CRN Exclusive: Dell EMC Channel Chief Mullen On New Storage Investments, IoT Bundles Ahead And Dell-VMware Partner Program Strategy

New Chief On Dell EMC Momentum

After just 90 days as Dell EMC's new global channel leader, Joyce Mullen is already leading the charge on significant channel improvements centered around (IoT) Internet of Things and the VMware partnership.

The 19-year Dell veteran, who was promoted to President of Global Channel, OEM and IoT Solutions in November, has already made significant changes to the Dell EMC Partner Program aimed at making it easier and more profitable for the channel to work with the company.

Mullen, who is responsible for running the company's growing $43 billion global channels business, spoke with CRN about her channel vision, streamlining Dell's MDF program and special pricing strategy, reducing partner engagement conflicts, and her plan to drive new Internet of Things sales.

What kind of improvements have you made to make it easier for partners to sell Dell EMC storage?

We've recently made a big investment in what we call a Center of Competence (COC) around storage management. So if your sending lots and lots of quotes to special pricing, you might not have the right price to start with. This new center of competence, that is part of this reorganization that (Dell Vice Chairman Products & Operations) Jeff Clarke has done, is really an important element of how we're going to make sure we're super competitive on our pricing for our products across the board.

How fast do you want partners to get special pricing?

We're trying to figure out exactly how fast we can do that. But we need to be in the hours range, a small number of hours, not in days.

Are partners moving quick enough to hit the new storage quotas ?

We made the SPIFs very clear for sellers as well as the rebates have improved for our partners in general. I don’t know how long it takes for that stuff to work its way through the system. I'm anxious to see that too. I can tell you that the feedback around the storage SPIFs and storage program modification we announced in November, has all been really positive. We also have a bunch of people that we put in place and invested in, and those guys are starting to be productive. All that seems to be pointing in the right direction.

What are you doing to better enable your partners around the new competencies they need in the digital transformation era?

What we heard loud and clear from partners is that, 'Yeah, you guys do an effective job in helping us understand how to train ourselves on the products and the capabilities of the products, but customers aren't really buying like this.' They really want someone to solve a problem. We have to figure out how to evolve our training to address those solution sets that we've chosen as the starting point. IoT (Internet of Things) is the most obvious and glaring in my mind. That is such a sausage-making exercise right now for any type of solution to be put in place. We think that there's an opportunity here to help crystallize these solutions a little bit better. We want to make sure these are validated solutions that work, and train our partners on how to package and sell the solution.

How fast do you think Dell partners can become solutions-oriented sellers?

There has been really consistent feedback from partners saying, 'Please help us evolve our business. We need to be much more solution-oriented. We need to change some of the skill sets we have on our team, and we need to change some of the skill sets [Dell] has on our team as well to move towards this goal.' It's going to take several years probably before we are really solutions-oriented in terms of our approach, but we have to start somewhere. We have eight or so (new solution competencies) that we identified for this year.

What's your strategy for better enabling partners around IoT?

We need to do a much better job for partners, and we have some pretty interesting plans around that. So far, every single project in IoT is a snowflake. We're trying to figure out how to put those in some kind of hardened capability, so if a partner sells a cold-chain solution to a supermarket or if they sell an asset or predictive maintenance solution to a heavy-duty machine tool company -- what are the pieces they need? How do we make sure they all work together? How do we make this easier to turn on? It's not so easy. The execution is a little bit tricky because there's a lot of different pieces and moving parts and every environment is different, but there's a long way we can go with partners to do this. We've been talking to a bunch of different partners about some of these ideas. We'll probably have some ready to do this year.

Like an IoT bundle?

Yes … All showing up in a box. We think that might work. We're going to test it.

What’s your vision for VMware related to the overall Dell EMC partner program?

We're trying to make it as easy as possible for all of our partners to buy all of the Dell Technologies assets in a simplified way. That means we're looking at trying to figure out how to give credit for training that a partner does in a VMware program, maybe make that training credit apply to the Dell EMC program, for example, if they want to buy it from us. We're trying to look at different ways to simplify this so that the partners have to train once on the same content, but maybe will apply to both programs. So we're looking at things like that.

So what will the overall Dell Technologies program look like in a few years with VMware?

