The event provided an opportunity for resellers to meet Helen Briggs, Westcon’s new Avaya Head of Sales, who has recently joined the company from Avnet, where she was Business Unit Manager for Nortel.
Briggs outlined her two immediate key objectives. The first is to invest in people, resources, training and support to align Westcon's business objectives with Avaya's channel partner initiatives. The second is to provide an account management team that offers experience in the entire product portfolio within Avaya, to support the business partners in areas where they wish to upskill and take to market.
The new sales structure was explained following the amalgamation of the Nortel and Avaya portfolios. The experience of both the Westcon Avaya and Nortel Sales and Pre-sales teams has been integrated to provide focused, experienced, knowledgeable support to ensure resellers can make the most of initiatives and solutions.
“Your accounts are now allocated to specific sales teams, each with expertise of the UC, Contact Centre, Data and SMB portfolios,” Helen told the resellers. “We have integrated Nortel and Avaya teams together and split them into five geographic and ‘medal’ areas (authorised, silver, gold and platinum). And we have aligned our account management teams with Avaya’s objectives to provide retention and growth with our existing customers to help them maintain or grow their status. Westcon are also working with Avaya on Business Development across the UK as we feel that the Avaya offering is a very competitive end-to-end solution that can be taken to new markets.”
The event also provided resellers with the latest on the integrated roadmap and channel support investments from both organisations.