Last week at Avnet Technology Solutions (ATS) (NYSE: AVT ) proved to be a busy one for executive changes, including the promotion of Cheryl Neal to vice-president of marketing for the U.S. and Canada for ATS’ Technology Infrastructure Solutions group.
Neal, who has worked at Avnet for more than 10 years, was most recently in the role of director of marketing within the Technology Infrastructure Solutions group at ATS, a position she held for four years.
“This new role is an evolution to what I’ve already been doing,” Neal said. “My role is to align a lot of the key initiatives to drive strategic alliance with our suppliers and resellers. We do this thru things like communications, awareness and creating demand generation for resellers.”
Neal’s promotion was announced just two days before CDN learned of other executive changes within ATS which involved Rick Alvarez, who now leads the newly created team better known as Sales Acceleration, Fred Cuen, whose responsibilities have expanded to now include the Canadian team (a role, which was previously held by Rick Alvarez), which is led by Canadian general manager, Brian Aebig, Scott Look, who has been promoted to vice-president and general manager of ATS’ Technology Infrastructure Solutions business, Gavin Miller, who’s now in charge of the Solutions Marketing and Development team, Tony Vottima, who now leads the HP Solutions team, and Nicole Enright who now leads the Strategy Development and Execution team.
These changes were “designed to drive long-term strategies and support succession planning by enabling leaders to share experiences and acquire new knowledge in key areas and increase the knowledge transfer between teams,” an Avnet spokesperson said in an e-mail.
Neal, who reports to Gavin Miller, the vice-president and general manager for ATS Americas’ Technology Infrastructure Solutions, echoed these thoughts stating, “Avnet’s big on succession planning. I have 17 people that work for me and there’s also an extended team that I work with for marketing and development as well as demand generation teams.”
With responsibilities for both countries, Neal said the one thing Avnet continues to realize is that every market has its unique needs from a geography and industry standpoint.
“We do a really good job in customizing the marketing we do for the geographies and markets we serve,” Neal said. “Where we need to continue our focus is around really understanding the end-user in a deeper way and being able to speak their language. As part of this, we’re also focused on enabling our resellers with sales tools, etc.”
At its IBM Partner Summit last October in San Antonio, Tex., Avnet announced new vertical market practices around banking, retail, energy and finance to help partners win more business.
“We’ll continue to engage with our partners to help them understand each market,” Neal said. “Partners can leverage the investment we’ve made in understanding the vertical markets. We can help them understand where the high growth markets are and we can also help with leveraging our suppliers’ key messages and bring that all together.”
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