LAS VEGAS – It’s been a little over nine months since Kevin Connolly took over for another Kevin (Peesker) as the new president of Dell Canada Commercial. And, while Connolly is approaching his first-year anniversary on the job, he told EChannelNews during the 2018 Dell Technologies World conference about a more important anniversary than his own: it’s been a year-and-a-half since the integration of Dell EMC.
Connolly has worked through the transition process with his team to reorganize the sales force with channel. He admitted more work needs to be done, but he believes the Canadian operation has its “act together” now and can support innovative Canadian customers and channel partners who are looking for hybrid solutions.
While at Dell Technologies World 2018, Connolly was literally everywhere channel partners and customers could be in Las Vegas and he hosted several of them at a special hospitality suite called “Canada House.”
Connolly likes to refer to himself as partner friendly executive: “I look at myself as a two-headed coin. So, when it comes to making decisions on the channel, I flip the coin and its always heads. It’s better to have more friends than enemies and I want to bring in more partners and advance more partners to the Titanium levels.”
He goes into detail in the podcast, but Connolly is strategizing for the mid-to-smaller channel partners in Canada. Connolly is working on a plan to make it easier for this group to do business with Dell Canada Commercial.
“The challenge is getting in front of them,” he said. So, Connolly has been hiring more people to get in the field with the channel. The strategy is two-pronged. Make the back-end easier and support them with people on the front-end.
The second part is to price the products more appropriately for the SMB. Connolly said that this market should be interested in hyper-converged solutions and by getting the price point and warranties in an affordable package will go a long way.
The same strategy will be used for cloud-based backup solutions, on-premise solutions and software-defined solutions where customers do not need to spend a lot of money on infrastructure.
“I want to make these affordable, deployable and do it with a big staff. We need to support this base better and it will help from a client perspective. We had a great year-end, but I know we can do a better job with SMB sellers and businesses and I want to get that story out there.”
In the podcast, Connolly also talks about his first impressions of the Canadian market, what partners should focus on from Dell World, next generation productivity, digital transformation and cloud.
