‘Fast and Furious’ Dell Brings AI To Speed Partner Sales: Channel Chief

‘When you envision the partnership of the future, it’s not just going to be about, human-to-human interaction. It’s going to be about how our sellers and our partners sellers are managing all of those touch points and interactions through agents,’ Dell Chief Partner Officer Denise Millard told CRN.

Dell Technologies is preparing its reseller community for a future where AI agents are built into the sales process to drive leads to their business, align partners with opportunities and speed up pricing and quotes to move transactions, Chief Partner Officer Denise Millard told CRN.

“That future is not three to five years aways, it’s coming fast and furious,” she said. “It is really going to set us up to kind of reimagine the partnership for the future, and then how do we engage with our partners across those multiple dimensions?”

Millard said the $96 billion Round Rock, Texas-based infrastructure giant has been on a multi-year journey to listen to its reseller partners and transform the partner program to better fit the way the company engages with its channel, all in the hopes of providing better productivity and profitability. She said in the near AI future, partners and Dell don’t have years to wait to see results.

“When you envision the partnership of the future, it’s not just going to be about human-to-human interaction. It’s going to be about how our sellers and our partners’ sellers are managing all of those touch points and interactions through agents,” Millard told CRN ahead of Dell Technologies World 2025, which kicks off today. “Whether that’s selling agents or marketing agents or operation agents, it is really going to streamline the operations between our organizations and then put us on a whole new trajectory in terms of how we go and win and deliver great outcomes for customers.”

Darren Sullivan, Dell’s senior vice president of global partner program and operations, said in order to deliver those outcomes for Dell and its partners, the company is targeting three areas of the partner experience: driving demand, collaborating more effectively, as well as simplifying and expediting the transacting process.

The first, he said, is finding ways to improve how Dell drives demand to partners through its lead flow process, by pairing demand signals with data about existing partners to shape how the leads are distributed.

“We’re thinking about that differently,” he said. “In thinking about the demand signals that we can provide to partners based on literally billions of data points that we have about our customers and our partners and leveraging AI and leveraging algorithmic technology to be able to provide those demand signals to the right partner at the right time in a way that they can consume and act on quickly and easily,” he said. “That obviously drives more productivity for our partners, but also ensures that we’re getting, after all, the opportunity that’s available to us and our partners.”

He said the second area focuses on removing friction from the sales process to drive more collaboration between Dell sellers and partners along the lines of Partner First For Storage, and changes to client device sales. Dell wants to arm the company’s internal sellers with the most up-to-date information about partners in their territories, so its sellers understand the best partner to work with.

“What’s been the transaction history? Who has open deal registrations? Do partners have partner of record in your accounts, but also the capabilities of our partners and ensuring that over time, even if maybe a territory might change over time, and new reps might come and go, that intelligence, that history shouldn’t go with the person,” Sullivan said. “It should be embedded in the intelligence in our solution, so that any rep coming in right away understands the ecosystem of the partners in the accounts in their territory.”

The third area is around Dell’s transactional experience to make the process faster and easier than it is today.

“There are a number of elements here and this gets into kind of old fashioned, process redesign, but also looking at our data structures, looking at our tools. And then, how do we infuse best-in-class capabilities of today?” he said. “How do we build AI-guided selling into our quoting and ordering experience, so that in real time, our partners can be guided to what the best next step is in that solution, based on who the customer is and based on a number of different data elements about the customer in the solution.”

This includes intelligent pricing that gives partners the right price for the right quantity for the right solution as quickly as possible.

“That’s a place of focus for us, and where we’re going to really break through here and provide a leading capability in our partners, ability to transact with us going forward,” he said.

Millard said since 2023, Dell has realigned the sales force in one of its most profitable divisions – its lineup of market-leading storage – to remove friction between resellers in the field and Dell’s own direct force, with Partner First For Storage. The program incentivizes Dell sellers to close storage deals through the channel to win bigger incentives.

At last year’s Dell Technology World, Millard announced that partners could win partner of record on PC sales, a shift that gives partners ownership of those customers. The moves are designed to shift more of Dell’s sales opportunities through channel partners.

“All of this is in the spirit of really doubling down with the ecosystem and making sure that we’re setting up a strategy for partnerships of the future and redefining that at pace,” she told CRN. “Ultimately, it’s all about how do we drive growth and innovate and collaborate with partners so that we can deliver great outcomes for customers.”