If you haven’t caught our first Meet the Team feature yet, you can read John Phillip’s interview here. John is the Senior Vice President of Sales for the small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and managed service providers (MSPs) groups. You could say his right-hand man is Camden Fuller — or as his friends call him — Cam. We gave him tough questions and learned about his passions, while also discovering the secret behind the SMB Connect advantage. Dive in and uncover it all for yourself!
LevelUp: My first question is an easy one – when you go in, which office do you work from?
Cam: I work from the Greenville, SC office. Been there my entire career. I was legacy SYNNEX, and I’ve been with the company for a little over 11 years — with John for about seven years now.
L: Are you from Greenville?
C: No, I'm actually from Washington, DC originally. Then I went to Clemson University and stuck around after college. I actually got a job with SYNNEX not long after college.
L: I’m guessing you’re a Clemson fan, then? Do you root for anyone else?
C: The Washington Redskins, or I guess, Commanders now because I'm from there. But there's like six of us left who are fans. And obviously, Clemson football is a big passion of mine, so we go to all the games.
L: What does your average weekend look like? How do you like to spend your time off?
C: I'm an avid golfer, so I'm pretty much on the golf course anytime the weather will allow it. It’s nice to be outside with friends and not really care about anything for four to five hours.
I also spend time with family and friends. My wife’s family is local, so we like to spend a lot of time with them.
L: Do you and your wife have any kids?
C: Actually, tomorrow's our one-year wedding anniversary. So, it's very new. We've been together about five years and not yet, but I hope so one day.
L: Do you have any family traditions?
C: Well, we actually started a great family tradition recently. My sister owns a restaurant in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She also wants to own Thanksgiving, so she shuts down her restaurant and we have 200 friends and family members come. We’ve been doing it for four years now, and it’s grown incredibly large. It’s a lot of fun to have that many people together – we’re very spoiled on Thanksgiving.
L: Besides necessities, what is one thing that you could not go a day without?
C: Probably coffee in the morning. I think that's a very basic answer, but I wasn't a coffee drinker when I started working — but boy am I one now.
I would also say my team and my support staff because honestly, without them, we would spend every waking moment at our desks.
We've got a lot of people directly and indirectly on this team. We've got big goals and expectations and are not allowed to fire off a whole lot of excuses. But the good thing is we have a very good team who all pull their weight to make sure we get things accomplished in a timely manner.
L: Now, put yourself in the shoes of an SMB owner — they make a lot of difficult choices to keep their business successful. So, I have a tough decision for you to make: Would you rather give up smart phones and only use a flip phone or give up laptops and only use a desktop computer.
C: I would say only use the desktop computer. Almost without a doubt, because I think I do as much work on my phone as I do on my computer. With traveling and needing to stay up to date on things, I have all the access to the system now on my phone. Without the phone, I’m pretty much offline until I get back in front of the computer — the phone is my gateway.
L: Speaking of getting work done, can you tell me about your role at TD SYNNEX?
C: I'm the Director of Sales for the SMB and MSP groups. I report directly to John [Phillips]. I'm very operationally heavy. I manage a lot of the back-end pricing and commission files, solve escalation issues with customers and build relationships with them. I also develop, manage and support our regional managers. I have nine of them reporting to me now, so we have a couple in each region: Northeast, Southeast, Central and West. They all kind of own their area of the country, their reps and their accounts — I act as a higher-level support for them as well.
But really, I focus on a lot of back-end work that a lot of people don't see to try to optimize our offerings for our partners. I like being behind the scenes. I'm not a big ‘on the stage’ guy. I like being involved in every aspect of the business and knowing what's going well and what's not so I can help improve it.
L: What would you say is the best part of your job?
C: Building relationships with my team and my customers, I really enjoy spending time with them. We have several customer appreciation events, or we go take a show to the customer’s home city so they can come a short drive to see us, and I really enjoy spending time with them.
The day-to-day grind is one thing that's kind of part of the job. But I've got a lot of great customers who I'm personal friends with, and that adds a bit of joy to the job when we're both having fun.
L: Can you tell me more about SMB Connect and what it offers SMBs and MSPs?
C: SMB Connect is a bridge between small customers and large vendor partners who want to help them grow.
I'll oftentimes say there's a big gap in our industry, and the small customer doesn’t always get the attention and the opportunities. With us behind them, they can operate as a bigger entity and get all the benefits of a bigger entity, too.
John and I only focus on the small partners. So, SMB Connect is a great way to take top-level vendors and connect them with the small customers who they wouldn't normally be as focused on. We give them the same types of benefits, pricing, stocking opportunities and value — even down to a possible business itself, like leads. Once we’re able to put it into the right perspective and show the value of our SMB partners, vendors realize it's well worth the investment. What they don’t know is how to get more involved with these small businesses. SMB Connect brings these two together.
A big pain point for our customer base is thinking they aren’t a big player and assuming they aren’t going to get attention. With us, they can.
L: While on the subject of getting in front of partners, can you tell me about SMB Connect’s roadshows?
C: Our roadshows are designed to form connections. Many of my customers don't have a travel budget so we bridge the gap by traveling to them. They get to meet us, meet the vendors, see our value prop in action and get to see things they didn't know we had.
