By Varun Aggarwal
Dell is sprucing up its PartnerDirect program by creating a process-driven partner engagement framework.
“We have devised clear rules of engagement over the last six months to broadly achieve three things—listen to partners, manage channel conflict and invest in their growth,” said Neeraj Singh, Head, Commercial Channel Operations, Dell India.
The company has set up regional advisory councils and introduced regular partner surveys to ‘listen’ to partner feedback and understand their challenges. “We recently conducted two such advisory meets. Each advisory council has close to 15 key partners as members. Based on their feedback, we have made several changes to our PartnerDirect program like introducing back-end rebate and sales reps incentive programs—which we didn’t have earlier,” added Singh.
In order to make the deal registration process more efficient, Dell has introduced an online tool called Online Configurator to provide instant price quotes for given product specifications. Based on the recommendations of the advisory council, the company also plans to launch a completely revamped partner portal.
In order to minimize and manage channel conflict, Dell has put in place a documented process for conflict escalation and resolution. “Our set of rules provide guidelines on direct and partner accounts, for mapping and managing accounts between partners and, in case of conflicts, the process to escalate and resolve issues,” explained Singh.
The third aspect of the rules of engagement is to ensure partner profitability. To enable partners to earn higher revenues, Dell has introduced a ‘find a partner’ feature on its website for customers to easily locate partners.
The company is now allowing partners to provide post-sales service to several of its direct customer accounts in order to help them augment their services revenues. “Previously for direct accounts, the service was managed by us. We also plan to appoint partners as service providers,” added Singh.
Another important step by Dell has been the introduction of custom factory integration. “We can reduce the customization overheads significantly. Things like installing a company’s software image, partition, etc can be done at the factory level itself. So the partner has to simply plug-and-play the system at the customer’s premise, thus considerably reducing customization time .”
Dell aims to have about 325 trained and certified partners under its fold by end of this fiscal. “Our mission for the PartnerDirect program is to develop a loyal network of solution provider partners by leveraging a differentiated value-add that is disruptive in the market place and provides incremental growth and profitability to Dell and its partners. We will continue improving our partner engagement based on this principle,” he added. |