The Softer Side of EMC
Hard-charging. Single-minded. Passionate to win. That is how some described EMC sales- people. But VARs used another label: predatory. The Hopkinton, Mass.-based company may have been known as a favorite stock pick of the '90s, but it was not considered a friend of the channel. So, when the bottom fell from under the booming economy, EMC found itself in a predicament: It needed to trim costs and increase sales. To save money, it reduced its head count, including 15 percent of its salespeople. To increase sales, it turned to the channel, where it had few friends and more than a few enemies. This is the story of EMC's year-and-a-half old effort to remake its image and retool its sales force.
It begins with EMC's decision to split its sales force, redirecting a portion of its direct sales reps to work with reseller partners. In doing so, the company was faced with the task of taking some of its gladiator-type salespeople and remaking them into team players. For Bill Taylor, director of EMC's global channel development group, that's tantamount to taking a direct sales force that could run through a wall and turning it into one that could still plow through, but with a partner in tow.
That's been a significant structural and cultural shift for the former Wall Street darling. In January 2001, EMC instituted corporatewide policies and more defined rules of engagement,all in the name of building a more substantive channel program. The sales force has been repositioned into one group that solicits sales directly,focusing more on enterprise accounts,while another pool of some 200 representatives works directly with channel partners. Those reps team up with resellers to generate leads, write proposals and make presentations to potential clients. Most important, those direct salespeople don't make money unless a reseller closes a deal.
"What we are doing is changing both culture and compensation at the same time. Culture says it is OK to do things this way, and compensation is saying the same thing," Taylor explains. "That was a huge initiative for us, as a company, to be able to say, 'Let's create a space where partners can play. Let's put a sales force out there that can't take it direct.'"