If you step back and say, 'What do we want this to look like in two or five years from now?' -- it should be as easy for a partner to buy Pivotal from Dell EMC as it is to buy a server from Dell EMC. We're trying to figure out how to line those up. Now, there's going to be distinct program elements because VMware is going to have its own Partner Program for sure, but how do we reduce any kind of friction or duplication of effort between the Dell EMC partner program and the VMware program for partners that participate in both.

What kind of improvements have you made around partner tools and deal registration?

We've launched and improved the portal for partners that gives them all the access and information that we have. It's not going to be perfect, but what that allows us to do is react to partners. We can start fixing it fast. That's a big improvement. There's a bunch of new processes around deal registration. We were basically putting that through a bunch of people to look at and review, and they were the wrong people. So that wasn't very effective. That changed maybe two or three months ago. We trained our people in rules of engagement when there was some concern or lack of clarity around who's in charge of what and who could go after a deal. We've seen our rules of engagement escalations drop by 80 percent quarter on quarter.

Can you talk about that 80 percent drop in rules of engagement?

We saw a quarter-on-quarter, from third quarter [in fiscal year 2018] to fourth quarter, a reduction in the number of issues associated with rules of engagement – a reduction in the number of escalations. It's a really big percentage improvement. That was across the board.

What was the key?

The training that we just talked about. The new deal registration process where we asked different people about the deal registration – that helped a lot. … We had a pretty long document that said, 'Here are all the things you shouldn't do.' We basically backed up and said, 'Let's be clear, there's felonies and misdemeanors. Let's focus on the felonies – that's where a partner gets hurt.' And simplification of that helped make sure everybody understood the ramifications with the issues.

How will Dell EMC's new MDF program help partners?

We wanted to keep a balance between earned MDF and programmatic MDF. The earned MDF is that part of the predictableness because if you sell stuff, you will earn MDF dollars. Not everybody has that anymore. A lot of people have taken earned MDF off the table. We also want to have an element of programmatic MDF, which is, if you have a really great idea and plan, we're going to fund that. So we've removed a bunch of the documentation requirements. We heard a lot of feedback that it was complicated, it takes too long to justify the expenses – we've removed a bunch of that. So that makes the entire process a lot simpler.

What other MDF improvements have you made?

We heard loud and clear from our partners that the way we had structured the MDF plans, we forced them to basically finish one set of plans before they started to do the next set of plans. So now, we're allowing for much better and more effective future planning so even if you don’t have any MDF funding left, you can start to put in your request for funding going forward so we can start to evaluate that. It helps our partners plan their businesses a lot better.

We've also allowed the partner to upload multiple programs, processes and MDF projects into the tools, so we can evaluate those. We used to require that they load those one at a time. So there's some operational benefits that we spent a lot of time working on that hopefully makes this whole process a lot simpler for them and a lot more efficient.

Talk about your first 90 days in the channel leadership position?

I've seen a ton of partners. Traveled around the world talking to partners. We have a bunch of internal work to do to try to get to know the teams and I spent a lot of time with the team to understand partners here in the U.S. I also went to a China partner event. Spent time in France and Germany talking to a lot of partners. I've been listening and learning and finding out what we're doing really well and the improvements we need to make. We launched a new program on Feb. 7 where we really incorporated a ton of partner feedback to try to figure out how to make that program even simpler, more predictable and better from a profitability point of view.

What's one thing partners want you to improve?

We've got work to do in terms of improving the operational aspects of the program. We heard about that in the partner advisory boards all through the fall. So we're putting a lot of focus on things like making our deal registration process smoother, more efficient and faster [as well as] figuring out how to quote and configure systems faster for our partners, how to make rebates faster. It's speed of operations. We have work to do to make sure we are truly simple, predictable, profitable.

What's your vision for how the channel is going to evolve with the Dell Technologies portfolio over the next few years?

I see a huge upside in the market. We are in an unbelievable position with our partners. Partners are excited about the breadth of the portfolio. So if we can make it easy for partners to actually learn about, understand, package up and sell our broader portfolio, there's nothing stopping us.

We have the world's best and broadest portfolio. We can put these elements together in really compelling ways to solve problems around digital transformation, IT transformation, workforce transformation and security transformation. There's a lot of pieces that can come together to make those super compelling.