Veeam CMO Tackles Company Brand Redo, Encourages Partners to Align

(Pictured above: Veeam’s Kate Hutchison on stage at VeeamOn Partner Summit in Chicago, May 14, 2018.)

VEEAMON PARTNER SUMMIT — Hired in October, Kate Hutchison, chief marketing officer at Veeam, is working to create a powerhouse brand to match the company’s aggressive growth strategy, which is to capture a big slice of a projected $30 billion “hyper-availability” market and enterprise business customer.

A hyper-available environment is one that’s always on and provides access to data at your fingertips.

The newly hired CMO sports an impressive résumé, having held top marketing jobs at Riverbed, Polycom, VMware, Citrix and BEA; she also has an 18-month transformation effort ahead of her. That effort includes making sure that partners become experts on positioning and selling the Veeam platform and align with the company’s vision and strategy.

“We’re one of the industry’s best kept secrets, but I think it’s truly time for the world to hear and to see the Veeam that we have become along with our partners,” she told attendees at the VeeamOn Partner Summit 2018 keynote on Monday. “We’ve made great strides in the SMB and commercial markets and we’ll continue to invest in those markets, to generate demand in those markets and to sell in those markets. But, if we’re to become a multimillion-dollar sustainable company, we have to win the enterprise — it’s critical.”

Kate Hutchison

Kate Hutchison

With that, Hutchison said the company is improving its positioning and is transforming its brand. 

Expect to see Veeam position itself as a thought leader among CXOs and Fortune 5000 companies as solving an urgent and strategically relevant challenge in a new way.

“We have the most complete platform to ensure the hyper-availability of any app, any data, across any cloud,” she said. “And selling the platform changes the game.”

What that means to partners is being able to move from selling a point or tactical solution to being able to sell a complete solution for intelligent data management.

“Because it’s a platform, we’re able to leverage our alliance partners and open more doors higher into accounts and get access to that CXO,” said Hutchison. “Partners could have more strategic conversations and ultimately achieve the goal of being a trusted adviser to them, to help them solve their data-management challenges.”

Platforms also enable partners to deliver more value-added services, she noted.

Partners need to know that brand transformations aren’t easy. They require a lot of change within a company, but when done holistically, they send a powerful message that something about the company has changed and it’s time to take a fresh look.

Hutchison’s approach to repositioning Veeam includes: brand promise, vision, strategy, positioning, messaging and identity — think of those elements as a pyramid with brand promise at the top.

Partners need to understand the repositioningin order to align with Veeam. Partners were given the Veeam Messaging Handbook 1.0., which will be updated periodically and translated into multiple languages. Hutchison also advised partners to check out the Marketing Center in the partner portal for new digital content and campaigns, co-branded content and other tools to generate demand. Partners will also see a new feature – a live concierge – to help them when they can’t find something or would like to make a request

“We’re giving you a more powerful story to take to the enterprise by ‘up-leveling’ the value of Veeam. You’ve already shown how successful you can be in the SMB and commercial markets. Now we want to make you very successful selling into the enterprise,” said Hutchison.