Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Chad Dowlen - Dell Technologies’ Journey from Direct to Partner-First
In this episode of Partnerships Unraveled, we sit down with Chad Dowlen, Senior Director of North American Channels at Dell Technologies, to unpack one of the most remarkable channel transformations in tech history. With over two decades at Dell and 17 years in the channel trenches, Chad offers a firsthand account of the company’s pivot from a direct-only model to becoming a global channel powerhouse.
Chad shares what sparked this strategic shift, how Dell overcame internal resistance, and the cultural evolution that made "partner first" more than just a mantra. From key inflection points like the EqualLogic acquisition to groundbreaking initiatives like Partner First for Storage, Chad takes us behind the scenes of the structural and strategic decisions that changed everything.
We explore how Dell scales partner engagement, nurtures long-term relationships in a high-churn environment, and maintains one of the most tenured channel teams in the business. Chad also provides hard-earned leadership advice for new channel chiefs and outlines the communication strategies that keep 400+ team members aligned and executing.
Whether you're leading a channel team or shaping your company’s route-to-market strategy, this episode is a masterclass in channel leadership, culture, and long-term impact.
Connect with Chad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chad-dowlen-9672868/
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Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships and channel on a weekly basis. My name is Alex Whitford, I'm the VP of Revenue here at Chanext and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, chad. How are you doing Good? How are you Alex? Yeah, I mean I'm excited for this one. We had an excellent preparation call. In fact, you were just giving me some fatherly advice. So looking forward to getting into all things sort of channel and vision. Maybe for the uninitiated, you could give us a little bit of an intro about who you are and what you do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks for having me Excited to be here. Chad Dallin, over at Dell Technologies, I've been here for the last 21 years and it's been the last 17 years in our channel program, so super excited about that. I was here before we had an official program. I was here when we started our official program and it worked as a frontline seller, a technical seller, a manager, and now I'm senior director over all North America channels for Dell.
Speaker 2:So quite literally, ground up for Ground up, ground up from our official program. So Dell, I think arguably, I mean early on, dell, or maybe pre-2007, was as direct a company as a company is able to be, but then you obviously went all in and Dell's one of the largest channels in the world today. What sparked that change? That's a complete 180 in terms of strategy. How did that change come about?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm thinking about our mission statement, right, we want to deliver technologies that drive human progress. That's not a statement that has a route to market tied to it. That's a statement about how we want our technologies consumed by everyone, and so the channels always had a tremendous place in our industry and has had tremendous share, and so I think Michael saw that and wanted to take a part of it, and there were some incredible things about how we got to where we were through the direct model and the history of the company. But to accelerate and see that force multiplier down the road, we needed to embrace the channel. We did it and we did it wholeheartedly and it's been a really good thing for us. It's been really good.
Speaker 2:It certainly has. I mean, I can't knock it, you guys have been wonderfully successful. It certainly has. I mean, I can't knock it, you guys have been wonderfully successful. So, yeah, seems like the right structure. That's quite a mindset shift though right. I've been of organizations where there's direct and indirect and it can take a lot of time to sort of win the hearts and minds of those direct AEs. What was that process like?
Speaker 1:winning over those internal stakeholders was it's. You know, it starts with finding somebody willing to change and you know, one of the greatest things about our culture is we're always willing to change and innovate and find new ways of doing things. Uh, michael's such an innovator, right, and uh, you know he's. He says fail fast, right, and so he wants us to take a risk and do that. And so if you think about how that evolved over time, it was the success of individuals who are willing to take that chance and others seeing that and seeing the scale.
Speaker 1:And if you think about where we get with partners, we get tremendous scale. Where we get with partners, we get tremendous scale. The sales reps on my team can touch multiple partners who have multiple sales reps who can touch multiple end users, and so the ability for us to scale and create volumes just is significantly faster than you can do direct alone. There's tons of advantages to selling direct, but there's a lot of scale with selling on the channel and so, as our folks saw that, they jumped on board. That's one piece. So success breeds, success, breeds success. The second piece would be leadership was bought in and they told us the messaging, they told the teams we want to embrace the channel. We want to grow every route to market.
Speaker 2:We want to grow with our partners and as the front line sees more programs and more focus being put in that area, they get on board or they're not successful and that's what we is there, this domino effect where you're sort of winning the hearts and minds one by one but you almost create I don't know ambassadors, evangelists within those, within that end user team who was sort of nudging the people left and right to say, hey, you should play with this partner, you should listen to this. It becomes this almost.
