Deidre is a strategic marketing consultant, community‑builder, and the founder of Zebra Perspectives. She helps Microsoft partners clarify their value, strengthen their messaging, and become partners of choice. With 30 years of marketing experience in the technology sector, she brings a blend of strategic insight, creative storytelling, and values‑led leadership to every engagement.
Her career began in global PR and communications agencies supporting technology brands including Motorola, Xerox, and Microsoft. She went on to spend more than a decade at Microsoft, where she worked extensively within Microsoft’s partner organisation — collaborating directly with channel partners across UK and EMEA. This deep, hands-on experience inside the ecosystem shaped her understanding of how partner programmes, co‑sell motions, and strategic alignment drive meaningful commercial outcomes.
Alongside her client work, Deidre leads the IAMCP UK Chapter (2025 Global Chapter of the Year), championing inclusion, allyship, and practical enablement for partners of all sizes. She founded Zebra Perspectives to build a consultancy grounded in honesty, curiosity, and a belief that successful partner marketing is built on clarity, collaboration, and integrity.
Originally from South Africa, Deidre moved to the UK in 2003 and now lives in Spain with her family. Her cross‑border life — balancing entrepreneurship, community leadership, and family — shapes the grounded, values‑based approach she brings to every client relationship.
Trevor van de Ven is a partner marketing strategist at Zebra Perspectives, where he helps Microsoft partners cut through the noise, articulate their unique value, and build go-to-market strategies that earn recognition and support from technology vendors. With more than 20 years of marketing and communications experience, including over five years specialising in partner marketing, he brings a rare combination of strategic clarity, hands-on execution, and genuine curiosity to every client engagement.
His career began at Text 100, a global technology PR firm, where he supported Microsoft through pivotal product launches including Windows NT and MSN in South Africa. Since then, he’s worked across technology, finance, mining, and luxury hospitality—partnering with organisations including Ricoh, Epson, LG, SAP, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, Westcon Comstor, Westbrook, Ford, Lexus, Anglo American, Absa, and Four Seasons. This breadth of experience gives him a grounded understanding of how businesses operate across sectors, and how to translate complex capabilities into compelling market propositions.
At Zebra Perspectives, Trevor specialises in channel programmes, messaging, and GTM strategy—with a particular focus on ISVs, resellers, and scaling startups. He excels at uncovering customer pain points and transforming them into partner solutions that resonate in the market. His approach is deeply personalised: he invests time to understand the mechanics of each business, the challenges they’re navigating, and the outcomes that matter most. That curiosity—paired with meticulous execution—enables him to develop content strategies, platforms, and programmes that don’t just look good, but convert.
He’s a member of IAMCP South Africa, contributing to a community that champions collaboration and growth across the Microsoft partner ecosystem.
Based in South Africa, Trevor is driven by a love of problem-solving and a deep respect for the entrepreneurial journey. He’s motivated by the opportunity to help partners scale to the point where they no longer need his support, a measure of success that reflects his commitment to creating lasting impact, not dependency. Whether it’s crafting a GTM strategy or refining messaging that earns vendor investment, he brings empathy, rigour, and a results-focused mindset to every partnership.
The zebra’s gifts include seeing in black and white, clarity without filters, balance, agility, uniqueness, power, sureness of path, keeping up individuality within the herd.
“An understanding of how aspects of a subject relate to each other and to the whole. The ability to perceive things in their actual interrelations or comparative importance.”
