TD SYNNEX Turns the Partner Volume Up to Eight
The company’s latest investments in community are designed to combine the scale of a broadline disti with the kind of face-to-face relationships that online marketplaces can’t offer.
Last week’s post about Ingram Micro’s recent ONE event noted that online marketplaces and product-led growth pose potentially existential threats to distributors, 20% of which will sell, merge, or exit the market by 2028, according to Omdia. It also noted that Ingram plans to mitigate that risk by combining cutting-edge technology with person-to-person relationships that no marketplace or self-serve website will ever provide.
Days later, in announcements entirely consistent with the strategy it underscored at its Inspire conference in September, TD SYNNEX announced the latest developments in its own people-and-tech strategy during its PartnerLINK event.
“So often it’s an either-or statement,” observes Kristi Kirby (pictured right), the distributor’s senior vice president for North American communities. “We’re trying to give them both.”
If the tech part of people-and-tech got a little extra attention at Inspire thanks to the launch of the company’s new PartnerFirst portal, the accent at PartnerLINK was squarely on people. More than just a conference, PartnerLINK is a community launched in April and architected as of last week around eight affinity groups for service providers, resellers, Canadian partners, print specialists, and others with distinct, related interests. Each group has its own advisory council, which means that TD SYNNEX executives are now speaking directly with some 60 vocal, engaged partners versus 15 back when there was just one council for everyone in North America.
“The members feel more influential than they ever have in the past,” says Anthony D’Ambrosi (pictured left), CEO of PartnerLINK member Abacus Group LLC and newly installed chair of PartnerLINK’s governing council. The larger goal, he adds, is to give PartnerLINK’s roughly 1,000 members a best-of-both-worlds experience combining the scale of a broadline disti with the kind of face-to-face relationships faceless marketplaces can’t offer.
“Bigger can be better,” D’Ambrosi says. “Bigger can still be more intimate and guide your resources where you get the best return.”
And he’s not just talking about prices. “What a lot of companies have traditionally done is shop around for the best deal on a transaction,” D’Ambrosi says. “It’s almost like you’re treating the distribution channel like a discounting consortium.” A wise partner goes deeper with fewer distributors offering strategic, growth-generating business advice.
Which, according to Kirby, is exactly what TD SYNNEX aims to provide by combining tools like PartnerFirst with communities like PartnerLINK. “We’re trying to free up time and resources to reinvest into business development, finding new markets, winning clients, servicing existing clients, or in a more intimate way, winning new business and expanding offerings,” she says.
Of course, TD SYNNEX stands to benefit from its community strategy as well. “There’s probably $15 billion of upside over the next three years that we can get our hands around as we start enabling some of these high-growth areas,” says Gary Palenbaum, the company’s EVP of revenue and customer success. PartnerLINK is a key element in his plan to grab that money, which is why TD SYNNEX is investing in additional field coverage for PartnerLINK members and rolling out benefits beyond the new advisory councils.
“That might be freight optimization, that might be credit support, that might be extra training and technical support, services that maybe someone else that’s not in PartnerLINK might be getting today,” Palenbaum says. There’s more on the roadmap for 2026 as well.
“You’re going to see very hands-on member experiences and member development. You’re going to see deepening engagement with our vendor community as well,” Kirby says. “We’re just getting started.”