Meet the channel manager: Dell

Geoff Wright has headed up Dell’s Australia & New Zealand channel for the past year after a career heavily invested in partner strategy.

Journey

I’m a New Zealander, but I spent quite a lot of time at Microsoft at the start of my career, in Europe where I worked in the channels team. I transferred to Australia about 1997, still working for Microsoft and running channels, SMB and anti-piracy.

I took some time off then started a consultancy, which grew into a company called Channel Enablers. Over 11 years, two partners and I grew that to an international business. Most of our business came from tier one vendors in Europe, Asia and the US. We sold very successfully in 2011.

I stayed on working with the organisation and Dell was my client. One day I went from being the consultant to the employee. It was a very easy transition.

Dell’s channel growth

What excited me about Dell at the time was that there was a fantastic opportunity. Dell in Australia had said, “Channel will be the route to market for us that delivers growth.”

It was recognised, but it wasn’t implemented. You don’t get those chances very often. When I was at Microsoft it was already a [channel] business. It’s a big team and you’re working on bits that add up to the whole picture. With Dell’s channel, we had an opportunity to build and grow. We’d been doing that, with double-digit growth every quarter.

Internationally, half Dell’s revenues come from the channel – that probably surprises people. We do have a history of being the direct organisation, but that’s long gone.

Partner community

Currently we have 31 premier partners. In our preferred base we’re close to 100, in the registered base we’re just shy of 2,000. There are unregistered partners who buy through distribution as well. Now we’re working out how can we grow their businesses to be more successful, then checking if there are there more partners we need to engage with.

One thing that has been really important for us is not to look at the channel as one big thing, but to say “we need to form true partnerships with a small number of partners”.

We work with several distributors – Ingram, Avnet, Hills and Dicker Data. There are some differences in the product lines and we’re looking to really build that part of business. Dell has not only had a history of being direct to users, but also direct to partners.

Events

It’s our plan this year to have a partner event. We’ve actually had a history of doing technical partner events. It’s absolutely critical for us to make sure our partners have the technical ability and the services ability to deliver solutions based on our technology.

On the other side of things, we’ve been very good at doing small-format executive sessions, where we have Peter Marrs, the leader of our enterprise group for APJ. He’s here this week and we ran a very intimate lunch with some of our key partners, talking about what’s coming. You can imagine, there were lots of questions about things that may happen during the year with EMC.

Lessons

Channel partners do things for their reasons, not yours. It’s not the vendor’s job to push the partners and to force them to do – or even ask them to do – things that are unnatural for them. What we have to do is make sure our programs, and the way we work with channel partners, grow their business. If you can grow your channel partners business, your piece of the pie grows too.

The ultimate goal working with channel partners is for your importance to the partner to be more than just about revenue that you create on your products. You want it to be the revenue and profit that they make on the solutions around your products and the influence you have on the [client] business.

I often see vendors who have a very transactional model and they look at every deal as being here or there. You can’t do it.

RESUME

• May 2015 – present GM, ANZ channels and alliances, Dell
• 2002-2015 Founder and VP, Channel Enablers
• 1997-99 Director of channels, SMB and anti-piracy, Microsoft Australia
• 1990-97 UK distribution manager, Microsoft UK