CRN Interview: Dell EMC Channel Chief On Direct-Indirect Account Planning And Cross Selling Momentum

Dell EMC's Channel Sales Strategy

Dell EMC channel leader Joyce Mullen said the company is focusing heavily on driving better collaboration between its direct sales teams and channel partners.

Mullen, a 19-year Dell veteran who became president of global channels, OEM and IoT solutions in November, said the investment will help Dell EMC drive more predictability, simplicity and profit for its channel partners. The channel chief has been critical in the company's recent storage market share gains by implementing new programs, incentives and lowering channel registration escalation to drive partner revenues in 2018.

In an interview with CRN, Mullen explains her company's indirect sales strategy and where she is seeing partners sell more lines of business throughout the Dell Technologies portfolio.

You recently told us Dell EMC significantly reduced channel conflict by revamping the deal registration process. Are there any other changes you're doing to drive collaboration between indirect and direct?

Yes. We talked a lot about this at Global Partner Summit. We are specifically spending a ton of time with our sales teams to focus on account plans for key customers and getting very, very specific about, 'Here's where the partners can help the most. Here's where there's significant opportunity for growth and investment. Here's where we really need the partner support around consulting capabilities. Here's where partners can win and make some money.' Those conversations are going very well.

Where else are you investing to help drop registration escalation?

We are also putting in some more programmatic resources to help ensure that those account plans are happening across all of the territories and in some of our largest accounts where we have the most to gain. That's absolutely underway. We expect a continued focus throughout the rest of the year and ongoing, but that's also going to help us drive a little bit more predictability and a little more simplicity, and ultimately, more profit for our partners.

Are you seeing partners selling more lines of business? If so, where?

The simple answer is absolutely. Partners are starting to represent more of our products in the data center across storage and servers and networking. The hyper-converged solutions are obviously a really great segue there which is helping drive some of that, but there's just a whole lot of storage partners who were only storage partners that are selling our servers now. The lines between a server and storage are blurring. So it's getting harder and harder to distinguish between those. When we're looking at solving customer problems and supporting their workloads, lots of times they don’t care whether it's a storage product or a server – they just need it to perform.

Where else are you seeing partners selling more lines of business?

We are also seeing traditional data center partners who are interested in putting to good use our workforce transformation technologies that bridge some of those lines of business and help us acquire new customer in the client space or client customers who are sort of morphing into more data center space, especially when they start to think about selling as-a-service offerings. It's really across the board, but the bulk of [partner cross selling] is inside the data center.