During these roadshows we address customer challenges, vendor challenges and our challenges to find a way to solve them. It's been tremendous, I mean the sales we see from customers who attend — after spending half a day with us, they understand how they can use our resources better.
They form connections and it’s not just John and I, it’s the services team, cloud team and many others. We share what they should do, what they may not know and important things they haven’t had time to research because they’re small businesses. We know that the person attending may be the same person doing the installs. It becomes a challenge of resources, and time is one of the most precious ones.
Sometimes taking that half a day, being able to meet seven people at TD SYNNEX who can help them grow their business, I think it was worth every moment they were there versus trying to take a webinar or reading a pamphlet. They get to meet face to face and create new opportunities.
These roadshows are a lot of work and effort, but it’s really worth it. I wish we could do twice as many as we do.
L: As your biggest event of the year, the SMB Connect Symposium is coming up on August 21-24, 2023, in Brooklyn, New York. Why would you recommend attending?
C: It’s like a super roadshow — we're going to have twice as many attendees including vendor sponsors and resources from TD SYNNEX. This is our SMB national conference. Considering time as a resource for customers, I’ve heard past attendees who have joined us before saying, ‘I got something new out of this one’ or ‘there's a new person I got to speak to.’
There's a mountain of information that they can get. Some customers care about one thing, others care about another, and that's okay. We're showing them so much that they can take what they want and leave the rest. But the reality is, a lot of them take more than they thought they would.
John does a very good job on the presentation, too. He focuses on ways customers can make money. I’ve been to a lot of roadshows and conferences, and so many of them are vague. Whereas John's presentation is designed to give you your next step: Here's how you make money, here's what you focus on to create more sales and here are free offerings.
Attendees know what to do when they get home, and they know which person to call when they have a question.
L: Can you give me a pulse check on the market? And as a follow up, how do you help your customers maintain stability when challenges in the market arise?
C: Back at the height of the pandemic, the biggest challenges were things like stocking inventory. Now, with the Fed raising the rates, I think we're starting to see that it takes time to take effect. They've been moving the rates for nine months. But now we're starting to notice that end users are delaying refreshes and we're getting a lot of deals pushed.
Although this is hard on them, I think the SMB market is still strong. The people they’re servicing — hospitals, police stations, dentist offices — these are day-to-day customers that are still going to need a lot of things. While it may get harder to sell, we have demand marketing tools to help get them new customers. Many customers think holding on to their base and hoping that it will get better is the answer. I think they should take this opportunity to expand their end-user customer base. The way to do that is to use the free tools and resources we bring them to make things easier.
We understand that growth isn't always the biggest motivation. Some of our customers have said that they don’t want to grow to a certain point because then they have new issues. ‘I want to sell more of what I have’ versus ‘sell to more people’ is a pretty big distinction if you think about it.
But when the economy slows and the public sector tightens spending or small private businesses decide to keep the junker computer running because they just don’t have the money to spend, we help our customers find more profitable ways to either maintain their business or help it grow, depending on what their goals are.
L: What sets your team apart?
C: I’d say tenure for starters. A lot of our team members have been here for over 10 years. They’re extremely knowledgeable and extremely hard working. This can sometimes be a thankless job, but our managers and reps really try to give everybody the same type of support and take a lot of work on.
I've been very impressed with the people I have working with me — everybody’s willing to get their hands dirty. Everybody's willing to take on challenges. Nobody's above helping a customer, even my boss. John took a customer call about a mild issue the other day – he’s the SVP. How many SVPs do that? Not many.
He leads by example, and everybody jumps in and gets involved. So, I’ve been very impressed with the knowledge base, tenure and overall understanding of the business. I think that’s why customers like working with us.
L: What is one thing you want SMBs and MSPs to know about your team?
C: A few things come to mind, but I’d just want to say our dedication to their business is our biggest advantage. We are a team that focuses on SMBs – that’s where we spend all of our time.
We value every customer. I know that's a cliche answer, but I've gotten on the phone with a lot of customers and somewhere in the conversation they hit me with something along the lines of ‘I know I'm not a big partner’ or ‘I know I'm probably wasting your time.’ I assure them that they’re not wasting my time. It doesn't matter how small you are – you are the focus of our business. That's the only reason we're here. This group was started by John 12 years ago to focus on this account base in particular.
The fact that we do only care about SMBs is what I want them to know. This is what we do, and I enjoy doing it. We usually work with small business owners who are doing it all. When you talk to them, you can feel their passion. The misconception is that TD SYNNEX is a huge company that doesn’t care about them. But our group focuses on them — if they invest in us, we’ll invest in them. It’s a partnership.
A Bridge Built on Passion
In between questions, Cam shared just how proud he was of his team. They realized, just as he did, that the secret to success was their dedication to SMB and MSP customers. They’ve been partnering with small businesses for years, fueled by their passion and their unrelenting drive, that’s what keeps them motivated to evolve and develop new resources to connect small customers to leading vendors.
Contact SMBConnect@tdsynnex.com to speak with an SMB Connect team member! If you’d like to connect with Cam directly, email him at Camden.Fuller@tdsynnex.com.