5 Programs Dell EMC Partners Need To Leverage In 2019

Dell EMC has poured millions into new programs to help its channel partners discover net-new opportunities, get deeper into customer accounts, receive hands-on training and simply make more money. Helping to lead partners to new heights this year is Cheryl Cook, senior vice president of Global Partner Marketing at Dell EMC, who is urging the channel to take advantage of these five partner-centric programs.

“My call to action for partners would be to embrace the breadth of the portfolio and make sure you’re teaming and planning with the field sales organization because we’re all aiming to grow new business and new customers in 2019,” said Cook.

Here are five programs Dell EMC partners need to take advantage of this year.

1. The Heroes Program

The Heroes Program allows for direct, ongoing access to Dell EMC pre-sales engineers, architects and senior technical leaders. A typical Heroes Program event is a regional gathering where partners can bring their technical staff for training and advising. “These face-to-face events are for the technical audience within our partner community, for their practice leads, engineers and their CTOs. We bring in technical experts and in many cases there’s hands-on opportunity,” said Cook. “We also host Heroes technical boards, which is like a technical advisory committee with many CTOs and technical engineers for our partners.”

2. IT Transformation Campaign

In 2018, Dell EMC launched its IT Transformation Campaign, an effort that included a $1.5 million investment in third-party research that is now available to the channel through the company’s digital marketing platform. The research helps solution providers adopt a better consultative approach to helping customers modernize their infrastructure leveraging Dell’s portfolio.

“It has really good factual evidence with some findings about what our customers are struggling with as they look to their digital future and really working through outcome-based, workload-oriented conversations to business success,” said Cook. “It basically shows you how to position a lot of our enterprise portfolio towards those business outcomes—versus just product solutions to drive a consultative-led discussion— and dialogue for our partners so they can represent themselves as really adding value as that trusted adviser.”

3. Enterprise Partner Preferred Program

The company has opened up 2,000 under-penetrated Dell enterprise accounts to channel partners with its Enterprise Partner Preferred Program, launched in August. Dell is not only giving solution providers access to these accounts, but is providing special front-end pricing, incremental discounts, deal registration protection and joint account planning.

“Think of this as really an acquisition strategy of, ‘How can we do joint account planning and territory mapping with our partners to go break into netnew customers?’” said Cook. “It’s really a partner-led sales program all aimed at rapid growth, taking share and breaking more into customers.”

4. Commercial Partner Preferred Program

Like the enterprise program, the Commercial Partner Preferred Program, launched in October, offers similar channel incentives and joint account planning, but for 20,000 commercial Dell accounts. Dell’s inside sales and channel teams will work with partners to drive new or larger deals inside these accounts, which the company has deemed as under-penetrated.

Cook said a key feature inside the program is what the company dubs, “partner of record.” “For all the investment and effort that a partner makes to break into a new account, we’re deeming them the ‘partner of record,’ which means they will truly own that account. It protects them,” she said. “It gives them predictability on front-end discount and margins. With the deal registration, they get advantage pricing.”

5. DP4400 Acceleration Program

In July, Dell EMC unveiled a data protection appliance with a 2U form factor optimized for VMware environments: the DP4400, and created the DP4400 Acceleration Program.

“Our DP4400 Acceleration Program is targeted at our really strong data protection partners that have great skills,” said Cook. “We have invested in 200 seed units for those partners to perform demos at no cost, and we’re seeing an excellent return when we leverage those seed units for the partners to really resonate and accelerate their growth around our data protection.”