Dell makes unusual move to revamp partner program mid-year
A simpler program with incentives to deepen customer engagement and capture AI opportunities.
Dell has rejigged its partner program outside of the usual annual cycle as it responds to the changing technology landscape and partner feedback.
“It’s not typical for us to update midyear. We have this year, partly prompted by the pace our industry is moving at and to recognise the opportunities in front of us,” said Lynn Nicol, ANZ distribution and NZ channel leader, Dell.
Dell’s broad product portfolio can lead to complexity. To address this, it wanted to simplify the program and make its acquisition programs and incentives easier to understand and use for partners.
“We’re constantly taking feedback from our partners to make the programs as simple and as clear as possible, so they know exactly how to maximise the opportunity with us,” said Nicol, speaking at the Dell Technologies Forum in Sydney this week.
Prior to this change, Dell had a number of incentives for partners targeting new accounts, particularly greenfield opportunities, with different rules.
Dell has now brought its acquisition programs under one umbrella, with two elements: an acquisition incentive and a newly introduced development incentive.
The development incentive is designed to encourage partners to do more than simply win a new customer. It encourages an increase in the breadth of Dell’s technologies deployed and an increase in the depth of Dell's technology footprint within that customer.
“It incentivises our partners to not just win new logos with us,” Nicol told CRN Australia. Nicol explicitly identifies this as a response to partner feedback.
New product rebate structure
Dell has also introduced differentiated rebates around products. The objective is not simply to incentivise sales across the entire Dell portfolio equally. It wants to offer higher rebates to focus partners on more strategic and higher-end solutions.
These include higher-end client device products, AI-enabled products, PowerStore and private cloud products. These are solutions to help customers modernise, prepare for AI and build the infrastructure required for AI workloads.
“Those are all solutions that partners will be interested in selling to help customers modernise and be ready for AI,” she said.
Dell has a long history of partnering, but the scale of the opportunities driven by AI is unmatched. Its partner ecosystem grew double digits globally across all lines of business last year.
This is no coincidence. “It’s because our partners are skilled, already established, and used to working with us,” she said.
Nicol noted that the sheer scale of the AI opportunity — an estimated US$6 trillion, twothirds of it partnerfacilitated — makes partners more critical than ever.
“The size of the opportunity and the pace of the change – we all need partners. We need to partner and customers need partners with deep skills,” she said.