Nida Ashraf Ali – Vendor Marketing Manager
Nida Ashraf Ali
Vendor Marketing Manager
Date Joined: April 2021
Tell me about your background and why you joined Trustmarque?
Throughout the past 14 years, I have been a part of various corporations and IT resellers supporting sales, vendors, and marketing teams in creatively raising awareness of solutions and focusing on increasing demand generation by using various go-to-market strategies to successfully appeal to and assist a broad range of customers and support them in their challenges.
Why did you join Trustmarque?
After assessing further into Trustmarque’s background and propositions like PRISM and BizApps capabilities and exploring how these resolved sector-specific challenges. It was evident to me that Trustmarque had an excellent ethos in approaching and resolving challenges and it is a rapidly developing organisation that had an approach that I value. Trustmarque has an explicit people-centred approach to internal and external stakeholders, which encourages me to be a part of the organisation.
Tell me about your current role?
Primarily my current role as a Vendor Marketing Manager is to manage Trustmarque’s broad portfolio of vendors within each of the following solutions: Cyber Security, Cloud, Datacentre & Storage, Modern Workplace, Data & Analytics, and ITAM. I have recently been nominated by Proofpoint as their Partner Marketeer of the Year for 2022, due to my collaborative approach between Trustmarque’s vendor alliance team and Proofpoint. This recognition shows that I am motivated to build solid partner relationships and gain an understanding of individual vendor solutions, capabilities, and USPs, and to collaborate with vendors to promote a joint solution with Trustmarque. The variety within each solution aids in resolving the most niche to prevalent customer challenges. This is also the key element that continually helps me further build my understanding, create effective go-to-market plans, and execute them in creatively tactful ways to promote and generate demand for each vendor’s individual solution along with trying to gain a significant ROI. In conjunction with this, I actively support the overall marketing team with various business projects and events.
What other trends are you seeing in the sector/with customers?
The biggest trend and demand I am seeing affecting everyone especially the public sector is around Cyber Security, Ransomware, and Penetration Testing. The need to enhance this, and train and educate organisations in preventing and managing this is persistently evolving.
Do you have any real-world examples of this you can share?
One of many examples is the increasing requirement of Penetration Testing. At Trustmarque, the Penetration team assisted a public sector, NHS organisation to perform an independent security assessment of their internet-facing systems. Trustmarque provided a swift diagnostic report of the potential security flaws and previously unknown issues ranked according to their severity. With these findings, Trustmarque was able to guide the team by showing where to invest resources in the assurance of their digital estate. The Head of IT highly valued this service and advised that it gave him clarity in achieving the organization’s cyber security objectives.
What are your ambitions and where do you see yourself next?
I do not have any immediate plans; I never really do follow a plan. I do however always have an intention, which is to learn robustly, work vigorously and continue growing the organisation and brand with some sparkling dust.
What more would you say about the culture at Trustmarque?
The culture is exceptional, and the people are a genuine asset! It is fast-paced, results-driven, and has a high level of trust, support, and flexibility.
