Bill Scannell’s Enterprise Sales Mantra: ‘We’ll Win Or Lose With Our Partners'

Bill Scannell’s message to the channel community is clear regarding Dell EMC’s recent move that opened the door for partners to go after 2,000 enterprise accounts. “We’ll win or lose with our partners,” said Scannell, president of Global Enterprise Sales and Customer Operations at Dell EMC.

In August, the infrastructure giant launched its Enterprise Partner Preferred Program, which hands 2,000 under-penetrated enterprise accounts to solution providers to find net new opportunities with the full backing of Dell EMC sales representatives. The program is chock-full of robust incentives to encourage partners and sales reps to work together.

Scannell, who started his 33-year career as an EMC sales representative in 1986, said 2019 will definitely be a year of channel sales execution. In an interview with CRN, the longtime executive breaks down the most important aspects of the Enterprise Partner Preferred Program that partners need to know.

Rebates And Incentives Galore

To push partners to drive new sales or expand deals in these 2,000 accounts, Dell EMC is granting lavish rebates and incentives to the channel partners participating in the Enterprise Partner Preferred Program.

“We’re going to give you more money on the front end and more rebates on the back end. We’re going to give you more money for competitive takeout, money for doing technology refreshes. We want to enable partners to win and win bigger than you are today,” said Scannell.

Joint Account Planning

Dell doesn’t simply hand over accounts to partners and leave them to fend for themselves. Scannell and his team created and fine-tuned custom game plans on a regional basis to attack each individual customer.

“We work the account plan, the strategy, the sales calls with them. We basically don’t go into a call without them. They don’t go into a call without us. It’s really a joint effort,” said Scannell. “When you take the resources of our channel partners and the resources we have, it’s the one-plus-one equals something more than three. It’s the fastest-growing part of my business right now.”

In addition, if a partner finds an opportunity in an account where Dell EMC sells direct, the company is lending a helping hand. “If a partner comes along to one of those accounts where we have a direct relationship, and they find an opportunity and want to register it and we’re not working it—100 percent we’ll accept it and work with you.”

Racking Up Channel Wins Already

Dell EMC has successfully landed 685 new wins via partners as of December through the program.

“If you look at the 2,000 accounts, we already have 685 new wins that weren’t buying our storage, our servers and now they are. That happened in, really, less than two quarters,” he said. “We’re seeing a big uptick in business and I don’t see it slowing down.”

SLAs ‘In A Day’

Dell has paved the way for partners to quickly register and close deals inside the program. “We made deal registration easy again. We’re hitting the SLAs we’ve promised on how quickly we can either accept or deny an agreement. We’re doing it in a day, which is nothing. It used to drag on for three, four, five days,” Scannell said. “There’s no more noise coming out of the channel on deal registration.”

‘We’re Hiring’

New investments slated for the program this year include the hiring of pre-sales, sales, specialty sales and channel resources to help drive more partner wins. “We’ve added a few hundred people already. That’s more than some of my smaller competitors have in total across the globe,” said Scannell.

To make sure solution providers are the true focus in the Enterprise Partner Preferred Program, Dell EMC is protecting its own sales team commissions on the accounts.

“I have 3,000 enterprise accounts around the world in about close to 10,000 locations when you look at subsidiaries. We do a really good job and have great share in the top 1,000 accounts. In the next 2,000 accounts, our share is no better than anywhere else in the world and we don’t like that. We want to be No. 1 in share in that space as well. This Enterprise Preferred Partner Program says, ‘Look, we have these accounts that we want to leverage our partner community to go after,” said Scannell. “When we go in there parallel, working together, our win rate is pretty high