Bill Scannell On ‘Simplifying’ Dell’s Go-To-Market With ‘United’ Sales Org

‘This organizational change is really to simplify our go-to-market, make it easier to do business with us and make it easier for the partners to engage with us,’ says Dell Technologies’ Bill Scannell in an interview with CRN.

Poised to take over Dell Technologies’ massive $91 billion new unified sales organization, Bill Scannell says he will drive a new level of go-to-market simplicity and channel partner synergy in a bold move full of “immense opportunities.”

“This organizational change is really to simplify our go-to-market, make it easier to do business with us and make it easier for the partners to engage with us,” said Scannell, president of global enterprise sales and customer operations, in an interview with CRN. “We’re going to continue to work with partners. We’re going to continue to sell solutions and we’re going to continue to be the biggest, most professional, most strategic technology company in the world – supported by a great channel organization across the globe.”

Round Rock, Texas-based Dell unveiled this month that it will combine its enterprise and commercial as well as channel sales organization under the leadership of Scannell, as Dell’s commercial leader, Marius Haas, is retiring. Effective, Feb. 3, 2020, Scannell will become president of the combined new sales organization, which has yet to be named, by adding worldwide and commercial and partner sales to his responsibility. On top of leading Dell’s 2,500 largest enterprise customers in the world, Scannell will add Haas’ 500,000 commercial customers to his plate.

Scannell said the merger of the two organizations provides “immense opportunities” for Dell Technologies and channel partners heading into 2020 as many customers – both enterprise and commercial – are all looking for digital transformation solutions.

[Related: Dell To Become ‘Six-Times’ Bigger Than Nutanix, Says Michael Dell]

“If you think of where we’re focused as a company -- yes, we sell a lot of product and we have a really good velocity business going -- but increasingly, our customers are asking us to help them with outcomes and sell them solutions, not products. So we are really focused on four big transformations,” said Scannell. “The first is modernizing the data center and helping our customers with their multi-cloud strategy. There’s not a customer that I have spoken with in the last three years that hasn’t said, ‘Hey I need help here.’ This is where our partner community is a great extension to our reach into the market and can help us with this IT modernization or IT transformation. Likewise, they all have a digital agenda and are asking for our help there. They have increasing demands on their workforce and they want to make it more productive. So we’re helping them increase the productivity of their workforce through workforce transformation.”

Scannell said his company is also “one of the best kept secrets” in terms of security. “We have a great offering throughout [Dell Technologies’] around security,” he said. “Increasingly, customers are having challenges with ransomware and we have some really neat solutions there. We have some great solutions with Carbon Black now around endpoint security as well.”

Scannell said providing these digital transformation needs for both enterprises and commercial customers in a unified sales organization will help boost sales in 2020.

“We’re just looking at our go-to-market in, ‘How do we simplify this for our customers? How do we simplify this for our partners and make it easier for them to do business with us?’ he said. ‘It’s about simplifying Dell’s go-to-market in a united way. We want to increase the velocity of our business while not breaking anything along the way.”

Joshua Lee, director of sales at VirtuIT Systems, a Nanuet, N.Y.-based Dell partner, said the goal of simplification throughout Dell’s sales organizations is “definitely a good thing” for channel partners.

“Simplification in the next fiscal year is going to be welcomed for us – that’s nothing but great news for partners,” said Lee. “It can sometimes be trying to understand how the Dell ecosystem works and in figuring out who we need to go to for business. I think this unified sales origination will help drive that message of go-to-market with the channel in the data center. I’m very excited to see how it looks like from a simplification standpoint on who the go-to’s are in each territory.”

Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell is more than confident in Scannell’s leadership abilities to take sales to the next level in 2020.

“Bill is an outstanding leader,” Dell said in a recent interview with CRN. “He’s been with EMC since really the beginning and has done a great job in leading the enterprise business for us.”

Scannell told CRN that he’s never been more confident in his company’s current market share and channel position.

“I’ve certainly been involved with the channel and direct sales my entire career, 34 years now. I’ve never been more excited in how well we as a company are positioned today,” said Scannell. “We’re just having a lot of fun. The business is going great. Our channel business is growing even faster than our direct business. Our customer net promoter scores are at all-time highs. … Our value proposition to our channel community and our partners has never been stronger in the 34 years I’ve been doing this.”