Speaker 1:There's some of that, for sure. There's also our side, our inside sellers that are under me. We spend a lot of time talking to those end user teams and helping them understand the value that our partners bring to the table and why it's an advantage for them to work with us, and so it's a team effort right Both sides of the aisle. So the end user teams have those ambassadors and the channel team has those ambassadors, and we all work together and over time it's developed a really great culture and a really, really great thing. It couldn't be any better than it is today in terms of the messaging, which is we want to win period, and it doesn't matter the route to market. We want to win through our partners. We want to win directly. We want our consumers, our end users of our products, to get our product however they see is the most beneficial way for them to do it.
Speaker 2:And evolution is a funny thing, right, because it's not linear. There's this big step change. You'll have periods of flatline change and then periods of sort of rapid evolution. Um, dell's obviously uh built several programs, partner programs. It's gone through several phases. I imagine a couple of those rapid uh moments of evolution really stick out in the mind. Um, talk me through one of those experiences. How was it?
Speaker 1:but you know, and I'll tell you, it kind of takes you a little bit back to the infancy of the program and where we got started. But for me, having been in our channel business since it started, I'll never forget when we bought equal logic and you know that was a company that was channel only uh, that had a program and the partners who participated in that program absolutely loved it. And so when we brought on Equalogic and bought that company, that was just a huge momentum shift and a huge insight into how we could scale this thing. And that would probably be the timing of it was incredible, because we bought it at the same time as we launched the official partner program and so when those two things synced up we really got a ton of momentum. So that was in the infancy of the program.
Speaker 1:And then, to give you kind of more of a recent example of something that was huge for the company was Partner First for Storage. Right, we launched Partner First for Storage. We launched partner first for storage. That was like the next level of aha moment for every seller in the organization, because they're like oh, you want me to go to a partner first before I even think about selling directly. And so you're kind of even shifting the momentum even more from hey, we welcome our omni-channel strategy, all routes to market to now getting prescriptive in the data center, to say, not only do we want to embrace partners in the data center, we want to go here first. And so those are kind of two pivotal moments. One, structural right we get the equal logic, acquisition and we give an aha moment there.
Speaker 2:And then tactical strategy saying let's go to partners first in the data center. I imagine that also creates a cultural change. Right, there's one thing to hear a senior executive and certainly Chad to call you a biased senior executive. Right, you're getting paid on channel revenue. To hear who gets paid on channel revenue saying channel is great. But then to hear an organization say partner first. First talk to me about the momentum shift that creates within an organization it start?
Speaker 1:it starts totally new dialogues, right, you know, and so you know I talked a little bit earlier about how folks who were on board early would have success and that success would breed new success. To your point, when it comes down from the top, oh, the person who gets paid on everything now says partner first. It creates new dialogues that we didn't have before. So we started getting dialogues from folks who historically didn't engage the channel and it starts super simple. You know I haven't used the channel a lot in the past, but I know we've got this initiative. Talk to me, what does it look like? How do I leverage the partner community and us being able to engage across the company? Uh, super helpful and a big benefit to everybody involved. And the more dialogue you have, the better. And it really all starts with communication and picking up the phone and talking to people um, so chad, did you see uh?
Speaker 2:did you see uh areas? Areas where being partner first within the storage business unit started affecting other people's perception on bringing in partner first in other sort of segments, other business units.
Speaker 1:Of course. You know I mean ultimately our customers. They want solutions to problems, right? Nobody buys a storage array because they think that'd be cool. I really like to have a storage array in my office. You know they buy it because they're trying to solve problems and those problems typically evolve all of our ecosystem.
Speaker 1:And so when you get a partner in there in that particular area, you start to uncover other areas where you can expand and grow. And why not engage the partner on those as well? They're already in there and so 100% it expanded. And what you learn is partners have expertise that are very niche, and so when you get one in a particular industry, that's doing a really good job. They may know a lot more about that customer than we ever could, and so we're able to provide solutions to that customer through the partner that we probably wouldn't have tapped into had we not engaged with the partner. And so we get more of that force multiplier, more of that scale with that partner, because of their expertise Might have brought them in for one LOB. That's not where the partnership ended, and so it allowed us to really expand our footprint within our accounts.
