Guest of the month : Ashok Nair Director – SMB, Lenovo India

 Ashok Nair Director – SMB, Lenovo India What makes you successful among the channel community? Channel being an important part of any enterprise business today, one needs to build a connect with them that will help in winning their trust and establish credibility in the future endeavors that one would pursue with them. Their actions and decisions in terms of business will always partly depend on how you deal with them, the trust you have built in them and how often do you meet up with them. So you need to be extremely consistent and fair in your dealings with the Channel that will also ensure the kind of relationship you will enjoy with your partners. Any message that you would like to give to the Channel. IT is emerging as the fastest changing industry today. Working in a dynamic market, it becomes imperative for a partner to keep themselves abreast of these changes and then adapting to them. They also need to develop the ability to be able to assess the future and how is it going to shape up with respect to opportunities and business prospects. Earlier there used to be two separate channels catering to IT and Telecom; but now with the convergence of both, the channel has a bigger role to play to the extent of enriching and enhancing their expertise to cater to the requirements of customers of both the areas. As a Sales Director, how do you choose to be different from your competitors? I always keep one thing in mind – your product is equally good as your brand. Being in the commercial sector, I always believe in constantly engaging with the Channel as they are the face of your company before your customers. A channel-centric company that Lenovo is, we lay maximum emphasis on strengthening our association with channel to the best possible way. Product quality, reliability and a robust channel base are our strength that makes us a strong contender in the market. What are the new growth plans for Lenovo? The coming quarter is going to be a big time for us as we are coming up with many new initiatives and growth plans. We are going to introduce many new products in the market and accordingly strategize our future channel and retail strategies in line with these new offerings.