human element is still so essential, we've got a new generation of decision makers and a new generation of buyers Millennial Gen Z decision makers. They're seeking all their information digitally, right? So if you as a reseller or as a partner, if you're not visible where this new generation of buyers is going and consuming their information, you're not gonna be part of the purchasing equation.
Speaker 1:So, while you still need the human to human element, there's this whole new aspect that's coming in to marketing and it's digital, it's a digital customer experience, it's digital information consumption. So I think that's our job is to help our partners see that shift, see where they need to invest, meet them. Going back to what I said earlier, meet them where they are on their journey and focus on being enablers and augmenters, not only in terms of product and services skillset, but also in helping our partners market, helping them get out into the channels that they need to be in and visible where they need to be in order to grab the attention of this next generation of buyers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I completely agree. I also, you know, I think there is a maybe slightly combative part of me that just says hey, if everyone's going left, you should probably go right, and if most of your competitors aren't marketing, that doesn't mean marketing doesn't work. It means they haven't made it work and that's where your competitive edge lies. But I'd also layer on top of that. Mdf exists. Brands are paying you to go and do face-to-face meetings, but they will pay you to do marketing. Does a particular story come to mind where you can think about a partner who's really sort of over-performed, done something different and demonstrably grown their business?
Speaker 1:You know I think I don't know that. I have one specific example because, again, we probably we serve as partners from S&B all the way up to enterprise, so the needs are very different. What I will tell you, though, what partners are coming and asking us for every day is I need help marketing. They're coming to us. Can you give me a marketing consultation? I need more presence on my website. I need to be able to drive more traffic. I need to understand how SEO search engine optimization works. So we're getting those requests for marketing consultations and we do that. So I think that partners are having success in many pieces and pockets, but it's those that are willing to think outside of the box and get outside of that traditional way of thinking that are really successful.
Speaker 2:Now, one of the things that I think is really complicated about the role that you're in is there is your two-partner strategy and then there's your through-partner strategy. Those two things are wildly different. In fact, it requires different reporting, different strategy, different creatives. But I know marketing as a service touching end users is being asked for why.
Speaker 1:Partners need help to scale. They need help to scale, and I think what I see is the amount of data that we have and our capabilities. We're only scratching the surface and I think partners realize this on the surface, and I think partners realize this and I actually think that we have the ability to help partners manage their data better than they can. Now. That's not to say we can do everything better, but I think that's something where we can help our partners scale, because the partners that are buying a lot from us, that are interacting with us on a consistent basis, we know what they're buying, we know their end users, we know where there's refresh and renewal opportunities, so we're able to help partners get a lens into that data and action it and so I think that's what the partners are needing help with is how do I take my data and create an opportunity with it?
Speaker 2:And how can you help me organize it and create a go-to-market strategy around it. And so I think we wouldn't be having a podcast, I suppose, at this moment, if I didn't mention AI. But I think TD Senex is uniquely placed right. Ai is formed on data and to me, marketing and AI are two peas in a pod, because it's generative understanding, it's mass creative workflow, it's hyper-personalization at scale. What's so special about your offering? Let our audience know and understand why TD Senex and your sort of data lake is so important in terms of how you are able to support that SMB demand.
Speaker 1:Yeah, ai is pretty powerful and I think we're learning something new about it every single day. And while I mentioned that we have an immense amount of data, that data is not going to do anything but sit there and collect dust if we don't have an engine that can create insights around the data and we do. We've actually launched something called Pace and it's a personalized engagement capability where we're able to look at partner data right partner data and engage with those partners based on what the data says, based on where they are in their onboarding journey or where they are in their sales cycle, and that's been immensely successful, and the vision is to create that same type of interaction and engagement for our partners to be able to leverage for their end users. So that's the roadmap for us to be able to take all of that information, create actionable insights around it, create a way that our partners can engage with their end users in a very personalized way, based on the data and based on the way that generative AI can help formulate a very customized strategy and engagement plan.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, I always want a highly customized engagement plan, which is why I cheat, not by using ai, but by using you, jessica. We always ask our current guest to recommend our next guest. Who did you have in mind?
Speaker 1:I think that it would be a really fun conversation and an insightful conversation for you guys to talk to monica white. Monica Monica is the chief marketing officer at Broadcom. She's got great ideas, she's got a lot of energy, she's got a fresh view. I highly recommend her.
Speaker 2:Awesome. I'm excited to speak to Monica and Jessica. Thanks so much for sharing your wisdom. It's been awesome.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Alex.