Simplification is the watchword for Dell as the company begins a new calendar year and approaches a new fiscal one.
Partners can expect to see a more easily navigated sales organization, standardized incentive programs, and streamlined tools in the months ahead, according to Cheryl Cook, Dell’s senior vice president of global partner marketing, in a conversation with ChannelPro.†
“We’re really committed to just continuing to simplify the overall engagement and operational experience for our partners,” she says.
Some of the forthcoming changes Cook previewed were spurred by the previously announced departure of President and Chief Commercial Officer Marius Haas, who will leave Dell at the start of the company’s 2021 fiscal year next month. Following his exit, Bill Scannell, who is currently president of enterprise sales and customer operations, will take on responsibility for commercial and partner sales as well and become the new leader of a consolidated worldwide sales unit. Channel chief Joyce Mullen and John Byrne, head of Dell’s North American commercial sales, will both report to Scannell.
According to Cook, the new organizational structure will make working with Dell easier for partners. “I think this leadership change is an example of simplifying our sales engagement and our sales structure,” she says. “A partner can now see a single sales organization.”
For example, Cook continues, Dell’s various specialty sales teams for storage, cloud computing, and converged infrastructure, among others, will be soon be combined into one group. “If you are a partner serving both enterprise as well as commercial, you were engaging with a couple of different sets of specialty sales organizations and leadership,” Cook notes. “That’s all been centralized under a single leader now.”
Consistency, however, will be the norm concerning the sales reps and other people who partners interact with on a daily basis, she adds. “It’s really unchanged to the partners from a partner coverage perspective.”†
In a further simplification effort, Dell plans to align rules and processes this year for many of its sales incentive programs, including its technology refresh, “competitive takeout,” and new business incentive offerings. “All of that will kind of look the same no matter if you’re hunting in an enterprise account or a commercial account or whatever,” Cook says. The new business incentive program, she notes, helped Dell attract over 17,000 net new buyers to its customer base in the company’s third fiscal quarter and more than 52,000 in the fiscal year to date.
Simplifying other sales-related processes is an ongoing priority for Dell as well. The company completed a series of steps aimed at streamlining deal registrations and automating some registration approvals in the second half of 2019, for example, and plans to make getting sales quotes easier in the first half of 2020 by merging the multiple systems partners currently use for that process.
“The future vision would be we keep them in a single platform and a single quoting tool where they could quote the entire thing,” Cook says. “That’ll save time.”
With Dell’s fourth quarter and 2020 fiscal year weeks away from closing, Cook reports “consistent, strong momentum in the business.” In Q3, overall sales through the channel and channel sales of storage solutions both grew 4%. That’s down substantially from the 16% increase in company-wide channel revenue and 26% spike in storage revenue Dell saw in Q1.†
Server sales, meanwhile, declined year over year in Q3. On the other hand, Cook notes, they’re up 7% year to date. “That continues to really be healthy for us,” says Cook of the server business. “Macro market economics,” she adds, are at least partially to blame for the dip in that segment, along with the difficulty of sustaining the double-digit upticks Dell announced in earlier quarters. Indeed, server revenue climbed 18% in Q1.
“I’m not overly concerned,” Cook says.
Results from 2019, she continues, will keep Dell focused on encouraging cross-selling of the company’s sprawling portfolio in 2020. At present, partners who sell three lines of business (like servers, storage, and client PCs, for example) generate 31 times as much revenue as partners who sell just one. Partners who sell three lines of business plus products from Dell’s VMware unit, moreover, produce up to 103 times the revenue of single-LOB partners.
“There’s a tremendous opportunity for our partners to really invest and engage in the skills and the capabilities and the innovations that VMware is bringing to market,” Cook says.
Dell will unveil its 2020 plans for the partner program next month. Without previewing specifics, Cook suggests that what’s coming will be more along the lines of modest enhancements than wholesale modifications.
“We think the program is really effective and competitive, so I wouldn’t foresee any major, major changes,” she says. “We’re just making subtle adjustments to the strategy in business, but really staying the course.”