Speaker 2:And can you talk to me about the decision-making criteria that leads to Dell, who is omnichannel, right, you spoke about? You just want the win.
Speaker 1:Any route to market.
Speaker 2:Why storage in particular? It was called out. Hey partners are critical to this motion. We want to prioritize that route to market.
Speaker 1:Because of the type of sell. It is right. It's a complex sell today. It's not a. You know. If you think about client, super easy. What size screen do you want? You know what are some of the features you want. That's changing today with the AIPC. So we got a reinvention of the client sales motion with the era we're in today. But historically that's been a pretty simple sale. If you think about servers, it's compute and size et cetera, and you go. But with storage there's so many different ways to solve that problem, whether you go software defined, whether you go hyper-converged, whether you go three-tier traditional architecture and what is the right fit, whether you go on-prem, off-prem, cloud, multi-cloud, right.
Speaker 1:So there's all these different ways to tackle that, and we saw that as an area where, hey, the expertise that our partners have in those specific markets that they serve is going to be really beneficial in ensuring that Dell wins in those areas, when you've got a really big market with a lot of ways to solve those problems and a lot of competitors who do it differently. And so making sure we had somebody in there who knew the customer really well and knew all the different solutions to position our way of winning was critical. For us it was a very strategic move.
Speaker 2:And I imagine it's a beachhead right strategic move and I imagine it's a beachhead right. So you've got a super trusted advisor that's now bought into not just Dell Storage but Dell as an entire ecosystem. And now they're landing you in new logos and suddenly your sellers just have a route to market that's untapped. Did you really see that uptick, not just culturally, but also at the top and bottom line? Oh wow, this has really shifted channel behavior in Dell and therefore the revenue as well.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I think you start to see how we can be more successful in different areas of the data center. And so we've got our strongholds. We're really good in certain segments, but that's just really expanded now because we can leverage partners who are experts in a lot of different industries. And so, if I go way back, I would think there were certain areas where we probably weren't as proficient as we needed to be and we didn't have a lot of penetration into those particular verticals. We don't really have that problem anymore because we've leveraged all these partners to expand our intellect around it and expand our ability to execute awesome.
Speaker 2:One of the things I sort of find really interesting around building channel is you've got to influence a culture which influences a culture which influences an end user. Um, you've stayed and you've helped build dell's channel from literally the ground up. Um, what is? How do you cultivate that culture around long-term relationships and the average ae is in role for about a year and a half, not the same for channel people right, long, valuable relationships. That's a culture you need to build. How do you encourage that?
Speaker 1:Well, first of all, I didn't build Dell's channel.
Speaker 1:I think it said that in there I've participated in the great engine that Dell has created over the years, but by no stretch was it on me.
Speaker 1:But to answer your question more directly, it's true that partners they live in the communities, they work for smaller businesses. Many of our partners are owner-operator right, that is their livelihood and they've built that business over a really long period of time. And if I think about a lot of our partners, they've had the same AEs and CEOs the entire time I've been in Dell Channel and that's just uncommon in large corporations and so you do tend to have a lot of change. You quoted the stat there. So a year and a half change and so you could go through multiple end user reps on our side that have the same partner relationship. Now we've really got a win-win because we've got stability for the customer, but we've also got fresh eyes on the customer and so you're allowed to re-ask some questions, do some re-scoping in that account, because you got the new guy, but you've also got that rock solid partner that you've had the whole time, and so I think it's a huge win when you combine the two together.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I think is really challenging about being a channel leader is channel account manager. Churn is a real problem. It's really painful to feel that if you've got someone who's managed this partner for 10 years they're trusted, they know each other, they're friends to lose that people, which means that you have to work so hard as a leader to develop them and keep them within the business. Talk me through some of the tactics you have to maintain that channel talent inside your organization.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you're talking about when we have turnover on our site, correct? Yeah, well, I'll give us a little bit of credit there. In the US channels, my average sales rep on my team has been here eight and a half years. Crazy, on average, that that's. That's very uncommon. You don't necessarily see that on the user side. You don't see it really anywhere. We celebrated a sales reps 30th year the other day, you know, and so I've got two more 20-year anniversaries coming up this month for inside frontline sales reps and they spent the vast majority of their career in the channel. So we do have some tenure here and I think, if I thought about the reason behind it and I want to get to the specifics of your question but if I think about the reason behind it is because they get over here and they're combining two really awesome things the Dell portfolio and the Dell culture, which is awesome, which is why I've stayed and the power of channel partners and what they bring to the table, and so sales reps come over here and they just don't leave.
