Some new incent programs have gone live, and other partner offerings announced at Dell World last October are now available.
Cheryl Cook, Dell’s Global Channel Chief
Dell has played a familiar tune the last several years in terms of how it introduces and enhances its channel programs. The company typically announces changes at its major Dell World event in the fall. Then, with the start of Dell’s new fiscal year at the end of their Q4 in February, the changes usually are ready to go live. That was pretty much the case again this year.
Dell’s channel business continues to post strong numbers, said global channel chief Cheryl Cook.
“We saw strong double digit growth across all business units, and the channel business continued to be above 40 per cent of the total mix,” Cook said. “We also saw a record high number of deal registrations in Q4. In North America, we had 34,000 deal registrations, up 28 per cent year over year. Globally, the number was 94,000, up 19 per cent year over year.”
Cook said that Dell continues to lower its deal registration approval time.
“We are improving the service level to resellers to a four hour window, even with the increased volume, through our automation,” she said. “We are absolutely below four hours now, and in some cases are pushing three hours.”
Cook also indicated that rebate payouts are up 50 per cent in North America to partners.
“We are driving consistent sales engagements with partners, bringing in new business and securing Line of Business expansion,” she said. “In this new acquisition sales segment, the mix with the overall channel was at 42 per cent in Q4.”
Cook said Q4 also saw a 60 per cent growth in engagement and payout in their Green Fields new bonus program for enterprise Clients, which is a spiff program.
The new programs rolled out February 1.
“We modified our incent programs to provide more precision in our program structure, and give partners the ability to maximize their earnings opportunity with a structure most closely aligned to their own business model, whether they are focused in a specific area or a broad infrastructure partner,” Cook stated.
They include base rebates with growth accelerators.
“In the enterprise, we have introduced up to 16 per cent back end rebates for storage and networking, which is extremely aggressive,” Cook said. “We see these as a natural adjacency to server growth.”
New competencies have also been launched around core clients, and cloud, while others like systems management, have been enhanced. Dell’s first partner services competency, announced at Dell World, which integrates its formerly segmented deployment services into a united ProDeploy offering, has gone live as well.
A new pilot for certified engineered systems with Microsoft and VMware has also been launched.
“This is a compelling value proposition for partners, which brings about tangible savings in pre sales hours,” Cook said. “We have gone to pilot with 40 partners globally.”
New payment options through Dell Financial Services are also now available
“We have launched a series of payment solutions on the principle that not one size fits all,” Cook said. “These include ‘pay as you grow’ programs, provision and pay, and scale on demand utilization model. What is new here compared to what DFS has offered before is the terms and flexibility of these new programs. There is more flexibility and variability of payment terms.”
One programmatic element is slightly behind schedule. At Dell World, a contest was announced in which $1,000,000 will be offered to 10 partners in the U.S, and Canada for the best marketing campaign around Future Ready. Winners were to be announced at the end of Q4, which hasn’t happened yet. It will happen soon though, Cook said.
