CRN Channel Awards Australia: Finalist Q&A with Ben Klason, Director of Enterprise & Marketing at Leader Australia

Ben Klason talks about being a finalist at this year's CRN Channel Awards Australia

Ben Klason is Director of Enterprise & Marketing at Leader Australia. He is responsible for enterprise strategy, vendor growth, marketing and partner enablement across the business, working with vendors, MSPs, resellers and integrators nationwide. Ben’s focus is helping partners move from product resale to recurring-revenue service businesses — particularly across cloud, telephony, security and AI — and building the programs and platforms that make that transition commercially viable. He is a long-standing advocate for the Australian channel and for partners building sustainable, profitable and future-ready businesses.

What prompted you to enter the CRN Channel Awards Australia this year?

The CRN Channel Awards are the recognition our industry actually pays attention to, so it is not a decision we make lightly. What prompted us this year was less a single achievement than a change in what the business has become. A few years ago, the honest description of Leader was a distributor with a cloud line of business. That is no longer true — cloud and services now sit at the centre of how we go to market, how we invest and how our partners make money with us.

Entering was a way of testing that against the rest of the market rather than marking our own homework. It also mattered to the team. A lot of what changed this year was done by people whose work does not show up in a vendor announcement and putting our hand up is one of the few ways that effort gets seen outside the building.

What would winning mean to your team and your customers/partners?

For our people, it would be recognition of a fairly demanding couple of years. Moving a distribution business towards cloud and services is not a strategy slide — it is systems, billing, support hours and a lot of retraining, and most of that work is invisible from the outside.

For partners, I think it would mean something more practical. A partner choosing where to build their cloud practice is making a bet on a distributor they will be tied to for years — through migrations, through billing, through the support calls their own customers make. Independent recognition is one of the few honest signals available to them when they are weighing that decision. And for our vendors, it would validate a shared investment. The programs that worked this year worked because vendors backed them properly rather than badging them. That is worth acknowledging publicly.

What is the company’s proudest achievement over the past year?

Helping a meaningful number of partners make the jump from hardware resale to recurring revenue. It sounds simple and it is not. A reseller with a profitable product business has every reason not to change, and asking them to rebuild how they sell, bill and support is asking them to take real risk. Our job was to make that risk smaller — certification pathways, provisioning and billing that work, and a support model that does not leave them exposed in front of their own customer. What I am proudest of is not the figure, though. It is that the partners who made the jump are still with us, and the ones watching from the sidelines last year are the ones starting now

What have been the biggest challenges this year, and how did you overcome them?

The hardest part has been asking partners to change their business model in a year when margins were already under pressure. We did not solve it with a campaign. We solved it by doing things different to ever other distributor:

- Giving smaller & mid-size partners a dedicated account manager they can call.
- Building knowledge through our enablement, certification & training programs that is open to any partner.
- Treating our channel partners business like our own & working for ‘their’ profitability.

and by being straight with partners about what the transition would cost them before it paid off.

Our people carried most of that. And a handful of partners and vendors backed us early when it would have been easier to wait and see — That is worth saying out loud, because the channel remembers who showed up.

What lessons has the industry learned, and what still needs to change?

The lesson is that technology on its own stopped being a differentiator some time ago.

Customers are not short of products; they are short of people who can tell them which problem to solve first. The partners who have done well are the ones who moved from supplying technology to advising on outcomes, and they did it by narrowing their focus rather than widening it.

What still needs to change is our honesty about skills. The industry talks about AI adoption as though it is a licensing exercise. It is not — it is a data, identity and security exercise, and a lot of organisations are going to discover that expensively. As distributors we carry some responsibility here. It is easier to sell a partner a product than to tell them they are not ready for it, and we should be more willing to have the second conversation.

What are the main opportunities in the next 12 months, and how will you capitalise?

AI is the obvious answer, but the opportunity is not in AI itself — most partners will never build a model. It is in everything AI requires to work safely: identity, data hygiene, network capacity, security posture, and the licensing and governance around it. That is squarely the work our partners already know how to do, and very few of them have connected it to the AI conversation their customers are having.

Cloud telephony and modern workplace are the other steady opportunity. Legacy phone systems are still being retired across Australia, and every one of those is a recurring-revenue conversation for a partner rather than a one-off sale.

Our plan is to keep investing in the platform and the enablement behind it so partners can lead those conversations instead of following them.