Customer Stories: Dell

A Successful Partner Program

The Client

For more than 28 years, Dell has empowered countries, communities, customers and people everywhere to use technology to realize their dreams. Customers trust Dell to deliver technology solutions that help them do and achieve more, whether they’re at home, work, school or anywhere in their world.

The Business Challenge

PartnerPath has consulted on numerous projects with Dell since they increased their efforts at enhancing their channel partner engagements, including a Next Generation Program Architecture. The objective for these projects was to develop a roadmap for a partner program including certifications by understanding needs of stakeholder, partners and comparison to industry best practices. This program architecture was the foundation for their entire partner program and building it correctly from the start has allowed Dell to expand their program and grow their number of partners without having to rebuild at subsequent stages. After this engagement, PartnerPath also conducted an annual satisfaction survey with partners to gauge overall partner satisfaction and identify partner issues. PartnerPath has also worked with internal Dell business units with go to market channel engagement models and processes.

"They spark conversation, provide thought leadership, drive dialogue and create collaboration."

– Bob Skelley, Executive Director, Global Certified Partner Program & Channel at Dell

A Successful Engagement

Analysis and recommendations for the partner program architecture centered around establishing channel and partner effectiveness, development of a two-year plan, benchmark gap assessment, alignment with industry peer group best practices and a detail drill down on each assessment category. According to Bob Skelley, Executive Director, Global Certified Partner Program & Channel, the Dell partner program tripled the number of partners in the year following the PartnerPath program architecture recommendations.

The PartnerPath Touch

One of the greatest assets of PartnerPath is the “channel staff who bring lots of experience, expertise and good insights. Everyone has a good blend around the channel,” says Skelley. He went on to say our consultants don’t just provide a list of what to do, but instead “dictate why you should do it. They spark conversation, provide thought leadership, drive dialogue and create collaboration.” Skelley also identified the breadth of knowledge in our leadership team as key components in the success of our engagements.