Sponsored Content: Ingram Micro - Paul Bay

We're a $48 billion technology company that we're excited to say we sit right in the middle of a multi-trillion dollar technology sales channel. Our customers — people ask who are your customers? They're the CIOs, the chief technical officers, the chief digital officers for those businesses that don't have these technology skill sets or competencies on staff. Stated another way, they're helping manage those end businesses' all things technology.

Definitely, some things within my lens have changed, but some things are relevant no matter the size of the company you're CEO of. So first, set the strategy, work the strategy, but execution and consistency is ultimately key. Make sure that strategy is clear and simple and don't overcomplicate it. Teams need to be able to live and breathe it every day, and don't lose sight on performing while you transform. So keep an eye on investing in the future, and it's got to be clear what those outcomes will be as you set your sights on the right strategy. Staying firm on that strategy and ultimately work in that process. If you have too many initiatives and they're playing against each other at one time, you got to make sure that the focus is key. And the last thing I would say is put the customer in the middle of everything you do. If you develop your leaders, you hire right, and when you have the right team, things that sometimes seem really impossible start to become possible, and that way you can be unstoppable.

Absolutely. So working with your team, you got to believe — and I believe that the people are the biggest asset and it's the currency. What we have is our relationship throughout this entire industry and within our countries. Together with our technology and our great people, we can show up and help customers spend less time on tedious — and I call them administrative tasks — and more time on large, more important opportunities. I like to call this moving from transacting with our customers to really interacting and having a completely different dialogue. Our people serve as a critical resource for our customers. We help fill gaps that they can't service on their own, and our customers view us ultimately as an extension of their teams and their business. So we serve as a trusted adviser on the business front, and we are often co-selling or working with our customers as we work for them to give them things like credit line for better cash flow. We're the experts in advising the right mix of technology and solutions, and we can even help provide, at the end of the day, data and insights and provide them new business opportunities as they move forward.

Well, our sales channels tend to be really transactional. A traditional distributor serves as an extension of the manufacturer, so our vendor business and really to help service the small to medium-sized businesses that they can't reach. This is due to lack of scale and the reach that I mentioned. However, business happens between people. Customers buy from people, and our X Vantage platform takes away the complexity that currently exists among all of those millions of transactions that we do as an industry together with our vendors and our customers, and this really helps them and allows them to work better together. There's 45 years of legacy that exists between our more than 1,500 vendor partners. So we've been in business for 45 years, and we have more than 160,000 customers globally. So imagine everyone has their own systems, tools, databases. As an example, in the US alone, we take 2.4 million phone calls and emails just to check the status of technology orders. Our X Vantage platform is built on a proprietary platform and technology, and we file dozens of patents of how we can be able to provide and remove friction and complexity between the transaction and actually enabling a very business-to-consumer — we call it a B2C-like experience — really giving personalized interaction. But ultimately, data is key. We're using AI and machine learning models which tie together the data with our unique technology engines to ultimately produce personalization that's really an industry first. How do we go from personalization and not standardization? So being able to provide that at a very personal level.