Speaker 2:They love it and they stay.
Speaker 1:But there's still product transitions, there's still a sales rep transitions, there's still people who come and go. And so how do you navigate that? The gold standard in what we try to do is have some runway when someone's going to move on right, and so if we know someone's going to take a different role, let's prepare ahead of time. And who's going to take over that account set and how well can they debrief them and how well can they educate them on how that partner likes to interact with us. So that's the best move. But also you've got to have consistency of processes. And so if the deal registration process doesn't change and if the order entry process doesn't change and how you get a quote doesn't change, the human interactive changes, but at least everything doesn't change at once, right, and so that can help and we try to do that.
Speaker 1:And then, most importantly, I try not to change them. I don't have to, right, and so just don't navigate change for change sake. Make sure you do it with purpose. Job of talking to that partner and talking to the sales rep who's leaving ahead of time, finding out, hey, what are the key things about the relationship that are going well, what do you like, right, and when we sign somebody in new, what of that can we adopt? Can we keep the same? And so where we can keep things the same, then that's going to help out a lot. But no doubt it's a tricky process and generally when you have churn you have a little bit of a sag there and then you build it back up.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Maybe then, looking back at your career, what advice would you give someone stepping into a senior channel leadership role for the first time?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think if I answer that question, it's like what do I wish I knew when I started that I don't know today it would be all throughout your career, no matter where you're at, you need to practice influencing those who are not under your control. Right, and I think too often people think well, when I'm the manager, people will do what I say because I'm in charge, and to an extent that's probably true for your direct reports. But nothing's more valuable than your ability to influence and get on board with you and stakeholders who don't have a tie to you. And you can practice that no matter where you're at in an organization. And so to the extent that you practice that early, you're going to be more prepared when you get into that role, rather than trying to build that skill set from the ground up.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I've personally experienced and it's challenging is when you go from managing people or managing ICs to managing managers and having that influence over your entire organization. Being able to communicate in a way that lands complicated messaging easily is really challenging. And I think that's doubly challenging when you're in the channel because you also have to do that messaging to partners, which is doubly complicated. How have you found communicating around some of those changes into your organization or even outside of your organization the importance of the channel.
Speaker 1:Well, it's critical. You get it right for one. Anytime you try to deliver a message and it gets what I call lost in translation as it moves down the stack. You're going to have inconsistencies, and so one of the things I do, if a message is super critical, I roll it to the managers, but then I also roll it to all of their direct reports so they get one message right. And so there's a pre-wire, there's ownership at the leadership level. You make sure you have their buy-in A, because ultimately they have to be able to execute with their sales reps, and they won't do that if they don't trust the message that I've given them right.
Speaker 1:So we're going to get buy-in there first, but I like to deliver the message one time, and so everybody gets the same message at one time. We just do it on large calls. We have large group calls. There's 400 people on the call and that's okay, and so we'll deliver that message. But the managers previously got a pre-wire. They know what it's all about. We've talked it through and then all the follow-up does funnel through them, and so, to the extent that you can centralize messaging, I think that's helpful. But you've got to have your team prepped ahead of time. All right.
Speaker 1:A With partners. You can't do that. It's more difficult, and so things do have to trickle down and you just have to be really clear. There's nothing wrong with practicing right and making really clear. There's nothing wrong with practicing and making sure that the managers practice their pitch and practice the messaging that they need to deliver so that it comes across really good. But I definitely prefer to the extent when it's structural strategy change or specific motion that we deliver at one time. If you can do that, you're going to have more success, less confusion.
Speaker 2:Awesome, chad. We try and keep confusion here at a minimum, so I prepped you that I'm going to finish the podcast by asking you for an introduction into our next guest. Who did you have in mind?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. You know, I've been on the Dell side and given you some perspective from that side, so I think it'd really be beneficial to invite Tim Carger from Arrow over your podcast and he can kind of give you that viewpoint of distributors that work with us. Right, and so how does that engage with Dell and how does that engage with other vendors as well? I'll get that information over to you. It'll be a great addition.
Speaker 2:Awesome, Tim. Welcome to the chat. Thank you so much for sharing your experience.
Speaker 1:It's been awesome, awesome, thanks, alex.