Avnet Memec Shifts Customer Strategy in UK and Ireland

Avnet Memec is shifting its rules of engagement with customers. It has created a team of business development managers who will now focus on vertical markets in the UK and Ireland.

Chris Shipway, country director for Avnet Memec in UK and Ireland says the new strategy is designed to enable the maximum time in front of customers and to gain access to the upper echelons of customers design teams. "We will look to be engaging with the systems architects within customer businesses," says Shipway. "These are the people who spec out the new designs, we want to be working with them on the designs coming through."

It is a shift from the previous strategy where the business development managers held specific supplier responsibilities. Now their task is to have a clear understanding in trends in the vertical markets they will be serving.

All the business development managers have engineering backgrounds and many years of experience between them. They will be tasked with identifying opportunities in customer designs for the whole portfolio of Avnet Memec suppliers products. "Our aim is to increase the number of our product lines going into existing customers, take new products to existing customers and take all our products into new customers," says Shipway. By focusing on new vertical markets, Shipway says the company can increase it's customer base.

Supplier support will shift to a new team headed by technical manager Stuart Edwards, which includes Avnet Memec's seven strong team of field application engineers. They will follow the business development managers into customers to offer in-depth support for specific product lines.

Shipway and his team have targeted 15 vertical markets. Some are established sectors like military/aerospace, consumer and storage where Avnet Memec already has a strong presence. Emerging markets which will now receive more scrutiny include smart metering, renewable energy, solid state lighting and information and the wireless sector following Avnet Memec's acquisition last year of Spectre (Communications).