Her title is category manager but that doesn’t come close to telling our Rising Star winner’s full story. Jamena Haddad started in sales just under five years ago at Ingram Micro and quickly moved up the ladder to become a product manager. She went from managing 8-12 vendors to indirectly managing over 50, and is now helping manage a team of three.
“It’s been very challenging and I feel that every time that I look back a month, or a quarter to quarter, I notice that I have definitely grown, or that I have hit a new milestone,” she told Channel Daily News. “I have been challenged, and I feel like that’s what keeps me on my toes. I’m the type of person that needs to always be challenged to stay motivated.”
Haddad currently serves as a category manager of pro AV/digital signage (a category worth around $140 million a year) at Ingram Micro, but most people who have worked with her say she is a lot more than that.
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“Haddad has taken her own personal time to coach and groom her team to excel,” said Dan Rancourt, national account manager at Sharp Electronics, who has been working with her for over a year now. “She has always tried to find ways to make things work and figure out what the problem is, and bring solutions to the table. We are a lean organization at Sharp and just like with any other business, we have had ups and downs. When I joined the company in March 2019, Jamena helped look into what accounts had seen drops, set up conference calls with her team, the customers/her contacts to see how we can get that business back. She shared insights in the market and has always been involved in planning for marketing activities (we do have a separate marketing manager) because she wants to see the best for us and for her company and I suspect she does this with all of her vendors.”
Haddad says she has won in many different ways at work in the past year. The learning curve has been a steep one for her and getting certified to become a digital signage expert has been a major win for her in the past year, Haddad says. Growing the category by around 41 per cent year over year in 2019, and being able to mentor as well as train her team members and see where they have come from being fresh grads are among some of the other triumphs defines Haddad’s last 12 months.
“My personal journey into the channel has definitely been very interesting and positive at the same time. And I would say that it has also been challenging because I have moved from role to role, making sure that I am always in a position where I can continue to learn and I have always been very eager and anxious for that,” said Haddad. “I call it interesting and challenging because I did not know this whole distribution world existed before I started at Ingram Micro. I knew about how big of a company Ingram was, but I didn’t really realize the strength of the channel until I started working here and now it’s really a place where I feel like it’s home.”
