Partners Celebrate Sales Legend Scott Millard Finishing Dell Career After ‘100 Quarters’

Scott Millard was recently named CRO of Sprinklr, maker of a customer experience management platform. Millard joined storage giant EMC in April 2000 and worked in numerous channel-facing roles winning scores of admirers who valued his sharp intellect and strategic mindset.

A Dell Technologies sales superstar — who won raving fans in the channel — announced on Friday that he is departing the company after he was named chief revenue officer at software company Sprinklr.

Scott Millard took to LinkedIn to post that after “100 quarters” with Dell, he was leaving. Sprinklr announced earlier this month that Millard had been hired as revenue chief at that firm.

“I leave on an extremely high note, grateful for the journey and even more grateful for the leaders who shaped it,” he wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “I’ve had the honor of working directly for—and learning from—some of the very best, leaders who set the standard for integrity, vision, resilience, and results.”

Those in the channel who have worked with him over the years said Millard’s departure leaves a void that will be tough to fill.

“He is focused and disciplined,” said Advizex CEO C.R. Howdyshell, who has known Millard for years and closed massive deals with him. “He has a strategic mindset. It really goes back to his EMC roots. He is driven and would do whatever it took to win the deal. We worked together on some very large opportunities. He understood the importance of the channel as a way to build scale.”

Jamie Shepard, a 30-year-plus channel sales veteran who began working with Millard nearly 20 years ago as one of EMC’s top service providers, called the legendary Dell EMC enterprise sales veteran a great listener with a razor sharp focus on customer success who started his career as a direct sales star, but who became a big booster of the channel.

“The first time I met Scott, he just listened intently to understand our business model,” said Shepard, the former principal of EMC partner ICI and now a global industry principal for HCLTech, the $14 billion systems integrator behemoth. “I’m not saying he had a crystal ball and could see the future with how the channel would develop. But he was so customer-centric that he saw the value the channel could bring to EMC. Scott had the foresight and the professionalism to really listen to understand the channel model and then he helped integrate that into EMC.”

Shepard said Millard’s extraordinary listening skills and keen sense of the technology solutions industry set him apart as a sales leader. “Scott as a person is not a talker, he is a listener,” said Shepard. “That is what has made him so successful. At the end of the day it was always about doing the right thing for the customer. None of it was selfish. It was for the customer! When Scott saw a valuable partner he immediately saw the value of bringing them in to help his customers move forward. He was always customer-centric and embraced what was best for the customer.”

Shepard said when he sold ICI, Millard was one of the executives he reached out to thank for his support. “Without guys like Scott, ICI would not have been as successful as it was,” he said

Technology sales luminaries also took to LinkedIn to wish Millard well, with Dell’s Bill Scannell, president of global sales and customer operations, congratulating Millard on his quarter-of-a-century run.

“It’s been an absolute pleasure working alongside you for 25 years,” Scannell wrote. “You are a real pro and I for one will miss competing and winning with you every day.”

HPE, VMware, Check Point Software Technolgies, and Cato Networks sales veteran Frank Rauch also chimed in.

“Outstanding run my friend,” he said. “You were amazing to work with.”

Sprinklr is a publicly traded New York City-based enterprise software company for customer-facing functions. The company reported annual revenue of $796.4 million during its most recent fiscal year ended January 31. Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management platform uses AI to helps companies deliver “human experiences ... across any modern channel,” the company stated in a press release.

In a statement that accompanied Millard’s hiring, he said he was grateful to join Sprinklr at a pivotal time in the company’s trajectory.

“As Sprinklr works to expand their reach into larger enterprises, deepen customer relationships, and accelerate growth, I’m inspired by the opportunity to help guide an organization that is rooted in customer obsession, accountability, teamwork, and trust,” Millard’s statement read. “I look forward to empowering businesses around the world to reimagine exceptional experiences through Sprinklr’s AI-native, unified CXM platform.”

Dell is the global leader in the sale of storage and server hardware, a number one position that has fueled its growth in AI, particularly in the data center and enterprise as organizations seek to build out their own AI capabilities. One of the underpinnings of that success was Dell’s 2016 purchase of Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC.

Millard started his career as a senior account executive with EMC in April 2000. He has worked several channel facing roles in the 25 years since then, including: vice president of sales for Americas channels, vice president global channel specialty sales, where he was in charge of channel strategy and go to market, then senior vice president in data center sales, global channels.

Prior to his Friday resignation, Millard’s title was senior vice president, global AI sales. In the role, Millard oversaw a team of sales and technical product professionals who are involved in some of the world’s largest and most strategic AI deployments.

Millard’s departure is the latest shakeup inside the top ranks of Dell.

Last week, Dell CFO Yvonne McGill announced she would leave at the end of the quarter. The company’s chief accounting officer also announced she was moving to another role inside the company. The president of its PC business transferred to a strategy role, while Dell’s vice chairman and chief operating officer Jeff Clarke has taken over the day to day running of the company’s PC business.

Steven Burke contributed to this report.