Tomlin outlines ambitions in Northern European role at Exclusive Networks

The move by Exclusive Networks to appoint Rob Tomlin as regional vice-president of Northern Europe will provide the distributor with an opportunity to deliver support for vendors looking to sell across the regions.

Last week, Tomlin was given the Northern European role, adding responsibility for Benelux and the Nordics to his UK&I leadership role.

Catching up with MicroScope, he outlined the ambitions in the expanded role and why he is still grateful for making the move from Dell back into distribution and Exclusive specifically.

“I’m really pleased to be taking on the additional responsibilities,” he said. “I’ve spent the past year learning how unique Exclusive is as a company. The talent conveyor belt that we continue to produce is just unparalleled, and the customers really value what we do.

“Exclusive is at the core of one of the fastest growing parts of the market, which is cyber and data security,” he added. “We’re seeing unprecedented demand for cyber and that’s being driven by all of the challenges, which are now newer challenges that are led by AI and the like.

“I’m excited about what the future of our UK&I business looks like, and our UK&I business is cyber at scale with specialism. Then I’m looking forward to working across the other countries in my remit.”

He plans to help Benelux and Nordics meet ambitious growth plans and is keen to learn from those operations as the distributor looks to continue encouraging more partners to adopt managed security services.

“We are supporting some of Europe’s and the country’s critical infrastructure on a daily basis with our support services, where we’re supporting our partners to grow into all the new technologies and work on where to invest in the future,” he said.

In his position overseeing Northern Europe, Tomlin will be able to share best practice and introduce more automation to make life easier for partners.

“It’s a big opportunity for us,” he said. “So, we already have a lot of great tooling that we’ve created in Exclusive, but one of the key things we want to deliver for our partners – many of which are multi-geo – is to be their go-to partner across the region, be it EMEA or worldwide, helping them deliver out multi-country projects, which we’re very good at.

“We have this ‘think global at local’ approach as a company. We want to do more of that and want to be able to help our customers focus their energies on selling and service, versus operational capability and operational needs – so, be it renewals or how to upsell and cross sell. And then one of the things we really want to help our partners do is create demand,” he added.

In his time running the UK&I side, Tomlin has been keen to implement the “Exclusive experience”, which is an approach that has a customer-first strategy. The plan, he said, is to look at introducing that across Northern Europe.

“We’ve got four key tenants of what we call the ‘experience’, and all our events are based around this, all our updates, all our internal strategy, and we try to give [this experience] externally now as well. We want to put the customer first in everything we do, be it the end user, the partner or your colleague, who you are supporting,” he said.

“We all want to be one big team. The vendors are part of our team, the partners are part of our team and we’re all team internally. For me, that whole experience strategy is what’s making us win in the market and I’m keen to extend that experience and to my other countries.”

Tomlin said that there had been progress across the UK&I, with revenue figures underlining that its approach was working, but the focus is now on the future: “It’s what I do next that is the most important thing.”