Dell helps channel poach from its rivals’ partners

Dell has pledged to speed deal registration and revealed it is helping partners recruit staff from rivals, as part of wider efforts it hopes will “make more money” for its partners.

Speaking at an analyst meeting at which the company reviewed progress and talked up its hoped-for new structure, Dell EMC president and chief commercial officer Marius Haas said the company has concluded the project to combine Dell’s and EMC’s channel program.

“We had two great programs, one within EMC and one within Dell. We had the luxury of taking the best in class of both programs and create one. We now have a single channel program organization that has US$43 billion of revenue and growing at an incredible rate.”

He said that combination has been so successful that channel sales have outgrown others. “We grew about 10 percent all of last year. In the first half of this year, the channel organization has already grown 18 percent,” he said.

Haas said the company has worked to ensure it does not have “multiple routes to market all going after the same account base”.

Dell has therefore sought to “optimize how we align our partners, how we align our sales makers, identify where we can best collaborate or create opportunities or identify where they can go after net new logos, if you will, or lines of business, then we have created an engine that will, certainly, continue to deliver outsized returns. And that is what we’re doing from a predictability standpoint.”

He also revealed that “Last year, in total, we did about 400,000 deals in the channel” and that the company would likely top that number because “In the first half of this year alone, we’re almost at 250,000 deals already. We see at least 75 percent of the deal registrations are getting approved within four hours, 87 percent of those deal registrations getting approved within 48 hours.”

“We have more work to do. This is, clearly, an area where our partners are saying we have an opportunity to keep streamlining our processes, and we’re certainly going to go do that as together we can generate more profits and more returns.”

Haas said Dell’s already doing better and recounted a story of a sales rep who told him “I have a $300,000 opportunity and I have nobody to go to to help close this deal.”

“So, what we did is make sure that as those opportunities came in, that we had a streamlined process by which team members that can partner can go after that opportunity and close it, and we’ve demonstrated the ability to do so.”

Another interesting element of the company’s channel activities emerged in the Q&A session, when the company’s execs were asked how they get the sales staff they need.

President for global sales and customer operations answered by saying “there’s a lot of channel partners that represent our portfolio, there’s some that represent our competitors. So, we’re helping our partners recruit from some of the other channel partners that are selling some of our competitors’ offerings.”

Also revealed on the call was a new storage channel plan.

Vice chairman for products & operations Jeff Clarke said: “We just rolled out last week at a partner conference new channel programs and incentives around storage.”

CRN has sought detail on that new program and whether it applies in Australia.