Fast-growing IT security distributor Distology has recently made an internal promotion as part of its restructuring. This is indicative of a company culture that looks to break from the norm and bring new and different people into the sector to help the company to grow quickly.
For young, growing businesses agility is key to achieving their potential. This is something that Hayley Roberts, CEO of Distology, knows well. Distology has grown rapidly in recent years, and she appreciates that much of it is down to the people she employs and the structures in the business.To this end, in the past 10 months, an agency-style model has been introduced to the marketing function by Sarah Geary, who joined the company at the start of the year as CMO.
Soon after joining Sarah also took on the alliances function at Distology. “At that point, it meant that I could give the vendor portfolio and the alliance relationships some additional love and more structure,” she explains. “It also meant that all the business plans we were doing for vendors could be underpinned by marketing. “We talk about the importance of sales and marketing needing to work together, but it’s that age-old thing of everyone saying it and then going off on their own merry way and then pointing fingers if things don’t quite go right.”
Sarah has recently been promoted to CCO to continue to develop this more commercially focused role. “I’ve been fortunate to have an amazing team that has enabled this promotion, so I can take on that sales component as well,” she says. “Taking everything I’d learned from that marketing piece, underpinned by the vendor business plans, allows us to shape a sales function, which hopefully makes us more productive and profitable, of course, but also better able to service our vendors’ and partners’ needs. “Now we can get the sales teams driving in the same way that the marketing alliances functions are.”
Sarah also benefits from having had a channel sales role in the past. “There, I was on the receiving end of channel marketing so I could see what resonated and what didn’t. Then moving back into a marketing function, I had that extra level of credibility to say ‘when I did sales, this worked. It might not work for you, but this is the way I did it’. Having that deep respect for both sides of the business will make this move more successful.”
Ongoing restructuring
Sarah’s promotion is part of a restructuring at Distology. “We’re a young company that is growing, and we need to keep agile in development,” says Hayley. “Some people will join us for a huge part of the journey, some for a short part, but they can all make changes to the business.” But for Hayley, recruitment isn’t just a clinical process, it is finding people with the right characteristics to succeed in a role.
“I think people are too het up on the preconceived notion that you’ve got to have done certain roles before you jump into them, or you’ve got to have been the best salesperson to be a great sales leader,” she says. “That’s bullshit, because the worst sales leaders have been amazing salespeople. The reason is most good salespeople are selfish by nature because they’re trucking to their target and can’t pull back and see the bigger picture. But those that are better at leadership are probably not the best individual salespeople.
“It’s not always the case, of course. But we often have preconceived notions of how things should be and put too many restrictions on who should be promoted or how departments should work. Often people don’t push themselves or challenge the norm for fear of failure. We want to change that.“We haven’t failed every time we’ve restructured the sales team, but we’ve learned a lot on every occasion. And those lessons mean that you get to better people and better structures quicker.”
Hayley adds that Distology is private equity-backed, which gives the company the scope to take more risks and be agile with the aim of growing faster. “I believe the best is yet to come for the business because we’ve learned so much,” she says. “There’s so much more value we can add. “It is all about the people because the most restrictive thing for me personally as a leader and an owner of the business is to not have the team around you that can do the job without you. You always want to try and make yourself redundant. It took me years to embrace that concept, but now I do. It’s about me having that vision and helping the team believe in something and that they can craft it themselves.”
Focus
To this end, the sales team has also been reviewed and, from what was a flat structure, has been split into three distinct focuses.
“There is a vendor alignment with a solution sales component, a partner management function and business development, which retains the hunter component to continue to grow the partner base but also having an end user component,” explains Sarah. “Sitting in distribution, our vendors are crucial, and we’ve got to ensure we’re servicing them correctly, but we also need an end user perspective, otherwise our team will only be able to develop to a certain level. They must be able to understand not just a partner value proposition, but an end user value proposition.”
Apprentices
Distology is also looking to diversify its team and attract new people into the business through apprenticeships. Three apprentices have joined recently, one going into the finance team and the other two into sales. This is in part down to Hayley’s philosophy to bring people into the business and the sector from different backgrounds and removing that preconceived idea of what someone in tech should or shouldn’t look like or what they should and shouldn’t have done in education or previous career, explains Sarah.
“We give our apprentices exposure to different parts of the business and roles,” says Sarah. “For instance, end user sales is not for everybody, but they might want to look down the partner management route or even come into marketing. We’re not pigeonholing people as soon as they come into the business.”
Sarah adds there are well-known graduate schemes out there. “But these can be very restrictive, with the assessment days they have and having had to have attended university. We’re removing that, which I think is important. We are a young team. For instance, our social media lead creates brilliant content based on trending TikTok videos. I don’t have a clue. But that’s fine, because the team do, and they know what works. We’re talking to a real mixed audience – so for the young people among our partners, we want to advocate that fun side of the business.
“It doesn’t all have to be techy and corporate. Of course, we’ve got all the technical components and we pride ourselves on making the complex simple but I encourage the team and give them the autonomy to try different things to get traction with our audience.
“The social component is massive and it’s what gets talked about by new people to the industry who we interview. When people are coming into or wanting to step into tech, we want them to think, ‘oh, it does seem exciting’ when they look at, say, our LinkedIn.
“They can see us being silly, but know we have the technical expertise to back it up. A huge portion of our industry is not technical. We have technical teams for that very reason. We need to draw on everyone’s strengths and emphasise it’s okay to say you don’t understand.”
Hayley adds that it is important to not put up any hurdles to people at entry points to the sector. “People will hear the word ‘tech’ and especially girls at the age of 11 will often shut off from anything technical because they think ‘I can’t process that,’” she says. “But there is so much more to the sector than tech.
“Yes, the salary is high, yes, it is an aspirational industry. I want it to be something to really strive for. But by the same token, I don’t want to put up hurdles to get involved in what is a fast growth industry.”
SDR as a service
Agility is also about offering new and different services to customers. While IT security remains Distology’s focus, the company also maintains its end user focus by having the capability to offer services such as sales development representatives as a service (SDRaaS). “We’ve seen great traction for SDRaaS in the Benelux countries,” says Sarah. “We’re always focusing on return on investment with our vendors and this service will allow us to assist our vendors end to end – marketing to partners and creating leads for them.
“Let’s be honest, telemarketing is expensive because of the sheer resource that it requires. Whereas for us in-house, because it would be in conjunction with a dedicated portfolio vendor, they will have a level of understanding of the customer business anyway. This will increase that speed to market, which again will only add to the value. “It’s something that vendors could look to bundle with complementary technology on the portfolio and offering that is only going to increase that stickiness into customers. The plan is that that demand will only continue to grow, and we can grow the team accordingly. “Hayley adds that this is part of Distology being as agile as possible and it will be driven by customer demand. “If we see a commercial reason to do it, we’ll do it,” she says.
Future
This attitude sums up Distology, and Hayley’s vision to maintain the company’s fast growth. To achieve this, she says there are plenty of value levers that can be pulled. “We want to be as end-to-end as possible for our vendors and partners until our partners become fully enabled and they can be a lot more proactive themselves,” she says.
“But we want to make sure that whatever we do is high quality. It’s not just doing it for the sake of it. I want to make sure we get it right and do it well and that everything is of high value and is synonymous to the values that we represent.” Hayley adds that she won’t rule out new investment or mergers and acquisitions in the future. “We will do what we need to do to generate enough firepower to achieve what we need to for the benefit of the channel, our vendors and our partners, and to help future-proof the business,” she says.