Distology maps its course for the future

Distology is celebrating a decade of existence and is using the moment as an opportunity to adjust its strategy and solidify around key areas of growth.

The distributor has developed a solid reputation in the cyber security market and is continuing to build on that effort by reorganising sales to support the next stage of its growth.

Hayley Roberts, CEO of Distology, is masterminding the strategy and bringing to bear the lessons of the past 10 years as the firm continues to carve its position in the market.

“We’re 10 years old, and it’s a really good celebration of not just achievement but also coming through some tough times,” she said. “Every business will struggle throughout its lifetime. It’s important that we start making a nod to that, not just to celebrating success, because I think celebrating times to come through restructures and changes is also important, because everybody will evolve. The word of our year this year is ‘evolve’.”

The channel player has launched a technology strategy and reorganised sales to align with that shift.

“We’ve got a much more robust strategy where we were working with four main component parts within cyber, and so we’re looking now to make sure that within those areas (workspace, product security, operational technology security and security operations) that we have access to, we’re doing due diligence on some new technologies and some existing technologies,” said Roberts.

She added that as part of that strategy, it now evaluated vendors based on where they fit in the tech strategy, as well as their ability to support the channel.

“It’s about the value level. So, do they need the value that we would provide? That’s been our biggest launch at our company kickoff last week, along with our vendor tiering and our sales restructure,” said Roberts, adding that tiering was based on “the resource access they’ve got internally”.

“The top tier is scale, where we have five vendors, and that’s been a lot of work in progress, of joint go-to-market, joint planning and proven track record as much as anything else. And then the bulk of our vendors sit in accelerate, which is where they’re honing and developing go-to-market, and growing and developing with us,” she said.

“We’re carving out a really good relationship moving forward and it’s working well, because that transparency is very clear. It is about making sure that both parties – vendors and us – are taking a joint risk, rather than it being either all our risk or all their risk.”

To run in parallel with the tech strategy, the sales restructure has been announced to align closely with vendors and strengthen the go-to-market support the distie can provide.

“The sales restructure is very much about audience, said Roberts. “So rather than just saying you’re in a pool of salespeople, we have salespeople to have solutions specialists who are predominantly focused on vendors.

“So, they will be going with a vendor hat on to our partners and work with the vendors on their go-to-market [strategy]. Then we have partner team working with partners on what their go-to-market strategy is for their customers, [along with] what their security strategy is like, what makes sense for us to work with them on, and how we’re developing and growing them.

“We’ve also got an end user focus where we’re doing SDR as a service, which is a big growth area. We work with our vendors on things like win-back campaigns and on generating new interest for them.

“It’s a case of working with vendors to understand what they want from all of this and listening to partners and the ‘buying from’ element, rather than just the ‘selling to’ piece,” she added.

In addition to the tech strategy and sales reorganisation, the focus is on international growth and extending the reach of the business.

“We’re a lot more mature and more strategic than we’ve ever been, and we’re profitable in all areas now, which is brilliant,” said Roberts. “Our Benelux team is doing really well, the UK is doing really well, the services team [is too], winning some great tenders and contracts, and we are starting […] the German commercial presence.”

Looking ahead, Roberts was upbeat about the prospects for the rest of this year and beyond as the firm moved deeper into its second decade: “I’m super optimistic, because I know that the team here are better than they’ve ever been. I know that our strategy is better than it’s ever been, and that’s all we can do right now.”