Mobility News
John Byrne On Dell’s PC, Laptop Channel Strategy
Mark Haranas
Dell Technologies North American President of Sales John Byrne talks to CRN about his sales and go-to-market strategy for Dell’s client systems business as channel partners voice their concerns.
Partners say you’ve told the team that it’s a top priority to take client system deals direct, and that Dell channel reps should unhook partners from PC deals. Are you denying that?
Let me give you a very firm statement. We are not interested in any share shift—zero. No share shift. We want to drive our core sales team to drive incremental business. We are a $94 billion company, and we’re playing in a $1.3 trillion market. We’re proud of the momentum and proud of the growth. There’s plenty of whitespace.
Look, I’ve got the direct sales team, I got the channel specialty team, I got the specialty team—all reporting up to myself. So at end day, I can only talk about the results. So there’s me talking those words, but think of the numbers I just threw at you. Then if you look at the infrastructure, my channel sever business is up 51 percent year over year in the second quarter. We took close to another 300-plus basis points share. We are nearly 40 percent of the mainstream server market. Our storage business was up double digits in the channel.
So how would you describe Dell’s client systems sales strategy: direct-led, partner-led or channel-neutral?
All of the above. We want both routes. We want both to be growing and both to be growing dramatically. We are taking share from HP, Lenovo and other competitors in this space.
