Creating a DELL STORM with a unique Channel strategy

From what started as a direct marketing company has today successfully come an inch closer to harnessing the Channel power by having adopted a GTM strategy that clearly puts Channel at the forefront. What is even laudable is the business relationship that it has built all along the way with both its partners and customers that will eventually take the company to the next big level. Dell has, indeed, created a strong channel ecosystem that extends well to business conversion and profitability. 

Ajay Kaul
Director & General Manager,
North Geo - Dell India

"Customer will continue to be the epicenter of everything we do. With the new GTM structure now, we are able to reach customers far & wide with the help of channel partners and also drive deeper engagements in large & complex accounts with a rich solutions stack .
Good news is that the business outcome is depicting growth across all  Routes to Market ( RTM) & we are growing exponentially in all lines of business.
Partners are seeing a new Dell & are excited to collaborate. As per them, Customers value Dell, due to a strong brand, superb quality, variety of solution offerings and best in class post-sales support. "

When Dell India started its operations 14 years back, it began by keeping in mind certain key strengths that it has – the best of supply chain management, the best of direct selling model and, lastly, products that could be customized as per customer’s requirements. From there on started a legacy that today supposedly grew into a much bigger entity with its business growing and expansion happening in every single market vertical.  To cater to these huge customer verticals, Dell formed four verticals which were – government, education & healthcare, consumer, SMB and, lastly, large enterprise. These four verticals kept on growing quite rapidly and today after acquiring more than 20 companies, as Dell embarks on a new journey, it looks to have a hyper growth by getting into the cities of India where it did not have any presence so far.  So it was a two-pronged strategy of improving its coverage further and getting into customer businesses where it did not have a deeper presence so far.

There have been both challenges and opportunities all along the way. Because Dell started with a direct model, partners were skeptical of whether this partnership is going to be a sustainable one or not. This is when the whole background change of the Route-to-Market (RTM) strategy necessarily took place. However, this is a change not at a minute level of simply changing account managers or adding few partners but it is an organizational change where Dell created three routes to market – Dell-led, where the customer relationship is going to be managed by Dell and execution will be kept open for partners (it will enlist pre-dominantly larger and complex accounts), partner-led and lastly distributor-led RTM. In the latter 2 RTMs, every single business that happens will be carried through partners. Given the intricacy and the magnitude of the project, a pilot project – RoM (Rest of Maharashtra) had also run for almost a year by creating teams that were running businesses in the rest of Maharashtra, including Pune. Dell also had its share of learnings in those couple of months that the pilot was run and has taken into cognizance these learnings while launching a much bigger show at the country level.

Anil Sethi
Director & General Manager,
Commercial Channels - Dell India

"Collective thinking is always better than solo thinking because this brings in maturity and innovation. Secondly, it is always good for a company to change with times. We are known to be the largest start-up. For us, indirect marketing was always there but it is much bigger and committed now. This is going to be the biggest change ever and partners are going to find this quite interesting as we bring in a whole lot of opportunities on to the table. We got to build the trust level with customers and improve in terms of our engagements with them. Opportunities will be there, but it depends on how you go and engage."


Dell has opened more than 30,000 existing accounts to partners in addition to acquiring new ones, which will pave way for a strong business execution through Partners , both from Value & Volume perspective. Besides there will be Inside sales representatives (ISRs) who will be passing on these customer leads to partners by working big time. So if a customer needs a virtualization solution, it knows best which partner to address and the lead automatically goes to that partner.

samrita@varindia.com